A Teeny Bit of Trouble

by Michael Lee West

  “Coop, we should call the police.”

  “And tell them what?”

  “That a man strangled Barb Philpot.”

  “But you said he used a key to get into her house.”

  “Maybe he stole it.”

  “The police will be more interested in you.” He glanced at my wet suit. “They’ll want to know why you were peeking through Barb’s window.”

  “It was a door.”

  “As your lawyer, I’m advising you to skip the police. At least for tonight.”

  “Can lawyers give advice to their girlfriends?” I swallowed. Was I still a girlfriend?

  “I’m not worried about an ethics violation. Barb told me she was going to leave the little girl. I believe she went through with that threat. I don’t know how the masked man figures into it. Maybe we’ll find out when Barb turns up.”

  I looked into his eyes. Why was he so calm? Normally he was a worrywart. Always scanning for danger. He kept a stash of extra batteries in the pantry, paid his taxes before they were due, and stopped at yellow lights. Hurricane instructions were taped to his kitchen wall. I didn’t know what had made him this way, but I knew he longed to be different.

  He stared back at me, his irises changing to pure gray. His gaze said, Stick with me, Teeny. I’m trying to change. Just last week, we’d driven to the Battery and traffic was backed up. He’d swerved down a one-way street, knowing full well that his truck was going in the wrong direction. He’d gritted his teeth, ignoring the honking horns. When he’d finally turned off King Street, he’d flashed a one-sided grin. “See?” he’d said. “I can break the rules.”

  But I just wanted the truth, not a whole different man.

  “Let’s get Emerson settled in the guest room.” He stepped closer, and his sweatpants brushed against the front of my rubber suit. “Then you and I will sort everything.”

  Sort everything? Coop had lived in England for several years, and he’d picked up weird phrases from his ex-wife, a gorgeous British archeologist. I’d found out about Ava O’Malley the same way I’d found out about Emerson—by chance.

  “Sort it yourself,” I said, pulling away from his grasp. “I’m going home.”

  three

  Fifteen minutes later, I was back on Rainbow Row, barricaded on the third floor of the Spencer-Jackson House. Sir was nestled beside me, the burglar alarm was set, and a walnut dresser blocked the bedroom door.

  But I still didn’t feel safe. I’d never been comfortable in this mansion. It’s real pretty, a pink stucco with gray shutters, one of the most-photographed places in Charleston. Inside, the rooms were filled with priceless objects that dared me to break them. I was clumsy, better suited to a house with muddy floors and battered furniture. But I knew one thing: beauty isn’t the secret ingredient of a warm, welcoming home. I didn’t know what that ingredient was, but I was determined to find it.

  Sometimes, though, when I baked supper for Coop, a sweet, butter-crust aroma wafted through the air, shimmering like notes in a gospel song, and a peaceable feeling wove through me. During those moments, I felt right at home in the Spencer-Jackson. Smells are real important to me.

  Tonight, those fragrances were gone. The bedroom had a closed, musty odor. Lightning shivered behind the windows, showing a glimpse of shape-shifting rain, then the sky turned dark again.

  I shut my eyes and imagined myself in The Picky Palate. If I bought it, I’d add a new recipe to the menu: I’m-Scared-to-Try-New-Things Tilapia would go nicely with Orange-You-Glad-You-Took-a-Risk Marinade. This sauce calls for 1 cup orange-flavored liqueur, ½ cup blood orange juice, and ½ cup peach juice. Whisk until smooth, then add: ¼ cup blood orange zest, ¼ cup finely chopped, skinned peaches, 4 garlic cloves (peeled and minced), 4 tablespoons stone-ground mustard, ½ cup safflower oil, 1 teaspoon sea salt, and 2 tablespoons chopped fresh pepper. Add ¼ cup chopped herbs, such as Italian parsley and lemon thyme. Serve over pan-fried tilapia.

  Coop loved tilapia. But he was on Isle of Palms and I was on Rainbow Row.

  Get a grip, Teeny. I opened my night-table drawer and pulled out my emergency stash of Reese’s Cups. As my teeth sank through layers of peanut butter, I reminded myself that food had brought me and Coop together. When I was an itty girl, Aunt Bluette had taken me to an Easter egg hunt at the Bonaventure First Baptist Church. Even then, I could locate candy the way a bloodhound tracks convicts. I went straight for the chocolate ducks and Jelly Belly carrots.

