You'll Always Have Tara

by Leah Marie Brown

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you remembered to make your train reservations from London to the Cotswolds?”

  “Mrs. Nickerson said she would send Knightley to pick me up.”

  “Knightley?”

  “Her son.”

  “That’s awfully generous of them.”

  “Isabelle said it was the least she could do for the niece of one of her oldest and dearest friends. Besides, Knightley is some bigwig barrister. Apparently, he splits his time between London and the Cotswolds. So, it’s not like it’s a big deal for him to let me hitch a ride.”

  “Even so, be sure to thank him and Mrs. Nickerson.”

  “Please, Tara,” she says, snorting. “I’m Southern born and raised. I know how to do gratitude. I went to the Candy Kitchen and bought a big old box of pecan pralines for Isabelle and a bag of Bourbon Balls for Knightley.”

  I slow to a stop at the intersection before the entrance to the Charleston International Airport and look at my sister, at the sophisticated, messy bun carefully piled atop her head, and the confident tilt of her pretty chin, and realize, with a painful pang, she has grown up.

  It’s an unusual phenomenon among siblings that no matter how old or grown our sister becomes, we continue to see her as a child. I have an image of Emma Lee stored in my mind, a bright, flickering film clip of her dressed in a floral printed muslin gown, a dainty miss sitting in the garden, picking berries with a coterie of giggling, giddy little friends.

  But she’s not that little girl anymore. She’s a sophisticated, confident twenty-four-year-old woman who doesn’t need her big sister telling her why she shouldn’t pick berries that aren’t fully red or how to slice a strawberry so it looks like a heart. I should quit my mother-hennin’, but old habits die harder than a stubborn mule.

  “Are you sure about all of this, Emma Lee? When was the last time Aunt Pattycake lived in Wood House? What if it hasn’t been cleaned? What if it is infested with vermin? What if—?”

  “Don’t get your feathers all ruffled up, momma hen,” she says, laughing. “Mrs. Nickerson said Aunt Pattycake gave her a key to Wood House years ago, so she could look after it while Aunt P. was away. Mrs. Nickerson sent her maid to clean the cottage and stock the larder—which I assume is a pantry—with staples.”

  It sounds as if Mrs. Nickerson has been working her wand overtime, bippity-bobbity-booing things for Emma Lee.

  I turn into the airport and drive slower than molasses until we finally arrive at the ticketing and check-in terminal. I pull up to the curb and turn on my hazard lights.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come in with you, just in case you have any problems at the ticket counter or with security?” I snatch my press pass and station badge out of the cup holder and fiddle with the lanyard, nervously weaving it over my fingers. “I don’t mind.”

  Emma Lee reaches over, unwinds the lanyard from my fingers, and drops the badges back into the cup holder.

  “I’ll be okay, Tara,” she says, linking her fingers through mine. “I promise.”

  I look at her through a haze of tears.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am mighty sure.” She gives my fingers a little squeeze. “Are you going to be okay? You seem sad.”

  I consider telling her that losing so many people in such a short time has left me feeling like a threadbare quilt coming apart at the seams. I even consider throwing my arms around her and begging her not to leave me.

  “Don’t worry about me. I am just fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Now who’s being momma hen?”

  We laugh. She opens the door and climbs out. I watch her walk to the back of my car and pop the trunk. I get out of the car and open the back door, reaching into the foothold and retrieving a big shiny black box. By the time I walk around my car, Emma Lee has removed her suitcases from the trunk and is waiting for me on the sidewalk, Burberry trench wrapped around her slender figure, the belt tied artfully around her waist.

  I hand her the box.

  “What’s this?”

  “A proper going away present.”

  She squeals and jumps up and down, before tearing the red ribbon off the box and removing the lid to reveal a pair of tall glossy Hunter Wellington rain boots.

  “Ooh!” She lifts one of the boots out of the box. “Military red wellies! How did you know this is the color I wanted?”

  “Hmmm, let’s see,” I say, laughing. “Maybe I saw something on your Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook feeds. Or, was it your Pinterest board? Wait! I think I might have figured it out when you changed the screen saver on my computer to a collage of red rain boots.”

