The Secret to Hummingbird Cake (2 page)

I knew this because I eavesdropped on my teacher talking to another teacher about it. “It's positively strange,” she said. The other teacher agreed. These people were not to be trusted. I was intrigued.

So the very first day Laine arrived in our kindergarten class,
Ella Rae and I recruited her to become a part of our posse. I remember the whole thing like it was yesterday. Ella Rae, in a bad paisley dress, with an even worse haircut she'd given herself, voiced some skepticism at first. “My daddy says them people are strange,” she said. “What they doing here?”

But that day at recess one of the Thompson boys pushed Laine down and made her break her glasses. Ella Rae ran over to him and popped him with her fist. Laine had been on board with us from that day forward.

Befriending her turned out to be one of our better decisions, and those were sometimes few and far between.

Laine had been the “good girl” of our trio since that very first day. Even when that Thompson boy ran off with a bloody nose, Laine said, “I hope you didn't hurt him.”

Ella Rae looked at her like she was crazy. “I was
trying
to hurt him,” she said.

I agreed with Ella Rae.

And that pretty much explained the way all three minds had worked in this posse for the past twenty-five years. Isn't it funny how you can remember certain parts of your life that made it better . . . or worse . . . in such vivid detail, no matter how young you were when the memory was made?

“Where is Jack, by the way?” Laine asked.

I snapped back into the present. “Who knows?” I said. “And I know you don't agree, but my guess is . . . he's leaned up against a bar stool somewhere trying to coax a phone number out of a bleached blonde with big hair and bigger . . . assets.”

I reached into the refrigerator, came up with a bottle of wine, and waved it in Laine's direction. “Want some?”

“Yuck,” she said.

I don't know why I even asked.

“You're wrong, Carrigan,” she said. “I don't believe for a minute that Jack is out chasing another woman.”

“Then where is he?” When she didn't answer, I said, “I don't know either. But he sure isn't here. Even when he's
here
, he isn't here.”

I stood in front of my grandmother's china cabinet and took out one of the crystal wine glasses. Then I put it back and closed the door. Who was I kidding? I fetched a plastic stadium cup from the kitchen and started pouring.

“You think you got enough?” Laine said.

I took a huge swallow and waited a second before I answered. “Nope, I guess not.” The taste made me shudder. The truth was, I hated wine. Didn't matter if it was five hundred dollars a bottle or three bucks at the local bait shop, the stuff was equally disgusting to me. But tonight I needed something to take the edge off. I chugged down another huge gulp. It was awful.

“That's not going to help,” Laine said.

I made a face and swallowed. “It ain't gonna hurt.”

“Tell me that in the morning.”

She probably had a point, but that ship had already sailed.

“You know, it's none of my business what you drink or how much you drink—”

“But that's not gonna stop the freight train of your opinion, is it?”

“Aren't we grumpy tonight?” She ignored the dig and kept right on going. “What I was going to say, before you so rudely interrupted, is that we have to be at the ballpark at eight in the morning.”

“No,” I said. “You have to be at the ball park at eight in the morning. I don't play until one.”

“It wouldn't hurt you to show up beforehand,” Laine said. “I mean, this is a great cause. You need to show your support.”

“I'll be there on time.” I tried to shoot her a withering glance, but the wine was already making me fuzzy. “And stop trying to handle me. You know I hate that.”

“No one can handle you, Carrigan. I'd sooner try to handle a porcupine.”

“Was that a jab at my hair?” I tried to smooth the wild red curls away from my face.

She laughed. “No,” she said, “it was a jab at your attitude.”

“ 'Bye, 'bye now.” I walked around the bar and grabbed her arm. “You have a cake to see about.”

“Are you throwing me out?”

“No, I am making sure you get across the street before the serial killers come out.”

“Because that's such a huge problem in Bon Dieu Falls,” she said.

“You never know where those Thompson boys are.” I opened the door and gave her a gentle nudge.

When I finally got her onto the porch, she turned around and looked at me. “Don't drink the whole bottle.”

