Wedding Bell Blues (24 page)

 

Chapter Thirty-nine

I was out of powdered sugar, not an uncommon occurrence in this house. I couldn't count the times Mama Alice had sent me to M.&G.'s for a box or three of XXXX sugar. I sometimes thought it was like magic dust. She wore it. The kitchen wore it. You could swipe your finger across kitchen counters or canisters and taste sweetness.

So it turned out that I got filled in on the rest of the story at M.&G.'s Grocery. Here I was over in the baking aisle with Mrs. Pastor Pittman, the Barbie blond stick of a preacher's wife. She tried to hide a box of cake mix, lemon supreme, behind her back but not before I saw it. She wore a lime-green dress with matching shoes. Every time I'd ever seen her, she was in a dress and her shoes always matched. Did she not own a pantsuit or jeans? Were preachers' wives not allowed to wear such things? I thought they must lead a life under a magnifying glass. Yikes.

“You heard about our Lesley Lynn Leaford?” She patted her perfect blond shell of a pageboy. Not a hair out of place.

“Yes,” I said. “It sounds wonderful.”

“She's staying with us. I keep our guest room always at the ready. You never know.” She laughed a little glass chime of a laugh. “Pastor did the services for her father,” Mrs. Pittman went on.

I tried to think of Mrs. Pittman's first name. Lynda? Lorie? Lucy? Lydia? Barbie, I decided. Of course. Barbie Pittman.

“She always kept her membership here, paid her pledges. Even after they moved.”

Did preachers' wives know everything? Maybe she was the mysterious Pearl Buttons. Mama Alice had kept me posted on some of the local news while I was away, but how could Lesley Lynn Leaford's return have been missed by Pearl Buttons and her binoculars?

“Where had they moved to?”

“North, up north.” She laughed. “Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Can you imagine? For her treatments. Some facility there. We had a grand time.”

“We? At the facility?” I loaded my shopping cart with yellow boxes of powdered sugar.

“No, no, no.” She waved the hand that wasn't hiding the box of cake mix. “The Red Lion Inn. That's where we stayed when Pastor did the services in the cemetery down the street. She paid for us to fly up.”

She called her husband “Pastor”? Didn't he have a real people name? Oh my, I thought. “Oh my” seemed to be my words for the day.

“We went to the Norman Rockwell Museum and all that stuff,” Mrs. Pittman continued. “It was such fun.” Who knew Pastor Pittman was such an art lover? “We rented a car, did Walden Pond, Orchard House … he grew up loving
Little Women
as much as I did.” She sighed. “Nobody reads it anymore.”

I thought, Well, I did, but I liked Nancy Drew better. She had more spunk and wasn't always moaning about Marmee and sick little sisters.

“But Emily's coming back.”

Emily? What Emily? She must have seen my puzzled look.

“Why, Emily Dickinson, of course. Her work has always been read, but now she's really popular. We whizzed on over to Amherst. Broke my heart.”

“What?” I asked. “What broke your heart?” Who knew Mrs. Pittman was such a reader of poetry? So much I didn't know. Some people kept lovely secrets or maybe I had just never taken the time and energy to get to know them.

“Her grave, of course. It's behind a shopping center.” Barbie Pittman looked pained, her perfect lipsticked mouth turned down. “A sort of strip mall. Ugh.” She drew up her shoulders.

“What was all this Stockbridge business about?” I asked.

“Daddy Leaford, of course. It seems he grew up there, even posed once for Norman Rockwell. Remember that prom scene
Saturday Evening Post
cover painting? The boy and girl on a date at a soda fountain? The soda jerk was her father. He always said Littleboro reminded him of Stockbridge.”

Now I had to laugh. Littleboro, North Carolina, as the flip side of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. How many people never in their lives knew there was an underbelly, another side to everything? She gave me a little three-finger wave and moved toward the checkout line. Guess she had to smuggle her box of cake mix home before somebody else saw her little secret. Did “Pastor” even know she used a mix? What else didn't he know?

 

Chapter Forty

Back at the Dixie Dew I iced three layers, four more to go. Ida Plum brought in sheets from the clothesline and started at the ironer. This house was filled with good home smells: baking and ironing.

