by C D Cain
I let her words sink in like a slideshow played in my head. It was a collection of all of the thoughts I had been having of her. I had hidden them pretty well until then. I’d also hidden the fact I too thought of her endlessly. Hadn’t I awoken several times to reach for her across an empty bed? I let the feeling of all of it in. Let it truly in and let out a releasing breath.
“I’ve not stopped thinking of you and I don’t want that to change,” I said.
“Do you want to try to see what happens here? Talk a little more? Call? Maybe make plans to see each other the next time I’m in town?”
I let my head fall back against the wooden frame. I smiled for the first time since I returned back home. “Yeah. I think we should do that.”
“Excellent. Until then, I suppose.” I heard the smile behind her voice too. “Good night.”
“Good night.”
I nestled into the bed and suddenly felt the calmness of a night’s sleep calling me.
“Lawd, child’, if you ain’t a sight for sore eyes.”
I hardly rubbed the fatigue from my eyes or expressed a good yawn before Flossie had me in her arms.
Brown sugar and honey. Wait! Brown sugar and honey?
I pulled back quickly from her. The look of surprise on her face matched the surprise I felt.
“What you got that look for, sis?”
“Flossie…you…you smell just like Meems.” The heaviness of the black hole opened across my heart. Its weight changed the beat and caused a flutter in my chest.
She dropped her head slightly and tugged at the dishrag she held in her hands before throwing it over her shoulder. “Yeah. Dat heifer gave me her damn recipe for the soap she’d been using all the time. I found it a piece back.” She shrugged and turned her back to me as she walked to the coffee pot. “Sorry, sis. I done forgot I was using the stuff. You want some coffee?”
I took her arm and pulled her tightly against me. I breathed in all of the scent that reminded me of the last time a hug felt like being held. “No apologies. It’s nice. I didn’t think I would ever smell this again.” I held her hand in mine and gave it a gentle squeeze. “It’s a nice reminder, Flossie.”
“So is laying eyes on you. If’n you ain’t the spitting image of her, I don’t know what is.”
“Eeeeek.” The ear-splitting squeal was followed by clapping hands. “Rayne Amber Storm, you done slipped in on us ol’ gals.”
I turned toward Cora’s voice and stared shocked at the stiff-styled coif upon her head. It was of the same style but this time the usual blue-to-gray color was dyed a coal black. I recoiled as I looked back at Flossie for support. She merely rolled her eyes, shook her head, and turned away from me.
Cora ran, well…waddled over to me. She swooped me up in an embrace that squeezed every bit of the wind out of me with her well-endowed chest. She rocked me back and forth in her arms. “I was thinkin’ you weren’t ever gonna get here. We been waitin’ pert near an eternity for you to come home.” She pushed me away from her with nearly the same force as she had pulled me into her. She looked me sternly in my eyes. “Yo’ momma been needin’ you, baby girl. She been needin’ you something fierce I tell ya’.”
“I hardly doubt that, Cora. Charlie Grace needs no one but Charlie Grace.”
Cora slapped my arm hard. “You hush that talk around me, young lady. I’ll not have it.” She stomped her chubby foot against the tile floor and brushed my shoulder as she walked past me. The force of her hip knocked me into the kitchen island. “Now you sit and I’ll gets us some coffee.”
Flossie was already pouring the cups. She turned around to hand two to Cora before sitting at the bar.
I took a sip. “Now this is coffee.” I took another long sip. “I can’t get good hot strong coffee like this in Birmingham.” Not that I had been out for coffee much lately. “And you definitely can’t get it anywhere in the hospital which is where I spend most of my time. I sure miss it. Doesn’t taste near this good there.”
Flossie smiled over her cup. “Ain’t nothin’ as good as it is back home.” Her voice was flat.
Cora spooned the fourth teaspoon of sugar into her cup. “And you best be listening to her on that one, Missy. It’s time you be gettin’ that fanny of yours back home. How much more you got up there in that big fancy school?”
“Not long now.”
