Never Say Never
Never Say Never
Never Say Never
Daily, Texas
Talk of the Town
Word Gets Around
Never Say Never
Moses Lake
Larkspur Cove
Blue Moon Bay
Firefly Island
Wildwood Creek
Lisa Wingate
5
Never Say Never • Lisa Wingate
Bethany House, a division of Baker Publishing Group © 2019 used by permission
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photo-
copy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only
exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-0-7642-3303-6
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version
of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®.
NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission
of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and
“New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and
Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products
of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to
actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Donetta Bradford
11
12
on, I never understood it. My mama, with her hair the deep
auburn of fall leaves, and her olive skin, and her eyes so dark
you couldn’t see the centers, was beautiful, exotic like a movie
star. When she talked, the words fell from her mouth with a lilt
that made her voice ebb and flow like the currents in the bayou.
Mama’s people knew the water. They lived on it, and farmed
rice alongside it, and felt it in their very souls.
Every summer, Mama gathered me and my little brother,
Frank, and carried us on the train to southeast Texas to see her
people. I’d come back afterward and tell everyone in Daily that
Mama’s family lived on a plain old farm, just like folks in Daily.
That was as far from true as the east is from the west. Those
trips to see the Chiassons were like going to a whole other world.
After my mama passed on, there weren’t any more lies to tell.
Daddy never sent us back to her people, and I didn’t hear from
them, and the secrets from that final summer, when I turned
fifteen on the bayou—the biggest secrets of all—never got told.
I thought I’d take the secrets to my grave. And maybe I
would’ve if Imagene Doll, my best friend since we started
school together at Daily Primary, hadn’t got a wild hair to
celebrate her seventieth birthday by catching a cruise ship out
of the harbor near Perdida, Texas.
It’s funny how from seventeen to seventy can be the blink
of an eye, all of a sudden. Every time we talked about that
cruise, I had a little shiver up my spine. I tried not to think too
hard about it, but I had a strange feeling this trip was gonna
change everything. That feeling hung on me like a polyester
shirt straight out of the clothes dryer, all clingy and itchy.
The day we sat looking at the map, using a highlighter to
draw the path we’d take to the coast, static crackled on my skin,
popping up gooseflesh. I imagined them east-Texas roads, the
piney woods growin’ high and thick, towering over the lumber
trucks as they crawled with their heavy loads. I followed the line
13
down to the bayou country, where the rice farmers worked their
flooded fields and the gators came up on the levies to gather
the noonday sun. Where the secret I’d kept all these years lay
buried, even yet.
“Are we really gonna do this?” Imagene asked, tracing the
road with her finger. A little shimmy ran across her shoulders.
Imagene’d never got out in a boat on anything bigger than a
farm pond in her life. Even though we’d already booked the
trip and paid our money, she was trying to wriggle off like a
worm on a hook. Sometimes what looks like a wild hair at first
looks harebrained later on.
Across the table, Lucy, who came from Japan originally (so
she ain’t afraid of water), had her eyebrows up, like two big
question marks in her forehead. Her mind was set on taking
the cruise. After all these years away from the island country
where she was born, she wanted to see the ocean again.
They were both looking at me, waiting to see what I’d say,
since right now the vote was one for and one against. I knew
they’d probably go for it if I told them, Oh hang, let’s just go
to Six Flags instead. It’d be lots easier. We can ride the loop-
de-loop and say we done somethin’ adventuresome before we
turned seventy.
I sat there, staring out the window of my beauty shop, where
the wavy old glass still read DAILY HOTEL—from back in the
day when wool, cotton, and mohair kept the town hoppin’—
and it come to my mind that I’d been staring at that same
window almost every day of my whole, entire life. How many
times over the years had Imagene and me hatched an idea to do
something different, then sat there and talked ourselves right
back into the same old chairs?
Imagene swished a fly away from her cup. Early September
like this, the flies hung thick as molasses under the awnings on
Main Street.
14
15
16
17
18