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The Secret to Hummingbird Cake
By Celeste Fletcher McHale Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2016 Celeste McHale
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-3956-1
CHAPTER 1
I glanced at the grandfather clock. Almost midnight. I padded across the dark hardwood floor of my living room to peer out the window.
Again.
Where was he? Just as I reached for the curtain, the phone rang and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Somewhere in the background, I heard my long-gone grandmother asking, "Guilty conscience?"
I'd certainly been nursing one of those lately.
I looked at the caller ID. A man, but not the one I was looking for. The familiar pang of remorse punched me in the belly. I'd brought this on myself, and what was I supposed to do about Cell Phone Romeo now?
"What are you doing?" came a voice behind me.
I jumped. "Good Lord, Laine, don't you ever knock?"
She plopped down on my sofa. "Come on, Carrigan. I'm your best friend. I've been living across the street from you forever. Why start knocking now? And why did you look like a deer in headlights when I walked in?"
I shrugged. No sense in bringing up issues that would send her into one of her classic tizzies. "I don't know, just jumpy, I guess. I tend to get that way when somebody breaks into my house in the middle of the night. What are you doing still up?"
"I had to make a cake for the bake sale tomorrow," she said. "I've been so busy today. I just got the layers in the oven. Your lights were on, so I decided to kill that fifty minutes over here."
My mouth watered. I could taste the creamy white icing and the sweet pineapple. "One of those cakes?"
"Yes, one of those cakes."
"I could help you."
"Nice try." She winked.
"Why won't you tell me what's in that cake?" I had to ask the question, even though I knew it would do no good. I'd been trying to get Laine's recipe for years. We all had.
"Because it's not your business, and if I told you, you wouldn't believe me." She sat back and crossed her arms. "Now, give. Why were you so antsy when I came in?"
I avoided her gaze. "No reason."
She picked up my new Southern Living magazine and flipped through the pages. "Okay, that's fine," she said. "I'll just read about the geraniums in —" She stopped abruptly as the light bulb went off. I could almost see the glow above her head. It might have been comical had I not known what was going to happen next.
She threw the magazine on the table, and the previously mentioned tizzy commenced. "It was him, wasn't it? I heard your phone ringing when I was on the porch. It was him!"
The way she said "him" would make an innocent bystander believe the devil himself was calling me. And that assessment might not be too far from the truth.
I winced. "Yes, it was him," I said. "But I didn't answer the phone. I haven't answered his calls all week. It isn't my fault."
"Oh, it never is your fault, is it?" she asked. "This is a bad situation, Carrigan, bad, bad, bad." She began pacing. "I can't believe you got yourself into this."
"Okay, I know it's an ... uncomfortable situation, but it's been over for weeks. He's just having some trouble letting go. I can handle it." I hoped telling her this would calm her a little. Or maybe a lot.
She stopped pacing and glared at me. "Are you kidding me?"
Clearly I had said the wrong thing. She had no intention of being calm. I braced myself for the scolding and/or lecture.
Laine put her hands on her hips. "Let's just examine that statement, shall we?"
I recognized the content immediately. At least the suspense was over and I knew I'd be dining on the lecture portion of my best bud's verbal buffet tonight.
"You always do this, Carrigan," she said. "You dive off into things and never consider the consequences. You flirt with disaster. You walk right up to the edge of the cliff and teeter there until somebody yanks you back to firm ground. Don't you know that one day you'll go over? This has got to stop! It's time to grow up. No, it's past time to grow up."
I sighed. It wasn't that she was wrong, I just didn't want to hear it. I searched for the pacifier. "I know. You are right. I'll do better, I promise."
"No," she said, "don't you dare do that!"
"Do what?" I tried to sound innocent, but I knew I was busted.
"You know that thing you do when you say what you think I want to hear so I will shut up. I've known you a long time, Carrigan. I know your tricks."
Ouch. There were some distinct disadvantages to having your conscience living directly across the street.
I took a breath and tried to choose my words carefully. "Look," I said. "I know I did a really stupid thing ... and believe me, I'm not proud of it. But I had my reasons."
"Oh, Carrigan, stop! Jack is not having an affair. And even if he were, it doesn't give you a free ticket to do the same thing. Nobody can make you do anything. Your choices are your own."
She might as well have thrown a lit match into a gas can. "Do you ever get altitude sickness from the moral high ground, Laine? What's the view like from up there? 'Cause we can't all be saints, you know."
I was furious with Laine. She had seen me fret, worry, and agonize over my husband for the past year. At some point all that emotion finally turned into defiance. That shouldn't be difficult for anyone to understand. Especially a best friend. She should want me to be happy, shouldn't she? Isn't that the job description for a best friend — hide the bodies and encourage the bliss?
Our other best friend and my partner in crime, Ella Rae Weeks, didn't care what I did, what I said, or who I said it to. She wanted me to be happy. Period. The end.
Laine, on the other hand, wanted us to get baptized once a week, run a soup kitchen, volunteer at the local day care, and neuter dogs on the kitchen table in our spare time.
Laine was talking again, this time in her subdued voice. "All I meant was, this is not a competition. You forget that sometimes."
Remorse washed over me. I had hurt her, and that was the last thing on earth I'd ever intentionally do. "Sorry."
"It's okay, Carri," she said. "I ... just want what's best for you."
"I know," I said.
And I did.
CHAPTER 2
Ella Rae and I met Laine on the playground when we were five years old. She moved to our little town of Bon Dieu Falls, Louisiana, when her daddy got transferred from his job as a state policeman to the troop that served our area. Even at five, a small-town girl in the South has learned to be suspicious of newcomers. You're either born here, married to someone from here, or your grandparents live here. You don't just show up out of the blue.
But the Landrys did. They could've gone to Natchitoches or Alexandria, both fairly large towns within forty-five miles of Bon Dieu Falls. Instead, they moved here. And a dark cloud of suspicion moved with them.
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.
CHAPTER 3
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."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Secret to Hummingbird Cake by Celeste Fletcher McHale. Copyright © 2016 Celeste McHale. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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