Southern Charmed

by Melanie Jacobson

“No, but fishing for men as a singles conference theme might be the funniest thing I’ve heard in a while.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said, smiling even though I was annoyed.

  “I know. But as far as a barn theme, is that something you guys do a lot down here? Like country western dances or potlucks and stuff like that? I remember having a few dances and activities like that. Maybe a barn dance isn’t going to feel like a marquee event.”

  “You think it’s hokey.”

  “You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  “No, I’m reading tone.” My temper rose, but I took a deep breath and decided he was doing me a favor to remind me that he was an outsider who thought anything “down home” was corny. “We don’t do a lot of barn dances. Most of us live in the city, and that’s not a thing.”

  “Maybe the tone you’re hearing is frustration that you went out and decided on a venue without including me in that decision. Can we back up and talk about our roles first?”

  I frowned. “That’s fair.” It hadn’t once crossed my mind to call and invite him to go see Brother Samuelson’s place. “Okay, division of responsibilities.”

  “Let’s back up further to leadership philosophy. I’m not one of those guys who thinks it’s my job to show up the night before to set up chairs and tables and call it good. I want to help for real. Can you live with making major decisions together and handling details our own way?”

  I turned his words over, trying to read his intent. It was so much easier when I could run with a plan without any interference. I couldn’t tell if Max was really thinking in terms of partnership or if he wanted to hold all the reins. “Fine. Let’s discuss all major decisions. Theme?”

  “I like your idea of letting the venue dictate it. Focusing on a marquee event is smart. How would you feel about checking out more venues to see what ideas we get?”

  He definitely wanted the reins. “Is the right venue the one that feels right to you?”

  “Nope. We’d have to agree. I think we have such different tastes that if we find something we’re both excited about, it’s a good chance the other people are going to be stoked too.”

  “You’re using voodoo business school psychology on me.”

  He gave me an “if you say so” look.

  “It worked. That’s a good plan.”

  “And another thing. We should check out venues together.”

  It was a bad idea to spend that kind of time with him but a good way to approach venue selection. “Fine. What else should we file under ‘major’?”

  We added a few more things to the list. “I think venue stays at the top,” I said, reading it over.

  He saluted. “Agreed.”

  We moved on to brainstorming more classes than we could ever fit, narrowed them down, and still couldn’t whittle the list as far as we needed to. “You have too many good ideas,” I complained.

  “I’m not just a pretty face.”

  No. You’re awesome shoulders and a nicely sculpted chest and sexy arms and great legs. But I kept my mouth shut and rolled my eyes at him.

  “Hey, y’all,” Mom said, walking in to get herself a glass of water. “How’s it going in here?”

  “We’re getting a lot of planning done.”

  “Sounds like y’all make a great team. I’m going to check the cobbler and get out of your hair again.”

  I could have sworn Max’s ears perked up. “Cobbler?”

  “Lila made it. She’s a good cook.”

  I wondered if she would offer to let Max take me out and kick my tires next. She pulled it out of the oven, set it to cool a bit, and wandered out again, satisfied that her work was done.

  Max and I went back to figuring out speakers, dividing up a list of bishops to ask for suggestions. By the time Mom came back in again to dish up the cobbler, we’d started in on the venues. Max had Googled a few things, and I’d added my native knowledge. We talked through the list while Mom scooped ice cream.

  I don’t think Max even realized she’d come in until she set a bowl down in front of him. He jumped and blinked at it, then at her, a huge grin spreading over his face. “You’ve made this for me before. I remember once when we came over for dinner. We had cobbler for dessert, and you gave me an extra scoop of ice cream, and then I got a crush on a married lady, and I wasn’t even sorry.”

  “It’s as easy as ice cream, huh?” she said.

  “Of course not. Even two scoops of ice cream wouldn’t have done it without the cobbler.”

  She laughed and patted his back before setting mine in front of me. “You’ll have to thank Lila for making this one.” She winked and left us alone again, and I took a bite.

  “I know it’s wrong to say this since I made it, but this is perfection.”

  He nodded but didn’t stop eating to answer. When his bowl was empty, he leaned back and watched me, which made me hyperaware of the way I chewed. Did I do it right? Were my lips supposed to be all the way closed when I chewed or did I look stupid like that? How did other people do this? Why couldn’t I remember the right way to chew?

  “Do you remember that? When we came over for dinner?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He cleared his throat. “That was a fun night.”

  It had been, but given everything that had followed, it was hard to look at it as its own event and not part of a chain that led to my total humiliation.

  “We played Sardines, right?”

  “Yeah.” It had been one of our favorite night games, a reverse hide and go seek where one person hid and, one by one, the searchers found and joined the hider. On that night, Max had found me first. Those were still ten of the most intense minutes of my life.

  I finished the last bites of my cobbler and reached for his bowl. He held it down on the table. “Uh, sorry,” he said when I withdrew my hand. “But on a scale of one to ten, how bad are my manners if I ask for more?”

  I smiled. “I don’t know, but mine are worse since I should have offered. Let me go dish you up some.”

