Like Sweet Potato Pie

by Spinola, Jennifer Rogers

  “Ah.” She patted my shoulder, smooshing my hair. “You’re all right, Ro. I’m glad I came. After all, who else can I pick on back at the office? They’re all a bunch of dorks.”

  I reached up and squeezed her hand as she pulled it away. “Thanks.”

  “For what? You’re a dork, too. But with a more intimate knowledge of fried chicken and biscuits.”

  “I meant thank you for coming here and caring,” I said, ignoring her attempt at humor/affection. “I mean it.”

  She yawned, leaning back on her elbows in an I-don’t-care position. “Yeah. Well. I do what I can. Just try not to get attacked at any more battlefields because I can’t exactly send you ninja throwing stars through the mail. Well, actually I can, but I’d have to … never mind. I’d better just do it because then you can claim you didn’t know if you get caught.”

  Kyoko’s skills, legal and otherwise, never failed to impress.

  “Just one thing.”

  I looked up. “What?”

  “That Stella woman is one weirdo with a capital w.”

  My blood ran cold. I hadn’t seen Stella in a few days. “Why? You didn’t say anything rude to her, did you?”

  “No. But I sure made up some good stories about your neighbors.” She snickered. “I bet she’s off investigating them now.”

  “Kyoko! You didn’t!” My eyes popped out.

  “Kept her busy, didn’t it?”

  “That’s evil!”

  “I know.” She beamed. “You should hear the stuff I said about you!”

  The following morning frost painted the grass velvet-white. Kyoko took the remaining vestiges of summer with her, leaving me standing on the front porch in a cold, dazzly, hazy-breathed dawn. I’d hoped to drive her to Richmond, but she refused on the spot. Probably the emotion thing.

  “I’ll do anything for you, Ro,” she said in an uncharacteristic spout of tenderness, patting my head with more force than necessary. “Just let me know.”

  It stung. I rubbed the spot and fixed my hair. “Want to buy a house in western Virginia?”

  “Ha! Don’t kid yourself. I’d go insane.” She flicked my shoulder. “Like you.”

  I hugged her as long as she’d let me (about one-and-a-half seconds), and then she jumped in the car and left. Honked at the end of the driveway and pulled away.

  I thought I saw her wipe her face with her free hand. And then never look back.

  Leaving me with a mouthful of unsaid good-byes.

  I walked Christie then put on my well-used running shoes and ran a loop through a couple of neighborhood streets to clear my lungs and the lump in my throat. Watched the sky brighten, chilly with fall gold, then sat on the deck steps in my sweatshirt, sticky and breathless. Heart beating gloriously in my ears as the sun turned Stella’s sugar maples to flame and rust.

  And when I stood to open the screen door, they caught my eye: Mom’s last white Kobe roses of the season frozen in a shock of fine, diamond-like frost, as if sprayed with glitter starch. Breathtakingly beautiful for their last moment.

  Just like Mom. Taken in an unexpected instant, the bloom still in their cheeks. Fearless. Bold. Standing strong in the face of death.

  “Come, fall! Come, winter!” Mom had written in her journal. “I am not afraid! I will keep on singing until my last petal falls.”

  My breath misted as I touched the papery petals, frozen in time. Their last bloom before winter. I knelt on the cold mulch, sun sparkling on the tiny ice crystals that formed on each delicate white petal like shards of spun glass.

  I raced inside and grabbed my camera.

  Squatting next to her roses, I snap-snapped away, trying to keep my cloudy breath out of the frame.

  I could still see Mom’s words, written in her distinctive loopy script, so different from the angry words I remembered from my childhood:

  Even though the canes are bare, life stirs beneath the surface. How do I know? Because that’s what faith is. Belief in an unseen God. Belief in grace and second chances even when all else shouts otherwise. Belief that one day the evil will fall away, and what we see now will be transformed. Renewed. Made perfect.

  Belief that somewhere, under this cold, earthly flesh, is a heart made to sing His glory—now and for eternity!

  My camera groaned, sluggish with cold, and my fingers turned red. I rubbed them together and took a few more shots. Then I gently touched one of the chilly canes, which had burst forth in glorious bloom in the late summer sun.

