Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “Oh, and this, too,” he said, pulling out a square Rubbermaid container with M. Pinaldi written on the lid. “Your soups, girl … I could eat ’em every day. I poured it over a piece of toast and it made me a real good dinner for myself last night.”

  Margaret took the container and got up to leave. “I hope I haven’t bothered you, Mr. Ted,” she said.

  “Always a pleasure talkin’ with you, darlin. I haven’t seen Dewayne the past few days. Is he okay?”

  “We’re just spendin’ some time apart.”

  “Dewayne’s a nice boy. He fixed my ceiling fan, did you know that?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Ted.”

  “Enjoy the rest of this lovely day, young lady. I think it’s fixin’ to rain—I can smell the paper mill.”

  Sitting on the front steps of her house, Margaret opened the package and pulled out a white letter from Sig Hamblin.

  Margaret: As directed by your mother, I am forwarding this letter to you exactly one year after her death. Please call me when you want to follow up on this new matter. I hope this finds you in good health. I miss your mother. New York is a much quieter place without her.

  Margaret looked into the darkness of the cardboard UPS packet again and this time pulled out what she had missed the first time—one of her mother’s trademark red envelopes, sealed and inscribed with Margaret Pinaldi in her handwriting. She opened it and began to read:

  Margaret: If I were to give you a windfall of cash upon my death, you might have been numbed into a false sense of security and done nothing with your life. You served me well at the clinic, and for that I am forever indebted, but it is my concern that you will hop off into the world, armed with your worthless, esoteric degrees, and fail to define yourself through your work and passions. I trust you are now self-sufficient and successful, and therefore I can leave you this money, which I strongly suggest you invest in an aggressive mixture of stocks (70 percent), bonds (20 percent), and the remainder in liquid cash reserves—at least through your fiftieth birthday, and then the allocations should be revisited.

  I hope you’re happy, Margaret. Remember that I love you.

  There will be no more red envelopes. I am finished.

  Ruth

  Margaret brought the second page to the top, a bank statement from First Federal Buffalo.

  “Oh … my … Lord,” she whispered.

  Toward the bottom of the page, Ruth had expressively circled the balance with a red felt-tip marker: $235,812.35.

  Margaret set the papers in her lap and looked about her from the parapet of the front stoop. She wanted to share the news with someone, but whom? Dewayne’s presence right now made her anxious and confused. Donna was in Atlanta on her interview. There was a time Margaret would have shared such news with Randy, but she had crested that hill months ago. Suddenly, and for the first time since Christmas, Margaret felt acutely alone in this land with soil the color of Mars.

  She went inside and returned to the porch with journal in hand. Margaret then uncapped a new, red felt-tip pen and began to write:

  Dear Mother: Why did you have me? For the same reason I’m thinking of having mine? Was it because both your parents had died and there was no longer an older generation standing between you and mortality?

  Was the ticking of your biological clock so loud and relentless that you gave birth just to shut it up?

  Was it because you were so inexperienced with men and love that when someone finally did get you pregnant you were so bewildered and pleased that you just let it happen?

  Damn you, Mother—who was/is he? And why did you choose not to marry him? Did you love my father? Did you intentionally get pregnant? What could be so bad about a man that would make you hide him from me for forty years?

  There is a man in my own life now, and though he is sweet and gentle I still hold him at arm’s length because it seems too easy and comfortable being with him. I think I watched and learned from you that struggle was best and that a state of satisfaction meant you weren’t trying and that you were lazy and destined to die ignorant and unfulfilled.

  You would not approve of Dewayne—at least I don’t think you would. He has taught me to enjoy the light, easy things you scoffed at. (I read the funnies now.) We do not debate the issues as you and I used to do. We argue about the most superficial things. (Who makes the best barbecue sauce in town?)

  I am thirty years old. I believe you told me cancer took grandmother when she was fifty-nine. I lost you at fifty-five, and I cannot help but feel a looming deadline here. As I write this I realize how precious life can be and how sweet it is to intertwine one’s emotions with another … something you never had the pleasure of doing. I think you had me because you did not want to be alone in the world. Yet I realize now you were the loneliest person I’ve ever known even though we lived in the same house.

