Dear Carolina (20 page)

I could almost hear her replying, huffily, “If they insist on using language like men, they can crop tobacco like men.”

I am convinced that there is nothing harder in life. Maybe giving birth, but it's a close call.

I heard the front door swing shut, and I didn't turn to look around. I could smell Daddy's Old Spice and pipe tobacco before he even got to me. He sat down beside me and held my hand.

“I think it's wonderful that you're having a baby, baby girl.” I didn't say anything, and we both kept rocking in the moonlight. “I can scarcely believe that my little girl is so grown up that she is going to be a momma three times over.”

I turned my head and smiled weakly. “Do not tell Mother I used this word—I'm not cropping tobacco again—but having these three tiny babies scares the shit out of me.”

Daddy laughed jovially and said, like I knew he would, “Lord won't give us anything we can't handle.”

“I know, Daddy, but sometimes I wonder how I'm going to do it all. I want to be a great mom, and do my job well, and make time for my husband. Sometimes I'm terrified that I'm screwing it up and that I'll look back and wish I had done something differently.”

Daddy was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “You know, Khaki, two men have come to ask for my little girl's hand in marriage now.” He chuckled. “Graham has come twice, actually.”

I didn't see how making me remember my dead husband and how I had turned down my current husband's first offer of marriage, when I was twenty, were going to make me feel better. But I let him continue anyway.

“After Alex died, when I looked back, all I did was wish that, on that day when he had come to see me, that I had said no. I wished that I hadn't let him marry you and then you wouldn't have gone through all that pain and heartache.”

“Daddy,” I interrupted, but he said, quietly, “Let me finish.”

“The thing that I've learned,” he said, “is that when life gives you an opportunity, the only thing to do is to be open. You have to keep saying yes. That's how you realize who you're supposed to be and what this life is supposed to have in store for you.”

I nodded. “Hey, Daddy.”

“Yeah, baby girl.”

“I love you, and you mean the world to me.” I bit my lip. “But I would have married Alex regardless.”

He smiled and nodded. “I thought about it for months after his funeral, and that was the conclusion I came to too.”

I could feel tears in my eyes, remembering Alex telling me the story of asking for my hand in marriage, of how nervous he was, how unsure. He told me that when he asked Daddy if he could marry me, Daddy said, “Son, there are two types of men in the world: the ones who want to bridle the horse, and the ones who are content to let it run free. I know which kind I am. If you're that same kind, then I think it'd be all right.”

And he had been. I had grown and blossomed into the woman I am today partly because Alex was content to let me be who I
was—loud mouth and all. I felt that familiar sadness, like the red dripping right off my heart and into my stomach.

I smiled at Daddy and said, “Well, thanks for being excited for me.”

“Oh, I never said I was excited,” Daddy said seriously, and I swatted his arm.

“Guess it's a good thing we aren't living full time in New York anymore, huh?” I thought of Kristin back in the city, Alex's amazing, talented, fabulous nanny, and wondered if I would ever be able to find anyone as incredible right here in North Carolina. People say finding a nanny is like finding a husband, but I think it's harder. It's nearly as large a commitment with all of the compromise and none of the makeup sex.

THROWING-AWAY RIPE

Every jam-makin' woman in the county's got her own thinking 'bout how ripe fruit's gotta be to make award-winning preserves. But, seeing as how I've won more awards for my jam than all them put together, I think I'm in a pretty respectable place to say that berries ain't ready for the pot until they are good and ripe—almost throwing-away ripe.

So maybe that's why I don't think people is made to live alone until they're good and ripe too. At nineteen, I just weren't ready—and it was lonely as all get-out in that trailer.

Ain't no arguing that I shoulda listened to that voice in my head when Ricky wanted me to move in this place. That voice, it was saying,
It's too soon to move in together, Jodi
, and
You deserve a man that treats you better, Jodi
. But I woulda swapped skin with a convict on the run to get away from my momma.

When I told Ricky that Graham was gonna let us park the trailer on his land he swung me around in the air and said, “It'll be just like having our own farm.” Then he had smiled all honest
like. “I promise you that one day I'm gonna give you that white house with the red tin roof that you want so much, and land of our own for our babies to run and our crops to grow.”

I had ignored right hard the fact that Ricky was about as lazy and no-good as they come. He wouldn't never hold down a job long enough to get a house. But pretty words, them things is as distracting as shiny diamonds.

When Ricky come stumblin' in drunk and said, “Wish I could have taken home one of them hot chicks at the bar instead of getting in bed with an ugly bitch like you,” I shoulda known better than to move in with him. But I just got to thinking on how he was drunk, and, when he'd been sober, he'd been all nice to me.

