The Secret to Hummingbird Cake

by Celeste Fletcher McHale

  We laughed for a minute and looked at Laine’s picture.

  “Come on,” Ella Rae said. “I don’t want to leave her either, but we’re gonna look pretty stupid dragging her around behind us.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve looked stupid.”

  “Won’t be the last either,” she said.

  The side door to the sanctuary opened, and Jack and Tommy appeared. Jack grinned at me. “Looks like you slept,” he said.

  “That obvious, is it?” I said. “What about you?”

  “We didn’t sleep at all,” he said. “Around two a.m. Mitch joined us. He had left the wake around ten and headed out to the Farm, but ended up driving around a couple of hours, then coming back to the church.” He pointed to the blankets and pillows. “Y’all ready to go?”

  “We better,” I said, “before we get caught looking this way.”

  As we drove home Jack continued talking about Mitch. “I think he is going to have a tough time dealing with Laine’s death. Maybe even more so than you and Ella Rae. His guilt is going to eat him alive if he lets it,” he said. “And I know how that feels.”

  I touched his hand. “What do you mean?”

  “Pull over,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just pull off the road for a minute.” I drove into the parking lot at the softball field and stopped the car.

  “Look at me,” Jack said.

  I turned to face him and he caught both of my hands in his.

  “I know this is a terrible time to do this, but I have something I need to say to you.”

  He took a second before he started to talk. His face was a combination of guilt and pain. “Whatever it is, I don’t care,” I said. “Jack, really. It doesn’t—”

  “Just listen. Please. I was a fool, Carrigan,” he said. “Our life together was good. It was better than good. It was exactly what I wanted. But I heard you say something . . . and then Lexi came back to town . . .”

  Last night’s goodwill for Lexi Carter disappeared, and I felt my well-established anger rise up again. But I didn’t say anything. Wherever this discussion was headed, I had to let it happen.

  “She said she was in town and wanted to say hello, wanted me to meet her for lunch, but I said no,” he said. “I never loved Lexi, Carrigan. I want you to know that. I liked her and we had fun together, but I never loved her. And she knew it. I was always honest with her about it.”

  He looked at me and waited for me to respond. When I didn’t, he continued.

  “We talked on the phone a long time that day, mostly about her life since she left here, which hasn’t been good.” He cleared his throat. “And eventually the subject turned to you and me. I told her things were great, and they were. I told her the truth. She said she’d heard some things about you she thought I should know. And I know I should’ve cut her off then. But I didn’t.”

  I was getting increasingly angry, but I wanted to know the rest. “Go on.”

  “She said a friend of hers had told her you were getting restless in our marriage,” he explained. “She said you were making comments at the diner about how bored you were all day and how you needed something more. I didn’t believe her, Carrigan.” He paused and looked out the window. “But I started paying better attention after that.”

  I don’t know what kept me calm in the car that day. Maybe it was because it was the day of Laine’s funeral. Maybe I had matured over the course of the year. Or maybe I was just curious. But whatever it was, I never spoke until he was finished.

  “A few days after I talked to her,” Jack said, “I overheard a conversation you were having with Ella Rae. You told her you were sorry you hadn’t gone to college and were sorry you’d given up your softball scholarship.” He looked at me. “I felt like a piece of crap. I had taken all that away from you.”

  I felt my heart soften a little.

  “It wasn’t just the scholarship,” he said. “There were other things too. You’d stopped coming to the Farm to work. You’d pretty much stopped going out there altogether. Then one night I asked you about starting a family. Do you remember what you said?”

  I did remember, but I didn’t answer.

  “You said, ‘I don’t want a baby right now. Maybe never. I haven’t even had my childhood yet.’ You have no idea how that made me feel. You weren’t happy, and I knew it. That made me feel lower than a snake. Not only had I stolen your teenage years, I was trying to take the next decade too.”

  “Jack,” I said. “Please—”

  He clenched his jaw. “Let me finish. Lexi showed up at the barn one evening. Said she hadn’t seen Mama and Daddy and wanted to visit before she went back to New Orleans, but they had gone to Dallas for the weekend. I should’ve known she was lying, because neither of them ever cared for Lexi too much. So we sat in my office in the barn and talked. That’s all. She told me about her prescription pain pill addiction, how she was going to check into rehab, the whole nine yards. I believed her. Hell, I felt sorry for her.”

  I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I knew it was coming. It was going to explain a whole lot of questions I’d wrestled with for a long time. But to be honest, I was terrified of what I was about to find out.

  “We talked till about eight o’clock that night,” he said, “at least that’s the last time I remembered looking at my watch. You were in Natchitoches at a tournament, so I knew you wouldn’t be at home wondering where I was. Lexi had never caused any trouble after your birthday party years ago, and I had no reason to believe she was there to start any that night. Besides, she was on her way out of town.”

  I wished he would just say it, just blurt out whatever it was. This was driving me insane. “Please, Jack,” I said, “just tell me.”

