The Secret to Hummingbird Cake

by Celeste Fletcher McHale

  As soon as we arrived, I dragged my chair under Laine’s tent and hid from the sun.

  “And how do you feel this morning?” Laine asked.

  I closed my eyes behind my dark sunglasses. “I know you’re going to enjoy this,” I said. “Go ahead, jab me.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to jab you,” she said. “You slept a total of eight hours and I slept a total of four. I’m too exhausted to jab you.”

  Ahhh . . . classic Laine. She could have been a travel agent for guilt trips. “I owe you one,” I said.

  “You owe me about a hundred and twenty, but who’s counting?” Finally she broke into a real smile. “It’s fine,” she said, then lowered her voice. “When did Jack get home?”

  “Who knows?”

  “It isn’t what you think, Carrigan. I’m sure it isn’t.”

  “So you’ve stated.” I put my glove over my face. There was no way I was getting into an argument with Laine this morning. I barely had enough stamina to sit upright in this chair. If she wanted to spar, she was going to have to do it by herself. And what was that stench coming from the canteen? Cotton candy? Pure, hot, sticky sugar? Wine historically gave me liquid courage at night and horrendous nausea the next day. I fought the urge to gag and took a sip of my bottled water.

  “Hey, Miss Landry!” I heard a small child say.

  “Hey, King!” Laine answered.

  Oh crap, a Thompson offspring. Would they never stop reproducing? You couldn’t go anywhere in Bon Dieu Falls without tripping over a Thompson. And who names their child “King” anyway? He was stirring greasy nachos with his grubby little fingers. I had to look away.

  “Whatcha doin’?” He flung half his cheese mixture onto the quilt.

  My gag reflex went from zero to sixty in a second. Those grimy fingers and that greasy cheese coupled with the cotton candy smell from the canteen was about to make me projectile vomit.

  “I’m just keeping score,” Laine said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just watching my daddy play ball,” he said. He grinned at her as he swiped at the cheese on his chin.

  “Okay, Prince, Deuce, Ace,” I said, “whatever your name is, shoo! Run away!” I scooted back in my chair.

  “ ’Bye!” he shouted as he ran off.

  “Carrigan!” Laine said. “That was so rude! He is a child!”

  “Yes,” I said. “A Thompson child. Trust me, he’s seen and heard worse.”

  “Hey, y’all!” A saccharine drawl greeted us. I looked up to see bleached hair so bright it nearly blinded me.

  Bethany Wilkes. If this didn’t finish me off, nothing would.

  Her hair was too blonde, her lips were too red, her fingernails were too long, and her boobs were too fake. “Missiles,” as my girls and I referred to them. How did you even get your boobies to point like that? Were there special bras for that? Was that actually Victoria’s secret?

  Besides that, I had never once seen her with a pair of shoes on that I liked. I glanced at her feet. Today was no exception. Were those feathers? I rolled my eyes behind my sunglasses.

  Bethany Wilkes wanted Jack so badly she could taste it, and everybody in Bon Dieu Falls knew it, including me.

  Especially me.

  I wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t already had him. The curiosity was killing me. But for now, all I had was speculation, no proof. If I accused her, it would make me seem weak and insecure. If I accused him, it would make it seem like I cared. So I watched and waited all the time for my “gotcha” moment. Until then, I had to force myself to be cordial. I kicked at the nacho cheese on the quilt and smiled broadly at Bethany.

  “Hi, Bethany.” I used my friendliest voice. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s just going great!” She smiled, revealing her huge and snow-white teeth. “How are you ladies?”

  “It’s all good.” I smiled and looked away. I didn’t want to encourage any sort of communication other than niceties.

  I could see Laine wiggling in her seat and trying not to laugh, which was her reaction to anything uncomfortable. And I was glad Ella Rae was already in the dugout, because she would have glared and done that snarly thing with her lip, which was her reaction to anything uncomfortable.

  “How’s your new job?” Laine asked. I could’ve kicked her. Perfect, now we’re having a conversation.