Then I heard the sound of sawing and hammering from the backyard, peeked out and saw Scott with his helper, Randy, hard at work on the gazebo. Could he have it up, painted and ready for Ossie's wedding? I was betting on it, if he had to keep working on it by shining his truck's headlights into the backyard at night, or rig up some sort of outdoor light with an extension cord plugged into the back porch light. Weddings and funerals go on as scheduled most of the time and the world stops for a bit. Pauses, reflects, takes a deep breath.

The Raleigh
News & Observer,
which we counted on for our “real” news, had a half-page obituary of Debbie Booth with a cute, perky photograph of her looking as if she was alive and a listing of all her awards for food writing, her best selling cookbooks. It did not list cause of death, something I was still waiting to learn. No calls from Ossie about the fingerprinting. Maybe living in Littleboro had slowed down his New Jersey angst or he was so busy basking in his marital status-to-be he'd put his big-city crime busters on the back burner. He had said I'd hear from him, but so far I hadn't. Too much wedding on his mind, maybe? I hoped.

Mama Alice had owned two of the original big old KitchenAid mixers on stands and I had both going. The queen of mixers, these “girls” kept on beating and mixing. Pound cakes, layer cakes, meringues, buttercream frosting, royal icing. They knew butter and sugar and flour and rose to every occasion, doing Mama Alice proud.

I piped trellises in royal icing, arbors and garden gates. Oh that I could ever have the real things in my back garden! But I piped icing and dreamed. I hadn't done royal icing in a long time, not since my teens, with Mama Alice looking over my shoulder. Yet now it felt a bit like she still stood behind me, saying, “That's it. Curve it a bit more. Curley-q she goes.”

I had ordered a little bridal couple for the top, but Juanita wanted real roses, fresh roses, along with the icing ones. I guess Juanita just couldn't get enough roses to suit her. I wondered if Ossie would be the type to ever bring her roses on not-so-special occasions after they were married? Somehow I couldn't picture Mr. DelGardo with a bouquet of anything in his hand. Gun, yes. Handcuffs. But not flowers.

White roses I'd have to get delivered from Raleigh if Debbie Booth's fans hadn't bought them out from every florist in town. I bet the day of her service there would even be some enterprising vendors selling boxes of Kleenex and embroidered memorial handkerchiefs to the line of fans waiting to get into Edenton Street Methodist Church.

And I couldn't be there. I had this damn wedding to put on or pull off or whatever the occasion called for. Not that I'd be missed, but I had sent in a donation to the Southern Food Ways Alliance Debbie wrote about so much. That left some roses for other fans to buy.

Ida Plum kept the ironer going, piling up a stack of freshly ironed sheets beside her. Scott and Randy hammered away. The gazebo had a shape, skeleton though it was, and I hugged both guys, Scott the longest. He smelled like cut lumber and had sawdust in his hair. I tousled it. He caught my arm and pulled me in for another hug. “You just love to get close to real work, don't you?” he teased.

“What?” I said. “Baking, icing, decorating in a hot kitchen isn't work? At least out here you got a breeze.”

I made them a snack, even whipped up oatmeal cookies. And beer, of course, a local ale Mr. Gaddy stocked in the back of his drugstore. Honey Locust.

“You're a honey,” Scott said. “The girl of my dreams.” He winked. “And heart.” Like he could read my mind and chagrin about last night and this morning with Miles Fortune.

I had been so busy I'd forgotten about Miles and now I remembered, could guess he'd been down filming the remains of the courthouse. Perfect image for his “theme.” The South in Ruins. For all I knew he could be a firebug, been the one to start it. He'd sure shown up fast and Johnny-on-the-spot to start filming it.

And here he was staying in
my
house that was two hundred years old, without a sprinkler system, built of pine boards dry as paper. Not that I didn't already have enough to worry about.

 

Chapter Forty-one

Ida Plum made the cheese straws and when they came from the oven we roasted Honey Hot Nuts. Then she grated vegetables for the little tea sandwiches and I made pimento cheese. No reception could be held in Littleboro without pimento cheese and some sort of pickle. Baby gherkins, you made your own or bought some at the Farmer's Market, but you had to have a sour to cut the sweets. John Blue down at the diner even had a pimento cheeseburger on his menu. It was sloppy to eat, you had to use a knife and fork, but it was really good.