  “You’re the best, Tara! The best,” she says, kicking her heel off and sliding her foot into the boot.

  “You said Manderley was the best.”

  “When?”

  “When she called to make sure you got your Burberry.”

  “Oh!” She puts on the other boot and clicks her heels together, squealing again. “Well, can I help it if the good Lord blessed me with two wonderful big sisters? You’re both the best.”

  She throws her arms around my neck and squeezes something fierce and we are little girls again, before those pesky puberty hormones had us bickering over silly things like shoes and clothes and makeup and boys. We are in the attic, tearing through fusty old trunks for some of our momma’s clothes to play dress-up. I find Momma’s cotton-candy pink taffeta ball gown—the one that looks like it tumbled out of Grace Kelly’s wardrobe—and hand it to Emma Lee, even though the slender spaghetti straps are too wide for her little shoulders. Thanks, Tara. You’re the best!

  She stops hugging me as suddenly as she started. I pick up the discarded Hunter box. Emma Lee shoves her heels into her bulging carry-on.

  “This is just fab,” she says, grabbing the telescoping handles of her suitcases and smiling confidently. “I’ve got my proper rain boots and my proper raincoat. I am ready for my new life as a very proper British broker of marriages. Seriously? What more could I need?”

  A few dozen things come to mind, like a degree in psychology, dating experience, a wide social circle in the Cotswolds, a reality television show. I open my mouth to speak, but Emma Lee cuts me off.

  “That was rhetorical, Tara! Stop worrying about me. I am all good.”

  She waves her hand and begins rolling her bags toward the terminal. I climb back into my car and look out the windshield just in time to see her disappear through the sliding doors, a whirlwind of blonde tresses, Burberry plaid, and shiny red rubber. My chest tightens. I have a new appreciation for how my daddy must have felt when I left for college. Then again, except for intermittent homesickness, I did just fine in Austin, didn’t I? Emma Lee will probably do just fine in the Cotswolds. I am being a tiresome old momma hen over a simple rite of passage.

  I am about to pull away from the curb when the terminal doors slide back open and Emma Lee runs out of the airport, suitcases bumping along behind her, Burberry trench flapping like two khaki plaid wings. For a wild, wishful second I think she has decided to abandon her new life plan and remain in Charleston.

  Emma Lee wrenches open the passenger door and ducks her head inside the compartment.

  “Oh sweet baby Jesus!” She reaches down and lifts her purse out of the passenger foot well. “Can you believe I almost forgot my purse?”

  Purse. Passport. Tickets. Money. Pretty much every damned thing required for a transatlantic flight. Maybe I have been clucking over Emma Lee because I instinctively know the baby chick isn’t ready to leave the hen house. Just a thought.

  “Can I believe you almost forgot your purse?” I tilt my head and look at her over the tops of my sunglasses. “Is that a rhetorical question, too?”

  She laughs and sticks her tongue out at me, before closing the passenger door and racing back into the terminal.

  My chest becomes tighter with each mile I travel away from the airport, until it feels as if my ribcage
and heart are being crushed by a vise grip. I take several deep breaths.

  Inhale. I am fine.

  Exhale. I am just fine.

  I keep telling myself I am fine as I drive across the Ravenel Bridge and down Johnnie Dodds Boulevard and that I am as fine as frog’s hair as I am pulling into my parking spot and climbing the steps to my condo.

  It’s only when I walk into my living room and see a pair of Emma Lee’s earrings on my end table, some of her sketches scattered over my coffee table, and a scrap of her needlework stuck between the cushions of my couch that I become the opposite of fine. I drop my purse on the floor, kick off my shoes, and sob my way into my bedroom, peeling off and discarding garments along the way. I pull my Texas Longhorn gym shorts and Keep Austin Weird tee out of the bottom drawer of my dresser and put them on, because desperate times calls for desperately tacky, but desperately comfortable clothes. I walk around my house, closing the blinds and drawing the curtains until my condo is as dark as my mood.