  As I toted my overflowing basket across the lawn, a big kid in a rabbit costume knocked me down. My candy spilled, and the rodent scampered off. Coop helped me to my feet. He was a year older than me, a serious boy who’d won punctuality awards. Me, I was a tardy, child slob, but I knew handsome when I saw it. And just like that, Coop had imprinted on my brain as if I were a baby goose. For the rest of the day, I’d toddled after him, trying to say his name, but I couldn’t shape the words.

  I didn’t talk until I was three years old, mainly because I was afraid to open my mouth. If I did, someone shoved an asthma inhaler between my lips. When I finally worked up the nerve to speak, my first word was turnip, and I shouted it in front of everyone at First Baptist. I was sitting in the back pew with Mama, right behind the O’Malleys. Coop sat between them, dressed like a child evangelist—shiny black suit, starched white shirt, and a red bow tie.

  Halfway through the sermon, he flicked a paper wad in my hair. I ate it. He laughed, a watery sound that whirled through the holy air, colliding with the preacher’s dry voice.

  “Hush!” Irene O’Malley hissed in her son’s ear. He slumped down in the pew. I waited for him to toss another paper wad, but he held real still, as if trapped by the shrill edge in his Mama’s voice. I kicked the back of the pew. He didn’t budge. I opened my mouth wide, intending to shout Coop’s name, but my lips wouldn’t form a C. So I hollered out turnip, mainly because we’d eaten a batch for supper the night before, and also because Ts were easy, seeing as my name started with one.

  The preacher’s voice snapped off, and Mama stared down at me. I pulled away, thinking she’d smack me, but she gathered me into her arms. “My baby talked! Thank you, Jesus!”

  Laughter rippled through the congregation, but Mama kept smiling like I’d found a cure for vaginitis, a word she herself had been using recently.

  Coop’s head popped up. He turned around and whispered, “Taters.”

  “Turnip,” I insisted.

  More laughter. Irene O’Malley pinched her son’s arm. “Bad Cooper,” she hissed. “Bad!”

  He slid back down in the pew. I wanted to make him laugh again, and I wanted Mama to hug me. But I was also peeved at Mrs. O’Malley.

  “Damn turnip!” I yelled, and threw a hymnal to the floor. I wanted to say something real special, so I threw in a few of Mama’s favorite words. In my childish mind, beets and bitches sounded like the same things, foods that grew in the dirt. I realized my error when Mama’s proud smile morphed into a frown. She hustled me out of church, slapping my legs with the mimeographed program.

  When we reached the peach farm, she washed out my mouth—not with soap but with Some Like It Hotta sauce, which was supposedly made from jalapeños, vinegar, and brimstone. This fiery baptism was meant to correct my vocabulary while it burned my tongue, but it only proved that mixing root vegetables with profanity was a bad idea. On that day, a foodie was born, but I never forgot the lowly turnip, and each Thanksgiving, I lovingly add them to casseroles and savory pies.

  Just thinking about that day calmed me down. But I was still determined to improve my vocabulary. I lifted my thesaurus from the night table, opened the book to the Ps, and the word prevaricator floated up. Evader, deceiver, tale-teller.

  “A sign,” I whispered, and tossed the book aside.

  Sir placed his paw on my arm. Bulldogs have the most expressive faces, and his dark eyes looked directly into mine, as if to say, Chill.

  The phone rang, and I leaned toward the night stand. Coop’s number
appeared in the caller ID panel. I lifted the receiver. “Hey,” I said.

  “Just making sure you got home safely,” he said.

  His voice sluiced over me like warm pear juice. “I’m okay,” I whispered.

  “No, you’re not, baby. You’re hurt and confused—”

  His strained voice worried me, but I was even more concerned about the endearment. Baby? What did that mean? He’d always called me sweetheart.

  I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes. “Any news about Barb?”

  “No.”

  “I was just about to nod off when you called. I’ll talk to you later, okay?” I didn’t trust myself to wait for his answer, so I hung up. A few seconds ticked by, and the phone trilled again. My hand closed on the receiver. No, let it ring. I’d speak to him in a few days, after I’d had time to sort a few things on my own.

