First Frost (23 page)

She gave him a skeptical glance, one of her sagging eyebrows lifting. “Better than the mango splitter I gave you?”

“Better.”

“Better than the colored pencils?”

“Better.”

“Better than that tarp I gave you before the big snowstorm? The one you used to cover your car so all you had to do was take off the tarp and all the snow was gone and you didn't have to scrape your windows?” She laughed to herself. “Ha! That was a real handy gift, if I do say so myself.”

“Nope. Even better than that. You're my best friend, Evanelle Franklin.”

Ten years ago, after his breakup with James, Evanelle had picked him up and brushed him off and had ultimately convinced him that, if he could choose to be like anyone, it would be Evanelle. He would choose to be the person who knew what you needed and gave it to you and didn't expect to be thanked. He would choose to be accepting and funny and he would take in old gay men when they had their hearts broken and would mend them with peals of laughter and long talks at the kitchen table.

“I don't think I've ever had a best friend before,” Evanelle said thoughtfully.

“Me, either.”

“Well, aren't we a pair?” she said, reaching over to knock his knee with her bony knuckles.

Fred drove home, feeling that awful sense that she was fading away, right before his eyes, and he had no power to stop it. He pulled into the driveway and cut the engine, then sat there as the car ticked as it cooled. He turned to Evanelle and said suddenly, “Don't leave me, okay?”

Evanelle just smiled, making no promises.

Then she got out of the car.

*   *   *

Evanelle walked to her bedroom and sat on the bed. Fred came in and exchanged her portable oxygen for her at-home oxygen.

“Thanks, BFF,” she said to him, a term she'd learned from Mariah. Evanelle pronounced it
Biff.

That made Fred smile. Then he left her alone for her nap.

Evanelle took off her shoes and rested her head on the pillow, all thoughtful now, her thoughts zipping back years and years.

She couldn't get her mind off her Mary, how it had all turned wrong, how all this Waverley unhappiness had started with her.

Mary and Evanelle had been only a few months apart in age. Being a Waverley female, growing up in that house, Mary had always had something magical about her. It was expected. But Evanelle's gift was, frankly, a surprise. She was from a distant line of Waverleys from across town, with no special talents to speak of, until the day young Evanelle gave the postman a stick of Blackjack chewing gum before his wife unexpectedly showed up to say hello to him at work. He'd told his wife he'd stopped smoking and the gum helped mask the tobacco odor. Then Evanelle gave a spool of dark thread to the preacher's wife a week before she tore her dress sneaking out the window to go dancing in Hickory.

Evanelle walked to the Waverley house on Pendland Street every day for years to see Mary. They grew up together, Evanelle always making the effort, and Mary slowly growing used to the fact that Evanelle would always be around. At one point, Mary even referred to the two of them as fig and pepper, which was what she always called any two opposite things that made perfect sense together. The truth was, Evanelle was Mary's only friend, because Mary was arrogant about her looks and her talent, and often treated others callously, but Evanelle was never one to get her feelings hurt easily. She'd learned that early on. You can't be a giver of sometimes unwanted presents and be sensitive about it.

Mary grew up to be as beautiful as Evanelle was plain, the kind of beautiful that made you stare too long, as if in disbelief. Women stayed clear of her, and told their husbands to do the same, though the women always came to her back door when they wanted something to make their parties special, to make them the envy of their friends, something made with marigold and dandelion and sometimes rose petals hidden in pats of butter. Mary was not only a beauty, she had a pretty Waverley gift, too, working with flowers and food. But if the women who wanted her goods were nasty, or spoke down to Mary, there was always a catch to what she gave them—a dish that was supposed to make other women at parties jealous also made them resentful, and the more they ate, the less they wanted to be friends; a dish that was supposed to make a husband more affectionate also made him unable to lie, so all past discretions would be revealed.