  “Oh, it’s the best job,” she said. “I just don’t know how they survived until I got there. Between us, those books were a mess!”

  What? She worked part-time at a small bakery in the next town. They couldn’t possibly sell more than ten cupcakes a day. How bad could the books be? Was somebody missing a quarter? But on the other hand, I sincerely hoped she would eat her way through the summer. She was much thinner than I was, and I only weighed a hundred and twenty pounds.

  Did this chick eat at all? Probably all the time. Another reason to be annoyed at her. I wanted to drag her out to the parking lot and beat the crap out of her, but she’d probably even bleed cute.

  “Oh? Well, bless your heart. They are lucky to have you, Bethany.” I smiled and Laine coughed. “Looks like it’s just about game time. It was good to see you.” I tried to be lithe so she could see how graceful I was as I pulled my tired body and aching head out of the chair, but I tripped over a wrinkle in the blanket. Great.

  “Carrigan—” Bethany grazed my arm with her red claws. “Where is your good-looking husband? I need to talk a little business with him.”

  About what? Chocolate icing? “I don’t know where he got off to.” I looked around and as if on cue, he was driving up. I wanted to throat punch him. Or her. Or both. “Today’s your lucky day, girl.” I pointed toward the parking lot.

  She fluttered off all white and poofy and lacy with her ugly sandals on to talk “business” with my husband. What kind of moron wears all white to the ball park? I watched her twist her hips into the parking lot and greet Jack as he opened his truck door. I looked down at my T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and cleats, feeling a little bit like a dirt farmer who had just spoken to a super model. This was quickly shaping up to be a stellar day.

  “Hmm . . .,” Laine muttered as I walked away.

  “Shut up, Laine.” I heard her chuckle behind me.

  I spent most of the game playing left field and trying to see what Jack and Bethany were doing without being obvious about it. I told myself I was only making sure Jack wasn’t making a spectacle of himself by allowing Bethany to hang all over him. In reality, I was trying to stifle the voice inside me that kept accusing me of being jealous. She’s a very irritating voice, by the way. I could usually shut her up by thinking about Cell Phone Romeo, but she was quite a little chatterbox today.

  Most of the time Jack, Bethany, and a couple of Jack’s friends were standing a few feet from our dugout, talking and laughing. Bethany must have touched Jack’s arm fifty times. Couldn’t she speak without using her hands? I missed a fly ball while she told an entire story with her arm on his waist. His waist. Seriously. How many people talk to somebody with their hand on the other person’s stomach? I was furious. I had to hand it to Jack, though. He looked very uncomfortable, and that made me very happy.

  Mercifully, we lost the game. It was single elimination, so we were done for the day. As competitive as I am, I never could have tried to lose on purpose, but I absolutely wasn’t upset that we had gotten beat. Maybe I could get some much needed rest now.

  Jack, Bethany, and their little group were still talking. Ella Rae and I brought our things over to Laine’s oasis and dove under the tent.

  “Nice game,” Laine said and smiled.

&nbs
p; “Ha-ha,” I said. I sat down and put my glove over my face. “I don’t feel well.”

  “And whose fault is that?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I said. “I acknowledge that I may have made a couple of poor choices last night.”

  “Thank you,” Laine said.

  “You need to slap Bethany Wilkes.”

  Ella Rae announced this out of nowhere in her “Ella Rae is irritated” voice, which was very loud, almost as loud as her “Ella Rae has been drinking” voice.

  “Shut up, Ella Rae!” I said. “And stop looking at them!” I didn’t want either Jack or Bethany to think I cared what they were doing or saying.

  “I can’t believe you’re just sitting here!” She didn’t lower her voice a single decibel. “I can promise you she’d be wearing that ugly little white shirt around her neck if she was rubbing up against Tommy like that!”

  “Tommy wouldn’t be over there,” I said. “He’s a real husband.”

