Southern Living (38 page)

“I gotta drop by and pick up an urn at Daniel Quincy before we go to the hotel, Suzanne.”

“Who’s it for?” she asked.

“Mona Beckner. I’m doin’ her dinin’ room over.”

“She just did that dinin’ room last year.”

“She’s still not happy with it. I swear that woman doesn’t know what she wants.”

Suzanne stopped to picture the Beckners’ dining room in her head. “They need a coffered ceilin’ in that room,” she said. “That room’s got too big a feel to it. That high ceilin’ probably makes ’em feel like little kids.”

As John David visualized the change, they whizzed past a picture of Scarlett O’Hara on a billboard that advertised a new
Gone with the Wind
tour in McDonough, an Atlanta exurb that claimed to be the setting for Margaret Mitchell’s novel.

John David began to nod. “You’re right, Suzanne,” he said. “A coffered ceiling would add a lot to that room.”

“John David!”

“What?”

“Are you actually agreein’ with me on a decorating matter?”

“What are you so surprised about? You’ve got good taste, Suzanne.”

“But you always say I’m wrong.”

“Sometimes you’re a little over the top—like those tacky scallop-shell sconces in the dining room—but you got a good eye, girl. Especially with curtains.”

Suzanne shook her head and smiled. “Why on earth did you wait until now to tell me that? I sure would’ve liked to hear that earlier, John David. I swear I never get a compliment for anything.”

“I’m not stupid, Suzanne. You’re my biggest account—and now you’re fixin’ to be a pauper. Woe is me.”

As John David took Suzanne’s black Lexus past eighty, her mind traveled back down I-75, into Selby and through the front door of 2146 Red Hill Drive, where she began to float from room to room in an exquisite tour of curtains, tassels, and fringe.

Y
ou outdone yourself tonight, Donna,” Frankie Kabel said. “This is the best fried chicken I’ve ever had—just as good as your momma used to make.”

“Thank you!”

“I mean it, girl. Very tasty. Very tasty.”

“This is what all chickens used to taste like, Daddy—did you know that? It’s a free-range chicken. They taste better ’cause they weren’t cooped up in a cage eatin’ stale birdseed all day. These chickens run around on a farm eatin’ what God wanted ’em to eat.”

“Well, all I know is I’m gonna miss your cookin’.”

“You’re gonna do just fine, Daddy.”

In the weeks since she announced her promotion to her father, Donna and Margaret set about teaching Frankie Kabel how to
subsist without a woman in the house. They helped him draft shopping lists and shadowed him at Kroger. They taught him how to make turkey chili and chicken soup and squash casserole with low-fat cheddar cheese and how to store all these things in the freezer then resurrect them in the microwave.

What surprised Donna even more than her father’s openness to learning all this was his reaction to the news that she was moving out and up to Atlanta.

As a celebratory meal, Donna cooked all her father’s favorite foods, including not only the fried chicken but also gravy from the drippings and buttermilk mashed potatoes, collards and corn bread and a peach cobbler. She’d added a single black cardamom pod to the cobbler—something Margaret had taught her—giving it a subtle, mysterious flavor not unlike smoked allspice.

Before they sat down to eat, Frankie and Donna stood behind their chairs for grace.

“Lord, we thank you for these glorious bounties before us,” he said, his eyes scrunched tightly closed as if afraid that any intruding light could zap and vaporize the message. “And we ask that you watch over this girl in Atlanta, ’cause she’s got a temper and puffed-up pride that can get her in trouble. And, Lord, we wanna say thank you for providin’ this opportunity for Donna and helpin’ her succeed. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

To herself, Donna thought,
This is my doin’, Daddy. It’s all mine. God didn’t scrape me off the floor when Robbie dumped me. God didn’t memorize all those produce flash cards. God didn’t teach me how to like spendin’ time by myself and how to start seein’ past a face. God didn’t work six days a week and come up with clever cross-merchandising so the produce section of Kroger Store #578 would outperform every single unit in the Atlanta region
.

Instead, she said, simply, “Amen.”

They ate their meal, and when it was time for dessert Donna went into the kitchen, pulled the cobbler from the oven, and
spooned it into bowls. She watched the steam rise from the piles of flaky crust and peach slices bathed in clear syrup. “This needs ice cream,” she said.

Donna went to the freezer, which was packed with all the single-serving meals she and her father had been making. One by one, as if saving someone from a building that had collapsed on top of them, Donna pulled the bags of spaghetti sauce and soup and casseroles from the freezer and set them on the kitchen table. She came upon the famous heart potato and opened the lid of the Rubbermaid container. It was covered now in fuzzy ice crystals that glittered beneath the light overhead. Donna thought back to the night months ago when she’d awakened with cramps and noticed the kitchen light on, and hiding in the hallway she could see her father sitting at the kitchen table with the tuber, which he had freed from its cryogenic state. His head bowed in prayer, he laid his three fingers, the ones used for the Boy Scout’s pledge, on top of the cold skin and held them there as if taking a pulse or bestowing a wish on it. “I know this was your doin’, Doris,” he said out loud to himself. “She don’t listen to me, maybe she’ll listen to you now.”

After returning the potato to the freezer, Donna then came across the frozen Three Musketeers bar that Billy Ray Cyrus had bitten into and thrown to the crowd. She took it from its container and tossed it in the trash can beside the stove.

And finally, there it was … the last of the peach ice cream her mother had made. To prolong its life, Donna had triple-wrapped the two pale-orange scoops in three Ziploc bags before setting them into an airtight plastic container.

With scissors, she now cut away the plastic and set the frozen lumps atop the helpings of cobbler, which were still warm, and in the short time it took Donna to get the dessert to the table the edges of the ice cream had started to melt and run down the slopes of the dessert, pooling at the bottom of the bowl.

