He gives her a quick kiss on the cheek and then he’s off, in search of food, water, and whatever else he can think of that Emma Jo might need.
“I can’t believe how much I love that man,” she says softly, staring after him as he moves through the crowds of people milling about the yard, drinking, talking, and listening to the music of Caden Jefferson’s band.
“I can. It’s been a year and you’re still staring at his ass all the time,” Bettie laughs, coming up to us with a bottle of beer in her hand.
As much as Emma Jo tried to deny it last year, she liked Buddy Lloyd. A lot. And the entire town knew how much Buddy liked her right back and did everything they could to pry into their business and push them together. Buddy understood the kind of life Emma Jo had lived for twelve years and he didn’t rush her. He taught her how to trust someone not to hurt you, he treated her like a princess, and he showered her with all the love and compassion that she’d never had with Jed. Even though they wanted to take things slow, the universe had other plans.
“How am I only seven months pregnant? I feel as big as a house,” Emma Jo complains, rubbing her hand in circles around her huge stomach.
“You should see your ass,” Bettie snorts, which earns her the middle finger from Emma Jo and a smack on the arm from me.
As much as this town loves gossip, no one batted an eye when Emma Jo’s stomach started expanding, nor did they put up a fuss when Emma Jo told everyone her and Buddy wouldn’t be getting married until after the baby came, because there was no way in hell she wanted to be pregnant and unable to drink wine at her own wedding. Everyone in town knew Emma Jo had lived through enough hard times, and they were just too happy for her to bother with gossip and rumors.
Not only did Emma Jo finally have someone who loved her the way she deserved and they had a baby on the way, she was no longer a housewife without any money of her own. As soon as I made the decision to open a Liquid Crack in Bald Knob when I returned from packing up my things in Chicago, I hired Emma Jo as my manager, and the first Liquid Crack to have a pastry chef. She runs the business when I’m not there or helping Leo on the farm, selling her pies alongside my coffee. The night I offered her the job, she broke down in tears, finally blurting out everything that happened the night of Jed’s murder. This obviously happened after several bottles of wine, and it wasn’t my intention when I started pouring the Moscato down her throat. I just wanted her to finally admit she was in love with Buddy, not come clean about killing her husband.
From what I could understand through her slurring and crying, Jed started blowing up her phone with calls and text messages after he’d been punched in the face by Leo in the parking lot of Pickerson’s Bar. Since I was passed out in her living room, Emma Jo decided to take matters into her own hands and tell Jed to come over so they could talk. She never had any intention of killing him, she just wanted to finally stand up to him and tell him it was over. She grabbed the award from the front table for protection and snuck out into the backyard to wait for him. Jed met her out there and immediately started threatening her. As he charged in her direction, she wasn’t fast enough to pull the award out from behind her back and hit him with it. He wrestled it from her hands and tossed it to the ground behind him. When he laughed at her attempt to overtake him, she kicked him in the balls and shoved him as hard as she could, which resulted in Jed tripping over his own feet and falling backward…right onto the award that pierced his skull. She panicked, yanking it out of his head, and ran deep into the woods, burying it where no one would ever find it. Since he was still breathing when she came back from her trek to the woods, Emma Jo really was just as shocked as me when we saw his dead body in the back yard the next morning. She honestly thought he’d wake up and crawl away after she locked herself back inside the house that night. Still in shock and not wanting to believe her shoving Jed to the ground was what killed him, she took hold of the poisoned pie theory and ran with it, until that idea was blown out of the water after the whole dead raccoon’s incident.
Her drunken ramblings then led to even more crying and her apologizing to me for hiding the truth and letting me take the blame, never thinking in a million years that all fingers would point to me. She was scared and she freaked out, and she lied to me and everyone so well that I couldn’t be mad at her. I could only be proud that she’d finally found her strength and used it for evil.
“I love you assholes,” I state from the comfort of Leo’s arms.
“I love you guys more,” Emma Jo replies softly.