  “I’ll miss you,” I whispered, thinking of Mom’s smiles from her photos. Of Japan, slipping steadily from my grasp. Of Kyoko’s retreating car, when I’d finally lost it from view behind a neighbor’s white siding.

  Good-byes were becoming part of me. A little ache just below the surface, always holding back a tear.

  But spring would come.

  I believed it now.

  “I’ll see you when winter’s over,” I said, touching a cold leaf in the morning glow. “I can’t wait to be together again. To say hello instead of good-bye.”

  To you, roses. And to you, Mom.

  I can’t wait for our reunion.

  Chapter 10

  Somebody should have warned me about fall in Virginia.

  Whole mountainsides roared with red and orange flame. Gypsy Hill Park turned to gold, leaves sifting down to brilliant carpets where I used to see grass. The air crackled, crisp as the endless apples people gave away in bulging bags to ease the weight on their groaning trees. Our clear blue mountain ridges turned a distinctive smoky purple. My marigolds glowed.

  Even the sun shone differently—muted apricot, a little bit sad and a little bit joyful, slanting across railroad tracks and evergreens with cool blue shadows.

  Another color sprouted across the hillsides: blaze orange. Tim informed me “huntin’ season” was about to open and it was almost “deer time.” His gun rack bloomed with actual rifles, while he dressed in an odd combination of neon and camouflage. Eye-smarting, synthetic orange popped up everywhere—on caps, on vests, and gleaming from endless trucks and cars that winked in the receding fall sun.

  While the local guys huddled at the gun range in plaid-wearing clumps to sight in their rifles, Wal-Mart set out a huge hunting display—complete with taxidermied deer and mannequins clad in shaggy, leaf-covered coats. Rows of camouflage caps, hand warmers, bows and arrows, rifle scopes, and shotgun shells stacked all the way to the counter, which bristled with rifles. They issued hunting licenses for the opening of deer season by the hundred—first for bows, then for muzzleloaders, and in November, the long-awaited rifle season. The waiting line snaked around the corner and into the photo area. I listened to them chat about “twelve pointers” and “three-fi’ty-sevens” and “black powder” as they inched forward in their blaze orange and camo, cleaning their nails with pocket knives or fingering boxes of shiny gold ammo cartridges.

  The most astonishing fact of all: Becky told me that local schools gave excused absences for hunting!

  Tim mysteriously disappeared three different weekends, and Adam and Todd, one. Staunton’s general male population shrank. Everybody—including the membership of my “new believers” Sunday school class—jawed about buckshot and synthetic pheromones, and my Sunday school teacher even drew deer-stand diagrams on the white board.

  And then I started seeing dead deer strapped to tops of cars and in beds of trucks.

  It horrified me to stomp on my brakes at a red light and find myself staring into the cold eyes of a buck just a few feet ahead. And I told Tim so the night they invited me over for rice and venison.

  “It’s barbaric! How can you kill a deer? They don’t even have any natural defenses!”

  He looked up from packing another Ziploc full of red stuff, fresh from his meat grinder. “Well cows don’t neither, and ya eat them up mighty quick.”

  “Well, that’s different. They’re raised for food.”

  “Ain’t no differ’nt. Fact is, deer got the better end of th
e stick. They live their lives free an’ wild, an’ then I take ‘em out before they know what hit ‘em. One clean shot. Ya ever been in a slaughterhouse?”

  I hadn’t. And I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “Maybe I should become a vegetarian.”

  “Try it.” Becky slid a plate of tender venison and gravy in front of me as Tim slammed the freezer door shut. I tried not to notice the scarlet-stained rinse water as he washed his hands in the sink. Gordon, the hound, obviously undisturbed by such moral dilemmas, whapped his tail and stared at me in expectation of a handout.

  “Fact is, if we don’t keep the doggone deer population down, they’d overrun the place,” said Tim, pulling out his chair. “Few years back they was beggin’ us to bag as many as we could ‘cause they was destroyin’ farmers’ crops and gettin’ hit by cars. I take out a few of ‘em nice and quick, and we eat the proceeds. Sounds like a fair deal to me.”

  As liberally as people gave away apples and zucchini (which I still couldn’t figure out why God created), they also gave away deer. Faye’s freezer bulged. Even Earl presented me with a couple of Ziplocs—the traditional redneck packaging—of frozen red stuff. They’d probably remain under my TV dinners until the next Ice Age.

