Welcome to HOUSEL, HALLELUJAH!
You may remember Housel Jones from “The Farmstand,” the short story featured in my Valentine’s Day collection, Everyone Falls in Love. If you haven’t read it, don’t worry. “The Farmstand” is included inside this story, so you won’t miss a thing.
Ever since that story, so many of you have fallen in love with Housel and his daughter, Keisha, and asked me the same question:
What happens next?
Well...here’s the story…
Truthfully, Housel, Hallelujah! has been finished since earlier this year. But while revising it, I realized I needed a little distance from some of the heavier themes, so I went off to write something light and fun instead. And somehow that little detour became Stone Fruit Summer. 😂
Now that Dilly and all his shenanigans have made it into your hands, I circled back to Housel. Except...something still wasn’t clicking. I kept trying to make this story into a traditional novel, and eventually I started wondering if maybe that’s not what it wants to be.
Maybe Housel wants to unfold slowly.
Week by week.
Episode by episode.
So, at least for now, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Welcome back to Juniper, Roena County, a tiny rural town where there’s plenty of farmland, good people, and apparently a little meddling.
Widower Housel Jones has poured himself into raising his teenage daughter and running his farm, never expecting to fall in love again.
Then Ramona Thibodaux starts visiting his farmstand.
Every Saturday. Same time. Same order. Every week…for a year straight.
When Keisha realizes her father has a crush, she decides to take matters into her own hands. But falling for Ramona means Housel must decide whether he can move forward without feeling like he’s leaving the love he lost behind.
And that’s where our story begins.
So settle in.
We’re doing this one episode at a time with weekly drops.
Welcome to Housel, Hallelujah!
Here’s Chapter One.
TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER:
Grief and bereavement
Death and loss of a spouse
Terminal illness
Hospice and end of life care
Discussions of death and dying
Parental grief
Loneliness and rebuilding life after loss
HOUSEL JONES
“Diane ain't got no business being gone!"
Daphne's voice cracked the room open like a shotgun at a library. She was jumping, feet leaving the floor, tears streaming down her face, dark liquor sloshing out of her cup in wide desperate arcs while Raquel made grabs for the glass with both hands like she was trying to catch something that kept changing direction. TJ had his arms around her from behind in the full body grip of a man who had accepted that this was his family no matter how big of a fool they looked like.
"She posed to be here right now!"
"Daphne calm yo ugly ass down!" Roderick came out the bathroom still buckling his belt, toilet flushing behind him like it was providing commentary, moving with the energy of a man who had just handled business in there and was fully prepared to handle more. He surveyed the room like a general arriving late to a battle he had already decided he was winning.
I was fairly certain he had not washed his hands. Noted. I set down my plate and stepped away from the deviled eggs I’d seen him circling before he went to the bathroom.
"That's my sister!" Daphne snatched the funeral program off the end table and thrust Diane's smiling face toward Roderick like she was serving him papers. "We were sisters!
"Every single event, every single time, Daphne gotta be the main character. Somebody's graduation, somebody's wedding, somebody's any damn thang, and you still making it about you! All that hollering like it's yo funeral! "
"If it was my funeral I'd be dead, fool!"
"Shoulda been you instead of Diane." He pointed at her. "Jesus came all the way down here and took the wrong one. Took my favorite cousin. Shoulda asked me for directions first, I woulda walked him right to you. There she go, Big Sandals! The bad built, cockatoo looking creature in the corner knocking over the flower arrangement! That's your girl right there! Take her on home!"
"Bad built??" Daphne looked down at herself and back up at him, genuinely offended. "I know you better recognize a good shape when you see one!"
"Shaped like what though? That's my question. Shaped like what exactly?"
"Built like yo mama is what!"
"Shaped like yo damn daddy! Drink like him too!"
"Least my daddy was around!" Daphne whipped toward him, Hennessy sloshing over her knuckles, something older in her eyes now, something that had been in the chamber a long time waiting for exactly this moment. "Yo daddy left, came back, left again, and the second time he took the good tv! My daddy's good for nothing brother!"
