Ladies' Night (17 page)

Wyatt held up his hand. The bruises were still a vivid greenish-black. “Pain? Me? Nah.”

*   *   *

“Callie and Luke were gaming me, for months. That day at the ball park was the last straw. I coach Bo’s T-ball team. Callie had the game schedule. I gave it to her myself. But all spring, she’d drop him off late for the games half the time, without his glove or his shoes, or even his uniform shirt. It got so I bought extras of everything and kept ’em with me. But I’d sent him home with the spares the week before. That day? They didn’t bring him until the second inning—and again, with no equipment. Poor Bo was so upset, he was in tears. Luke acted like it was nothing, just blew me off. Told me if I didn’t like it, too damn bad.”

Wyatt flexed his right hand and winced. “You saw how I reacted. Not my finest moment.”

He’d finished his doughnuts and his coffee. Grace broke off half her doughnut and placed it on his empty plate.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I think I just wanted a taste. To remind me of old times here. You know how that is?”

He gobbled the doughnut. “I’ll tell you a secret. I feel the same way about Krystal’s sliders.”

“Ick,” Grace said. “Not the same thing at all.”

“Krystal was where my granddad would take me on Saturdays, for lunch, when I was a kid,” Wyatt said. “Just the two of us. He’d order me two sliders, and he’d eat four. Right out of the paper sack, in the front seat of his old tan Buick Regal. Every once in a while, not that often, but sometimes, if I have Bo on a Saturday, we ride through the Krystal, get ourselves a bag of sliders, take ’em out to Holmes Beach, sit on the sand, and scarf ’em down.”

“Sweet sentiment, but still, ick,” Grace said. “Does your ex know you do that?”

“If she did, she’d probably sic the Department of Child Welfare on me.”

“Not to mention Judge Stackpole,” she added.

“You saw how he treated me,” Wyatt said, leaning back on his stool, “How did you do?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Grace said. “Not great. Mitzi—she’s my lawyer—is trying her best, but we still can’t get his lawyer to respond to us, and I’m still essentially locked out of my business. He’s supposed to be ‘giving’ me two thousand dollars a month, but I haven’t seen a dime yet. And, oh yes, that money he’s ‘giving’ me? It’s mine anyway. All this while he transforms his new girlfriend into Grace 2.0.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Does that make me sound bitter?”

“Kind of,” Wyatt said. “But then, I’m on a first-name basis with bitter these days. Right now, it looks like Bo’s going to be moving to Birmingham by the end of summer, and so far, there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. Yeah, technically I can see him weekends, but how do I pull that off when he’s living nine hours away? I can’t afford to buy a plane ticket every weekend, and anyway I’ve got a business to run. Or what’s left of a business.”

“That’s really rotten,” Grace said. “I can’t believe any mother would deliberately deny a child the chance to see his father. It’s just cruel.”

“Callie’s into cruel these days,” Wyatt said. “She’ll do anything she can to punish me. And the weird thing is, I can’t figure out what I did to make her hate me like this. She wanted out of the marriage, I let her out. She wanted the house, I gave it to her.” He shook his head and yawned.

“Yeah,” Grace said, standing up and stretching. “It’s pretty late for me, too.”

“Thanks for listening to me vent,” Wyatt said. He hesitated. “I got the feeling, back there at Paula’s office, all of y’all were ready to tar and feather me. Just for being a guy.”

Grace shrugged. “Everybody in that room is there because a man dumped on her.”

“Hey, a guy dumped on me, too,” Wyatt said. “Remember?”

“Right.”

They paid at the cash register and walked out to their cars. Wyatt looked back at the old-timey neon
GUS’S DONUTS
sign. “I gotta remember this place. Bo would love it.”

“If you feed that child Krystal sliders and Gus’s for the same meal, I’ll report you to Stackpole myself,” Grace threatened.

“Hey,” Wyatt said. “Thanks for listening to me tonight.”

“You’re welcome,” Grace said, meaning it. “See you next week.”

“If Paula’s conscious. Do you think she’s really on drugs?”

“She’s definitely on something,” Grace said. “My mom would say she’s one ant short of a picnic.”

Wyatt laughed. “One brick shy of a load. I can’t believe I have to come up with three hundred dollars a session for this crap, on top of all the child support I’m paying Callie.”

“Do you think it would do any good to report her?” Grace asked, fumbling for her car keys.