  He took a deep breath. “Sometime before midnight, I woke up in the barn with my shirt on the floor by my desk and my belt unbuckled. And I didn’t remember a thing after eight o’clock.”

  I was instantly infuriated. Confess or don’t confess, but don’t ever lie to me. “Are you kidding me? That’s all I get? You’re going to sit here and lie to me on the day of Laine’s funeral? So, you slept with Lexi. I figured you had. I knew something wasn’t right—”

  “Carrigan, stop,” he said. “It isn’t what you think.”

  “Not what I think? What a coincidence! That’s the same thing Laine used to say.” I tried to get out of the car, but he caught my arm.

  “Carrigan, stop!” he said. “Nothing happened.”

  I jerked my arm away.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Don’t lie to me!”

  “She put something in my beer, Carrigan,” he said. “Some kind of drug. I passed out at my desk. When I woke up, she was gone. There was a note on my desk that said, ‘I knew it would be just like old times.’ I couldn’t remember what happened. The last thing I remembered was looking at my watch at eight o’clock. After that . . . everything’s a blank.”

  I tried to process this information, but was overcome with questions. “I don’t understand, Jack. What happened? Did you have sex with her? I mean, if you did . . . I can take it . . . Just tell me what happened.”

  “She was trying to extort money, blackmail me, shake me down, Carrigan. Whatever you want to call it,” Jack said. “She was trying to make me believe we had slept together, then she left town again. Two months later, she called and told me she was pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “It was a lie, Carrigan. All of it. She needed money. She got herself mixed up with some pretty bad folks in New Orleans. Started using drugs and God only knows
what else. She owed a lot of money to some pretty seedy characters, and she and her boyfriend came up with a scheme to get it out of me.”

  I sat in the car, my hands on the steering wheel, and stared at the rain. This was plain crazy. This kind of stuff didn’t happen in Bon Dieu Falls. It happened on soap operas. Yet I knew Jack was honest to a fault. “You’ll forgive me if I find this a little hard to digest.”

  “I know,” Jack said.

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “No!” Jack said. “But I couldn’t remember anything. I made it home that night before you did. The next day I found it difficult to even look at you because I didn’t know exactly what I had done. All I had was Lexi’s note . . . and what I thought was a hangover. I couldn’t tell you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It became easier not to talk to you at all. Then when she called and said she was pregnant . . . well . . . That’s when it really got bad. I tried to stay away from you as much as I could. I knew what it was doing to you, but I thought in the long run . . . you’d be better off without me.”

  What a mistake that had been. “When did you find out she wasn’t pregnant?”

  “She was pregnant,” he said. “But it had nothing to do with me. The child belonged to the man she was living with in New Orleans. She was already pregnant the night she came to the barn.”

  I thought about how distraught Lexi had been last night. How much she apologized. I thought it was a little odd then, but now I understood. “How did you find out she was lying?”

  “She finally told me,” he said. “I told her if the child was mine, I would take care of him financially. But I wanted a paternity test. She agreed to that. Six months later . . . the day before we found out about Laine, she called me. The baby was stillborn. And she told me the truth on the phone that day. I was furious, but relieved. That’s what I was going to talk to you about the day of our picnic. We never got around to having the conversation.”

  It was a good thing I couldn’t get my hands on her. “Why isn’t Lexi in jail? Or at least in trouble? Why is she back in Bon Dieu Falls again?”

  “She’s going to rehab tomorrow,” Jack said. “That was the deal she cut with the DA. She testified against her boyfriend in a drug case that had nothing to do with this. He got a twenty-year sentence. She was here because . . . I asked her to come before she left for rehab. I wanted you to hear it from her . . . just in case you didn’t believe me. It wasn’t the ideal time . . . but I had to do this today. I haven’t decided whether or not to press charges against her. I wanted to see what you thought.”

  I began to cry, and when Jack tried to console me, I pushed him away. At that moment, I hated Lexi Carter more than I ever had, and it had nothing to do with Jack. Not only did I want to press charges, I wanted her to go to prison for the rest of her life. She was responsible for what I had done. I never would have been in the emotional place I had been if it weren’t for her. I never would have cheated on him. It was her fault. She’d been a thorn in my side for years, and she was still poking and prodding and sticking me. Her actions were not only criminal, they were deplorable. I was about to tell Jack I wanted him to press charges when I heard it.

  “You are responsible for what you do. No matter what you go through, no matter what happens to you, no matter how much someone hurt you, the choices you make are ultimately your own.” It was Laine’s voice. I heard it as clear as a bell.

  It was true. I had made my own choices, no matter what the catalyst had been. I made the decision to cross the line. Nobody held a gun to my head. I made a conscious decision to sleep with a man who wasn’t my husband. Lexi hadn’t made me do anything. I did it out of selfishness and out of self-pity. I did it for revenge. I did it because Jack wasn’t paying attention to me, and I was too immature to see how he must have been hurting.

  Me, me, me. It was always about me. Maybe before Laine’s death I could’ve justified blaming Lexi. But now . . . things were different.

