Hand-Me-Down Love

by Ransom, Jennifer

  In the afternoons and on weekends, Sean took Cody into the woods surrounding the Rutherford’s house. Cody was eager to learn the land and more than once splashed into the creek that ran through. His ears pricked at every sound in the forest. Sean found a Frisbee in the little general store in town and spent some evenings throwing the Frisbee out into the meadow where Cody ran for it and caught it in his mouth. He brought it back to Sean, who threw it again.

  Sean had learned early on in his timber-cutting training to keep his mind focused on the task at hand. He couldn’t think about Meredith or Marla or anything else emotional. He didn’t want to get killed, and if he allowed his mind to wander, he might.

  Several times a week, Sean and Jesse got in the old truck and went to Billy’s. There really wasn’t much else to do around there.

  One Saturday night in mid-May, Sean and Jesse went to Billy’s and Sean found his place on his usual barstool. A brunette with long hair tied behind her back came over to Sean. Sean had never seen her before.

  “What can I get you?” she asked with a faint smile.

  “I’d say the usual, but I’ve never seen you here before. So, I’ll have a draft beer.”

  “I just started working here yesterday. My name’s Crystal.”

  “Nice to meet you, Crystal,” Sean said holding out his hand. She shook his hand, then walked down the bar and drew him a draft. She put it on the bar in front of him.

  “Let me know when you need a refill,” she said, smiling before turning away to tend to other customers.

  Sean kept watching the door, expecting Pete to show up. He usually was there on Saturday night, but he was running late or something. He kept drinking his draft. When things slowed down, Crystal walked back over to Sean and brought him a refill.

  “Are you a hiker?” she asked Sean.

  “I was a hiker until a few months ago,” Sean said. “I stopped off here and never went back on the trail.”

  “I figured you were a hiker,” she said.

  “Are you from around here?” Sean asked.

  “Sort of. I’m from a little town a few miles down the road.”

  Sean kept talking to Crystal and found out she had gone to college at the University of North Carolina, married right out of college, and divorced a few years later.

  “I didn’t really know what to do at that point, so I came back home. I got this job to keep myself busy and make a little money in the process. I’m not really sure what my next step is. Just taking my time.”

  She left Sean to make some drinks for customers. Pete came in while she was doing that.

  “I got a late start tonight,” Pete said. “The kitchen sink started backing up and I had to take care of it before I could leave. Can’t leave something like that.”

  “Right,” Sean said.

  Crystal came over to take Pete’s order, a draft as usual.

  “Who’s she?” Pete asked. “I’ve never seen her before.”

  Sean filled Pete in on who Crystal was and her story, as far as he knew it. For the remainder of the evening, Sean and Pete talked, and Crystal came over when she could to add to the conversation. She’d gotten her degree in American Lit and she and Pete discussed all of the books that Sean had never read. He really wished he had read them so he could participate in the conversation.

  But Crystal paid plenty of attention to Sean. She asked him about the trail, what he did for a living, all the usual questions. But she seemed really interested in his answers and he gave them easily.

  “I think she’s got a thing for you,” Pete said when Crystal left them to fill drink orders.

  “Me?” Sean said. “I just think she’s a friendly person.”

  “Okay,” Pete said. “Whatever you say.”

  Sean continued to go to Billy’s several nights a week and he continued to talk to Crystal as she tended bar. They talked about their childhoods, their careers, and finally Sean told her about Meredith. Crystal put her hand on his hand then, and that was all. She didn’t say she was sorry, she just let him know she was sorry, that she understood his pain.

  May moved into to early June. Sean had been cutting trees for four months by that time, and he was pretty good at it. The weather was warming up and flowers and bushes were blooming. One night, he and Cody sat on the bank of a pond in the meadow and the fireflies flashed their yellow lights on and off. They were reflected in the pond. The stars in the clear night sky shone brightly. They were reflected in the pond, too. It was a night of lights. Sean watched the fireflies and the stars. Cody sat beside him, looking out across the pond and up at the sky. In one moment, Cody looked over at him, and Sean looked in his eyes. He realized that Cody was watching the lights too. Man and dog were connected in the vast universe.