"Don't you bring up that tv—"
"I will ALWAYS bring up that tv! That was a good tv, Roderick! We was watching that tv as a FAMILY and he just—" she made a taking motion with both hands, Hennessy be damned—"GONE! TV GONE! RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF WALKER, TEXAS RANGER"
"That tv was in his name!"
Someone coughed to stifle a laugh.
Roderick's eye twitched. "The fact still remains! God made Diane first and she came out perfect. Then He looked at what He had left over, the spare parts, some scraps, the stuff He was just gon’ throw away, and said well I can't waste this." He looked Daphne up and down slow. "Swept it all into a pile and called it Daphne…and here you stand, pissing me off!"
"God don't make no mistakes," an elder said from the corner, mostly to herself, fanning harder.
"He made Daphne," Roderick said.
Something happened in Daphne's face right then. You could see it, the exact moment the last circuit blew. Her whole body gave a dramatic shudder, like she was downloading something too large for her system to handle, and then she threw herself down on the couch and started banging her head on the throw pillow behind her, while wailing from a place so deep and completely unhinged that three people in the kitchen stopped eating to see what was going on.
"My sister!!! Why you take her Lord?!? TAKE RODERICK!!! TAKE RODERICK INSTEAD AND BRING HER BACK!!!"
Half the room agreed under their breath. Roderick heard all of it, but stood there with his chin up, looking like a man recalculating his relationships one by one.
"That's enough now, Daphne!" TJ stepped toward her with both hands out like he was approaching something that had gotten loose from a facility.
Daphne looked at those hands coming toward her and made a split second decision.
She full barrel rolled, across the entire couch, dress and all, hit the far armrest, bounced, started sliding off the cushions feet first when Raquel grabbed for her. She went completely boneless and slipped through Raquel's arms like hot grease through a screen door, hit the floor on all fours, looked up, assessed the situation, and crawled directly under Raquel's legs like a woman who had mapped this route in advance, came up on the other side, grabbed the side table with both hands and hauled herself upright like she was raising a flag on a hill she had personally conquered.
"Don't tell me how to grieve!!!"
The side table wobbled. A ceramic rooster Diane had on there since before our daughter was born teetered on the edge like it was having a crisis of faith. And I'll tell you something, standing there looking at that rooster rocking back and forth, I had a moment. Because that rooster and Daphne were built the same, at least on the head. I don't know who Daphne's stylist was or what conversation led to that particular haircut, short on the sides, something architectural happening in the middle, red streaks running through it like a warning label, but that woman and that ceramic rooster looked like kin to me.
"Get it out, Daphne!" somebody hollered from the kitchen doorway with full encouragement.
"Don't egg her on!" Roderick snapped.
"Sick of yo ass Roderick!" Daphne spat.
"I'm'ma call Jesus on the main line right now!" Roderick spread his arms wide like he was directing air traffic straight to heaven. "It's a animal on the loose! A animal down to the repast! Lord, if you got any vacancies I got somebody for you and she is RIGHT HERE! Already in her good dress! I will personally drive her to the gate, I will pack her a bag, I will write her a reference letter. You seen her try to jump in the casket earlier. TAKE HER LORD! DO A SWAP! YOU MADE A MISTAKE ANYWAY, CORRECT IT TODAY!"
"Bitch, I outta—" Daphne pulled that hand back from somewhere so far behind her it had its own zip code, cocked it like a weapon, locked eyes with Roderick and charged.
I’d had enough and chose to look away.
I loved Daphne. Loved her the way you love a car with no air conditioning — deeply, out of loyalty, with full awareness that she was gonna make you suffer. She was Diane's baby sister, which meant she was family and had permanent rights to my refrigerator, my couch, and my last nerve, in that order. But I couldn’t handle her on that day. The Lord was gonna have to sort that one out. I had enough to deal with.
