Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi

by Nanci Kincaid

  “Go on.” He put his hand on hers to stop her tapping at her dinner plate.

  “Sorry.” She set her fork down. “Meghan’s mother answered the phone. I told her I was Courtney, a friend of Meghan’s. I said, ‘Oh I bet you remember me.’ And she tried to, then she just pretended to. She told me she was babysitting the boys because Meghan was out of town — ‘on business,’ she said. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that’s right, the trip to Scotland.’ I was fishing, right? ‘Yes,’ her mother said, ‘Scotland. Meghan was asked to make the trip. It’s a great opportunity.’ ”

  “Sounds like an understatement to me,” Truely said.

  Courtney looked away and rubbed the sides of her head where her skin was stitched together. “Before he left, I had asked Hastings point-blank if Meghan was going to Scotland with him. He denied it. Looked me in the eye and denied it.”

  “Very Christian of him.”

  “Christians are just people, Truely. None of us claim to be perfect. Least of all Hastings.”

  It was Truely’s instinct to argue the point, but he didn’t.

  “This is awful, Truely. Isn’t it? Why is this happening?”

  “Bad things happen to good people sometimes.” He sounded like a fortune cookie. “You’ll get this resolved.” He almost added, “like I did,” but stopped short of that since he was pretty sure that comparing her plight to his would do little to cheer her up.

  “I’m just thankful Mother and Daddy aren’t here to see this happen,” Courtney said. “They never really liked Hastings to start with. Especially Daddy. He never approved.”

  “I don’t know about that, Court.”

  “Yes you do. You know Daddy always thought Hastings was too … too … privileged. Too much given to him. Not enough earned. Whatever. But Daddy was wrong about that, Truely. Hastings works really hard. He’s ambitious and driven. So what if he was born to comfortable parents?”

  “Comfortable? Is that the way you see it, Court? Comfortable?”

  “Daddy shouldn’t have held that against him.”

  “Daddy never expressed any of that to me. As long as you were happy, Court. I think that’s all Daddy really cared about.”

  “Well, he’d be pretty disappointed about now, wouldn’t he? He’d be thinking he was right all along, that I never had any business moving away from Hinds County in the first place.”

  “You know how Daddy was, Court. He probably thought you’d grow up to be more like Mother — and marry somebody more like him.”

  “Maybe I should have.” She reached for her glass then as if to punctuate the moment, but her fingers hit it clumsily and it bounced across the table and flew off the edge, splashing red wine on both of them and shattering when it hit the tile floor. They looked a little blood-splattered, but neither of them made a move to address the mess. Courtney put her head on the table and he thought she might be crying. He put his arm on her shoulder, a futile gesture. Neither of them spoke.

  It made him think of years ago, when they were young and secretly afraid of the world and Courtney had cried because one of her classmates’ fathers had been arrested for molesting the girl. They had not known before then that such things could happen — especially not to people that they knew and went to church with. The girl was sent away to live with distant relatives and the father’s life was forever ruined in Jackson. Courtney had whispered the story to Truely. Later she would spend days trying to write a letter to the girl — that she read him drafts of and which, in the end, she never sent.

  “I’m okay.” Courtney lifted her head and looked at him. “Really, I am. I shouldn’t be drinking wine — not while I’m taking all these pain meds. It makes me dopey and I’m getting an awful headache. That’s all.”

  “You really look tired, Court,” he said.

  “When Hastings is out of town I never sleep well. Every noise, you know?”

  He convinced her to go to bed, leaving him to clean up the kitchen. She didn’t argue, which was a pleasant surprise. She kissed him and said, “Thanks, Truely. You’re a good brother.”

  He watched his tipsy sister make her way to the master bedroom at the back of the house. He loved her so completely watching her weave her way along, awkwardly touching the furniture and the walls as she went. At that moment he would have leaped in front of a speeding train or a stray bullet to save her from whatever disappointment might lie in wait for her.