“Report to who?” Wyatt asked. “Stackpole? I’ll mention what’s going on to Betsy, but I already know what she’ll say. ‘Shut up and turn up.’”

17

Grace sat cross-legged on her bed, her laptop balanced on her lap, tapping away at the keyboard.

Lately, I’ve gotten interested in the farm-to-table movement. Here on Florida’s Gulf Coast, where I live, there’s the tendency to think farms are all in the Midwest, or up north. But that’s not true. We have amazing small farms all around us. Citrus growers, of course, and small avocado groves, but once I started looking around, I was surprised to find honey producers, organic chicken and egg farmers, and even small family “row-crop” farms producing gorgeous lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, corn, and, of course, strawberries. In addition, we’re lucky here to have local seafood brought to port by fishermen who keep us supplied with fish, crabs, and shrimp caught right in the gulf and bay, and beef from the cattle farms that have been in the interior parts of this area since I was a little girl.

My mother’s generous friend Felipe brought us a bushel of white corn on Sunday. Picked that morning, it had the sweetest taste you can imagine. We feasted on it for dinner, but then I started thinking of new ways to combine it with other locally produced goodness, and I came up with this corn-crab chowder recipe. It utilizes the corn, plus sweet blue crabs, which are being harvested here right now, not to mention red bell peppers and jalapeño peppers, readily available anywhere. I hope you’ll try this at home, and let me know what you think.

She glanced over at the notes she’d scrawled in the kitchen earlier in the day. The corn-crab chowder really had been a triumph. She’d diced sweet yellow onions, jalapeños and red peppers, and some garlic, then sautéed them in bacon drippings in the cast-iron Dutch oven. Rochelle had grumbled about what a pain in the ass it was to cut all the corn off the cobs, but once she’d dumped them in the bacon drippings, along with diced tiny new potatoes and added chicken broth, the aroma wafting through the Sandbox kitchen had been irresistible. After the corn had simmered for twenty minutes or so, Grace had dumped in the crab. It was just back-fin crab, because Rochelle insisted you really didn’t need lump claw meat for a soup, and, although crab was in season, her supplier still charged her $6.99 a pound.

Half-and-half was carefully added to the corn and crab mixture, along with a generous sprinkling of Old Bay seasoning—at Rochelle’s insistence. As that simmered another five minutes, Grace diced up the crisp bacon she’d set aside from the pan drippings.

She’d gone outside to snip chives from the pots of herbs she’d started growing by the Sandbox front entrance, and when she reentered the kitchen, she caught her mother, standing over the stove, the Old Bay tin poised over the pot of chowder.

“Hey!” Grace protested, snatching the can from Rochelle’s hand.

“I was just adjusting the seasoning.” Rochelle dropped a wooden spoon into the big stainless steel sink.

“It doesn’t
need
any more adjustment,” Grace said, through gritted teeth. “Do you know how much salt is in that stuff? Not to mention the sodium in the bacon?”

“I don’t need to know. I just know you can’t make soup—especially soup with corn and crab, without a good douse of Old Bay,” Rochelle retorted. “I’ve been making soup for way longer than you’ve been alive, young lady, so don’t go lecturing me on salt. Or on cooking.”

Grace bit her lip. She wanted to remind her mother that she was already on medication for high blood pressure and that her doctor had been urging her to cut back on sodium. Instead, she began snipping the chives into a milk-glass custard cup. “If you want more Old Bay in your soup, you can keep the shaker by your bowl. But please don’t add it to the pot. Please?”

“Hmmph.” Rochelle began tossing dirty dishes into the sink, a sure sign that she was miffed.

Ignoring her mother’s tantrum, Grace found two old ice cream sundae glasses and placed each on a white plate. She started for the bar, to grab the sherry bottle, then, quietly, picked up the Old Bay can and took it with her. Just in case.

She turned the burner down to low and added a splash of sherry to the soup. Tasted, then added another splash.

A few minutes later, she made diagonal slices in the loaf of Cuban bread that had been delivered to the restaurant that morning, dribbled olive oil over the slices, and ran them under the broiler just long enough to toast them a light brown.

She placed a slice of bread on each plate, then dipped a ladle into the Dutch oven, carefully spooning the chowder into each sundae glass. A sprinkling of chives and diced bacon topped each glass.

Grace grabbed her camera and began snapping photos.