I grabbed up the empty paper plates, cups and utensils folks left on the dining room table and headed toward the trash can. Diane would never want the house like this, things out of order. She'd be unhappy with the place a mess. She'd be unhappy about a lot of things happening in this house right now if I was being honest. The Electric Slide going full on in the living room, for one. Uncle Curtis out there leading it like he was getting a check, calling out steps to people who had known the steps since 1976. Somebody's potato salad was face down on the good rug. Sister Mavis from the church having taken over the stove entirely, reheating somebody else's green beans without permission and salting them while she was at it, shaking her head like she was the last competent woman on earth. Deacon Phillips in the corner on his third plate, refusing to use the coaster that was literally right next to his cup.
And Daphne. Diane would have been very unhappy about Daphne carrying on the way she was.
But the house was packed with family and friends who'd come out to support. The church had been so full there was overflow out the doors and down the front steps. Unfortunately they all followed me home for what I was hoping would be an intimate gathering. But nah, that ain't how Roena County folk do. You gotta bury your dead and then immediately host a party, and right now the party was live and well and getting livelier by the minute, and all I wanted to do was collapse in my room and scream, because holy fuck it was hitting me — Diane would never be in this house with me and our daughter again.
Diane was gone.
My wife was dead.
The woman I had been reaching for in my sleep every night for decades, my hand crossing to her side of the bed before I was even all the way awake, that muscle memory so deep in me it didn't know yet that what it was looking for was gone. The woman whose hands I held for no reason at all, just to hold them, just because they were hers and they were warm and having them in mine felt like proof that my life had turned out right. The woman whose eyes I had been falling into since I was barely in my 20s and had never once wanted to climb back out of. The woman whose mouth did this thing, this little slow open thing, every single time I walked into whatever room she was in, like I was still the best thing that had ever happened to her, like years of laundry and arguments and hard months and long ordinary Tuesdays had never once made her tired of the sight of me.
She was never going to look at me like that again.
That was the part I couldn't get past. The never again. The forever and ever and ever of it. The fact that I could live another forty years on this earth, God willing, and wake up every single one of those mornings and she was not going to be in the kitchen, not on the other end of the phone, or coming through the door tired from work, dropping her bag in that spot by the door she always dropped it even though I asked her a hundred times not to.
She was in the ground and she was never coming back inside this house and all I had left of her was memory and photographs and cell phone videos I had watched so many times that I knew every second of them by heart. I knew exactly when she was going to laugh, knew exactly what she was about to say, and still pressed play again anyway because ten seconds of her voice was better than a world that had already moved on to the Electric Slide while I was still standing here trying to figure out how to exist without her.
I had stood at that graveside and watched them lower the only woman I had ever loved into the cold November earth while Keisha's hand shook in mine. This child, our child, was only twelve years old and already learning things she didn’t need to know about how permanent loss is, and how the ground just takes people and keeps them. And that the world doesn't stop turning even when yours does. I had held her hand and I had not jumped in after Diane and that was the bravest thing I had ever done in my life and I wanted no credit for it.
I had wanted to go with her.
God forgive me, standing at that grave in my good suit with my daughter's hand in mine and a hundred people at my back, I had wanted to go with her so bad I had to remind myself to breathe, had to find Keisha's face and hold onto it like a rope thrown into deep water, had to say to myself you cannot leave this child, you cannot leave this child, you cannot leave this child, until the words stopped being words and became something closer to a heartbeat, something my body just kept doing without being asked.
"Ain't got no pineapple upside down cake in this mother fucker? It's usually some when I come over here." somebody said from the direction of the dessert table, loud and offended.
"Diane always made the pineapple upside down cake," I stopped walking and said to myself, standing there at the trash can, dirty paper plates in my hand, not moving.
Behind me TJ hollered something at Roderick. Curtis called out slap that ground! Somebody laughed too loud at something that probably wasn't funny. The whole house full of people going on like the world hadn't just come off its axis, like we hadn't put the most important person in it in the ground that morning.
I stood there at the trash can thinking about cake and tried to remember how to breathe. She always makes the cake. Not made. Makes. Present tense. Ongoing. A thing that happens every time there's a gathering, every repast, every Fourth of July, every—
"Housel, you need to eat something, baby." My sister Joyce suddenly appeared at my elbow with a plate I didn't ask for, and that look on her face that'd been there all day that was equal parts love and pity that I was running out of room to receive.