  TRUELY LIKED being left alone in Courtney’s kitchen. He liked opening drawers and cabinets, loading the dishwasher, sponging off the counter. At his place it was a chore — the kitchen. Here it was an odd sort of entertainment. When he got the place pretty well spit-shined and had swept the floor just for good measure, he should have headed off to the guesthouse to get ready for bed. But it didn’t take him long to realize that sleep would be elusive. He wasn’t worried, really. His sister was a strong woman. It was more like his mind was swirling, his life intersecting hers at so many points, and he had this odd feeling of powerful connectedness — and total powerlessness too. He started thinking that it was true what they said about blood and water. Blood is blood. Always. What happened to him happened to her in some way. And what happened to her, well, it mattered to him and he knew that for sure and he was grateful to know it.

  HE REMEMBERED the Mississippi version of Courtney — young and barefoot with a bandana tied on her red hair, out in the carport making some kind of big mess that she referred to as art. He guessed some of it was still there, stuffed in the rafters of the storage room.

  After his mother’s death Truely had been the one to go back home to put the old house and surrounding acreage up for sale. After a few days of sleeping in his boyhood room, walking around the yard, drinking his morning coffee on the back steps — he changed his mind and put up a FOR RENT sign.

  Twice that same week Truely had gone out to hear music with Mose and some of his buddies. Mose had brought his current girlfriend along — Jennifer Shipley — a white girl they had gone to high school with. She had been under the radar back then, not a part of any of their distinct memories, but later had got herself together in such a way that it was hard not to notice. She worked for Mose now, teaching yoga at Jackson’s Gem.

  It was Jennifer who found a renter for Truely. Her sister, Beverly, whose husband, Ralph, had a horticulture degree from Mississippi State and wanted to try his hand at organic farming. They agreed to a fair rent, shook hands, and it was done. According to Fontaine, Ralph’s effort was only moderately successful. “He’s charging too much roadside,” Fontaine insisted. “People around here not going to overpay just because he puts up a sign saying ORGANIC.”

  Once Ralph sent Truely a photo of the house decorated for Christmas — it looked like a collision of flashing lights, as if a red-and-green spaceship had crashed to earth. It made Truely remember the way he and his daddy — urged on and closely supervised by Courtney — had gone to work slinging Christmas lights on the eaves of the house and carport, on shrubs, tree saplings, fence posts and toolsheds. His daddy had had an obsolete-looking old Santa with a broken neck, surgically repaired with duct tape, which he perched on the roof every year with Truely’s help — tied him to the chimney with fishing line. From a distance it had looked spectacular.

  Back in those days Courtney had made Christmas tree ornaments by the bushel basket too — tiny yarn stockings, Dixie-cup bells, tinfoil icicles, paper plate snowflakes, glittered pecans, cotton-ball Santas. Where was all that stuff now? He hoped nobody had thrown it out. He realized all of a sudden that it meant something to him.

  Truely wandered to the back of the house to see if Courtney was asleep. Her bedroom door was closed and there was no light escaping beneath the door, no sounds of the TV muttering away in the darkness. Probably she had taken something and gone right to sleep. He hoped so.

  He was wide-awake and not ready for bed. It crossed his mind to call Shauna, but he decided against it. He didn’t really have too much to say to Shauna right now and he would defini
tely not want to call only to find out that she wasn’t even home. That was always a possibility.

  He walked to the study, his favorite room. It was something he’d done regularly in recent years, at Courtney’s house late at night when everybody else was asleep and he was sneaking around like a thief. It was like he had developed an addiction to Courtney’s photo albums. He knew where she kept them. They looked like leather-bound ledgers or something. Not your regular garish photo albums or those cardboard photo boxes with everything dumped into them. These were engraved with Hastings’ gold initials. He made a stop at the kitchen for one last glass of wine, then headed for the study and closed the door. He knew the albums he was after. The ones with all their childhood photos — black-and-white shots of life in Mississippi, then color Polaroids. Shots of his mother and daddy in their last years. He started there.