Mary's brothers all died in the war and Mary was left alone in the house. Her back-door business was small, eventually only the truly desperate showed up, so she took on boarders to make ends meet. Evanelle still walked to the Waverley house every day. After her husband left for work at the phone company, Evanelle would go help Mary clean and do the wash, generally keeping an eye on things and making sure none of the male boarders got fresh with Mary. She didn't have to worry. Mary's boarders fawned over her and couldn't do enough for her. They even attended those silly fairy picnics she liked to give, when she dressed up in flowing dresses, flowers in her hair, calling herself a garden nymph. Men treated her special, and she believed she was.

Until Karl came along.

The right men make all the difference in the world. But the wrong men do, too.

And Karl was very definitely the wrong kind.

He started out as one of Mary's boarders. They all loved her, those men she took in, but she just played with them. She knew she was exceptional. Prettier than most, and magic in the kitchen. In her glory days, women were all jealous, and men were all in love. But Karl was the one who got to her because he acted like she was nothing special. He never attended her picnics, never told her she was pretty. There's no better way to get a vain woman's attention than to ignore her. So she got rid of her boarders and she stopped cooking. It was only when her hair lost its luster and she served only cold meat and cheese for dinner that he finally said, “I guess I have to marry you. No other man would want you now.” He started a handyman business. Oh, he was handy, all right. Handy with the ladies. The apple tree hated him. It threw apples over the fence at him all the time.

Evanelle would still visit every day, even though she knew Karl didn't like her.

Mary would always say,
Stay with me while I do this,
each time she decided to make him go. So Evanelle would stay while they fought and broke things and slammed doors. It always ended with Karl packing a suitcase and leaving and Mary crying herself to sleep. But, sure enough, when Evanelle would come the next day, Karl would be back, as if nothing had happened.

Eventually, Mary did get rid of him, but it took having a baby to do it. Evanelle knew that Mary was pregnant before Mary did. She woke up one morning with the overwhelming need to give Mary a baby bed, the dark wood one in her attic she'd been saving for when she and her husband got pregnant, which, as it turned out, they never would be.

She had her husband help her take it to Mary, and the look on Mary's face when she opened the door was one Evanelle would never forget. It was like she blamed Evanelle for it happening.

Evanelle sat while Mary told Karl. They argued about it, then he left with his suitcase like always. But he never came back. And Mary was never the same. He'd done a number on her heart. It takes a lot for a Waverley heart to grow back. And broken hearts cast long, dark shadows. Evanelle always thought that Mary's daughter, Lorelei, was sad and restless from the womb, because of Mary's heart.

Evanelle knew the old, reclusive Mary for much longer than the young, vivacious Mary. She seemed to turn old the moment she realized Karl wasn't coming back. Still, it was the young Mary who invariably came to mind when Evanelle thought of her cousin. Young Mary, her long hair sparkling in the sun, standing in the garden, her whole life ahead of her like a bowl of fresh berries waiting to be devoured.

Evanelle went to sleep that afternoon, lulled by the hum of her oxygen machine, thinking of how we always remember those we love when they're the happiest. She hoped that when her family thought of her, they would think of her at this moment, warm in her bed, clear air in her lungs, happy that she'd had this life, this strange, beautiful life full of strange gifts, given and received.

She wished she had told Mary that it could be like this. It would have saved everyone a whole lot of trouble. She wished she had known back then.

Known that happiness isn't a point in time you leave behind. It's what's ahead of you. Every single day.

 

13

“Claire?” Tyler asked, walking into her office late that night. She'd told him she'd be up to bed in a few minutes, but that had been three hours ago. She often worked late on Thursday nights. Fridays were the days she normally shipped her orders, so she liked to double-check everything. Buster had come in to work that afternoon, perplexed that there had been no candy in production. She'd instructed him to box and label the orders, then sent him off to the shipping store a day early in her van that still had
WAVERLEY'S CATERING
on the side of it. She'd never gotten around to changing the lettering. Or maybe she just hadn't wanted to.

When Buster had come back from mailing the orders, she'd told him he could take tomorrow off, that she had some personal matters to tend to.