"I'm good, Joyce."
"You ain't touched nothing since this morning."
"I'm not hungry."
"I don't care nothin’ bout hungry. You need to eat." She pushed the plate closer. "I made you a little bit of everything. The potato salad is from Sister Carol, you know how you like Sister Carol's potato salad, and I put two pieces of chicken on there because you always take two pieces and think I don't notice."
"Joyce."
"And drink some water. You been walking around here looking dehydrated since the benediction."
"Joyce."
"I'm just saying. Grief will dehydrate you. I read that on one of them grief websites. Your body don't know the difference between crying and running a marathon. It's all water leaving you either way and you been leaking all day. I don’t need you dehydrated on top of everything else you gotta deal with. Drink the water, Housel."
"Joyce."
She looked at me for a long moment, the way she used to when we were kids and she was trying to decide if I was worth arguing with. Then she squeezed my arm once, set the plate on the counter next to me like I might change my mind, and moved on.
Daphne's bright hair suddenly caught my eye. I watched her ease a flask out her bag and tip it into her cup like she was being slick about it, as if everybody in the room wasn't already aware that Daphne had been her own open bar since she walked through the door. I let her have it. I didn't have the fight in me.
What I couldn't let go of was Diane's end table. Somebody had moved it, pushed it against the wall to make room for the dancing. Diane had refinished that table herself three summers ago. Stayed up two nights straight sanding it down, hands smelling like turpentine for a whole week after. She was so proud of herself. I stared at it from across the room and had a thought so desperate that I had to swallow it.
I wondered if I went over there and put my hands on it, if I could feel her on it still.
That's crazy as hell, Housel. Keep it together.
I set the trash down, braced both hands on the counter and focused on breathing, just that, just in and out, just enough to keep my legs under me.
Not here. Not in front of all these people.
The back door was right there and I was through it before I decided to move.
November cold hit me clean in the face the second I stepped through that door, cutting and real in a way nothing inside that house had been all day, and I stood on the back porch steps and let it have me. I tipped my head back and looked up at a sky that didn't have anything to say about any of this. Just breathed, in and out, slow, the way you breathe when you been holding yourself together so long your whole body done forgot what it feel like to just be. Breathing didn't come natural no more. It took conscious effort, something I had to keep reminding myself I was still supposed to be doing.
Finally the music and the hollering faded down to a low thump behind the walls, like a heartbeat that wasn't mine. They was in there doing the Cupid Shuffle while I stood out back, looking out over my acres in the dark, flat and wide and stretching out toward the tree line the way Florida land do, no hills to speak of, just earth and sky and all that open space between them. I listened for the river, that little branch that ran along the south end of the property that always grounded me.
This land had always known how to hold me. Had always been the place I came when I didn't know where else to go. But standing there in that cold listening to that water, I wasn't so sure it was enough this time. Wasn't sure there was enough land or enough sky or enough of anything Roena County had to offer to reach down into where I was and pull me back out.
Diane had planted bulbs out there, the fall before she got sick, tulips and daffodils both, on a Saturday afternoon when the light was going gold and she had dirt on her knees and she kept swatting my hands away every time I tried to help. I told her I knew how to put something in the ground and she said baby I know you do but this is mine, let me have this one. So I pulled up a chair right where I was standing now and watched her work, the way she patted the earth down over each bulb gentle like she was tucking them in and making them a promise. Said they'd come up in spring, a whole riot of color, like spring was something the world owed her personally. She put them in the ground with her own hands and now she was in the ground herself and she was never going to stand out here in the April light and watch what those hands had made come alive.
I knew better than anybody what it meant to put something in the cold ground and wait on it. Had been doing it my whole life. But everything I had ever planted I had been there to see come up. Everything I had ever put my faith into the earth to hold had paid me back come spring.
Not this time.
"I don't think I can do this," I said as I let out a breath that had been sitting in my chest since opening my eyes that morning, maybe longer, maybe since the last time I had watched her breathe. "I'm gon’ die out here."