  But what he really was after were the albums with the Jesse and Truely photos. All the holidays they’d spent at Courtney’s houses. The special-occasion shots — their engagement party, their wedding, the surprise birthday party when he turned thirty-five, shots where Jesse began to look really thin and her smile was forced. He only noticed that now. He never noticed it when it was happening — when it might have mattered to notice.

  He didn’t gnash his teeth in regret. He liked remembering. There was no real harm in that. Courtney was so sure that he still loved Jesse, that he might never recover from their breakup, might never accept the fact that Jesse had moved on, to a new husband — some guy who had been assistant principal at her school and was as dedicated as she was to saving the world one child at a time. She hadn’t married him until their baby was a year old — and now a second baby was coming, another girl, he’d heard. Her husband was principal of his own school now. She was a stay-at-home mom. They lived out at Silver Creek on the golf course. The Jesse he used to know would never live out there where everything was so big and brand-new. She was more a Rose Garden sort of girl, downtown San Jose, everything old, well planted and well tended. She was more understated then. Her dreams were traditional and — he had believed then — manageable. But he was the one who changed that. He was the one who turned her into a well-to-do woman living a well-to-do life. If anybody asked him, and nobody ever did, he’d say he didn’t really miss Jesse — especially not the new updated Jesse, whom he didn’t know at all. What he missed was the old Truely. The person he thought he was when he thought she loved him.

  He remembered the night Jesse had told him she was pregnant. The first time. Long after he thought they had stopped trying. He had gotten swept up in the unexpected news, happier than he could ever have predicted because by then he had pretty much let go of the dream of fatherhood. He had practically talked himself out of even wanting a child because he thought his not-wanting would make things easier for Jesse. She had become so fraught with the pursuit of motherhood.

  He remembered the look on her face when he came home from work that particular night. He couldn’t tell whether she was happy or sad. She looked scared. He had never seen that look before. She met him in the hallway with a pregnancy test in her hand, saying, “Oh my God, True,” then dissolving into a flood of tears that was almost frightening. He had taken her in his arms and held her for the longest time, mistaking her tears for joy. Because his were. It was an honest mistake.

  Three delirious months later the blood came and washed away their hopes. Blood of my blood. Wasn’t that in the Bible? The blood of their blood — gone. Despite the advice of her friends, Jesse had already bought the crib and set up a small white sanctuary in anticipation of their answered prayer. They had loved worshipping at the shrine of their firstborn. When the bleeding began it was terrifying. He had driven Jesse to the hospital and they had sedated her. A few days later she had gone back for a D&C. A silence had set in between them then that Truely was never fully able to exorcise. Jesse had gone to stay at her mother’s house while Truely dismantled the baby furniture and donated it to the battered woman’s shelter per Jesse’s instructions. When she came home the loss was slightly less pronounced, like something you couldn’t really prove since all the evidence was gone. It was almost like it had never really happened at all.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Courtney had cracked the study door and was staring in at him. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “Just cruising memory lane,” he confessed.

  She nodded, then stood in the doorway swaying like she was frozen there.

  “Court?” he said. “Court, you okay?”

  “Tell me what to do, Truely,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.” Her voice had such a tone to it, like she was choking on a submerged wail that she refused to unleash, but he heard it. No more missed clues for him. He dropped the photo album and went to where she stood. She fell into his clumsy arms like a leaf falling off the highest branch of the family tree.

  Nine

  BY MORNING they were both exhausted from a restless night. But sunlight had the power to shrink the monstrous questions that loom at night to insect-sized pests in the morning. He had learned that for himself. Courtney confessed that she had gone to bed hoping to hear from Hastings, but he had not called. Usually, she said, when he traveled he made a point to call her several times a day — for no reason — just because. But her phone never rang. And when she tried to dial him — according to the travel itinerary he left — he had either not checked in yet or had just checked out. Or his cell was turned off or out of range. At night her inability to reach him was terrifying to her. By morning it was merely annoying.

  They made coffee and took cups with them on a slow walk around the property. Saratoga was beautiful this time of year. Cool and fragrant, the leaves doing their modest best at fall colors — not nearly as pretentious and bold as Mississippi, but oddly calming in their subtlety. Somewhere along the path, most of which they walked in silence, Courtney announced to him, “I want to go into Saratoga today for lunch.”