  Sometimes a girl just needs to close the curtains, shut out the world, and bake herself something ooey and gooey and chock full of calories, something so sweet it overpowers the bitterness of life, like a pecan pie.

  That’s it. I will bake myself a pecan pie. Not just any old pecan pie, though.

  I walk back into the kitchen, open my pantry door, and lift a mint-green enameled box off the top shelf—my momma’s recipe box, given to her by my daddy’s momma and filled with handwritten recipes that have been tried and perfected by generations of my womenfolk. I remove the card with my momma’s pecan pie recipe printed on it in her elegant, loopy script. I know the recipe by heart, but holding the card in my hands, looking at my momma’s handwriting, running my thumb over the vanilla extract brown spatter mark, has become my pre-pecan pie baking ritual, like I am summoning my momma’s spirit.

  I get out the ingredients—butter, sugar, eggs, a bottle of bourbon, vanilla bean paste, pecans—and neatly arrange them on my workspace. The instructors at the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts called the act of putting everything in its place mise en place.

  I didn’t actually graduate from the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree. I attended the Moody College of Communication studying RTF (Radio-Television-Film) my freshman and sophomore years and just got plumb worn out of the whole scene. Affected aspiring directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers smoking weed and debating whether it is possible for big budget films to have soul.

  And then there were the student screenings—sweet baby Jesus in Hollywood—the student screenings of black-and-white films, moodily lit, about homeless people searching for donuts, or sock monkeys marching through abandoned warehouses, or children staring into the camera reciting political poetry punctuated by long, self-effected pauses. I thought if I heard one more person say, Cinema is truth twenty-four frames per second, I would hang myself from the roof of the Jones Com Center building with two-inch gaffer’s tape.

  So, I changed my area of study to Journalism. It didn’t take me long to realize writing serious, hard-hitting news stories wasn’t my thing, either. I changed my major again, but marketing really wasn’t my thing, either.

  So, I dropped out at the beginning of my senior year and enrolled in the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. Seventy weeks later, I returned home with an Associate’s Degree from the University of Texas, an Associate of Applied Science in Culinary Art degree, and a Diploma in Pastry Making from Auguste Escoffier.

  All of that and a tin of old-fashioned lemon zest tea cakes landed me a job filming food-related segments for WCSC-Channel 5, the low-country’s News Leader. Some of the country’s most exalted culinary geniuses tumbled out of Chef heaven to land right here, in my little old not-so-sleepy hometown. I love filming stories about Charleston’s food scene, like the Kyoto-born chef who opened an Asian-Soul Food fusion restaurant or the chef who sources all of his seafood from a family of Gullah fishermen who use handcrafted nets and sing chants over their catch, but sometimes I feel like I did in college and I find myself wondering if TV news is my thing.

  Not knowing—I mean down deep in my bones the way Manderley knows she is a writer—what I am supposed to be doing with my life and where I am supposed to be doing it distresses me to no end.

  I take out a heavy saucepan, turn the burner on medium, and begin melting a stick of unsalted Irish butter. Momma jotted a note in the margin: “Irish butter only. No substitutions.”

  I am rubbing cold chunks of unsalted Irish butter between my fingers and smearing it into my flour-sugar-salt dough mix when I have a vague memory of sitting on a highchair and watching my momma make a pecan pie, the golden light of a Carolina summer day slanting in through the screen door. It might be a false memory planted in my brain after I found a photo of the scene in a battered humidor in my daddy’s room.

  Even so, I close my eyes and I hear my momma humming a lilting tune as she rolls out the crust. In the photo, she is standing behind the counter so the camera only captures what she is wearing from the waist up, but I see a ruffled apron tied around her narrow waist. I smell the syrupy concoction of bourbon, butter and brown sugar.

  It feels real.

  That one memory might also explain why I love baking and eating. Memories—even a single, grainy memory—hold awesome power, don’t they? The power to shape. The power to push a body in a direction they never thought to move.

  I press the crust into a blue glass pie dish I rescued from a second hand store in Summerville. The dish has an exaggerated scalloped edge that makes any pie look like a piece of art. I pour the ingredients in the crust, slide the dish into the oven, and set the timer.