The heard the door open behind me. I turned expecting Joyce with another plate, but it was Keisha. She was standing there in her navy dress with the white collar, the one we picked out together the week before because she said her Mama liked her in navy. She'd been so still all day — twelve years old, standing at her mother's casket, letting people squeeze her cheeks and call her baby and the spitting image.
"I was looking for you," she said.
"I was about to come looking for you again," I said. And it was true. Somewhere between the trash and the Electric Slide and Daphne hollering, some part of me had been tracking her all day, always knowing which room she was in, keeping count. I just needed a breather before I went to find her again.
She came down the steps and stood next to me and we both looked out at the yard.
"Somebody moved Mama's table," Keisha said.
"I know."
"She's gonna be upset about that."
I didn't correct her. She knew where her mother was. She just needed to say it out loud, and I understood that because I needed the same thing, had been doing it all day. Diane always made the pineapple upside down cake.
"Daddy."
"Yeah, baby."
"I don't want to go back in there."
"Me neither."
“They coulda danced out here, there’s more room.”
“I know, but the food is inside and I don’t have the strength to argue.”
She leaned into my side and I pulled her close. I felt how small she still was under all that stillness, under all that composure she'd been holding white-knuckle all day. She shook once, one single shudder that went all the way through her, and then her face was in my jacket and she was crying. Not loud like Daphne, who needed an audience for her grief. Just completely devastating, the way grief sounds when it's got nowhere left to go but out.
I held my baby girl. My own eyes burned and I didn't wipe it, or swallow it back. Keisha needed to see that it was allowed. That you could feel it all the way down and still be standing. That falling apart wasn't the same as falling.
"She was gonna teach me to sew next year," Keisha whispered.
"I know, HoneyBee."
"And she promised she'd do my hair for prom. That's four years from now, Daddy. She promised."
I pressed my mouth to the top of her head and closed my eyes. Four years from now. Diane had made that promise like she had four years to keep it, like she had all the time in the world, as if time was something that belonged to her. I used to believe that too. Used to believe we had so much of it we could afford to be careless with it, could afford to say we'll do that later, we'll get to that, there's time, there's always time, not knowing that time was already in the back room packing its bags.
Keisha was gonna need somebody to teach her how to sew and Diane wasn't gonna be there. Was gonna have her heart broken for the first time by some boy who didn't deserve her and reach for her mama and Diane wasn't gonna be there. Was gonna graduate high school and look out into that crowd and find my face and the seat next to me was gonna be empty in the exact shape of her mother and Diane wasn't gonna be there. Every milestone, every hard day, every moment that called for a mother's hands, a mother's voice, a mother's particular way of knowing what her child needed before the child knew herself, all of it was coming and Diane wasn't gonna be there for a single one.
And there wasn't a thing in this world I could do about it.
I held my daughter tighter and let that settle into me, the full weight of it, all the years stretching out ahead of us with that same empty space running through every one of them like a seam that never got sewn closed.
"I know she promised," I said into her hair. "Your mama never made a promise she didn't mean to keep."
"We gon’ be okay?" Keisha asked, her voice catching, the back of her hand dragging slow across her eyes. "Just us two, without Mama?"
Without Mama.
I thought about wrapping it up clean. Telling her yes baby, we gon’ be just fine, the way you tell a child something because they need to hear it and you need to believe it and neither one of you can afford for it not to be true right now. I thought about making it a promise I could tie a bow on and hand to her like something solid she could hold onto in the dark.
But Diane raised this child to know the difference between a real answer and a pretty one. Had sat at that kitchen table with her since she was old enough to sit up and told her the truth about things, even when the truth was hard, even when a pretty lie would have been so much easier on everybody. I wasn't about to undo that on the night we put her in the ground.
"I don't know yet," I said. "But we gonna figure it out together. Me and you, HoneyBee. That I can promise you."
She pulled back just enough to look at my face, reading it the way she always did, the way that was pure Diane, searching underneath the words for the truth. Whatever she found there was enough. She nodded once, tucked herself back under my arm, and we stood together in the cold, her and me, looking out over a garden full of things that hadn't bloomed yet.