  “Jack is a real husband too, Carrigan!” Laine said. “You need to take yourself over there and slide your arm around his waist!” She turned her attention to Ella Rae. “And will you stop encouraging her to be angry?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Ella Rae said. “She’d have to be blind not to be angry. And nobody says angry, Laine.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Oh, shut up!” I said. “I’m not angry. Because it doesn’t matter. If my hair was on fire and Jack had the only bucket of water in town, I wouldn’t go over there. So just stop it. And, Ella Rae, stop looking at them.”

  “Do you really think we believe you don’t care?” Laine said.

  “Well, you should,” I said, “because I don’t.”

  “I don’t care if she cares or not,” Ella Rae said. “All I know is she doesn’t need to go over there. He needs to come over here. Whether or not she cares is her business.”

  “You’re both crazy, wacko, nuts,” Laine said. “He’s your husband.”

  “My point exactly,” I said, “and this discussion is over. Besides, you need to pay attention to this game. You just missed a run.”

  She went back to her scorebook, but something told me this conversation wasn’t over.

  “I am so ready to go home,” I said.

  “Oh no, you aren’t going anywhere,” Laine said. “You both drag me all over the place when I want to go home. I participate in whatever moronic scheme either of you has going on, and both of you are staying put today. Till the bitter end.”

  There was no arguing that logic. I propped up a pillow on top of my bat bag and stole a glance at my husband, Marilyn Monroe, Jr., and their entourage. I laid my head down and closed my eyes. I might have to be here, but I didn’t have to communicate. I put my glove over my face and tried to sleep.

  I caught a few cat naps here and there during the day, but there was really no rest for the weary. In a small town, there is no such thing as anonymity. Everybody knows everybody else, and most of them feel compelled to talk to you. About absolutely nothing.

  I find this extremely annoying and totally unnecessary. Call me when something important happens, and we can avoid all this “how’s the weather” mess. But that’s not the way it works. If you don’t talk, you get labeled “stuck up,” and you spend the next six months having to kiss all the behinds in town.

  I’ve seen it happen. And I can’t be kissing anyone’s behind. So our conversations that day had ranged from ugly shoes, our new pastor at church, and the Thompsons’ choice of baby names, to Sara Greer’s gallbladder, and what design Otis had painted on the Bon Dieu Falls water tower that month. Some said a dragonfly, others claimed buzzard, but we all agreed on one thing: How in the world did he keep crawling up that water tower without getting caught or killed?

  Otis Moore had been fondly referred to as the town drunk for as far back as I could remember. I had no idea how old he was, but he had looked exactly the same since I was five. He slept in a shed by the Depot most nights, even though he had a ramshackle home and a common law wife. One of the older Thompson kids, Mackerel, I believe was his name (and no, I’m not kidding), told me town drunk was not a politically correct term any more. He said Otis Moore was beer challenged. I asked Ella Rae who that child was when he walked away. She glanced over her shoulder, caught a glimpse of him, and said, “Village Idiot.”

  Such is life in a small town.

  Ella Rae was going to have a terrible crick in her neck the next day, because she’d spent most of her time looking sideways at Jack and Bethany Wilkes. I asked her repeatedly to stop the surveillance, but she never did. She never stopped giving reports either. She’d been providing a play-by-play of Jack and Bethany for the last two ball games.

  Apparently Jack had tried to walk away several times, but Red Claws kept pulling him back in. I think that annoyed me more than anything. Jack was over six feet tall and two hundred pounds with arms like steel beams. And he couldn’t get away from that pasty-faced piece of painted pine straw? What a guy.

  I turned over on my stomach and demanded she not tell me another thing.

  A little while later, Bethany loosened her grip momentarily, and Jack came and sat down under the tent with us. Bethany stayed put with a swarm of men, but laughed too loud and stared too much at our little compound. So seventh grade. I had to turn and face Jack to keep myself from making faces at her. My inner child was aching to jump up and down with my tongue stuck out and sing “nanny nanny boo-boo!”