  I would be quite content to polish off half a pecan pie and call it dinner, but Beulah always said, a body can’t live on dessert alone, Tara Faith. Beulah was our cook. Daddy used to say she could burn a bowl of cold cereal, but she made the most delicious peach jam and the fluffiest biscuits in the Carolinas. Daddy loved peach jam and biscuits the way I love Goo Clusters—only he didn’t keep his love secret.

  There’s not much left in my fridge. Salad fixings. A bag of withered grapes. A pitcher of sweet tea. Ajar of tomato chutney. A container of Icelandic yogurt. A Styrofoam box of Emma Lee’s leftover Cane’s.

  I grab the Styrofoam box, dump the buttery, greasy contents onto a paper plate and pop it in the microwave. Forty seconds later I am schlumping on my couch in a very un-Southern ladylike manner, balancing leftovers in one hand and clutching a remote in the other. I point the remote at the cable box and scroll through the programs stored on my DVR.

  Sweet baby Jesus! Emma Lee recorded ninety-six episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker and forty-two episodes of Married at First Sight. No wonder the latest episode of The Great British Bake Off didn’t record—there wasn’t enough space left on my DVR’s hard drive.

  I click on season one, episode one of Married at First Sight, a reality show where a sexologist (I had to google that one), clinical psychologist, sociologist, and chaplain match couples based on some complex algorithm and voodoo magic (not really). These couples meet—wait for it—at the altar, seconds before they utter the holiest of phrases, “I do.”

  Crazy, right? Like, crazier than a soup sandwich.

  I dip a chicken strip into some Cane’s special sauce and fast-forward through the intro. Before I know it, I have consumed a gut full of greasy chicken strips, picked at my pie, and watched three episodes of the surprisingly addictive Married at First Sight.

  I’m not gonna lie, y’all. I’m secretly rooting for Jamie, the 27-year-old nurse who has given up on love, and Doug, the 31-year-old software salesman. I admire anyone willing to risk failure and humiliation in pursuit of their heart’s desire.

  I reach for my iPhone.

  Text to Emma Lee Maxwell:

  I am sorry I wasn’t more supportive of your decision to move to England and pursue a career as a matchmaker. I am proud of you.

  I am proud of my little sister. I still think
her decision to be a matchmaker is crazy—maybe not soup sandwich crazy—but if it is her heart’s desire, who am I to toss up impediments?

  I wish I had a heart’s desire. I thought marrying Grayson and supporting him as he pursued a career in politics was my heart’s desire, but not anymore. Ever since he told me he proposed to old Crawdad I’ve felt my ardor for him fading like a sunset on winter solstice. If marrying Grayson Everett Calhoun isn’t my heart’s desire, what is?

  I scroll through my recent calls until I come to Manderley’s name and touch the phone symbol beside her number. Manderley answers on the second ring.

  “I need to talk.”

  “Good afternoon, Tara. I am fine, thank you for asking. Cannes is even lovelier than Aunt Patricia’s postcards. How are you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mandy,” I say. “Of course I want to hear all about Cannes. Are you having a good time?”

  “Are you okay?” she asks, a new, slightly frantic note of worry in her voice. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I say, upping the perk in my tone. “I’m just worried about Emma Lee is all.”

  “Emma Lee will be fine, Tara. She is a charming risk taker who makes wild, daring leaps and always lands on her pretty little feet.”

  “Of course Emma Lee is a risk taker, because she has us running after her with a net. I would be a risk taker, too, if I knew someone would be there to catch me if I fell.”

  “Ah, I see. Is that what this is about?”

  “What?”

  “Are you envious of Emma Lee?”

  “No!” I sigh. “Maybe. Yes, a little. I envy her courage to boldly chase after whatever shiny thing captures her interest. She sees something she wants and she just goes after it.”

  “Tara, dahlin’, if there is a shiny thing you want to chase after, a bold leap you wish to make, do it knowing I will be there to catch you, too. I’ve always been there and I always will.”

  I sniffle and dash away a stray tear.

  “Steady-On Manderley. What would we do without you?”