“Lawd Jesus in Heaven.” Cora threw her arms up and brought them forward as if praying. “Please let my Charlie Grace make it ‘til her baby girl comes home.” She looked at Flossie who sat quietly drinking her coffee.
Wait. Flossie is sitting drinking coffee?
I looked around the kitchen. There were no pots on the stove. No iron skillets on the counter. No anything. “Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t it like a quarter past time for you both to be in frantic cooking crazy mode?”
They looked at each other with eyes that told the sadness between them both. Cora shook her head and sipped her coffee. She patted her hand over her chest above her cleavage line. She looked back at Flossie as if asking her to speak for the both of them.
“Flossie?” I put my cup on the counter to focus on her.
“We ain’t cooking this year.”
“What?”
Cora’s thump against her chest became stronger and more rapid. “She’s catering the whole thang. That chef from N’awlins is cooking our Thanksgiving dinner. Can you believe that?” She put her cup in the sink. “The menu’s so uppity I can’t near pronounce half of it. It ain’t right, I tell you. It ain’t right.” She pulled a tissue from her cleavage and wiped at her nose. “If’n it weren’t for yo’ wedding to plan, I think that woman would done dried up to nothin’.”
The wedding. I failed to catch the sigh before it escaped my lips.
“It seems I’m quite the topic of conversation since you’ve come home, Rayne Amber.”
Startled, we turned to the door. Charlie Grace walked by us with barely an acknowledgment, as we were between her and the coffee pot.
She filled her cup, blew a breath out onto the coffee, and took a sip. “Oh, please don’t let me interrupt. It sounds like a thrilling conversation.” She walked out without another word.
Flossie and Cora caught each other’s eyes again before they looked at me as if to say, “See?”
Cora slung her large bag imitating a purse over her shoulder. “Guess I’ll be goin’ too.”
In a kitchen which would have normally been filled with clanking spoons against metal pans, the chop of a knife against a wooden cutting block, the whirl of spinning mixers, and the shouts of needed ingredients, there was nothing but silence. There were no smells of cornbread browning in the oven nor onions and peppers sautéing on the stove. There was only the smell of burning coffee as the practically empty pot still sat on a heating plate.
“What the hell’s going on around here?”
Flossie drained the last of her cup. “So much, baby girl. Just so much. Wanna come help me out at the turkey fryer in a few hours?”
“You’re still frying a turkey?”
Flossie winked. “Come on out den.”
A few hours later, I found her sitting alone next to a large metal pot that rested over an unlit gas burner. She sat perfectly still while she stared out into the woods. Leaves and pine cones were scattered about the clearing. I couldn’t tell if they had been present there for some time or if they had been scattered about from last night’s storm.
The crunch of them under my feet startled Flossie. She turned her head to me. “Well, hey, sis. I didn’t hear ya come up.”
“Ummm…yeah. You were studying those trees over there pretty hard.”
She laughed. Well, she sort of laughed.
“You know that grease isn’t going to get too hot without that flame lit.” I pointed to the gas burner as I sat down in the chair next to her.
> She stood, raised the metal lid off of the pot, and reached into the depths of it. Instead of a hand dripping with oil, she pulled out a beer. “I didn’t say I was frying a turkey. I said I was at the turkey fryer.”
I peeped into the pot. The tops of several bottles of beer stuck out of the crushed ice. “Well, now that’s my kind of turkey.”
Flossie popped the top and handed me the beer. She grabbed her one before sitting back down next to me. “Didn’t seem right not being out here.” She took a long swallow. “Don’t feel much better this way none either.”
“It’s different here, Flossie. So much has changed.” The cold beer felt good sliding down my throat. It’d been too long since I had a cold one on my lips as I sat outside my Louisiana home.
“Yep, sis. It sho is dat.” She took another swallow of hers. I watched the liquid fall from its neck back into the bottle and realized she had already downed a hefty amount in two swallows. “It ain’t the same without her. She done been the glue for us. For all of us.” She rubbed her palm on her jeans. “She was da glue.”