  Unlike you, I’m going to do it right, Mother. I am going to regard my own feelings and the feelings of others and lap up the love and delights that lie within reach, around me. If that is lazy and Southern, then I am lazy and Southern.

  Thanks for the money. I have some plans for it. A new roof, for one. A bed. And then some bigger things.

  The last red envelope? I highly doubt it.

  Thirty-nine

  Dear Chatter: Cheese straws are little finger cookies made from flour and cheese and just a little bit of red pepper. You can fry them in vegetable oil. They are just about the tastiest things in the world.

  Dear Chatter: What is it with all the homeowners in north Selby who have a black man doing all their dirty work for them at pitiful wages? Maybe your history books left this part out, but there was this president named Abraham Lincoln? And there was this little war? And you guys lost? And the slaves were freed? Hello out there? Hello?

  A grease-spotted white bag of Krystal hamburgers sat open on the seat of Suzanne’s black Lexus between her and John David. On their way to Atlanta, at the Locust Grove exit, they’d decided they were hungry and pulled off I-75 long enough to make the drive-through purchase, along with one order of chili-cheese fries and two large Diet Cokes.

  As John David drove, Suzanne looked into the bag. “There’s just one left, John David,” she said in a taunting tone. She reached in and grabbed the little square burger.

  “It’s not ladylike to take the last of anything, Suzanne. You hand that over. You’ve eaten most of those anyway.”

  “John David! I have not!”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’m gonna tell …” he threatened in a childish singsong.

  “You’re gonna hold that over me for the rest of my life, aren’t you?”

  John David started shaking his head. “Who’d believe me, Suzanne? Who’s gonna believe you went around town wearin’ strap-on bellies. So what are we gonna do first when we get to Atlanta?” he asked. “I’ve never faked a miscarriage before.”

  Knowing very well this most likely was her last sponsored trip to Atlanta, and that Boone would not be changing his mind about the divorce, Suzanne pulled out all the stops for these three days and asked John David to join her. The official line at Sugar Day was that Suzanne was visiting her great grandmother in Ashville, but instead she’d booked a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead and then massages for them both at a new spa up at Lake Lanier. Plus, there was a ring she wanted at Tiffany and a new handbag at the Louis Vuitton boutique in Lenox Square.

  “I gotta drop by and pick up an urn at Daniel Quincy before we go to the hotel, Suzanne.”

  “Who’s it for?” she asked.

  “Mona Beckner. I’m doin’ her dinin’ room over.”

  “She just did that dinin’ room last year.”

  “She’s still not happy with it. I swear that woman doesn’t know what she wants.”

  Suzanne stopped to picture the Beckners’ dining room in her head. “They need a coffered ceilin’ in that room,” she said. “That room’s got too big a feel to it. That high ceilin’ probably makes ’em feel like little kids.”
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  As John David visualized the change, they whizzed past a picture of Scarlett O’Hara on a billboard that advertised a new Gone with the Wind tour in McDonough, an Atlanta exurb that claimed to be the setting for Margaret Mitchell’s novel.

  John David began to nod. “You’re right, Suzanne,” he said. “A coffered ceiling would add a lot to that room.”

  “John David!”

  “What?”

  “Are you actually agreein’ with me on a decorating matter?”

  “What are you so surprised about? You’ve got good taste, Suzanne.”

  “But you always say I’m wrong.”

  “Sometimes you’re a little over the top—like those tacky scallop-shell sconces in the dining room—but you got a good eye, girl. Especially with curtains.”

  Suzanne shook her head and smiled. “Why on earth did you wait until now to tell me that? I sure would’ve liked to hear that earlier, John David. I swear I never get a compliment for anything.”

  “I’m not stupid, Suzanne. You’re my biggest account—and now you’re fixin’ to be a pauper. Woe is me.”