  I unplugged the cord from the jack. Sir’s bottom teeth jutted into his muzzle. This was his “don’t be cruel” look. He didn’t know the half of it. We Templetons specialized in peaches and poisoned recipes. The fruit was real, but our recipes were a harmless method to relieve tension—like a punching bag, but with imaginary food. If someone pissed us off, we wouldn’t spit or pull hair; we’d just mentally cook a deadly meal and pretend to feed it to the enemy. My aunts had written these lethal concoctions in the back of a spiral-bound church cookbook. Some of the dishes were paired with music and Bible verses. That had been Mama’s special touch. At Coop’s suggestion, I’d hidden the tome in a Charleston lockbox—after I’d memorized every last formula, of course.

  If only I’d cooked a pie for Barb, a Get-Rid-of-the-Bitch Pie. The key ingredient is hydrangeas. The flowers and buds are poisonous, similar to cyanide, causing acute gastrointestinal distress. I wouldn’t have fed it to her; I would have thrown it in her face. Take that, you man-stealing, child-leaving hussy.

  I felt sad. I shouldn’t vicariously poison a missing woman. Because long ago, for a brief time, we’d been friends.

  Pink hydrangeas had bloomed in the front yard of Barb’s childhood home. She’d lived in Bonaventure’s historic district, and her family’s white wooden house had faced Newgate Square, with views of tiered fountains and manicured gardens.

  My house had also been white, but it stood at the end of a long gravel road, smack in the middle of a peach orchard. Barb had bought her clothes at the mall. I’d shopped at Tractor Farm Supply. My family was uneducated. Barb’s parents were college professors. My forebears were Irish convicts and farmers. Barb traced her lineage back to Atilla the Hun. My aunt was a professional clown; Barb’s great-great-aunt had worked as a cryptologist during World War II. Barb wrote encrypted love letters to Coop, and I wrote recipes to myself.

  In high school, Barb had been the head majorette—poised and focused, with perfect eye-hand coordination. Never dropped her baton stick, never stumbled, never failed to dazzle the audience with her gold sequins and vertical figure eights.

  Every Friday night, I’d marched behind her in the band, pretending to blow into my clarinet. During one homecoming ceremony, someone tied my shoelaces together, and I didn’t have time to unravel them. I lurched across the football field and tripped face-first into the grass. The audience let out a collective gasp when the tuba player stumbled over me, followed by a jarring crash of wind instruments and drums. Barb didn’t seem to notice; she kept doing arm rolls, her luscious cleavage spilling out of the sequins.

  When she was a junior in high school, she talked her way into my sophomore Home Economics class. She ended up sharing a desk with me. While I read about the history of onions, she held out her hand, showing off Coop’s class ring.

  “Would you like to touch it?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “But you like him, don’t you?” she persisted.

  “He’s a friend,” I said, struggling to control my telltale face.

  “Is that why he went fishing with you last week?” she asked

  I shrugged.

  “He told me all about it.” She licked the ring, leaving a slick trail over the blue stone. “He talks about you a lot.”

  I’d been crushing on him since that long-ago Easter egg hunt at First Baptist. Every Sunday I’d made a point to sit behind him in church. And yes, I’d invited him to go fishing in the creek that bordered my family’s peach farm. But I’d had no idea that he’d discussed me with Barb. A thrill shot through me, and I almost dropped my onion book.

  “You’re blushing,” Barb said.

  “No, I’ve got a fever.”

  “I hope you’re well by Saturday night,” she said. “I’m having a pajama party. Since you’re so crazy about onions, why don’t you bring a Vidalia dip?”

  Sure, with a little rat poison. Why was she inviting me? I wouldn’t fit in with her ritzy-fitzy friends. I politely declined. I thought I was in the clear until that evening, when the phone rang. It was Barb’s mom. She sweet-talked Aunt Bluette into letting me attend the party.

  Late Saturday afternoon, my aunt dropped me off at the Brownings’ house. To my surprise, I was the only guest. Barb sat at the kitchen table and painted her nails, talking about her deep love for Coop. I was relieved when Mrs. Browning gave me a tour of her walk-in pantry. The shelves were loaded with gadgets and gourmet spices. She was a professor of home economics, and she knew how to make vinegar from scratch and how to take plain old canola oil and infuse it with garlic, lemon, or hot peppers.

  Barb scowled at her mother. “Quit hijacking my guest,” she said. “We’ve got better things to do than listen to food talk.”