Frankie knew immediately what it was. He smiled at his daughter and she at him. At the same time, they picked up their spoons and scooped up a dab of the ice cream and brought it to their mouths. And once the sweet coldness was on their tongues, they closed their eyes and let it sit there for as long as it would last.

M
argaret spotted Donna’s Saturn from behind the counter, easy to distinguish because of the “VEGGY” vanity license plate.

“Can you please cover the register, Dewayne?” she yelled to the back office. “I’m gonna go meet Donna.”

Margaret wiped her hands on her red-and-white-striped apron with
The Casserole Shop
embroidered in thick black letters in an arc across the chest. Dewayne emerged, wearing an identical apron and with a sleeping baby that lay across his forearm in a football hold. Instead of her head nestled in the crook of his arm, however, she lay backward, her legs straddling his bicep and her head in his large hand, his fingers spread open as if he were holding a cantaloupe. At first, this bothered several of their customers—and most all of them were mothers of some age or another—but they soon learned how very comfortable and safe Ruth Case felt in her father’s care.

In the early mornings when he cooked, Dewayne slipped Ruth into a blue backpack carrier. She would bob about though sleep soundly as he worked in the kitchen, manually mashing potatoes and mincing onions and mixing the corn bread batter that would blanket the store’s most popular casserole, which he had named Dewayne’s Delight. It was a beef and lamb stew with roasted turnips,
garlic, carrots, thyme and sage, topped with the corn bread batter that would brown and crisp up real nice after twenty minutes at four twenty-five.

Dewayne did not feel centered unless he was in his daughter’s presence, and it was just three weeks after her birth that he resigned from the fire department and went to work with Margaret in their store. Crammed between an expansive Blockbuster video and an L.A. Weight Loss Clinic, The Casserole Shop sold casseroles and only casseroles, albeit a wide variety of them. They ranged from Dewayne’s traditional fare to Margaret’s ethnic and fusion offerings to the Middle Georgia Celebrity Casserole of the Week, which was by invitation only. Harriet Toomey was a frequent contributor.

“You take your time,” he said to his wife. “I can do this one-handed.”

Margaret would not have believed him had he not proven himself, but she watched Dewayne time and again as he pulled casseroles from the display case, dropped them into their trademark red-cardboard carrying cases, folded them shut and conducted a Visa transaction, all while holding his daughter. At Donna’s urging, they did hire Adrian Braswell part-time to help carry casseroles out to customers’ cars in the busy afternoons. Though he was good, reliable help, Margaret occasionally had to chastise him for attempting to convert their Japanese customers to Christianity.

Through the glass of the windows and the door, Dewayne listened to the muffled squeals and chattering of the two young women:

“You cut your hair!”

“You like it?”

“I love it—it’s so cute! I’m gonna get mine cut that short!”

“Don’t you dare cut that gorgeous hair, Donna.”

The girls had not seen each other for five months. Though Donna had just been in her new job in Atlanta for half a year, they were already using her to train most of the produce managers
from Chattanooga, south. She’d also become their chief perishables troubleshooter. If, say, cruciferous vegetables weren’t moving in the central Birmingham locations, they dispatched Donna. She would fax a plan then swoop into town on a direct Delta flight from Atlanta that morning and deliver an hour-long seminar on cross-store merchandising. Three times she’d tried to schedule the surgery for her face and had to cancel because of work.

The bells on the door knocked against the glass, tinkling, as Donna and Margaret came inside.

“Hey, hey!” he welcomed from over the counter.

“What is that attached to your body, Dewayne Case? Bring that little baby over here so she can see her aunt Donna. Oh, my gosh, Margaret—she looks so much like you! Oh, look at those little lips. Those are your lips, Dewayne.”

They sat and talked, each of them taking a turn with Ruth, passing her back and forth. The daily rush did not begin for another forty minutes—three o’clock was proving to be the hour in which most north Selby women decided they did not want to cook dinner that night—so Margaret cut them all a small piece of a Greek casserole. Flavored with lamb and feta cheese, fresh mint and roasted fennel bulb, it reminded Donna of the casserole Suzanne Parley so desperately needed to have re-created that one day more than a year ago.

“I almost forgot,” Donna said. “I brought you somethin’.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of
Southern Interiors
. “Have y’all seen this?” Both Margaret and Dewayne shook their head. Parents of a new baby and new business, they had read nothing esoteric or recreational in weeks.

“It’s Miss Suzanne—look. On page ninety-two.”

A frequent customer of The Casserole Shop after the divorce, Suzanne Parley had suddenly, inexplicably disappeared a few months back. Margaret heard rumors that she’d moved out of town. St. Simon’s Island, someone said. Brunswick, said another.

“There she is,” Dewayne said.

“It’s John David!” Margaret added.

Posing in a traditional, mahogany-heavy den, the two of them were dressed all in royal blue, John David in a suit and Suzanne in a simple, scoop-necked sheath dress.

The ad copy said:
Finally, one decorating firm that can do it all—cutting-edge, coastal contemporary, and the traditional look of Dixie … BluSouth … for drop-dead gorgeous interiors that will be the envy of the Georgia coast and beyond
.

Margaret looked at the picture of Suzanne, deconstructing it in her mind to figure out what exactly it was that made it seem so odd and unreal. She noted the all-blue wardrobe, the new haircut, the lack of the large diamond on her finger. Suzanne had not gained weight; she hadn’t lost any either. Plastic surgery? Different eyebrows?

And then, finally, Margaret realized the once-foreign addition to this perplexing image.

“You know,” she said, “contentment becomes her.”

Southern Living

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