The lawn chair fabric gave to my weight as I leaned back against it. All this time I had forgotten what she meant to my family—to the town of her family. I’d been as guilty of what I accused Charlie Grace of being. I had lost sight beyond myself to see the others affected. The hurt I felt in my heart, the black hole of loss, it was in the eyes of those around me. It was in Flossie’s eyes.
“It been hard here without you.” She kept her head down but looked at me from the corner of her eye. “Been missing ya more since I been’a missing her so hard. We all been needing you home.”
Charlie Grace’s face flashed in my head. “All of you except Mother.”
“What? She’d da one been missing you’d the mosts.”
I rolled my eyes and took a drink of beer.
“What? You not see her dis morning? You not see’d her a’toll? A good damn gust of wind pass’n her by and she gone be carried off with it. I’ma bettin’ she ain’t ninety pounds soaking wet.”
“Yeah, I noticed she had lost weight. Is she not feeling well? Has she been sick?”
“She heartbroken.”
“Over?”
“Addie. Time. You.” Flossie drained her beer. She stood, opened the metal lid, turned the empty bottle upside down in the ice, and grabbed another one. She pointed it at me. “You ready?”
I looked at the half-empty bottle. “No thanks. Not yet.”
She sat down hard in the lawn chair as if it took all of her strength to stand up to get another drink. “Time passed her up, baby girl. She done thought she’d had all the time to make things right. Now dat time gone by. She gone have to accept it and let it go.”
“What time? She needed time for what?”
“To make things right with Addie. To forgive Addie in the time Addie was here for her to forgive. Now she gone have to wrestle dem demons all by herself.” She tipped her bottle up to her lips. “Den she gone have to wrestle dem with you.” She looked at me. “And you gone have to do the same.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Flossie.” I finished the beer and stood. “What demons? What on earth did she have to forgive Meems about? Meems never did anything to deserve the way Mother treated her. Were you not at her funeral?” I felt my voice escalating as I pulled another bottle from the pot. “So why the hell should I help fight her demons with her?” I rubbed away the ice from the bottle and sat back down.
“I was dere.”
“Memaw didn’t deserve that. She was the best mother I had.”
“She was for you. Charlie Grace done growed up with a different Addie. She didn’t have that same Addie you had.”
What was she saying? Why? Why would she talk about Meems like this?
“Don’t you be giving me dat look. Sis, we all growed up in this life we get. Addie was dipped in gold fo sho but she tweren’t always like dat. Yo’ momma knew’d a different Addie. She held onto dat Addie for so long she couldn’t see the Addie you done know’d.” She turned to me. “And now she got to live with it. She ain’t ever gonna get the chance to make it right with her. She ain’t ever gonna be able to say she see’d the true Addie. I ain’t wanting to see dat same hurt in yo’ eyes.”
I understood the depth of her swallows and took in the same amount of beer.
“Did I ever tell you how’d I met Addie?”
I shook my head. Words were trapped within the thoughts she had started of Meems being a different person and mother to Charlie Grace.
“Lawd, child. Me and my old man had been in the moonshine something fierce dat day when we came up on Addie and yo pa. Drunks ain’t got no business being around drunks. Throw in a couple of pistols and we sho nuff got trouble. Throw in yo pa’s temper and my old man’s in da mix and you end up spending the night locked up to sleep it off.”
“What? Y’all went to jail?”
“Sho did. Spent the whole damn night dere. Dat’s when Addie and me made friends. After we done sobered up, that is. Dat Addie she was filled with piss and vinegar I tell ya. Piss and vinegar. When my old man cursed yo pa for crawfishing on his bet, she plum near jumped on his back to beat the cotton pickin’ stew outta him. I’d always say’d it was because she missed that bottle on her last shot. ‘Course she’d never agree to dat. Our old men thought it be fun to see who was’n the better shot between us. They threw’d up beer bottles in the air and we’d shoot ‘em with our pistols. Lawd knows he’d was watching over us drunks with dem guns.” She shook her head and took a smaller swallow of beer. A smile crept across her face. “Yep, she was full of piss and vinegar.”