  “So, you gonna sit there all day, Yankee, or you gonna try it?” Tim slung an arm over his chair.

  I stared down into my plate of venison, slivers of onion peeking out from the creamy gravy, and felt like a traitor to Bambi. Worst of all, it smelled delicious.

  “Don’t they have diseases and things?” I sounded like Kyoko. “I mean, just running around outside with … you know … ticks and worms and …?”

  “You tell me”—Tim took a bite and shook his spoon at me—“which one breeds more diseases—a cattle pen packed full a hundred head a cattle gettin’ fed artificial soy feed and hormones, all squished together in the mud, or a bunch a deer runnin’ free an’ wild in God’s green woods?”

  The little cubes of brown venison sounded more appetizing all the time. I took a bite and swallowed. Gordon bayed and wagged his tail.

  “All right,” I said grumpily. “I tasted it. Happy now?”

  I ate two more platefuls.

  “Now ya gotta try squirrel since ya et that up so fast!”

  I dropped my spoon and gawked from Tim to Becky, and she finally burst into laughter. “Now, Tee-um, take it easy! She done ate yer deer. Let’s take things slow-like. Right, Shah-loh?”

  “You eat squirrel?” My hand still hung open from the falling spoon. “I mean, like the squirrels that run around in my yard?”

  “Have some more venison,” said Becky, ladling some more onto my plate. So tasty, all covered in that nice, peppery gravy, that I forgot what we were talking about.

  Lowell’s news about my house, though, shocked me more than dead deer. Even after days of Tim’s venison stew, chili, jerky, and steaks, I couldn’t get his words out of my head.

  “You won’t believe what Lowell said about my house. Ever. In a million years.”

  I stabbed another sweet potato as Tim’s NASCAR clock made a zooming sound to mark the hour and jerked my head up to see the time. Fumbled with my knife. Swallowing my nerves at the thought of tonight’s ridiculous agenda. And why should I be nervous? I’d already decided not to go. Probably.

  “Is that clock right?” I tried to sound casual.

  “Shore it’s right. We got plenty a time. Why?”

  Tim chewed, looking at me for a response. “Why? Ya got somethin’ after the big shindig?”

  “Shah-loh?” Becky waved her hand in front of my face. “You breathin’?”

  “What?” I jerked straight and turned away from the clock, remembering to inhale. And putting tonight out of my mind. “Sorry. I’m just …” I took a bite of sweet potato, not sure how to frame my hesitation.

  “So what did Lowell say?”

  “Empty.” I wiped my mouth with a napkin and forced myself to focus on now, on one problem at a time. “Lowell said the last two people who looked at my house said it was empty!”

  I smacked my palm on the red-and-white checked tablecloth for emphasis. “Two separate couples! Can you believe it?”

  “Empty?” Becky peeled the foil off a baked sweet potato and sliced it open. Steam rushed up in curls from its tender flesh, the color of Tim’s bright orange hunting cap. “What, like ya don’t got nothin’ in it? What’d ya do, give away all yer furniture?”

  “No. They said it ‘felt’ ”—I curled my fingers in exaggerated quotation marks—“empty.”

  “Well, that’s plumb ridiculous. Ain’t a house fer sale s’pposed ta be empty? Kinda?”

  “That’s what I thought.” I held up the packet of Lowell’s “house staging” mumbo jumbo. “Anyway, he said the walls had to be painted off-white. All the personal photos and decorations taken down and something generic put up instead. I did that! How on earth could people call it ‘empty’? ‘Soulless’? That’s what somebody else said.”

  Christie was shredding a newspaper in gray shards across the brown-and-white linoleum floor, which reminded me vaguely of Mom’s ugly ‘70s wallpaper. Before Tim and Adam replaced it with sleek, cream-colored paint.

  “Please. It’s a house, for crying out loud! How can it have a soul anyway? It’s a blank canvas, according to Lowell. And that’s what I’ve made it.” I fished out a piece of venison for Gordon, who’d slung himself across my high-heeled boot in anticipation.

  Tim shook his head at me in pity. “Bunch a Yankee weirdos with too much money, I reckon.”

  Um … Connecticut and Maine, respectively. Not that I’d tell Tim that.