Behind us, The Cupid Shuffle thumped and I heard something break. I let it go because I didn't have anything left to give to broken things tonight.
This wasn't a party. This was a repast for the woman I met in college and knew from the first conversation was gonna be my wife. The bow on a year of watching something that had no business happening happen anyway, a sickness that came in fast and moved faster, that turned our home into something that looked more like a hospital every month until even that wasn't enough and we had to move her somewhere they could do more than I could, and then somewhere they could only make her comfortable, and then nowhere at all.
It was the end of me standing in Keisha's doorway every night telling her Mama was gonna be okay and meaning it, because why wouldn't she be? Why would God let us down after all those prayers? After a whole town of people who loved Diane got on their knees and asked Him to spare her? Why would He look down at all that faith and say no?
He said no.
And now it was just us. Me and my baby girl, my Honeybee, standing on the back porch of a house that still smelled like her mother, listening to people dance in her living room. Keisha didn't have her mama anymore. I didn't have my wife. Nobody else in that house full of people felt the shape of that absence the way we did, felt the exact size and weight of the hole she left behind, because nobody else had lived inside her the way we had.
She needed me and I needed her and as my tears fell quiet into the cold November dark, I did the only thing I had left to do.
I begged God to be merciful. That was the whole prayer, the only one I had left, because every other prayer I'd sent up that year had come back to me empty. I'd prayed for her healing. I'd prayed for more time. I'd gotten down on my knees in the dark next to our bed like a child and I had bargained and I had believed and I had watched her die anyway. So I wasn't asking for much then. Just let me raise my daughter. Just let me do that one thing and then we could talk about what happened to me after, because I was not confident there was going to be a me after.
I didn't know if I had wanted to survive this. Didn't know if surviving was even the right word for whatever came next. You survive things that leave you mostly intact. What was coming for me was something else. Something that was going to require me to learn how to breathe without the lung that did most of the breathing, to walk without the leg that held most of the weight, to be a person in a world that no longer had Diane in it. And I didn't know if Housel Jones without Diane was a thing that could exist. I didn't know if he was supposed to.
What I did know was this.
I was not going to do it again. Was not going to open myself up like that, was not going to let another person that far down into me, was not going to build something that beautiful and that necessary with another human being only to stand at another graveside and watch it go in the ground. I had loved Diane with everything I had and everything I was and it had been the greatest thing that ever happened to me and it had also broken me in a way I was never going to come back from completely. That kind of love was a privilege and a devastation both at the same time and I was done paying that price.
Keisha was my heart. This land was my life. That was enough. That was going to have to be enough.
I was forty one years old, standing on my back porch in the cold dark with my daughter under my arm, and I made myself a promise the same way I made all my promises, quiet and certain and without any intention of going back on it.
Housel Jones was never going to love another woman again. Wasn't even a thought I had to wrestle with or talk myself into or come to over time. Wasn't about desire or bitterness or any of the stages of grief Sister Mavis had been whispering about all day in my kitchen. It was just a thing I knew the way I knew the land, the way I knew my own name, the way I knew that creek was still running in the dark even when I couldn't see it. Simple and settled and not up for discussion, not even with myself.
Some doors you don't close. They just stop being doors.
© 2026 Jhéanell Westonberry. All rights reserved. No part of this story may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the author.ABOUT THE AUTHORJhéanell Westonberry is a small town Black romance author, homemaker, filmmaker, wife, and mother. She is the creator of THE WESTONBERRY TIMES and the founder of Westonberry Gathering Co.Through her fiction, Jhéanell crafts small town romance worlds where Black women live softly while being loved loudly. Her stories are rooted in the everyday magic of community, second chances, and the quiet courage it takes to open your heart again.When she’s not writing love stories, she shares gentle homemaking systems, hosting and reflections on romanticizing everyday life —blending storytelling with real life in everything she does.Her work invites you to slow down, fall in love with her characters, and believe that tender, intentional love is always worth the risk.PURCHASE BOOKS BY JHÉANELL WESTONBERRY