Graham and Ricky, they built a foundation underneath that trailer, and Khaki and me planted a red tulip border all the way around the outside while Alex chased butterflies. All fancied up like it was, that single-wide looked like one fine place to live. Looks don't mean nothing, though. It don't matter how many pieces of designer furniture and flowers Khaki put all over that place. If love don't live inside, it ain't never gonna feel like home.

If you ask me, a pantry all fulla homegrown food, that's kinda like love. “See,” I was showing Buddy one of them first days at the market, “you can buy this beef stew, pull it out and eat it any old time.”

“Do you think that's how Mrs. Fearnow got started?” Buddy was teasing me. And I liked it.

“I don't know. But I bet she did. People'd line up just to shake her hand and give her a big old hug, and she'd tell 'em how she made her stew right in her own kitchen for their family to enjoy.”

Buddy laughed.

A woman in her midseventies who'd been poking all around our bins for a while come up to Buddy with a vegetable in her hand and said, “What's this?”

“This here's fennel.” He pulled back one of the leaves just a hair and said, “Smell that.” She smelled, and so did he. “See how it smells right like licorice?” Her nose got to scrunchin' like her humped back. She leaned over on her cane and said, “I don't think I'd like that.”

“Oh, no,” I chimed in. “All you gotta do is boil it in a little chicken broth, and, once the chicken broth boils out, add a little butter and sauté for a minute or so.” I closed my eyes, thinking about the delicate flavor, the way it melts in your mouth like cotton candy. “It's one a' the most delicious things I ever eaten.”

Buddy nodded all enthusiastic. “You'll have a new favorite vegetable. You'll be calling me on the phone in the dead of winter saying, ‘Buddy, you gotta grow me some of that fennel in the hothouse. I cain't live without it.'”

The woman was laughing right along with us now, putting her hand up to her white, set hair and said, “All right, then. You've talked me into it. I'll take the fennel, the rest of the things in this bag, and a jar of preserves.” She turned to me and said, “Young lady, do you make this preserves?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well, you do a fine job,” she said, pulling out her wallet. “My husband had a stroke, and he rarely communicates anymore. But when I spread that preserves on his toast in the morning he takes a bite, smiles, and says, ‘This tastes just like my momma's.'” Tears got all in her eyes, which was good, 'cause I was a mess. I couldn't a' been any happier if she had told me that her husband loved that jam so much that he was gonna leave me their house and all their money when they died.

I hugged her like we was kin, handed her an extra jar, and said, “Now he can enjoy it twice as much.”

She tried to pay, but I weren't lettin' her. I ain't got much, but when I could help somebody out, you better believe I was.

She headed off and Buddy winked. “Wow. A name like Smucker's cain't compare to your sweet smile.”

I shrugged. “We just pushed fennel on that poor woman like a pot dealer on some middle school kids.”

We both got to laughing right hard. I arranged my jars again to make up for the missing two. And, do you know I sold every single jar I took to the market that day? Almost everybody'd bought something before. And the people who wasn't even planning on buying any cans got talked into it by the ones who already had.

“Best pickled asparagus I've ever had,” one woman told a man in line behind her.

“I don't like asparagus,” he said. His white hair and tanned face, lined right good from the sun, reminded me of my daddy.

“Don't matter,” the woman replied, “you'll like this.”

And dern if he didn't take a pickled asparagus and a jar of beef stew. “Better than a TV dinner,” he said.

I weren't sure if that was a compliment, but I was feeling like the Paula Deen of Kinston. I loved makin' things damn near better than anything. And being busy, it was right like tobacco on the bee sting of losing my baby. I think bein' busy and thinking 'bout you was all that kept me from drinking like I wanted.

I helped Buddy load the truck up that night, and he said, “Looks to me like someone's got a lot of cooking to do between now and Thursday.”

Thursday was our busiest day—and in Raleigh, a much, much bigger city. If I had sold out on a Tuesday that meant I would need to bring three times as much to the Thursday market. It felt good working hard, like them long days at the garage where I got in bed with that happy tired that meant I had done my best and earned my keep. The extra cash in my pocket didn't hurt much neither. I fell asleep right quick that night, like I hadn't
since I give you up. I got to dreaming of buying a little white clapboard house with a red roof and makin' my jars right there in my own kitchen. Buddy, he was there too, sittin' right on the stool by the stove. I waked up quick, gasping and choking like I was damn near drowning.

I got to figurin' that night that maybe, somewhere underneath our jokes and teasing, there might be more than just jam brewing between Buddy and me.

