The Secret to Hummingbird Cake

by Celeste Fletcher McHale

  And I knew these people, really knew them. I knew Bobby Ray Curtis would get drunk and hit on me tonight but not mean a thing by it. In the big city, they called that sexual harassment. In Bon Dieu Falls we called it, “Bobby Ray Curtis got drunk and hit on me last night.”

  I knew Jeannie McMillian would get mad at her husband sometime this afternoon and stay mad at him until they left tonight. I knew Jamie Washington would hug me so tight my ribs would almost crack. Then he’d tell me he how he still remembered when we were in first grade and I slapped him for using my purple crayon. We rolled on the floor and fought till our teacher broke us up. And he’d laugh the entire time he told me.

  Just thinking about it made me smile. People could say what they wanted to about small towns, but I could call just about anybody I knew, black or white, and they would show up if I needed them. Any time of the day or night. These were my people. The black ones, the white ones, the old ones, the young ones. You couldn’t drag me out of this town.

  I made the rounds like a good Whitfield and talked to my in-laws, my parents, and many guests before catching up with Ella Rae and Laine. I found them under the largest oak tree in the yard. Several of our friends had gathered there and were in the middle of a pretty hot game of horseshoes. I squeezed between the girls in the tree swing, only to pop right back up when I saw a familiar face.

  “There you are!” Charlotte Freeman reached out to hug me. “I’ve been looking for you all morning! Where have you been?”

  Charlotte was a couple of years older than Ella Rae, Laine, and me, but we had spent a lot of time with her in high school. She had gone off to LSU and married a foreign boy—he was from Mississippi—but they came from Vicksburg every year to the Crawfish Boil. She had proven time and time again to be a true and trusted friend, and I was genuinely glad to see her. In fact, after my girls, Charlotte and a couple of my softball teammates were about the only other females I really trusted.

  “I’ve been keeping a low profile.” I laughed.

  She raised one eyebrow. “I find that hard to believe! But you look fantastic! And so tiny!”

  “I’m starving myself,” I said. “I haven’t had anything that tasted good in two months.”

  “Because?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Bethany Wilkes, the porcelain princess.”

  “Oh, please!” Charlotte said. “I have heels higher than her standards. Is she still sniffing around? And is she still having shoe issues?”

  “Worse than ever,” I said, “on both counts.”

  “I don’t know why in the world you would ever give her a second thought.” Charlotte made a face as though the thought left a bad taste in her mouth. “Jack doesn’t want Bethany Wilkes.”

  “And you base this psychic knowledge on what?”

  “On the fact that you’re ten times prettier, smarter, and funnier than she is,” Charlotte said. “Not to mention the fact that the man married you. And he married you while facing a firing squad, I might add.”

  I shook my head. “I just don’t know what to think any more, Charlotte,” I said. “I wish I knew how to crawl inside his head and see what he’s thinking. But it doesn’t really matter any more. I just don’t think it’s going to work out. I . . . I . . . crossed a line.” I looked at her to see if she understood the obvious.

  She did. Right away. “Oh, honey, you didn’t.” She grabbed my hand.

  Looking at the sadness on her face, I finally understood the gravity of the mistake I had made. I felt a brand-new ripple of guilt. “I just . . . I don’t know. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

  “What a completely stupid reason,” Charlotte said.

  That, at least, made me smile a little.

  “Is this a full-blown affair or just a fling?”

  “Just a fling,” I said, “and it didn’t mean anything. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true. And it’s over. It’s been over for months.”

  “Does Jack know?”

  “No!”

  She looked around. “Honey, you gotta get a hold of yourself. These things happen. And I believe you when you say it’s over, but Jack is a smart man. You just be careful.”

  That got my attention. Suddenly I was not only guilty, I was scared. What if Jack knew?

  Charlotte pursed her lips in thought. “Look, Carri,” she said. “I’m glad your fling is over, and I’m not judging you for having one. But I have to tell you, I don’t think Jack is seeing someone else. I never have.”

  I didn’t want to believe that Jack had been unfaithful to me. But how could I deny it? One day we were happy. The next day he was cold. And it just happened to occur when Lexi Carter rolled back into town. True, I’d never had any solid evidence that Jack was cheating on me. But I had a feeling. Some nagging, annoying wariness I couldn’t shake or make sense of.

  Besides, what else could it be? I sometimes wished he’d just go ahead and ask me for a divorce and get it over with. As much as it would hurt me, anything had to be better than this purgatory.

  “I’m quite sure you’ve talked Ella Rae into believing Jack is cheating on you,” Charlotte said, “but she only believes it because you do. She’s your loyal disciple, you know that. If you said you saw Elvis in the garden at the cemetery, Ella Rae would say, ‘Yeah, and he was singing “Hound Dog.”’ But fifty bucks says you haven’t sold Laine on the idea.”

  “Oh, you are right about that,” I agreed. Laine could see a video of him with another woman and swear in court it was fake.

  We both looked at Laine, still in the tree swing watching Tommy give Jimmy Dreison a solid whipping at horseshoes. Ella Rae was cheering while Laine looked on smiling.