  He was determined to wander down memory lane while he ate. “One of the weirdest things about being back here is that I remember being so upset about moving here and being so happy to leave, but I keep remembering awesome stuff, too, that somehow I didn’t notice then.”

  “Why did you request the Baton Rouge office?”

  He shrugged. “It’s bothered me for a long time that I had such a hard time adjusting when I was a kid. I see it as a massive character flaw.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Watch it.” He pointed his spoon at me. “Anyway, I had several options for field offices, but I wanted to come here to give it another shot.”

  I hated that my heart rate accelerated. He wanted to like Baton Rouge. That’s not a sign, I lectured whichever part of my brain controlled hope. “And it’s better than before?”

  “Louisiana didn’t need to improve. My attitude did.”

  “Why’d you hate it so much? You knew it would only be three years.”

  “That’s an eternity when you’re thirteen. And Baton Rouge feels like other big cities, but then it’s like it’s surrounded by a foreign country. And I don’t mean that as an insult. The food and the music and even the religion is different from other parts of the South, much less the rest of the US. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t traveled a lot.”

  “You think I love Baton Rouge because I haven’t been other places to know any better?”

  “It sounds bad like that. I only mean sometimes it’s hard to truly appreciate and understand your hometown until you have to live away from it, and then you get another perspective on it.”

  I wondered if I should explain to him exactly how much experience I’d had traveling outside of my home state. I decided to let it go on the grounds that I wasn’t supposed to be trying to impress him. “So now you think Baton Rouge isn’t so bad, but you don’t exactly love it.”

  “Are you going to kick me out if I say
yes?”

  “No, I’m taking it as a challenge. By the time we’re done with this conference, you’ll be able to write a book about why Louisiana is awesome.” I picked up the list of venues. “Let’s put together a tour list now.”

  He groaned and closed his eyes. “Have mercy,” he said, cracking one eye open to look at me. “That’s a thing you say down here, right?”

  “Sure, Elvis.”

  “If we’re going to do any more conference stuff tonight, I’m going to need to get up and move around first. I demand a walk to the lake.”

  Despite a sneaking suspicion that he was trying to poke at my personal boundaries, I could use a walk too. “Let me grab a jacket.” I snagged a hoodie from the laundry room. Max already had his shoes off and his pant legs rolled up when I came back. A minute later, we were trekking to the water.

  “Do you remember the lightning bugs?” he asked.

  I stumbled over a paver, and he steadied me by grabbing my elbow. The night we’d played Sardines, someone had left an overturned rowboat on the bank to repair. It was a gift from the hide-and-seek gods: a brand-new location outside of our usual spots. I’d ducked under it, knowing it wouldn’t be too long before Brady or Logan thought to check it out, but when the first set of sneakers came walking up to the edge, it had been Max’s beat-up Adidas. He’d ducked down and slid beneath it without a word when he saw me.

  Silence was key in staying hidden, but I couldn’t have spoken if I needed to. I’d just turned fourteen the week before, and at Mutual, they’d called in all the teachers and Mia Maids at the end of the night to wish me a happy birthday. The Mia Maids had baked me a cake, and when they’d finished singing, everyone was calling for me to make a wish. When I leaned forward to blow out the candles, my hair fell forward too, nearly trailing in the icing, and I’d jerked my head back, making it harder to blow out the candles. Five of them still flickered.

  Max reached over and gathered my hair in a loose ponytail. “One more time,” he said. “Lean closer.” And even though I’d never had such a violent outbreak of goose bumps across my scalp and neck before, I managed to blow out the rest of the candles. He let go of my hair when I straightened, and each strand felt alive. I stood there registering almost nothing else around me, totally confused about why I had a sudden radar for Max’s every movement.

  On Sunday, he stuck his head into our classroom looking for something, and I felt the air around me stir when his eyes skimmed over me before he ducked back out again. I recognized the symptoms—he wasn’t my first crush, but he was the first one to spring up so violently. The weight of how much I liked him sometimes made it hard for me to breathe, like there wasn’t room for anything else inside me besides my feelings, not even air.

  It was the most confusing thing that had ever happened to me, and it had baffled Kate when I’d confessed it to her the day before by her pool. “I thought we hated him,” she’d said.

  And I thought we had too. But some switch had flipped inside of me, and I’d felt the uncertainty of it in the dark beneath the rowboat. We sat next to each other, both of us facing the side of the boat instead of each other until I heard a soft, “Whoa.” I looked at him, and between us, a lightning bug glowed.

  We’d both watched it for a minute, and then another one joined it, then another. Before long, a dozen of them filled the space between us. It was the closest thing to magic I’d ever experienced, before or since. Aidan, Max’s older brother, had shown up then, and the lightning bugs had drifted away.

  “I haven’t seen lightning bugs since we moved away. That’s one thing I always missed about this place.”

  “Just the lightning bugs?”

  He stopped at the water’s edge and pretended to think. “And king cake. That’s it.”

  “You should be sad that Mardi Gras is over. My mom always picks up the cream-cheese-stuffed king cake from Gambino’s on Saturday so we have it for Sunday dessert. You missed out.”