  I tried to fake sleep for a while. I was mad at Jack for talking to her for so long and furious at myself for caring. But I finally sat up and forced myself to be pleasant. There was one thing I knew for certain about Jack Whitfield III: he loved Ella Rae and he loved Laine, and he’d never do anything to disrespect either of them. That had always kept a soft spot in my heart for him. He wouldn’t even argue with me in front of them. If we ever had angry words in their presence, it was because I had started them, but he shut them down.

  “Where is Tommy today, Rae?” Jack asked.

  “He’s fishing again,” Ella Rae said. “I don’t know why he’s fishing again, but he is. We have so much fish in the freezer I can’t shut it.”

  “You should take some to the older folks around town,” Laine said.

  “What old folks?”

  “Any of them,” Laine said.

  Ella Rae stared at her for a moment. “So just walk up to some old guy on the street and say, ‘Here’s a fish’?”

  “You know,” Laine said, “I don’t know who the bigger smart ass is, you or Carrigan.”

  That surprised us and made all of us laugh out loud. Any time Laine used what she called an “unpleasant word,” we were shocked.

  “Girlfriend!” I said. “You pulled out an unpleasant word!”

  “It’s because y’all make me crazy!” she said. “It would do both of you girls a world of good if you thought of someone other than yourself every now and then. I know this is hard to believe, but there are other things happening in the world beyond softball and fitness.”

  “Here we go.” I put my glove over my face again.

  “I’m serious!” she said. “Ella Rae . . . how old are you?”

  Ella Rae made a face at Laine. “About seventeen seconds older than you are.”

  I laughed. Their birthdays were three days apart.

  Laine looked at me, then back at Ella Rae, then back at me and shook her head. “Never mind,” she said, “there’s no point in this. You both make me crazy, and this discussion is hopeless.”

  “I am glad we got that settled
.” Ella Rae pulled a video game from her purse.

  Jack chuckled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think y’all hated each other.”

  “I do hate them,” I said.

  “Me too,” Laine and Ella Rae said in unison.

  Jack shook his head. “Females.”

  The current game was a fast, close one, and I got caught up helping Laine keep the scorebook. Jack was standing close by talking to another rancher from our parish about cattle prices, and Ella Rae was still watching Bethany Wilkes like a hawk. If Ella Rae ever seized on something, neither hell nor high water could keep her from pursuing it. Sometimes that was a good thing, and sometimes it was like trying to talk a jumper off a ledge.

  The day dwindled into sunset, and the ball park lights popped on. Bethany, according to Ella Rae, had finally talked all the makeup off her face and left. We then proceeded to have a fifteen-minute conversation about Bethany’s lack of using the bathroom. Ella Rae was convinced Bethany was a vampire. “Smooth white skin, perfect body, doesn’t pee. And don’t even get me started on those teeth. You can’t make this up.”

  Ridiculous, I know, but sometimes you just had to go along with Ella Rae.

  Jack had never strayed too far from us after his escape from Red Claws. He had always attended softball tournaments when we were playing, but my mind worked double overtime these days and I was sure he had some ulterior motive. I secretly hoped his presence under the tent with me had thrown a major kink in Bethany’s plans. I had caught her looking at us earlier and I briefly laid my head on Jack’s shoulder. I wasn’t sure who was more surprised—Jack, Ella Rae, Bethany, or me. But I hadn’t fooled Laine for a second. She made a disgusted face and mouthed, You are the devil. I stuck my tongue out at her behind Jack’s back and laughed a little bit too loud.

  Luckily, Miss Lucy Grimes had picked that exact moment to spit her chewing tobacco out at one of the Thompson children, and everyone was laughing. Including the Thompson child. Miss Lucy was mean as a snake. Everybody in town knew Miss Lucy didn’t have any kids, and Miss Lucy didn’t like any kids. Besides, that child was the devil’s minion. I’d seen him under the bleachers earlier eating crickets. I don’t know how his mama still had hair; I would’ve pulled mine out long ago.