After the pimento cheese, Ida Plum got two mixers with pound cake batter going full-speed for cake squares just in case the wedding cake wasn't enough. I had stored the wedding cake layers in the basement freezer and when I put in the cheese straws, I noticed behind me on the wall shelves and shelves of canned vegetables. Beets, corn, tomatoes, lots of green beans. Every pantry in Littleboro probably looked like this. Mama Alice had a backyard garden and all the summers of my childhood I had weeded, watered, picked vegetables and “got them ready for the canner.” When was any of this canned? It had been years since Mama Alice had much of a garden and done canning. “It's cheaper to buy stuff now than to grow it,” she'd say, “and a whole lot less work.”

After she got the two freezers (in catering you had to do as much as you could ahead of any event) she froze vegetables. Except green beans, which seemed to grow better and more prolifically than anything else in Littleboro, hence our lovely Mayor Moss with her idea for the Green Bean Festival, bless her little not-from-around-here heart. Homegrown green beans were, for some universally recognized reason, not as good frozen, so every self-respecting Littleboro family canned theirs. At the end of a summer a lot of Littleborian women recited, “I put up a hundred and thirteen jars of beans this summer.” Or “I did a dozen canners of green beans.”

I couldn't help thinking about how different basements were from root cellars. I had a bad memory of root cellars: dark, musty smelling, dirt floors. Mama Alice's basement had a cement floor that was painted a clean-looking gray and the walls, too, were painted. A hardworking commercial washer and oversized drier we used in bad weather stood along one wall and along another was the water heater and furnace. And sure, it had shelves of canned goods, its own whole wall of them.

I picked a jar from the shelf and wiped dust off it. Probably not safe to eat. Home canned vegetables do not have expiration or “best used by” dates on them. There was always the danger of botulism if they were not properly canned.

I'd heard Mama Alice lecture on this deadly stuff as she put jars in the pressure canner, set it on the stove and set the timer. I'd listened to the pressure relief valve “jiggle” in that hot-as-hell summer kitchen many afternoons and vowed I'd never touch another green bean. A vow I didn't have any trouble keeping when I lived “up north.” Evidently Maine soil is better suited to potatoes. I love potatoes. Mama Alice sometimes cooked scraped new potatoes atop green beans. I ate the potatoes, left the green beans alone.

As I stood there holding that jar of green beans I remembered all those jars in the booth at the Green Bean Festival and Mrs. Butch Rigsbee presiding over smoothies and brownies and God knows what-all green stuff. Who had tasted it? If there was botulism there, there was enough to do in the whole town, or half of it at least.

But where was the infamous Mrs. Rigsbee now? I didn't realize I'd said this out loud when I came into the kitchen still holding the jar of Mama Alice's canned green beans until Scott said, “Didn't anybody tell you about Ossie's latest civic irritation?”

Scott had come in for a couple more “cold ones” for him and Randy, then stood holding them as he closed the refrigerator with his backside. “Some woman shot up the fairgrounds. Started with the green tin man, then all the balloons one by one. That got Ossie running down there. He must have thought the whole town was under siege.” Scott laughed.

This woman had to be Mrs. Butch Rigsbee. None other.

“That's awful,” I said, pretending I knew nothing. Sometimes I have found that way gets more information dropped in your lap. “What's with that woman anyway? I mean, she checks in here for an hour, then shows up working for Mayor Moss and drops a hot corn stick in Debbie Booth's lap, then has this booth at the festival.”

“Ossie said she said she hated the town of Littleboro and everybody in it.”

“Why?” I asked hoping he didn't see my tongue in my cheek. “What did Littleboro ever do to her? This crazy woman.”

“She said her husband was cheating with some woman who lived in Littleboro who had all the money from his business dealings and she was target practicing so she'd be ready when she found the right woman. But what she wanted more than her husband was her share of his business.”

I thought, Oh, Reba, what have you gotten yourself into now? And me right along with you. I must have had a strange expression on my face because Ida Plum stopped what she was doing and asked, “What? What's all this business about somebody shooting at the fairgrounds who sounds really crazy? Is this the same woman who checked in here and only stayed an hour, then asked for her money back?”