Susan Gregg Gilmore - Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen

Acknowledgments

Neither Catherine Grace nor I would have found our places in the world without the following people:

Shaye Areheart, my editor, whose wisdom and kindness and passion for things Southern has made her as much trusted advisor as friend.

Barbara Braun, my agent, who pulled me from the slush pile and gave me this opportunity to tell a story. I am forever grateful for her faith in me and her constant guidance and sage advice.

Bonnie MacDonald, reader, mentor, counselor, friend, who has read so many words I have written, generously providing countless hours of instruction from the grammatical to the spiritual.

Lee Smith, who not only taught me to diagram a sentence in the seventh grade but has continued to teach and inspire.

My big sisters: Mary Hall Gregg, Alice Gregg Haase, and Vicky Gregg; and all my Bradford-Street girlfriends: Suzanne Holder, Lisa Morse, Athena Wood, Tricia Partridge, Jane Herzog, Susan Regas, Cindy Norman, Michelle Doney, Sally Storch, Carey McAniff, and Michelle Whang whose early readings and enthusiastic encouragement were as reassuring and comforting as the discovery of the perfect tomato.

Fred Gregg, the big brother Catherine Grace never had.

Mark Wax and Mark Herzog, the movie men who thought it best I write a book.

Anne Berry, always patient with even the simplest of questions.

Claudia, who snapped her mother's picture.

My husband, Dan, and daughters Claudia, Josephine, and Alice, who took care of themselves and gave me hugs when the gang in Ringgold demanded all of my attention.

And, of course, my mother, Mary, and father, Fred, who made me go to church every Sunday.

And my grandfather, Pop, who took me to get a Dilly Bar.

About the Author

SUSAN GREGG GILMORE has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and three daughters. This is her first novel.

CHAPTER ONE

In the Beginning

M y daddy always said that if the good Lord can take the time to care for something as small as a baby sparrow nesting in a tree, then surely He could take the time to listen to a little girl in Ringgold, Georgia. So every night before I went to bed I got down on my knees and begged the Lord to find me a way out of this town. And every morning, I woke up in the same old place.

It was a place that I, Catherine Grace Cline, never wanted to call home, even though I was born and raised here. It was a place where everybody knew everything about you, down to the color of underwear your mama bought you at the Dollar General Store. It was a place that just never felt right to me, like a sweater that fits too tight under your arms. It was a place where girls like me traded their dreams for a boy with a couple of acres of land and a wood-framed house with a new electric stove. It was a place I always planned on leaving.

When I was no more than nine years old, a tornado tore right close to my house. I remember yelling at my little sister to run and hide in the basement. Martha Ann, I warned her, if that twister hits this town, nobody's even going to notice it's gone.

She started crying for fear she was going to be swept up in the clouds and carried away, and nobody, not even our daddy, would be able to find her. Turned out the only thing of any importance swept up in the sky that day was Mr. Naylor's old hound dog. People said that Buster Black flew some fifteen miles, those long lonesome ears of his flapping like wings, before landing in the middle of some cornfield over in the next county.

Mr. Naylor walked for miles looking for that dad-gum dog till finally my daddy and the sheriff had to go pick him up. And just when that poor man finished planting a wooden cross by Buster's little house, darn it, if that four-legged fool didn't come limping back home, wagging his tail and acting like he'd found the Promised Land. Mr. Naylor was crying, praising the Lord, holding Buster Black in his arms. The local newspaper ran a color picture of them both right on the front page, like that dog was some kind of prodigal son.

You know, Martha Ann, I told her after reading about Buster's triumphant return, a tornado like that just might be our ticket out of here, but unlike that stupid old hound dog, we are not going to limp back home.

My daddy said I was a little girl with a big imagination. Maybe. Or maybe I was a patient girl with a big dream, or a despairing girl waiting for her divine deliverance. But either way, I was going to hitch a ride out of Ringgold, whether it was on a fiery twister ripping a path through the Georgia sky or on a Greyhound bus rolling its way down Interstate 75.

Truth be told, I never even liked the name Ringgold. I mean, there's nothing in these green rolling hills that even faintly resembles a ring of gold, a ring of anything for that matter. And believe me, me and Martha Ann looked, somehow figuring that if we could find a ring of trees or ancient rocks, then just maybe our living here would have some kind of meaning. But after years of searching, the best I could figure was that it was just these darn hills that I had stared at every morning from my bedroom window that formed the ring, the ring that had kept me hostage for the first eighteen years of my life.

Nobody much ever bothers to visit this town except the truckers who stop to fill their fuel tanks because they can get some of the cheapest gas in the state here and Mrs. Gloria Jean Graves's second cousin, who has come up from Birmingham every year for the Thanksgiving holiday since before I was born. She always said it was refreshing to get away from the big city for a few days.

One time the governor came by for about twenty-five minutes to cut a ribbon at the new elementary-school library. Everybody in town came out to see him. Daddy made me wear a dress and tie my hair back in a ribbon, just like I was going to church. Six days a week my daddy didn't care too much how I looked, but on Sunday mornings there was no negotiating the dress code. My sister and I wore our very best dresses with a fresh pair of cotton panties underneath, out of respect for the Lord, Daddy said.

I really didn't think Jesus cared what I wore to Cedar Grove Baptist Church, or to see the governor for that matter, considering the fact that in every picture I ever saw of the King of Kings, He was wearing sandals and bundled up in nothing more than a big, baggy robe. But I figured this governor must be the most important person I was ever going to meet if Daddy was making me wear my navy blue Sunday dress with the white lacy collar and my patent-leather Mary Janes.

Martha Ann pitched such a fit about wearing her Sunday clothes that Daddy ended up leaving her at home with a neighbor. My little sister is a couple of years younger than I am, but she has always been a couple of inches taller, my guess from the time she came into this world. She has thick, dark brown hair and deep brown eyes like our mama. I have blue eyes like my daddy and straight brown hair that looks more like the color of a field mouse.

Martha Ann was a pretty baby and a pretty girl. Everything on her face just fits together so perfectly. When we were little, people said we looked just like twins for no better reason than we might have been wearing the same color shirt. You had to wonder if they were truly looking at us. But one thing was for certain, Martha Ann hated putting on her Sunday clothes even more than I did. She'd have much rather been in the library picking out a new book to read than waiting to look at some strange man cut a ribbon.

I told her that if she didn't stop all that stomping and snorting, she was going to get left behind. And sure enough, she did. She had to spend the entire afternoon with Ida Belle Fletcher shucking eighty-four ears of corn for Wednesday-night supper over at the church.