“Who serves crab chowder in a sundae glass?” Rochelle asked.

“I just like the way it looks,” Grace said, snapping away. “Eccentric.”

“Weird,” Rochelle muttered, watching from the sink. “Are we eating or shooting?”

“Eating,” Grace said, setting the camera down. “But if the finished product tastes as good as it looks, I think this will make a terrific blog post.”

She grabbed two blue and white striped dish towels from the stack on the stainless steel prep counter and draped them over her arm before picking up the soup dishes and pushing her way through the swinging door into the bar.

Grace unfolded the dish towels and spread them out as a placemat on the bar. She grabbed a couple of wineglasses, poured in some white wine, and stood back to look. Finally, she added a paper-thin slice of lemon to the side of each plate for a shot of color. Pleased with the effect, she went back for her camera and took a couple more exposures. “Let’s eat,” she called, over her shoulder.

Rochelle eyed the place settings at the bar. “Pretty fancy, just for Saturday lunch for the two of us.”

“You eat with your eyes, as well as your tastebuds, you know,” Grace said, refusing to let her mother bait her.

“Hmmph,” Rochelle said. But she dipped her spoon into the soup, tasted, and closed her eyes.

“Well?”

Rochelle took another bite of the soup. “Not bad. Not bad at all.” With a fingertip, she fished a small limp green fragment from her soup and held it up for Grace to see.

“What’s this?”

“Sorry,” Grace said. “It’s just a sprig of tarragon. I was supposed to remove it before I served the soup, but I got distracted. So … you really like it?”

“I do,” Rochelle said. She dipped a piece of toasted bread into the soup and chewed.

Grace ate slowly, pausing to make notes on her ever-present yellow legal pad. Next time, she thought, she might do cheese toasts to go along with the soup, maybe adding slivers of goat cheese to the bread before broiling. She pondered the soup’s consistency, finally deciding she’d need to add an immersion mixer to the kitchen equipment at the Sandbox, so that in the future she could puree part of the soup. Her own immersion mixer was back in the kitchen at the house on Sand Dollar Lane. Ben’s house.

When Rochelle finished her soup, she got up from her seat, found a piece of chalk, and began writing on the blackboard on the wall by the cash register.

Today’s SPECIAL—CORN CRAB CHOWDER à la GRACE. $10.

“You really think the customers will like it?” Grace asked, secretly pleased. She’d been living with Rochelle for nearly two months, and it seemed like the first time she’d done something in the kitchen or the bar that Rochelle approved of. “And more importantly, that they’ll pay ten dollars for a bowl of soup?”

“They’ll lap it up,” Rochelle predicted. “We just won’t tell ’em how healthy it is. And if anybody gripes about the price, I’ll show ’em my bill from the seafood wholesale house.”

They’d had a busy evening. One of the local softball leagues was having a tournament, and word had apparently gone out that the Sandbox was the place to meet after the games.

The first batch of soup was gone by 7:00
P.M.
, and Grace made another gallon, using up all the crab in the big walk-in cooler. At 9:30, she had to tell Rochelle to “eighty-six” that night’s special.

A loud groan rose up in the bar as Rochelle crossed the special off on the blackboard.

They were both exhausted by the time Rochelle’s late-night shift, consisting of Almina, a young Latin woman, and her husband, Carlos, showed up to take over at 10:00.

While Rochelle showered in the apartment’s only bathroom, Grace settled down to write her blog post, referring to her notes and editing and refining the photos she’d shot earlier before uploading to her blog, accompanied by a list of local farms, complete with their links.

It was after midnight when she tapped the
PUBLISH
button. She viewed the blog in its final form and smiled. “Take that J’Aimee,” she muttered, right before padding off to take her own shower.

*   *   *

Sunday morning, Grace was still sleeping when she heard the cell phone on her nightstand ding softly, signaling an incoming message.

She sat up and yawned, looking out the window. It was barely daylight. But the message on her phone woke her in a hurry.

HAVE U SEEN YR OLD BLOG TODAY?

The text message on her phone was from ShadeeLadee, one of her earliest Gracenotes followers and another lifestyle blogger based in Miami. Over the years they’d met at various blogger meet-ups and gotten friendly, and, although ShadeeLadee had a real name, which was Claire King, Grace always just called her Shadee.

Grace clicked over to what she thought of as Faux Gracenotes, and swore. Loudly.