  “Like them … whadda they call ‘em … pet whisperers?” His shoulders shuddered. “People plunk down a hundred bucks ta hear about their hound’s problem with his grandma! That’s what happens when people got too much money an’ not enough ta do.” He tittered. “I’m thinkin’ a gettin’ me a license fer pet psychology. Whaddaya think?”

  My fist tightened on the fork, and my laughter wrenched suddenly toward tears. “You don’t understand. I need this house to sell. Badly.”

  “It’s gonna.” Becky touched my arm.

  “Yeah. I keep telling myself that.” I wiped my eyes. “My horrible half sister wants a copy of Mom’s will and said if she doesn’t receive it by the end of the month she’ll turn the case over to her lawyer.”

  Becky looked up in horror. “Ya ain’t gonna send it, are ya?”

  “Not until I get a court order.”

  Ugh. Court. With a bunch of rednecks and a skinhead. Why on earth did I have to bring that up? I stabbed at my sweet potato, mentally counting off the months until February. Like a condemned man savoring his last moments.

  And what did I get for my last meal? Deer.

  “Everything’s against me! Why is it so hard to sell this place and move on?” I smeared butter on my sweet potato and sprinkled it with cinnamon.

  “Maybe God wants ya here.” Tim grinned at me.

  “In Staunton?” I glared then silenced the wrath that threatened to spill. After all, they were feeding me. “I’m made for big cities, Tim. For major newspapers. For … well, different things than Staunton can offer. You know that. So does God.” I forced a smile that I hoped didn’t look too farcical. “But thanks … uh … anyway.”

  Gordon nudged my foot under the table, and I slipped him another morsel.

  “It’s funny, though, Shah-loh, them sayin’ about yer house bein’ empty,” said Becky, shaking the ice cubes in her glass. “Fact is, a house is s’pposed ta have soul! Life! To hold in the mem’ries. The way that Lowell fella says it, it sounds almost like a skeleton.”

  “He’d better not find any skeletons at my house, or I’m moving in here!”

  I meant it as a joke, but Tim got this funny, faraway look in his eyes that usually preceded one of his more serious statements. “Ever’body’s got a few skeletons hangin’ around in their closet, don’t ya reckon? Goodness knows we ain’t born holy.”


  “Who, you and Becky?” I teased.

  “The people a God.” Tim shook his spoon at me, dripping gravy. “No matter how saved we look, we all got stuff we’d prefer ta fergit. Ev’ry last one of us. But ya know somethin’? Jesus comes ta kick all them skeletons outta the closet one by one! Just face ‘em! A couple a old bones ain’t nothin’ to be scared of. B’sides, ain’t He the one who made the dead rise and walk again?”

  Tim looked almost tearful then he reached out with rare emotion and clasped Becky’s hand. “We’re the most blessed folks on earth, ain’t we, Shah-loh Jacobs?”

  It struck me that Tim was calling himself blessed—blessed!—just months after Becky lost her miracle baby.

  “I guess so.” I smiled back at them both in admiration, Gordon nosing my ankle for more handouts. “You guys deserve all the blessings in the world.”

  “Deserve?” Becky nearly dropped her fork. “Shucks, Shah-loh! Ain’t none a us deserve nothin’! ‘Cept Tim, who, when he ain’t preachin’, deserves a kick in the pants from time to time.”

  I choked on my tea as they smooched over the napkin basket. Then I turned away, affecting great interest in a Remington rifle cartridge wall calendar, complete with a wild turkey gobbling on the November page.

  “Hurry up, y’all!” Becky finally said, scooting her chair back. “We gotta hit the road! It’s gonna start at what, around six?”

  “Maybe you guys can go without me. I’ll stay here and shop eBay for tapestries and lamps and stuff. Since my real-estate agent is so set on me spending more money.” I rolled my eyes and scraped the last of my rice with my fork.

  “Well, if it’s fancy decorations he wants, I got ya some NASCAR posters and ol’ pitchers a Jeff Gordon!” Gordon howled at his name, tail thumping and tags jingling. Becky poked my arm on the way to the sink with plate in hand, grinning. “That’ll give yer house some soul! Prob’ly got a ol’ set a deer antlers ‘round here somewhere, too.”

  My eyes popped. “I know! That stuffed groundhog Tim shot when he was … how old again? Seven?”