Deconstructed(68)

I groped for my tea, and finding it cold, I went back to noodling with a potential redesign of the black and orange. Jack-o’-lanterns. Basketballs. Tigers. Maybe a white-and-black tiger print to balance? Or would that look too hodgepodge? If I could refashion the bodice in some manner, I could use tuxedo pants. Or . . .

The doorbell interrupted my contemplation.

For someone who could count on one hand the number of visitors I had received in the time I’d lived in my duplex, I was certain I had now surpassed the record.

I struggled to get up, shoving aside the throw I had pulled onto my lap to cushion the sketchbook, and went to the door. Looking outside, I resigned myself to deal with those dang yellow flowers.

“Don’t you have beer to pour?” I asked.

Dak allowed a smile to touch his lips. “I have employees who know how to pour beer. Besides, Monday’s slow.”

“Which makes me wonder why you’re standing here when you’ve got all that spare time to not pour beer.”

He shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

Me and him both.

I swung the door open in an unstated invitation, and the boy I had once loved who had grown into a man I barely knew stepped inside my world. I closed the door behind him. “I’m having tea. You want some?”

“I actually brought some of Aunt Linda’s chicken salad.” He offered me a brown paper bag.

“So you show up unannounced with chicken salad? And you sent me carnations?” I didn’t have time to beat around bushes. Dakota wasn’t one for pussyfooting, either. He was always deliberate, never unsure, a trait that had served him well in life. He had never been one for ulterior motives or grand gestures. Not that carnations and chicken salad were grand. Quite the opposite, which suited me. And he knew that.

Yeah, thing was, Dak knew me.

“You always liked both.”

“I did.” And maybe I still do. So I took the bag because Aunt Linda’s chicken salad was a thing of beauty. She used Blue Plate mayonnaise, which was Louisiana’s answer to Duke’s. And in my opinion, a better answer. Linda chopped the celery fine and added toasted pecans from her prolific tree out back. She bought the chickens from a place out on Sentell Road—farm to table before it was a thing. And the combination of those things at her fingertips became a palate-stirring comfort food that was like southern gospel on the lips.

I took the bag to the kitchen and pulled out a plate, some club crackers, and the lemonade I had fresh squeezed yesterday. My gran always had club crackers and lemonade for visitors, which hadn’t seemed so weird until I truly thought about it. But old habits die hard even in a new generation, so I was set up for that chicken salad.

Dak had made himself at home on my couch. I placed the plate holding his offering on the coffee table atop some photography magazines and beside the bluebirds clustered on a branch that my gran had made when she took ceramics at the Mooringsport Baptist Church. We both tucked into the chicken salad in companionable silence, Dak sipping in appreciation at the homemade lemonade and me scarfing down half the chicken salad without so much as a how-do-ya-do.

“My stars and chickens, that’s some good stuff. How is she not rolling in the dough selling this? It’s the crack of chicken salads,” I said, leaning back on the couch, careful not to touch Dak as he polished off his half.

It was odd. For so many years we hadn’t spoken, and here we sat like two who’d never been apart. So unsettling, but at the same time, not as uncomfortable as it should have been.

He nodded. “You would think. But she says she only likes cooking for those she loves. Guess the rest of the world is SOL.”

I glanced over at the yellow carnations, and he caught me. I looked back at him with a question in my eyes.

Dak lifted one shoulder. “I just . . . Well, those others were the wrong flowers. That’s all.”

I made a moue with my lips, studying his discomfort. “What are you doing, Dak?”

He rubbed a hand over his eyes, for a moment looking quite tortured. “I don’t know, babe. I mean, sorry. Ruby.”

I sat like a statue, unsure how to proceed.

He dropped his hand and looked at me. “I don’t know.”

I counted off ten seconds of silence. “Okay.” And then I sighed, “Okay.”

And I didn’t know what I meant by that, but I couldn’t sit there and examine something neither one of us understood. We were getting nowhere. So I picked up the television remote. “The Cubs are playing. Wanna watch?”

“Nah. Water and bridges are things I sometimes don’t like to contemplate.” He clinked the ice in the glass, and I almost rose to fetch him more lemonade. But then I remembered that his hands weren’t broken. He cocked his head. “I think American Idol is on.”

“Done,” I said, clicking on the TV and finding the right channel. Dak settled back, crossing his feet shod in running shoes. He wore Adidas joggers and a short-sleeve T-shirt with some 5K ad on it. He sported a fresh cut and a tan from fishing. He looked good sitting next to me, and it didn’t escape my notice that I had invited Dak inside while I had sent Ty away. Of course, inviting Ty in pretty much acknowledged I would be having sex with him. But Dak was there for something he didn’t know he wanted. I understood that perfectly because that’s where I was, too.

So I sat beside my ex-love watching people yodel, bomb, and dazzle with their vocal abilities, deliciously full on chicken salad, with a check for $80,000 sitting not ten feet away.