  “And speaking of Laine, what have y’all done to her?” Charlotte asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She looks terrible,” Charlotte said. “Like she hasn’t slept in a week.”

  I hadn’t noticed it until now, but Laine really did look tired. Maybe she’d had a romantic comedy marathon last night. I’d had to suffer through one or two of those with her before. Or maybe it was that church project she had going on. I knew she’d been working day and night on a project for Bible School, which was coming up next week. Laine was there every time the doors of First Baptist were open. Ella Rae and I were mostly Sunday-morning Christians.

  “You know Laine,” I said. “She’s working on something for Bible School and it has to be perfect. She probably really hasn’t slept in a week.”

  “Maybe so,” Charlotte said, “but she sure looks like she could use some rest.”

  I gazed at Laine. She just looked like she needed some sleep and maybe a session or two in the tanning bed. She was white as Casper the Ghost, but she always was. She wouldn’t even go in the same room as the tanning bed and wore SPF twelve thousand anytime she stepped out on the porch. She didn’t look any worse than if we’d made her pull an all-nighter. Still, I made a mental note to ask her later if she felt all right.

  The horseshoe match got loud, and Charlotte and I joined the cheering. Sure enough, Tommy kept his town champion title, and Ella Rae gave him a big kiss.

  There were a dozen different activities going on under the massive oaks at Whitfield Farms. The older folks enjoyed Bourré games, dominoes, and spades in the shade-covered backyard, while the younger crowd gathered in front to play volleyball. A petting zoo had been set up at the barn for the little ones, and you could hear them squealing with delight as they hugged baby goats and touched noses with the calves. Most every tween in town was either in the pool or around it.

  The ranch hands had built a wooden dance floor under the oaks, and I laughed to myself
at the various Baptists who were cutting a rug. Wasn’t all that supposed to lead to something else? I once asked Reverend Martin if he knew the difference between Catholics and Baptists. He said he did not.

  “Catholics speak to each other in the liquor store,” I said.

  He was not amused.

  The party was in full swing by four p.m., and I had officially been on my best behavior all day. I hadn’t had anything stronger than water and had even turned down the sissified mint julep Jack’s mother had offered me earlier. No use in tempting fate.

  Bethany had arrived, fashionably late, missiles on full alert, and looking like a million bucks. Except for those wooden salad bowls on her feet. I wondered if she ever noticed me staring at her feet. I knew from the instant irritation I felt looking at her, I’d be on straight water the rest of the day. My twenty-first birthday had taught me a lesson about mixing alcohol and one of Jack’s girlfriends. Besides, I liked to think I was a little smarter than I was nine years ago. Recent events of course contradicted that self-proclaimed nobility.

  Thankfully, Jack was so busy talking about football, cattle, soybeans, and politics—pretty much the only four things men in Louisiana talked about—he’d never even noticed Bethany. I knew because I had watched him. All day. It was exhausting but necessary when half the women in town would give their great-grandmother’s china to be in my shoes.

  I had seen very little of Ella Rae and Laine all day. I had eaten crawfish with them earlier, but since my last name was Whitfield, I was part of the hostess regime. Ella Rae had spent most of the day playing volleyball. Poor thing was as competitive as I was. We sometimes stayed up all night long playing Yahtzee because neither of us would quit if we were behind. The domino games were worse than that.

  Laine was under one of the big white tents entertaining everybody’s kids with face painting and games. Children thought she was the original Mother Goose. I wished she would have a baby of her own, and I encouraged the idea at every opportunity. “I’m not married!” she said. “I don’t even have a boyfriend!”

  I pointed out, several times, that neither a husband nor a boyfriend was a requirement to get a baby. If she was uncomfortable with a one-night stand, then she could go the turkey baster route.

  I thought she was going to pass out discussing it. She’d made me promise to go to church the next Sunday just for suggesting she have a “baster baby out of wedlock.” Needless to say, she was neither amused nor interested. But she begged Ella Rae and me to have a baby so she could take care of it. Ella Rae wasn’t about to give birth to anything that kept her off a softball field or a tennis court, and the last thing I needed to add to the messed-up mix at my house was a baby. Besides, I didn’t hold anybody’s kid until their heads had stopped flopping around. Strange little creatures.

  The Crawfish Boil was, once again, a huge success. It had really been a good day. I had been so excited to see several friends who no longer lived here but always came down to attend the Boil, especially Charlotte. We talked on the phone once or twice a month, but there was no substitute for actually seeing a friend. Even her Mississippi husband had begun to grow on me a little. They left promising to meet us at LSU in the fall for a football tailgate.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about that conversation with Charlotte. I desperately wanted to believe that Jack hadn’t cheated on me, but how could I let myself? She was right about one thing, though—I knew my husband better than anyone. And I knew something was wrong and had been for a long time.

  It had to be about another woman. How could it be anything else? But if it were, why wouldn’t he just ask me for a divorce and be done with it? I’d signed a prenuptial agreement, something he hadn’t wanted but I had insisted upon. He wasn’t going to lose a dime, not that he cared much about money.