  “Oh man. How hard do you think it would be for me to start Mardi Gras in Philly?”

  “Maybe you should give in to the bayou magic and stay here so you can have it every year without trying to export our culture.”

  He laughed. “You don’t pull punches.”

  “Not for you.”

  “I like that.”

  We walked in quiet the rest of the way to the pier and settled on the end, feet in the water.

  He spoke first. “I swear I’m about to start talking conference again in a second, but can we soak this in for a minute?”

  I leaned back on my hands as an answer, my feet doing a slow swish in the water. He hummed, and I leaned closer to make out the tune. He smiled, his eyes drifting closed as he sang some Otis Redding. “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” I almost committed my first swoon listening to his soft tenor.

  He was killing me. He had to be, because I was about to die.

  The last notes faded, and it took me a minute to find my voice. “I had no idea you could sing. That was great.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What other hidden talents do you have?”

  “Well, Sister Guidry, that sounds like a date-type question, and this here is a planning meeting.”

  I kicked water at him, but I was too lazy to be accurate.

  “I’m not afraid of water. Sorry. You can’t avoid a venue discussion.”

  “What do we think our top five are?”

  “The riverboat and the Capitol Park Museum.”

  I nodded. “Maybe White Oak Plantation, but I’m not sure we can afford it. Leonard’s Cajun Dance Hall could be great, and I still think you need to check out the Samuelson property barn before you veto it. I demand that it round out our top five.” I splashed water in his direction again.

  “If you demand it, then sure. But I can’t see myself signing on to a country theme. We need something super dope.”

  I folded my arms like a gangster to mock him. “Super dope?”

  “I was going to say we should think outside the box, but I hate business clichés, so I went for something different.”

  “I’d keep your business expressions. Stay inside the box. Like smack in the middle of the box. And make it a small box. So small you never think of saying ‘super dope’ again.”

  “Noted. Can we still do outside-the-box conference activities though? Like could we go to the potato chip factory and have a competition to invent the best new flavor?”

  “The problem is whether they can accommodate two hundred people. And shut down regular production while we play around.”

  “Maybe we offer four or five of those kinds of activities and people pick one. One group can go to a catering hall and do a big old cooking class. Or go to a plant nursery and learn how to grow something. Or go to a lumber store and make something.”

  “I don’t know.” It was too far outside of people’s expectations. “We need more familiar activities so everyone’s anxiety doesn’t shoot up.”

  “No, we need something crazy so that everyone can bond over being in unfamiliar territory.”

  “No one’s going to register for the conference if they’re going to spend half of a day looking like idiots.”

  “They’ll love it. They’ll expand their horizons.”

  Somehow it felt like the argument had quit being about conference activities. I took a minute to clear my head. “We don’t have to solve that part tonight. Let’s go look at a couple of the dance venues this week and see where that gets us.”

  “Wednesdays are great for me. Want to shoot for that?”

  “Yeah. Want to start with the riverboat?”

  “Sounds good. I’ll call and set it up. When should I pick you up?”

  My heart rate quickened at the date-like words. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll drive over from school.”

  “Lila, I promise not to treat this like a date. I figure driving there and back together would give us more time for planning.”

  I climbed to my fee
t, tired from the whiplash movement of my emotions. He’s trying to make this into a date. Yay! Wait, no. Boo! “It’s not that. I’d be going out of my way to come home from work first. It makes more sense to go from school.”

  “Where do you teach, anyway? I went to University Academy when I lived here.”

  “I know. Anyone with two extra cents sends their kids to private school, but I’m one of those idealists that teaches in a public school. Lincoln High.”

  He was on his feet now, and it was too dark to see his expression clearly, but surprise tinted his words. “Oh. That was a pretty rough school.”

  “Still is.”

  I walked down the pier, sorry to see the night coming to an end but achingly aware that this was exactly why it should. We discussed some minor conference details on the way back to the house. When I closed the front door behind him, I darted for the stairs so Mom couldn’t ask me any questions. The only answer I would be able to give her was that I had no idea what was going on. And I had no idea how I felt about that.

  Chapter 8

  On Monday morning, Kiana came in ten minutes before the bell. “I read more about that competition on the Internet. Did you know if I win the parish competition, I go to state?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what I win at state?”

  “Yes.”

  “A $5,000 scholarship.”

  “Pretty awesome, isn’t it?”

  She drummed her fingers against her thigh. “I don’t know about college.”

  “It’s the thing after high school.”

  Her shoulders tensed. Obviously she wasn’t in the mood for joking. “I don’t know if I can go.”

  “Your grades are borderline, but winning this competition will put you over the top with any Louisiana college you’re interested in, except maybe Tulane.”

  “Miss Guidry, you the one teacher I count on to remember I’m not dumb. I looked into college. But my life is complicated. Going ain’t as simple as up and saying that’s what I’m going to do.”

  I took my time trying to step through an answer for her. “Did you read about Madame CJ this weekend?”

  “Yeah. If I did a project, it would most definitely be about her.”