          

  The last time Sean texted Marla, saying simply “I’m okay,” she didn’t text him back. He couldn’t blame her for that. He had dropped off the edge of the world. He had to keep going, maybe until he reached the bottom of the world and worked himself back up.

  One Saturday night in mid-June, Sean sat on his barstool and Crystal waited on him. They had talked a lot at that point, telling each other just about everything about their lives. But Sean had never mentioned Marla to her. That felt sacred to him somehow. Pete didn’t come in that night, which wasn’t worrisome. He sometimes didn’t show up, but Sean was always glad when he did. But he didn’t that night.

  “I get off when the bar closes,” Crystal said that Saturday night. “You want to go somewhere else after?”

  Sean didn’t know where Crystal was going with that. “Like where?” he asked.

  “Well, I know a place near here that’s spectacular at night. The moon shines on it and it’s like you’re in another world. And, I see it’s a full moon tonight, so it’s perfect.”

  Sean couldn’t think of a reason not to go. He wished he had Cody with him, but he didn’t.

  “Okay. Sounds interesting.”

  A few minutes later, the bar closed and Crystal walked from behind the bar taking her apron off and slinging it on the counter. She jangled keys in her hand. “I’ll drive,” she said.

  Sean and Crystal walked out of the bar into the small parking lot. She led him to a VW and he crammed himself into the passenger side. “This is a cool car,” he said.

  “Thanks. I got it when I was in college and never could let go of it. It’s a ’68.”

  Crystal drove away from the bar and down the main road. They drove for about ten miles or so—Sean wasn’t sure—before Crystal turned off at a sign that said Saligu Forest. The asphalt road soon turned to dirt, but Crystal kept going.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” Sean asked, concerned.

  “Oh, yeah. I used to come out here all the time when I was in high school. Told my parents I was spending the night with my friend and came out here camping with my boyfriend. I’ve been here lots of times. Don’t worry.”

  She navigated the VW through what looked like a spaghetti of roads and Sean knew he couldn’t have found his way out of there if he had to. After a few minutes on the dirt roads, Crystal said, “There it is,” and turned the VW onto a narrower road, more like a wide path really, and drove another minute. She pulled over to the side of the road.

  “We’re here,” she said. She reached into the tiny backseat and pulled out a large flashlight. She groped around and pulled out what looked like a rolled up blanket with straps around it. What had Sean gotten himself into? “Just follow me,” she said getting out of the car. Sean got out and walked over to Crystal, who had the flashlight on and was shining it onto what looked like a path in the woods. What choice did Sean have but to follow her?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Marla didn’t know what to think about Sean anymore. It’s true, she could have called him, she could have emailed him, or she could have texted him. But she didn’t. His lack of contact told her that he wanted to be out of touch. One night in April she missed him so much,
was so concerned about him, that she thought of driving to McGinley’s Gap and searching him out. She thought about that idea for hours that night as she tossed and turned. By morning, she had given up on it. She realized her presence would probably be an intrusion on Sean and the process he was going through. She had to leave him alone.

  And then Michael had come by the shop, and he kept coming by over the weeks that followed. He was the same old Michael, still wanting to visit bars. But he was different, too. He was, after all, a very successful businessman, and that was attractive to Marla. He took her to nightclubs in Mobile, where they danced the night away. Or to Gulf Shores, where they visited pubs and bars and restaurants.

  It was a lot of activity in Marla’s quiet life, but she needed the distraction. Michael had started taking her arm and holding her hand and she let him. She was starving for companionship. He started kissing her when he took her back to the shop, and she let him. But she didn’t invite him up to her apartment—she just couldn’t do that—and he never pushed her.