“That’s funny. Picturing y’all all lit up like that.”
“Tweren’t too funny for yo’ momma. She had to spend the night with the sheriff and his wife. Ain’t nobody else around to watch her overnight. Yo’ momma always did talk about the night her friends at school saw her riding in the back of dat police car. Yo’ momma got dem scars just like you carry ‘round. They gone fester in time if’n you don’t let dem go.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t see her growing much. She’s the same she’s always been.”
“Give her time. She a good mom now but she gone get better for you. Just like Addie did for her. I’ma just hoping you see it before it’s too late. You gone have to come back home to see’d it tho’.”
“I know.” I turned the bottle up and realized I’d already taken the last swallow. I don’t think I had ever given thought to Meems being anyone different in her younger years. I had never given thought that maybe Charlie Grace had a reason for her distance with Meems. The nice little package of Charlie Grace’s actions as a part of her personality seemed to fit the best in my mind. Anything else clouded the negative I felt for her. This made her more human. I didn’t like the confusion it stirred inside of me. I wanted the subject changed. “Where was Cora headed off to and what’s up with that hairdo?”
“Oh, Lawd. Don’t get me’a startin’ on dat. That crazy ole mule done lost her mind, I tell ya’.”
“It must be the toxicity from the hair dye.”
“I dunno know about no toxicosity but she had lost her fool mind fo sho. That heifer got on one of dem dating computer things. They done put dat whatever it is on dem computers at the home where you can talk to people but not talk to people. I plum near don’t get it. She be telling me she talked to some man but I ain’t once seen her on the phone. She just’n pecking away on dem keys. Peck. Peck. Peck.” Flossie put her beer between her legs and moved her middle fingers in the air as if she was searching for keys on a computer. “Giggle. Peck. Giggle. Peck. She sounded like some fool school girl over there giggling. Hell, the first time I saw dem ole mules circled all around that thinking box, I thought they’s were lookin’ at nudie pictures. Nope, it tweren’t nothing but words.”
“Cora started online dating?” I laughed
. A laugh that felt really good. “And she met someone?”
She nodded her head a vigorous yes. “Sho did. I swear she be thinkin’ dat man gonna fart and she ain’t gone be there to smell it.”
I spit the swallow of beer down my shirt and wiped at the mess I made. “Good gracious, Flossie. Give a woman a little warning before you say something like that.”
“I only tellin’ the truth. It’s Harold dis and Harold dat.” She turned her voice into a high-pitched sound. “I gotta go get dis for Harold. I can’t tonight. I’ma goin with Harold.”
“Wow. Cora’s got her a boyfriend. I’m a little shocked.”
“Oh, I got me a word for it and it ain’t dat one.”
Text message from Mo at 2:25pm: “Thinking of you”
Text message from Mo at 2:30pm: “Still want to be in that bed with U”
“Awww, now there’s a smile. Was that your friend Sam? Don’t see much of her no more. Ain’t been hearing much about her from you either.”
“No. It wasn’t Sam.” My smile faded but damn did that beer taste good. “She moved.” My words threatened to open the door to the feelings of Sam I was learning to keep locked away. “We don’t talk anymore.”
“That’s a damn shame, sis. I really liked her. So, did Addie. But you just’n got a smile I once saw on your face when dat Sam was around.”
The thought of Mo’s text brought the smile back. “She’s a new friend.”
“Ah.” Flossie took a swallow of her beer. “Maybe I’ll get to meet her one day.”
“Maybe.” Suddenly, the patch of woods which had held Flossie’s attention called upon mine.
Mo wouldn’t be the type of woman I would bring home. She’s said many times over she wasn’t a girlfriend type. That is what helped me to be myself around her. She never asked for more. In the here and now, it was that part I needed most from her. But I did wonder if in the future I would wish she were different in that way.
“Sis, it been eating at me. Somethin’ been playing on my mind pretty hard.”