  I was grasping at straws. It always happened when I thought about it too much. Come on, Scarlett, help a sister out. Get this out of my mind for a while. Let me think about it tomorrow. But my Southern sister was nowhere in sight and the battle in my mind raged on. I tried to be logical about it, to eliminate my emotions and make a decision based on my head and not my heart. That lasted about ten seconds.

  Then I looked at it from Jack’s side of the fence. He could walk away from me right now and pretend like the last eleven years had never happened. I’d give him a divorce. Without a fight. So why wouldn’t he go ahead and ask? I would pack my bags with my head high, and even if my heart were in pieces, no one else would ever know it. If he was fooling around, I didn’t want to stay with him.

  I wasn’t going to be anybody’s second choice. I sure wasn’t going to end up just like Nancy Wheeler, whose husband’s affairs were so common that the man was virtually scandal proof. I swear, if he drove up through the middle of town with two hookers and a circus clown, nobody would even blink an eye. We’d probably all think, Oh, poor Nancy, then go back to our regularly scheduled program. I didn’t want to be the next Nancy Wheeler. I’d rather have my information right between the eyes, thank you very much.

  Whatever was going on with Jack, one thing was true. He’d been a saint today. In fact, he’d been the Jack I married. Very loving, very focused, and very present. Every time I got anywhere near him today, he held my hand, put his arm around me, or introduced me to someone.

  But it was just a show for today’s audience. And it made me want to scream.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  July was hotter than any I could remember. It also found the girls and me busier than any other summer. Ella Rae’s mother had just gone through knee replacement surgery, and Ella Rae had gone to Shreveport to help her until she could get back on her feet. Laine had accepted a position teaching summer school and she tutored high school kids four nights a week. We’d hardly seen each other at all since the Crawfish Boil because I was at the Farm with Jack. His parents had gone on a monthlong cruise, and Jack had to be there to deal with the day-to-day operations.

  Things might have been strained between us, but I wasn’t going to add fuel to the fire by staying in town without him. Speculation about the state of our marriage ran rampant and was pretty much split down the middle in Bon Dieu Falls. Half the town was betting on divorce, and the other half said we’d always stay together.

  It never failed to stun me when somebody shared that kind of gossip with me. How was I supposed to respond to that? It took me a very long time to realize I didn’t have to say anything at all. There was no sense in running around town putting out fires or sweeping up speculation. Charlotte had put that in perspective for me: “Honey, if they aren’t sleeping in your bed or paying your bills, whatever you do is none of their business.”

  It had taken years for Diane Whitfield to talk Jack Whitfield Jr., into taking this Mediterranean cruise. He always found every excuse in the world not to go, but after forty years of marriage, he’d run out of ammunition. I had never seen Mrs. Diane so excited or Jack’s daddy more apprehensive.

  Poppa Jack, as we called Jack’s father, had spent at least an hour going over the same things he’d explained the day before. As if my husband didn’t already know how to run the Farm. I asked Jack once if it annoyed him when his daddy gave him the same instructions over and over. But he simply smiled. “Just who he is,” he said.

  And that’s who Jack was too. Nothing much bothered him. I loved Poppa Jack, but I’d have been in his face about it, saying something like, “Who do you think took care of this place while you recovered from heart surgery five years ago?” Still, I kept my mouth shut.

  Jack was a great deal like his father in other ways. They were both fairly quiet and reserved. But when they spoke, it was significant. They were polite and reflective, but there was never any doubt about who was in charge if either of them were in the room. It always left me in awe. It wasn’t just their physi
cal presence, although they were both big men, over six feet tall. It was more of an aura that followed them, an attitude, the way they carried themselves, that was both natural and mystic. Seeing them handle different situations over the years had left me in amazement on more than one occasion.

  Mrs. Diane had asked me to ride her horse, Gilda, every day while she was away. She had been quite the accomplished rider in her younger days and had won competitions all over the Southeast. The library was filled with her trophies and ribbons, but when she’d married Poppa Jack, she’d given it all up to help him run this farm and raise their only son.

  I often wondered if she ever resented giving up everything and moving from Tennessee. I asked her once if she felt like she’d missed out on anything. “No,” she said. “It was a wonderful time in my life, but I am exactly where I want to be.” I adored her, almost as much as I adored my own mother. Mrs. Diane had welcomed me into this family with open arms and an open mind, even though I had married her only child when I was just seventeen years old. Looking back, I knew they surely had concerns over that. But they had never voiced them to me or to Jack, as far as I knew. All I had found here was love and acceptance. They had treated me like their own from the second I had stepped foot into this house. In fact, when I was seeing Romeo, it was the thought of his parents, not Jack, that produced the most guilt.

  The Farm was only fifteen minutes out of Bon Dieu Falls, but when I was here, it felt like a different and all-inclusive world. I liked being here. I liked lazing in the big wicker swing on the massive porch that wrapped around the house. I liked listening to the hired hands tell Jack about their day. I liked helping Mamie in the kitchen, although I am pretty sure Mamie didn’t like it too much. I was pretty useless in a kitchen situation. She’d asked me to peel potatoes for her and I did. After I gave her the bowl, she said, “Humph”—or something like it—and, “Now peel your peelings.” But she did let me lick the spoons every now and then if she was baking.