  As John David took Suzanne’s black Lexus past eighty, her mind traveled back down I-75, into Selby and through the front door of 2146 Red Hill Drive, where she began to float from room to room in an exquisite tour of curtains, tassels, and fringe.

  Forty

  Dear Chatter: I’m calling to complain about a public school bus I saw driving through Red Hill Plantation. There is no reason for that bus to be in this neighborhood. All the kids here go to Canterbury.

  Dear Chatter: What has four teeth and is a hundred and sixty-eight years old? Two Waffle House waitresses. Ha, ha! Thought you’d get a chuckle out of that one.

  You outdone yourself tonight, Donna,” Frankie Kabel said. “This is the best fried chicken I’ve ever had—just as good as your momma used to make.”

  “Thank you!”

  “I mean it, girl. Very tasty. Very tasty.”

  “This is what all chickens used to taste like, Daddy—did you know that? It’s a free-range chicken. They taste better ’cause they weren’t cooped up in a cage eatin’ stale birdseed all day. These chickens run around on a farm eatin’ what God wanted ’em to eat.”

  “Well, all I know is I’m gonna miss your cookin’.”

  “You’re gonna do just fine, Daddy.”

  In the weeks since she announced her promotion to her father, Donna and Margaret set about teaching Frankie Kabel how to subsist without a woman in the house. They helped him draft shopping lists and shadowed him at Kroger. They taught him how to make turkey chili and chicken soup and squash casserole with low-fat cheddar cheese and how to store all these things in the freezer then resurrect them in the microwave.

  What surprised Donna even more than her father’s openness to learning all this was his reaction to the news that she was moving out and up to Atlanta.

  As a celebratory meal, Donna cooked all her father’s favorite foods, including not only the fried chicken but also gravy from the drippings and buttermilk mashed potatoes, collards and corn bread and a peach cobbler. She’d added a single black cardamom pod to the cobbler—something Margaret had taught her—giving it a subtle, mysterious flavor not unlike smoked allspice.

  Before they sat down to eat, Frankie and Donna stood behind their chairs for grace.

  “Lord, we thank you for these glorious bounties before us,” he said, his eyes scrunched tightly closed as if afraid that any intruding light could zap and vaporize the message. “And we ask that you watch over this girl in Atlanta, ’cause she’s got a temper and puffed-up pride that can get her in trouble. And, Lord, we wanna say thank you for providin’ this opportunity for Donna and helpin’ her succeed. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

  To herself, Donna thought, This is my doin’, Daddy. It’s all mine. God didn’t scrape me off the floor when Robbie dumped me. God didn’t memorize all those produce flash cards. God didn’t teach me how to like spendin’ time by myself and how to start seein’ past a face. God didn’t work six days a week and come up with clever cross-merchandising so the produce section of Kroger Store #578 would outperform every single unit in the Atlanta region.

  Instead, she said, simply, “Amen.”

  They ate their meal, and when it was time for dessert Donna went into the kitchen, pulled the cobbler from the oven, and spooned it into bowls. She watched the steam rise from the piles of flaky crust and peach slices bathed in clear syrup. “This needs ice cream,” she said.

  Donna went to the freezer, which was packed with all the single-serving meals she and her father had been making. One by one, as if saving someone from a building that had collapsed on top of them, Donna pulled the bags of spaghetti sauce and soup and casseroles from the freezer and set them on the kitchen table. She came upon the famous heart potato and opened the lid of the Rubbermaid container. It was covered now in fuzzy ice crystals that glittered beneath the light overhead. Donna thought back to the night months ago when she’d awakened with cramps and noticed the kitchen light on, and hiding in the hallway she could see her father sitting at the kitchen table with the tuber, which he had freed from its cryogenic state. His head bowed in prayer, he laid his three fingers, the ones used for the Boy Scout’s pledge, on top of the cold skin and held them there as if taking a pulse or bestowing a wish on it. “I know this was your doin’, Doris,” he said out loud to himself. “She don’t listen to me, maybe she’ll listen to you now.”