  By late May, it began to dawn on Marla that Sean might not ever come back to Bay Point. He had been gone so long and he was out of touch with Marla and she was out of touch with him. She began to think that their love affair had just been a reaction to everything that had happened, their horrible loss. And they had been bound together by that loss, reaching out to each other for the only comfort they could find. She hadn’t forgotten that she promised Meredith she would look after Sean, but how could she do that if he wasn’t even there? She had done her best, but he was gone now. He didn’t need her to look after him.

  One of Marla’s hardest days came on June Third, Meredith’s birthday. She had turned twenty-eight last year on that day, days before her death. Marla wanted to commemorate Meredith’s birthday and decided the only way was to make her sister’s gumbo. She went to a fishmonger on the bay and bought fresh shrimp and lump crabmeat. She went to the grocery store for the spices and vegetables. She went home with her ingredients and didn’t have a clue what to do.

  “I can’t believe I’ve forgotten what to do,” Marla said out loud in her kitchen. She sat at the table and wracked her brains for the recipe. She went online and researched gumbo recipes. There were thousands of them, but none of them seemed right. There was something special, or secret, that she was forgetting but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it was. She needed to get it right for Meredith. What kind of commemoration would it be if she couldn’t get it right?

  As she sat there at the table an idea began to form in her mind. Maybe Meredith had written the recipe down and stuck it in her main cookbook. She was always sticking recipes in there, though she rarely had to refer to them. Marla had just packed the cookbooks up without looking at them and had them carted off in a box to the storeroom. But what if Meredith’s gumbo recipe was in there, stuck between the pages of a cookbook? There’s only one way to find out, Marla thought. She grabbed her purse and headed down the stairs and out the door of the shop.

  Derrick and the movers had packed the furniture in the back of the storeroom and the boxes in the front, making Marla’s job a lot easier. She wouldn’t have been able to move the furniture around to get to boxes. Thankfully, she’d had the forethought to label each box but she had to move a lot of them around before she found the boxes labeled “kitchen.” The first box she opened had Marla’s pots and pans, a gift from Sean on their first wedding anniversary. She remembered Meredith had been so excited to get the set, which was very high quality. Marla shoved that box out of the way. The second box held kitchen utensils and dish towels. Marla was beginning to wonder if she’d labeled the box with cookbooks. Two boxes later, she found it. It wasn’t labeled “cookbooks,” it just said “kitchen.” But the entire box was cookbooks. Julia Child’s The Way to Cook, The Joy of Cooking, Cooking on the Bayou.

  There were about twenty books in the box and Meredith picked up each one, inspecting it for slips of paper. She picked up the red plaid Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, the “go-to” if you have a question, Meredith had always said. When Marla opened the book, recipes written on paper or cut out from magazines began to slip out. This is the one, if it’s even here, Marla decided. She put the book under her arm, ready to leave. As she was closing the storeroom door, a little table caught her eye. It was one that Marla had painted herself, in a brick red color, and given to Meredith as a gift for one of her birthdays. Meredith had always used it as her bedside table. Something told Marla to go over to the table. It was irrational, but she was driven to the table.

  She opened the one drawer. Inside, she found a clothbound book. She opened it randomly and her eyes read the top of the page. “Dear Diary,” it said. Marla closed the book and took it with her. Why hadn’t she checked that drawer before they moved the table? She didn’t know. She guessed that the movers had just picked it up and moved it and Marla had been too busy with packing to even notice.

  Marla put the diary on the table in the living room. She wanted time without distractions to read it. It did cross her mind that it was private, Meredith’s diary, and maybe she shouldn’t read it. But she knew she was going to.

  At the kitchen table, Marla flipped through the cookbook, taking out each piece of paper or cut-out that she saw. When she was finished, she had a pile of them. She picked up each one and studied it. Meredith wouldn’t have put them in there if she hadn’t thought the recipe was worth something, that it was a recipe she might try and then put her own spin on it, as she always did.

