Friendship Cake Read Online Free

everybody’s so mad at me. I was only trying to help. I figured a cookbook would help us raise some money, get us involved in a task together, create more love among the women at Hope Springs. But I just got off the phone with Louise, and she talked to me like I suggested we donate our kidneys, for goodness’ sake. My mother always told me I was too good for that church, those women. I’m forever having to be the one to smooth things over, get people to talk to each other. And I just hope they realize that if I hadn’t come in with this idea about the cookbook, our Women’s Guild would not last another year.
    The Good Lord knows that I have tried to breathe new life into that church by bringing in some younger women. But these girls today…they have aerobics classes and their careers in management. They have their children in everything there is imaginable. Why I even heard Rev. Stewart was planning to have some Chinese karate man using our fellowship hall to teach karate or kung fu or some Asian exercise that probably isn’t Christian.
    Things are just so complicated these days. Everybody’s trying to do everything and getting nothing done. Nobody wants to pitch in and help at the church. I feel like it’s all I can do to keep that little church up and running. Nobody has any sense of loyalty or responsibility anymore. And I don’t see it any more clearly than I do in my own family. Robin has an important job at some bank in Charlotte. She’ll probably never marry. Teddy keeps going to school for one thing and then another. And Jenny, bless her heart,the twins and that lazy husband of hers are all that she can handle.
    In the beginning I tried to busy myself in their lives, be a real mother to them, but I was told in a hurry to mind my own business. And after Paul died I just assumed I could live with them throughout the year, especially during the winter, since the homeplace gets so cold. It’s a daughter’s duty, after all, to care for an aging mother. But that idea went nowhere.
    Oh, I admit it hurt my feelings for a while, but I realized that they’ve got their own lives to lead. So I moved back home. And even though it took a while to adjust to living alone, I managed. I stayed busy with visiting the sick, taking cassette tapes of the Bible to the shut-ins, teaching crafts at the nursing home. I was home for about a year when Dick Witherspoon asked me if I would like to help over at the funeral home. Well, I never thought I would be one to do such a job, but it turns out to suit me very well.
    I always did know how to put clothes together, and I’ve fixed hair since I was a little girl twirling strands of cotton. The makeup wasn’t hard to learn. Pinks and rose mostly. Mr. Witherspoon says I’m the best funeral beautician he’s ever seen. He says you would hardly know that those corpses are dead the way I fix them up. I like to think of it as my little ministry for the community and for those who suffer.
    I know most of the dead. It’s a small community after all. So I can usually remember how they flip their hair and how much lipstick they wear. I’ve got a good memory for how people look. And I am also very clear about what they could have done to look better. On occasion, it’s this desire to better someone’s appearance that has gotten me into trouble.
    I almost got in a fight with Delores Wade over her mama.Delores claimed her mother had never had color in her hair and that I should leave the gray showing in the front. I knew perfectly well that Elsie Wade needed Clairol Number 83, natural black shade.
    I had tried to tell Elsie while she was living in a loving, gentle way, like the Scriptures tell us to do, but you’d have thought I was telling her she needed a feminine hygiene spray. We were in the Wal-Mart at Burlington, standing at the shampoo aisle, just chatting, and I said, “Why, Elsie, I believe that if you tried