  After returning the potato to the freezer, Donna then came across the frozen Three Musketeers bar that Billy Ray Cyrus had bitten into and thrown to the crowd. She took it from its container and tossed it in the trash can beside the stove.

  And finally, there it was … the last of the peach ice cream her mother had made. To prolong its life, Donna had triple-wrapped the two pale-orange scoops in three Ziploc bags before setting them into an airtight plastic container.

  With scissors, she now cut away the plastic and set the frozen lumps atop the helpings of cobbler, which were still warm, and in the short time it took Donna to get the dessert to the table the edges of the ice cream had started to melt and run down the slopes of the dessert, pooling at the bottom of the bowl.

  Frankie knew immediately what it was. He smiled at his daughter and she at him. At the same time, they picked up their spoons and scooped up a dab of the ice cream and brought it to their mouths. And once the sweet coldness was on their tongues, they closed their eyes and let it sit there for as long as it would last.

  Epilogue

  (Eleven months later)

  Margaret spotted Donna’s Saturn from behind the counter, easy to distinguish because of the “VEGGY” vanity license plate.

  “Can you please cover the register, Dewayne?” she yelled to the back office. “I’m gonna go meet Donna.”

  Margaret wiped her hands on her red-and-white-striped apron with The Casserole Shop embroidered in thick black letters in an arc across the chest. Dewayne emerged, wearing an identical apron and with a sleeping baby that lay across his forearm in a football hold. Instead of her head nestled in the crook of his arm, however, she lay backward, her legs straddling his bicep and her head in his large hand, his fingers spread open as if he were holding a cantaloupe. At first, this bothered several of their customers—and most all of them were mothers of some age or another—but they soon learned how very comfortable and safe Ruth Case felt in her father’s care.

  In the early mornings when he cooked, Dewayne slipped Ruth into a blue backpack carrier. She would bob about though sleep soundly as he worked in the kitchen, manually mashing potatoes and mincing onions and mixing the corn bread batter that would blanket the store’s most popular casserole, which he had named Dewayne’s Delight. It was a beef and lamb stew with roasted turnips, garlic, carrots, thyme and sage, topped with the corn bread batter that would brown and crisp up real nice after twenty minutes at four twenty-five.

  Dewayne did not feel centered unless he was in his daughter’s pr
esence, and it was just three weeks after her birth that he resigned from the fire department and went to work with Margaret in their store. Crammed between an expansive Blockbuster video and an L.A. Weight Loss Clinic, The Casserole Shop sold casseroles and only casseroles, albeit a wide variety of them. They ranged from Dewayne’s traditional fare to Margaret’s ethnic and fusion offerings to the Middle Georgia Celebrity Casserole of the Week, which was by invitation only. Harriet Toomey was a frequent contributor.

  “You take your time,” he said to his wife. “I can do this one-handed.”

  Margaret would not have believed him had he not proven himself, but she watched Dewayne time and again as he pulled casseroles from the display case, dropped them into their trademark red-cardboard carrying cases, folded them shut and conducted a Visa transaction, all while holding his daughter. At Donna’s urging, they did hire Adrian Braswell part-time to help carry casseroles out to customers’ cars in the busy afternoons. Though he was good, reliable help, Margaret occasionally had to chastise him for attempting to convert their Japanese customers to Christianity.

  Through the glass of the windows and the door, Dewayne listened to the muffled squeals and chattering of the two young women:

  “You cut your hair!”

  “You like it?”

  “I love it—it’s so cute! I’m gonna get mine cut that short!”

  “Don’t you dare cut that gorgeous hair, Donna.”

  The girls had not seen each other for five months. Though Donna had just been in her new job in Atlanta for half a year, they were already using her to train most of the produce managers from Chattanooga, south. She’d also become their chief perishables troubleshooter. If, say, cruciferous vegetables weren’t moving in the central Birmingham locations, they dispatched Donna. She would fax a plan then swoop into town on a direct Delta flight from Atlanta that morning and deliver an hour-long seminar on cross-store merchandising. Three times she’d tried to schedule the surgery for her face and had to cancel because of work.