  I was different.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said, still crying and so, so ashamed. “I did something, something so wrong and so—”

  “Stop.” He gathered me into his arms. “I already know. I’ve known for a long time.”

  I was stunned. I stared at him, trying to make sure we were on the same page, and I knew from the look on his face, we were. He had known all along. Of course he did. Jack always knew everything.

  “I pushed you into his arms.” Jack’s face twisted in pain. “I should have told you from the start what had happened. It’s not your fault. Stop punishing yourself.”

  I threw my arms around his neck and cried. “I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry.”

  He pushed me away from him and put his hands on either side of my face. “I love you,” he said. “I’ve never loved anyone but you. I didn’t tell you I knew about him for you to be ashamed. I told you so everything would be on the table. And now it is. I watched a man I barely know cry last night, and I listened to him spill his guts because he’ll never get a chance to fix his mistakes. But we can fix ours. And that’s all they were . . . mistakes. We got a second chance here. Not everybody does.”

  I clung to his words. He was right. We got a second chance. I wondered how many people, including Laine and Mitch Montgomery, never would.

  “We will talk about it more,” Jack said. “I will tell you every detail, everything you want to know. But for now, I needed to tell you the bulk of it. Do you want to talk to Lexi tonight?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t exactly feel a vast amount of generosity for her, but maybe something akin to compassion began to stir inside me. I thought about my sweet baby Elle, how much joy and happiness she’d brought me. Then I thought about Lexi’s stillborn baby, how sad and apologetic she had been last night, her addiction, and how . . . worn . . . she had looked. Lexi was living in her own private hell. There was no need for me to help her move in.

  “I’m so sorry I lost my faith in you,” he said. “If I’d told you . . .”

  “It was not your fault. I know how I am, how I was . . .” I hesitated. “And let me say this and we won’t have to talk about it any more today or tomorrow or until we want to. I never wanted out of this marriage. Maybe I was just bored that day when I said something about it. And honestly, maybe I should’ve played softball in college. I have thought about it, but it didn’t mean I didn’t want to stay married. And the baby thing . . . I never knew how much I wanted her until I held her in my arms. Does anybody? You didn’t steal my youth or keep me from anything. You gave me the world. You gave me everything. If I had it to do all over again, I would still marry you. At age seventeen.” I grabbed his hand and held it against my face. “And him . . . I am so sorry, so sorry. He meant nothing to me. I swear.” I felt fresh tears sting my eyes. “Nothing.”

  “I know,” he said. “It tore me up when I found out. But I thought maybe it was the best thing for you. He was your age, played on your circuit. I thought you could find happiness with him. I was a fool.”

  “I never wanted another man and I never will.”

  We sat in the car and held each other for a long time. I felt a lightness around me that morning that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I hadn’t realized what a heavy burden it was to carry guilt around—until it wasn’t there any more. Yes, there was more to say, but for us, there was time to say it. Thank God, there was time to say it.

  Jack pressed his mouth against my ear. “Let’s go see our daughter.”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  As we got to the Farm I saw my mother’s car, and I knew my baby was inside. I took the steps two at a time, even in my unfamiliar heels.

  Mama was holding Elle and Mrs. Diane was showing her a new rag
doll. I rushed straight to them.

  “Hi, my baby!” I said and took her from my mother. Elle felt so warm and smelled so good. Just having her in my arms was like tonic for my soul. I held her little body against me. I closed my eyes and drank her in, her coos, her nuzzles, her soft baby skin that smelled like lotion and everything in the world that was sweet. Just seeing her made the world seem right again. I didn’t even realize I was crying until my mother reached over and wiped a tear away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t even know where these tears come from any more. You know I’m not much of a crier, at least I never was one before.”

  “You’ve never lost Laine before,” my mother said. “It hurts.”

  “How long will it feel like this?” I was crying indeed now and gave Elle to Mrs. Diane. I didn’t want to hold her and sob.

  “Sweetheart, there’s no time limit on grief,” Mama told me. “It would be nice if it had an expiration date, but it doesn’t. There are many days I want to pick up the phone and call your grandmother, and she’s been gone for years.”

  I could remember times my mother had said, “I wish I could talk to Mama today,” then go on about her day. She still grieved my grandparents. I had been crushed when Papaw died and then again a few years later when Mamaw passed. But Laine was young and that made it different. I had operated under the assumption my grief was greater because Laine still had things to do in her life. But it wasn’t true. Perhaps Laine’s age made it more tragic, but my grief was no greater than my mother’s. It wasn’t a person’s age that made death sad. It was the size of absence it caused in the ones left behind.

  My mother and my grandmother were together every day. Mama felt her absence more than the rest of us did, the way Ella Rae and I would feel Laine’s.

  I suddenly felt sorry for my mother and hugged her tight. “I’m so sorry about Mamaw.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “it’s all right. All these things you feel are normal. That’s the bad thing about grieving anyone or anything. You have to go through it, not around it.”