“I thought what I drank was none of your business,” I said. “And besides, this ain't Ella Rae you're talking to.”

She rolled her eyes. “Might as well be.”

“Go on, go home,” I said. “I'll watch you.”

She walked down the steps but kept talking over her shoulder. “I am a grown woman, Carrigan. I can walk across the street.”

“You got lost in the mall last week, Laine,” I said.

“Not my fault,” she called back. “They move stores around all the time. You better put that bottle up and go to bed. You need to stop this. It's time to face your problems instead of putting a Band-Aid on them.” She never missed a beat.

She said all kinds of other stuff, too, but I turned her off. It was the exact same song and dance she performed after any of my slightly off decisions. I pretty much had the playbook memorized. I watched her walk across the street and into her yard. She waved as she closed the side door to her kitchen. I lay down on my sofa and sipped some more liquid Band-Aid. Laine was right, of course. This wasn't helping. She was probably right about everything she'd said.

But that didn't make me like it. Laine had always adored Jack, even though he'd cheated on me. At least I was relatively sure he'd been unfaithful. Laine took up for him, always insisted that he loved me and encouraged me to hang on and keep trying. But what good was trying if you were the only one making an effort?

She was
my
best friend. She and Ella Rae were the anchors in my now rocky life. Ella Rae never encouraged me to stay with Jack. She didn't care what I did as long as I was happy. Why did Laine insist that I stay? A better question:
How
could Laine insist that I stay?

I drank more wine and laid my head back. Laine frustrated me. She made me mad. And above all, she hurt my feelings. She was choosing Jack over me—there was no question about it. She might have thought she was helping me, but she wasn't. I consoled myself with the fact that she didn't understand because she'd never been in a relationship. Not a long-term one, anyway. She had no idea how twisted and complicated things got years into a marriage. Even if you still loved each other, sometimes that just wasn't enough. And if I were completely honest with myself, I wasn't even sure Jack and I had that left. We seemed like two stars that once burned so bright and brilliant, and now the only thing left was an ash so fine you could only see it when the sun streamed through the windows. I made a face at my own morose thoughts. Well,
that
was depressing

The phone rang again, and my shame meter shot up the charts. No one knew about Cell Phone Romeo except Laine, Ella Rae, and me. For that I was grateful, but I still carried a huge weight of guilt and shame about my indiscretion.

What a stupid word.
Indiscretion
. That's what all the blue bloods, including my family, called an affair. Why didn't they just call it what it was? One huge, idiotic mistake caused by an enormous amount of plain old ordinary hurt. Only there was nothing ordinary about it.

And when I was alone, I allowed myself to feel it. When I thought about the relationship I'd had with Romeo, it made me want to throw up. Because the truth was, I loved Jack—so much that I sometimes physically ached. I still loved him with that wild and crazy passion that had brought us together in the beginning.

And as close as I was to Laine and Ella Rae, I couldn't bring myself to tell them that. As far as they knew, I was ready to divorce him and move on. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. If I searched for a hundred years, I'd never love another man the way I loved Jack.

But my pride wouldn't let me show it. To anybody. So I found a way to hide it with an attitude, an . . . indiscretion, and a terribly disgusting bottle of—I glanced at the label—Flaming Peach Mist. I was pretty sure the finer homes in the great state of Louisiana weren't serving that same bottle on their hundred-year-old linens. But it was getting the job done in Bon Dieu Falls. And I had the tingly hands to prove it.

Sometimes lately I ripped a page from the Scarlett O'Hara playbook and decided I wouldn't think about unpleasant things today. I'd think about them tomorrow. This was one of those times. I took my wine into the bedroom and glanced at the bedside clock. One a.m. Do you know where your husband is? I took another drink, clicked the remote to an infomercial promising to make me look younger than my thirty years, and stripped. The sheets felt good against my skin. I was asleep in thirty seconds, the concerns of the day drowned in sweet, fermented grapes.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Ella Rae showed up at the crack of dawn. Actually, it was the crack of noon. It just felt like dawn. Laine had been right, as usual. I shouldn't have finished the Flaming Peach Mist. Yet another fine decision . . . I was becoming quite fluent in idiot.

