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sins. And the colorful way she lived her life probably didn't seem like that of a repentant woman. I wasn't troubled by the number of times she'd been married. It could have been twenty for all I cared. She was one of the most loving and exciting people I knew.
    But I think, more than anything, I liked being around her because she would talk about my mama. She was the only person in town who ever talked about my mama. Any old thing might remind her of her friend Lena Mae, like when the clouds in the sky come together to look like a bunny rabbit. Then Gloria Jean would say something like, “Oh honey, your mama loved to sprawl out in the grass and look for animals floating across the sky. She was nothing more than a little girl herself when she married your daddy.”
    Gloria Jean said she and my mama had been friends ever since Lena Mae came to town. Turned out our mama's aunt in Willacoochee was Gloria Jean's fifth husband's first cousin. “It's a small world, girls,” she'd laugh, “especially when you've married half of it.”
    You could tell Gloria Jean really loved Lena Mae Cline. She was just extra special, she'd say. And you could tell she saw something in my mama that nobody else saw. “Catherine Grace, I knew it from the minute I laid eyes on her. She was such a pretty thing. She didn't need all these creams and powders I wear to be pretty. She just was. And she was so eager to be a good wife and mother. Yep, she was a real beauty, hon, inside and out,” she'd say, making me feel so proud to be her daughter.
    “And, boy howdy, could she sing like a bird. She had the best voice in the Cedar Grove church choir. I told her that voice of hers surely made the Lord smile. I even begged her to take what the Lord had given her and head on over to Nashville and give it a go. There ain't no sin in singing for money. The Lord loves Loretta, Dolly, and Tammy just as much as He does Lena Mae Cline.”
    Gloria Jean really believed my mama could have been a country music star. Sometimes I tried to imagine what life would have been like if she had been, me and Martha Ann and Mama and Daddy driving around in Mama's big fancy tour bus, stopping in a place like Ringgold only to buy some gas and sign a few autographs. But that dream, just like all the others crowding my head, always ended with me waking up the preacher's daughter in my bed in Ringgold, Georgia.
    “Yes, sirree, girls, your mama had what it took to be on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. But the minute she'd start dreaming, well, she was real quick to remind me that her place was here with you girls and your daddy. I guess that don't really matter now. Either one of you know what time it is?” she'd say, always looking for a way to change the subject whenever my daddy's name drifted into the conversation.
    Gloria Jean never said a mean thing about my daddy; that wasn't her way. But I knew that since Mama died, she quit going to church. She said it was just too painful to look up in the choir and not see her friend standing there singing her praises to Jesus. But sometimes I wondered if Gloria Jean thought my daddy hadn't treated my mama quite right, that maybe he hadn't appreciated all of Lena Mae's God-given gifts and talents. I don't know, but somehow I knew that was her business, not mine.
    “Come on, girls. Let's get out the marshmallow whip and Ritz crackers and make us a little snack before the
Guiding Light
comes on,” Gloria Jean would say, and then we'd sit and watch the heartache and drama in somebody else's life for an hour.

CHAPTER THREE
    Wandering Through the Desert with a Jar of Strawberry Jam
    W hen the lightning bugs came out to decorate the night sky, my daddy started working overtime, redeeming Ringgold's unsaved souls from an eternity of hellfire and damnation. He figured he had only three, maybe four, months at best when the water at Nottely Lake was warm enough to baptize those willing to dedicate their lives to their Savior Jesus Christ. Even