HELPING

More than for my keen eye and unexpected pairings, I'm known for having the most perfect vision in the middle of the night and getting up to call my clients. It might be a little unorthodox, but, honestly, sometimes you get such a good idea at three
A.M.
that you can't contain yourself. Well, I do, anyway. Graham says regular people get up, write down the idea, and come back to it first thing in the morning.

So, that night when I woke up with a burning idea for a book, he said that most people wouldn't have the guts to call their editor in the middle of the night. But I'm not most people. I'd dare say that most people would be a lot more successful if they'd worry a little more about making things happen and a little less about what's appropriate. Plus, once your enthusiasm cools, the idea is half dead anyway.

After spending the entire afternoon with Jodi in my kitchen canning and boiling and learning recipes, I couldn't stop thinking about how that girl with so much talent and so much drive
was going to do something that would turn her life around. She thought that just selling out her twenty jars at the market was her big break. But I had bigger ideas. So, at three
A.M.
, when I sat up in bed with the answer, it only seemed right to call Patrick Zimmerman—who had edited both of my books—immediately.

He answered, which isn't my fault, really. If you don't want to talk to people at three
A.M.
, then you let it go to voice mail and call them when you're ready. That's what I say. Graham says that people always answer at three
A.M.
because they assume that no lunatic is going to call them then unless it is a dire emergency. He means to say that I am a lunatic. But the joke's on him. It
was
an emergency.

“Patrick, I have the best idea for a new book that you are going to die to get your hands on!”

“Who is this?” Patrick asked, sleepier than a bear in hibernation.

“It's Frances Mason,” I replied, breezily.

“Frances Mason,” he repeated. “Of course it is.”

I ignored that because I think he was also insinuating, as Graham had, that I was the only lunatic who would call him in the middle of the night.

“You know I'm always up for helping you display whatever your next amazing project is, so could this possibly wait until the morning, Frances? I have a big meeting—”

I cut him off because, no, it couldn't wait until the morning. “Well it's not exactly one of my projects, and someone else might have the idea by the morning.”

I proceeded to tell him that Graham had this fabulous cousin who made the best jam in the country and could can and pickle like people didn't even know how to anymore and that she should do a cookbook. Plus, with everyone so preoccupied with gut flora lately, it would be an easy sell because she actually ferments her sauerkraut, pickles, and salsa—even sour cream.

“Why don't you have her write up a proposal and send it to me?”

I laughed. “Don't be silly, Patrick. Obviously I'm calling you before her.”

“Obviously,” he sighed.

“Well,” I explained, “I wouldn't want to approach her about it and then you say no. That's not good for a young girl's self-esteem.”

“She's a young girl?”

“Nineteen.”

“Hmmmm . . .” I could hear in his voice that Patrick was starting to wake up. “That's kind of an interesting angle. A young girl who's a culinary whiz. Where was she educated?”

I rolled my eyes. These city folk had no concept. “In Graham's grandmomma's kitchen.”

“Of course she was,” Patrick said under his breath. But he relented, probably because he knew he wasn't going back to sleep until he agreed with me. “I think that sounds like a pretty salable idea, Fran. Not salable enough to justify calling me at three
A.M.
, but if you're willing to use your name to help with the marketing I think we could make something happen.”

“Yay!” I squealed. “I can't wait to tell her. She'll be thrilled!”

Only, she wasn't thrilled. She looked like she had gotten a glimpse into the slaughterhouse and was newly vegan.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she said, shaking her head. “I cain't do that. The recipes are all in my head anyhow.”

I put my hands on my hips. It was beyond me why all these perfectly good people in my family wouldn't listen to me. Graham says it's because I'm too controlling and that people can handle their own affairs. But I'm not controlling. I'm
helping
.

“Jodi, sweetie, you'll be fine. I'll help you every step of the way. I'm telling you, this could turn your life around.”

“Don't nobody want to see my pictures in a book.”

She was so silly. Jodi was a perfectly beautiful girl whose features had never applied themselves. “Nonsense. This could be the start of something for you, Jodi. This could be the career that you were born for, that could fulfill you and make you a decent living and make sure that you're never in a position where people like Mr. Phillips at the cleaners can boss you around again.”

I knew I was getting a little carried away. I mean, a first book wasn't going to set you for life. But I tend to get overly excited when I get an idea in my head. Jodi didn't look convinced. I smiled. “Forget about
your
pictures, Jodi. Just think about all of those gorgeous, glossy spreads of your food that will be laid out in those pages.”

“We'll see,” was all Jodi said in response.

Where I come from,
we'll see
almost always translates to
yes
.