“Personal?” Buster had asked, intrigued. “Do tell.”

“Not a chance,” Claire had answered.

“Fine. Have it your way.” Buster had handed her the keys to her van and walked away with some packing peanuts stuck to the seat of his pants.

“Claire?” Tyler asked again.

She looked up at him from her chair at her computer. He was standing next to her now, wearing only his pajama bottoms, heat radiating from him in such a comforting way that she reached up and put her hand on his chest just to feel it. “Sorry. I must have lost track of time.”

“I thought you were still working,” he said, nodding to her dark computer screen. “But you're still thinking about that journal you found, aren't you?”

Among other things. There was no denying that she was holding the
Waverley Kitchen Journal
she'd found last weekend, having flipped through its blacked-out pages hundreds of times now. “There's so much she didn't tell me. This one may contain the most important thing—maybe it was about my mother, maybe it was about why Grandmother Mary never made her back-door business bigger—but she blacked it all out.”

“Maybe she blacked it out because she didn't think it was important, ever thought of that?” Tyler kissed her, then walked away. He knew something was wrong, but he didn't press her. “Come to bed soon,” he said.

She got up and walked to the opposite wall in her small office, where her bookshelves were. All her cookbooks were there. One shelf was dedicated entirely to Grandmother Mary's journals. The journals were all small and thin, more like hand-sized notebooks. And all the covers were black except for a few red ones Claire assumed Mary had bought when the store happened to be out of black. They were all numbered on the inside flap, so Claire knew the order they were supposed to be in, a chronicle of her grandmother's life in recipes and gardening tips, and occasionally observances about the weather or on what Mary happened to be wearing that day. She never wrote about people, but Claire could glean certain big events in Mary's life by what she wrote about cooking. For instance, in journal number sixty-four, she began to write about jelly and chocolate cake and poultices to ease the itch of chicken pox, so Claire knew that was around the time her two granddaughters had moved in.

Claire looked in the flap of the Karl journal. Number seventeen. She counted her way from the left on the shelf and slid it in with the others. She ran her hand along the thin spines. There were one hundred and ten. Numbers three, nine, twenty-seven and sixty-one were still missing—along with any others over one hundred and ten—presumably still hidden around the house somewhere.

Her hand went back to the Karl journal, wanting to pull it out again and try to figure it out, but instead she pulled out the journal next to it, the next one in chronological order. Journal number eighteen, if she remembered correctly, contained simple recipes, nothing from the flower garden, no tulips or violets or angelica, just things anyone would have around the house. Claire had always thought of it as Mary's back-to-the-basics journal.

She opened the journal and there, on the very first page, was the recipe for fig and pepper bread.

Claire smiled, because it made her think of her sister. And Sydney's words earlier that day suddenly made sense.
It's you, not the garden.

Food is just something you grow and recipes are just words written in notebooks.

They are nothing until the right person comes along.

And that's when the real magic happens.

*   *   *

Claire had been baking since before daylight that next morning. Dough was rising in bowls everywhere, and the more she baked, the more the loaves seemed to multiply on their own. Every time she opened the oven, she took out more than she'd put in. The air in the kitchen was flecked with flour and scented with yeast.

Claire was kneading roughly chopped figs into a mound of dough when she heard a tap at the back door telling her Russell had finally arrived.

“Come in,” she said, shaping the dough into an oval and setting it on a baking sheet. Then she cut three straight lines into the top of the dough.

Russell opened the door slowly. He was wearing the same gray suit as yesterday. It was a little threadbare, she now realized. He looked around cautiously, to see if anyone else was there. He must be wondering,
Had Claire told anyone? Had she changed her mind?
This, she thought, was probably the hardest part of the game for him, the most dangerous. Now that she could view the situation more objectively, she was beginning to understand why her mother had associated with him, however briefly. Lorelei had always loved the wild ones, the ones who balanced themselves on moral cusps. It had made her feel alive.