  Halfway through the stack, Marla picked up a piece of paper that had been torn off of a little spiral notebook, one of those that had the spirals at the top and you might keep in your purse to make notes on. “Gumbo” it said at the top in Meredith’s handwriting. Marla couldn’t believe her luck. She studied the recipe and found what she had been forgetting. Cook the roux until it is “the color of mahogany,” it said. “This will take a while so don’t walk away,” it said. It was like Meredith was speaking to her all over again, walking her through the gumbo recipe. “Put the chopped vegetables in the roux,” it said. Marla had forgotten that too, and hadn’t seen that instruction in all of the recipes she’d looked at online. She was ready to cook.

  First, she peeled the shrimp, something anyone living on the bay knew how to do. She put the shells in a stock pot with water and turned the stove eye on high. While the shells were boiling, she cut up the onions, celery, and bell peppers and put them in a bowl. Then she started the most important part, the roux.

  She put oil into a big pot and when it was hot she added the flour. This was the hard part. Marla stood at the stove for a long time, scraping the roux with a wooden spoon—Meredith’s recipe said to use a wooden spoon. It seemed like forever, but finally the roux began to darken. She thought back on the night Meredith had walked her through the gumbo, step by step. How she had stood beside her at the stove saying, “Keep scraping it. It’s got to be the color of mahogany.” So Marla listened to Meredith in her mind, and she kept scraping until the roux was the color of mahogany.

  “It’s not burned,” she heard Meredith saying. “It’s toasted.”

  Marla threw the chopped vegetables into the roux and stirred them around. She kept her eye on them, stirring them frequently. When they looked slightly softened, she strained the shrimp broth into a large bowl. The roux hissed when she poured the shrimp stock in. She stirred the mixture with the wooden spoon. “And now, you are home free,” Meredith said in her memory.

  Marla put the Cajun seasoning in the palm of her hand, the way Meredith had shown her. “You can only go wrong if you don’t put enough,” she had said. Marla threw two palm-fulls into the pot. She put in another two palm-fulls of Old Bay seasoning. She added the stewed tomatoes and let the pot simmer.

  After about thirty minutes, Marla put the frozen okra slices, the lump crab meat, and the andouille sausage in the pot. “Put the shrimp in last,” Meredith told her. Finally, she did add the peeled shrimp and a few minutes late
r, it was done. Marla ladled the gumbo into a bowl. “To you, Meredith,” she said, lifting her spoon before putting it in her mouth. The smell and flavor of the gumbo brought back sweet memories of her big sister. She cried as she ate her gumbo. When she was finished, she put the leftovers in several containers and put them in the freezer.

  Marla sat down on the couch—the same couch she and Sean had first made love on, but she tried not to think about that—and opened the diary.

  Chapter Twenty

  Meredith’s Diary

  May 5, 2005

  Dear Diary,

  LOL! That’s what I’ve decided to call you even though Lindsey said it’s a journal. I’m calling you Dear Diary like I did when I was in elementary school and had a pink My Little Pony diary with a lock. That lock wasn’t much good because Marla opened it without any trouble and read it. I was so mad at her for that.

  I guess this is a continuation of that long-ago diary, so it’s still the same Dear Diary, right?

  So, Dear Diary,

  I’m about to graduate from the University of South Alabama with a degree in English. I mean, seriously, Diary. Did I think I was going to be the great American writer or what? What it means is that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.

  My father has asked me to go work at the bank. That sounds TOTALLY boring to me. But, the truth is, Diary, I have no other job. I don’t have a good plan. So I’m going to work at the bank after graduation. Help me!

  June 6, 2005

  Dear Diary,

  I started working at the bank today in the credit card department. Did I say boring? BORING!!!!! But I did meet a cute guy. Sean whatever his last name is. I could tell he got it bad for me right away. I’ve still got it! LOL! He is cute, though.