  “You feel up to that?” he asked.

  “I can’t just hide out here and worry.”

  “I could go into town and bring something home,” he suggested. He was thinking she probably wouldn’t want to make an appearance with her eggplant eyes and blood-caked stitches and matted hair. He was thinking she wasn’t thinking.

  “No,” she said. “I need to get into town, walk the streets, sit in a well-lit restaurant, see people — some I know, some I don’t. If anybody asks me a question, I’ll say, Yes, I just had a face-lift. If they ask me where Hastings is, I’ll say, He’s in Scotland with Meghan, his personal assistant. I won’t lie. Do you believe me, Truely? I won’t lie.”

  “I think you might want to think this over,” he said. “You’re entitled to your privacy, Court.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. And she was right. He didn’t.

  By noon they were dressed and getting in his car to go into town to lunch. Courtney had dressed in slacks and a sweater. She had pulled her unwashed hair and stapled scalp back from her face and covered it with a scarf. But her bare face was raw and wounded and she had not made any attempt to soften the shock of it with makeup or sunglasses. Truely was worried that she was not in her right mind exactly, what with all her meds and the recent anesthesia. Some people reacted badly to anesthesia, right? It messed them up. He had heard of that. Add to that the emotional upheaval of Hastings’ recent revelations, his untimely discovery of a soul mate, when for almost twenty years Courtney had perceived herself as exactly that. Now she had been reassigned to the role of a woman with whom he “had history.”

  If Truely were a better brother would he refuse to drive his sister into town, refuse to allow her to walk the streets freshly carved upon, freshly nipped and tucked and theoretically and artificially rejuvenated? Would she thank him later if he put his foot down and insisted she stay hidden at home until she healed? Isn’t that what women did when they got work done? If he went through with this misguided lunch idea was she going to blame him later for his lapse in pr
otecting her from herself?

  He started the car and eased slowly down the winding driveway. He looked at her for some sign that she was rethinking this plan, but she seemed relaxed and calm and more than happy to be on her way to a pleasant lunch. She even managed to smile at him. When they were maybe halfway to the restaurant she touched his arm and asked, “If Hastings does leave me, Truely, will you hate him?”

  He was not expecting the question. If there was a right answer he didn’t know what it was. If she was hoping he would say something to make her feel better, then he hoped so too, although he had no idea what that might be. “No,” he said, finally. “I won’t hate Hastings.” It was the truth too, he wouldn’t.

  “Really?” She seemed amused. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’ve known him too long to hate him.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Me too.”

  THEY PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT behind the Plumed Horse, one of Courtney’s favorite restaurants. He had parked as near to the door as possible and was walking around to open Courtney’s door for her when her cell phone rang. It played “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which he had once found oddly appropriate. She fumbled through her purse to answer it. He saw the way her hands shook. “Hello.” She spoke in what he thought was a childlike voice. He stood beside the open car door, waiting. “Hastings,” she said. “My God, it’s you.” She glanced at Truely with such a vulnerable expression, the relief and the pain of the call made apparent. Truely nodded and stepped away from the car. He would let her have this conversation privately. He would wait it out. It was the sort of moment when you might wish you smoked, so you could busy yourself with lighting a cigarette and standing idly by while you smoked it. It would feel like something to do, when there was really nothing to do but wait.

  HE WATCHED COURTNEY GESTURE with her hands while she talked. He watched her bow her head and go silent. He watched her laugh out loud, a fake laugh that was sickening to him, the garishness of it. He watched her squirm in her seat and rub her hand over her bandages and over her eyes. He watched her shake her head no, no, no. He watched every move his sister made, sitting there in the car speaking to the husband who was making her so miserable, and he instinctively understood the nature of the call without ever hearing a word of it. They spoke for maybe ten minutes. It seemed a long time to Truely. When Courtney hung up she went limp, and rested her head in her hands.