  After Barb’s nails dried, she dragged me into the dining room, where her father was bent over a jigsaw puzzle of the Pacific Ocean. They spent the whole evening discussing which blue piece went where. They were competitive, with strong egos, and their discussion quickly turned into a raging argument, which they seemed to enjoy.

  Mr. Browning got up to answer the phone, and Barb snatched a handful of pieces and took them to her room. She hurried back before her father returned. This seemed like undaughterly behavior, but I didn’t have a daddy, so what did I know?

  Later that night, she dragged me to her frilly purple-and-pink bedroom. She stretched out on one of the twin beds and showed me a coded love letter she was writing to Coop.

  “Looks like gibberish,” I said.

  “No, silly. They’re anagrams. That’s where you take a word and scramble it.”

  Just like an egg, I thought.

  Mrs. Browning poked her head in the room. “Your father is in tears. He’s missing critical pieces to his puzzle.”

  “Maybe you cooked them.” Barb smiled. After Mrs. Browning left, Barb slid off her bed and peeled back the rug. A dust mote swirled up, drifting over six blue puzzle pieces.

  “You lied to your mama,” I whispered.

  “Yes, but it’s so much fun.” She reached deeper under the rug and pulled out her diary. She licked the tip of a pencil and started writing. A few minutes later, she pushed the book into my hands.

  My friend Teeny could be majorly cute if she didn’t cut her own hair, eat too much candy, and shop at the Salvation Army. Her ugly brown eyes can be changed with blue contact lenses. A dentist can fix her gappy teeth, and a full-service salon can pluck her brows, straighten her grody hair, and add highlights.

  I’m not sure what to do about Teeny’s knees. They are yucky, way too far down on her legs, just this side of a deformity. She should throw away her cheap minidresses and buy jeans and long skirts. A hat will cover her fivehead—that’s an abnormally high forehead. I can’t do anything about her dwarfism, nobody can, but I can teach her to walk in stiletto heels. It’s an art form, one that every girl, short or tall, must master.

  I should have been offended, but I was more surprised that she hadn’t written in code. I asked her about it, and she rolled her eyes.

  “The point of a diary is to capture my feelings. Anagrams would take too long. They’d destroy my natural spontaneity.
Besides, I will be famous one day, and I want my diaries to be read by the world.”

  Next, she told me about her plans for next weekend: she wanted to fix me up on a blind date with Josh Eikenberry, the son of the local undertaker. “He’s a nice guy,” Barb said. “Even if he’s just a second-string quarterback.”

  I wouldn’t have dated Josh if he’d been an NFL football star. He had sad, puppy dog eyes and wore too much Ralph Lauren cologne, perhaps to cover the lingering smell of formaldehyde. Plus, he combed his hair in an unstylish pompadour, which showed off his striking widow’s peak. When he wasn’t dry humping girls in the back of his daddy’s hearse (so the rumors went), he hung out in the cafeteria with the other jocks and told Bad Granny jokes, but he always blurted the punch line a beat too soon and no one ever laughed.

  “I’m not going out with Josh,” I said.

  “You’ve got to,” Barb said. “Coop set this up. He thinks Josh is perfect for you.”

  “I don’t want O’Malley picking my boyfriends.”

  “He’s just trying to help,” Barb said.

  Maybe this was true. Coop had always been protective of me. I could totally see him acting as a matchmaker. Plus, if I went on a double date, I’d get to be near O’Malley for a few hours. So I let Barb fix me up with Josh.

  The next weekend, the four of us went to a block party on Oglethorpe Square. It had rained the night before, and Barb got her brand-new shoes muddy. Coop carried her three blocks to his house on Hanover Square. Josh and I trailed behind in a dense cloud of Polo cologne. While he cracked jokes, I blinked up at the O’Malley’s house. White clapboard. Black shutters. Six majestic columns. The kind of house that belonged on a plantation, not in the middle of downtown Bonaventure.

  Coop set Barb down in the grass. He began cleaning her shoes with a stick. Josh pinched my arm. “What’s red, dead, and can’t stop screaming?”

  “A tomato?” I said, trying to be polite.

  “No, a peeled granny in a bucket of salt.”

  I jerked away from him. I wasn’t in the mood for a joke, not when the love of my life was on his knees, scraping dirt from a goddess’s shoe. Pain twisted through my chest, a real pain like acid indigestion. If only I could be a girl with straight hair and muddy feet.