Ella Rae didn't care what kind of shape I was in. “Get up!” she shouted. She held the empty wine bottle over my head. “I bet this was just delicious.”

The sight of the bottle made me want to gag. “Ugh.” I turned over and wrapped my head up in my pillow. “I can't play softball today,” I said. “I'll die. I'm not going.”

She ripped the covers from me. “Oh, yes, you are going,” she said. “And put some clothes on. Nobody wants to see . . . all that.”

I tugged the cover back over my body. “You've seen me naked maybe a thousand times,” I said. “I can't play today. I just can't.”

“Seeing all your business when you get in and out of the
tanning bed ain't the same thing,” she said. “And nobody dies from a hangover. Go barf if you need to, but hurry up!”

I lay motionless. “Two more minutes.”

“Whatever.” Then she changed directions completely, a classic Ella Rae trait. “Did Romeo call again last night? Tell me everything.”

That made me sit straight up. “Where is Jack?”

“He left as soon as he let me in. Do you think I'm crazy? Asking about Cell Phone Romeo with Jack in the next room?”

So he had come home last night. I glanced over and saw that his side of the bed was rumpled. He had slept here, but I had no idea for how long.

Ella Rae reached into the suitcase she called a purse, pulled out an ancient Rubik's Cube, and began twisting it. “This thing annoys me.”

I shook my head. Ella Rae's attention span was three to five seconds long. Shorter if alcohol was involved.

“Thank God Jack is gone,” I said. “I thought maybe you'd switched over to Laine's team.” I looked around. “Where is Laine?”

“She had to be there at eight this morning, remember? She's keeping score.”

“Oh yeah. I think she mentioned that as she was delivering the sermon last night. I love her, God knows I do, but she's so . . . responsible.”

Ella Rae laughed. “One of us has to be.” She walked to my dresser and began fishing for clothes. She threw a pair of panties at me that hit me in the face. “Get in the shower and hurry. I'll find you something to put on.”

I stood up and groaned. The Peach Mist was indeed flaming this morning. Wine had to dispense the absolute worst hangover ever. What was I thinking?

I shook my head. Not the first time I'd asked myself that same question in the last few months.

“Ten minutes, I promise.” But as soon as I got in the shower, I stood still in the hot spray. It felt too good to move.

“Hurry up,” Ella Rae said and slapped the shower curtain.

“I am hurrying,” I said.

“Liar,” she said. “You're standing in one spot trying to recover. Now hurry up!”

“Fine.” I grabbed the shampoo bottle.

Today's softball tournament was a benefit for a five-year-old boy in our community who had recently been diagnosed with leukemia. His name was Dakota. Sweetest little guy in the world. Ella Rae, Laine, and I had gone to high school with his parents. Good people. Laine had helped put this tournament together. Thankfully, Dakota's prognosis was excellent, but the frequent trips to St. Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis were taking a financial toll on his family. Most of the expenses of the immediate family were covered by St. Jude's. But where we come from, your immediate family included aunts, uncles, cousins, that one guy who came for the summer five years earlier and never left, and your crazy Great-Aunt Doris who really needed to be in a home but just continued to sit on the front porch under the watchful eye of family and neighbors.

All the proceeds of today's tournament would go directly to Dakota's family to help with their travel expenses. That was
one of the perks of living in a small Southern town. Among other things, we came to each other's aid. Bon Dieu Falls, Louisiana, was no different. When one of our own was in trouble, we showed up. We baked, we babysat, and we gave cars, time, and money. Nobody could ever accuse us of being unfeeling or uncaring.

But the flip side of that coin applied as well. Your personal business was also everybody else's. The old adage, “When I don't know what I'm doing, somebody else always does,” fit Bon Dieu Falls like a glove.

For a girl like me, that was sometimes quite annoying. Not that I was a wild child. I was no child at all. But I was, well, busy. I was thirty years old, but every time someone asked my age, my immediate thought was “seventeen.”