Queen Bee (Lowcountry Tales #12)(18)

I stared out the window over the sink and thought about Archie. It was upsetting. The offer of money made my intentions feel cheap. I really did need to get my head out of the clouds and accept the fact that Archie did not have romantic feelings for me. I knew he meant well. And it wasn’t like I was rolling in money, either. Surely, he realized that and that was why he offered to pay me. If I was going to continue to cook for them, I’d need a calculator to figure out their portion of the food cost. Or I’d just charge him something that seemed fair. By the time I’d finished my tea, I made myself understand why he’d said what he said, but Lord, he had been so abrupt. Men could be like that. Maybe I’d be better off with the UPS man. A gentler and kinder soul, to be sure, but he had thought I was weird because I warned him about getting a flat tire. What was I supposed to do? Not tell him? But the butcher at Publix was pretty cute. I’d have to check his hand for a wedding ring.

The next day was my day to volunteer at the library. I always looked forward to that. For some reason, I’d been asked to do crafts with the children, which of course suited me just fine. Since we were approaching spring, even though half the time it felt like summer, I was thinking about having the children make flowers out of felt by wrapping precut petals and leaves around the ends of pencils and gluing them in place. It was a simple craft that even young children could do, and the pencils would make a nice Easter gift for their mothers or just for them to keep.

I pulled the plastic bin of felt strips out of my sister’s bedroom closet and brought it to the kitchen table. When she got married, I decided her closets were going to waste, so I gave the clothes she left to Goodwill and used the space for storage for my craft materials. To be honest, my books filled her shelves, too. As I started sorting what felt I had by color, I thought about all the things that had happened at our kitchen table and silently thanked God the table couldn’t talk. I wondered if it remembered the arguments our dysfunctional little brood had pitched back and forth across its old mahogany top. Every disappointment of my childhood was certainly ingrained in it somewhere, along with hundreds of Daddy’s fist prints.

For years there had been a sugar bowl in the center that Leslie bought for Momma for some occasion. It was beige crockery, octagonal in shape, and decorated with stamped gold filigree. Not exactly a fine heirloom. But oh, my word! To hear Momma carry on about it, you would have thought it was made by Fabergé, encrusted in real gold and decorated with jewels.

Remembering the moment I dropped it still made my stomach hurt, even all these years later. We were drying dishes after supper. I was wiping off the table, so I picked the sugar bowl up to catch any crumbs with my damp paper towel. My hands were wet. It slipped out of my hand and hit the table. One of the handles popped off in a clean break, and naturally the screaming started. Talk about drama! Daddy walked out. And he didn’t come home until very late. And when he walked out for good? That was my fault, too, because Momma had to spend half her life yelling at me. She spent the other half yelling at him, but somehow that was beneath her notice.

I glued the handle back on with Super Glue, but that wasn’t enough to restore harmony. Even now, every time she asked me to pass it to her, she’d suck her teeth and warn me to pass it carefully. Then she’d shake her head as though I was hopeless. Leslie was her favorite. I knew it. Leslie knew it. The whole island knew it.

I was just a kid. It was an accident, but Momma didn’t believe in accidents. Neither Leslie nor Momma were very nice to me for the longest time. I’m not exaggerating one little bit. That’s how it was.

For me it was a defining moment. As of the sugar bowl break, I began to withdraw from the family bosom. I began to read like a maniac, history and biographies especially. I learned that many of my heroes had challenging beginnings, which gave me hope for my future. I babysat for the island’s children and taught myself to do counted cross stitch when I could afford the floss and how to draw with charcoal on a pad of newsprint. I learned to cook and bake by reading Southern Living magazine. Slowly, I redeemed myself because there was always a cake available for slicing or a new ornament for our Christmas tree or a new cross-stitched hand towel for the powder room. But by then I didn’t care as much. I’d grown into a citizen of the world, or so I thought, and saw that both Momma and Leslie were always setting me up for a game of Gotcha! To this very day, Momma still gave me suspicious looks, cutting her cold eyes at me, freezing my heart. All of this started over a cheap, stupid sugar bowl.

But the real truth? Leslie looked like a clone of Momma when Momma was a striking young woman. That was the underlying reason for all of their vitriol. I looked like the man who left her high and dry and gave her back the beach house on Sullivan’s Island that had belonged to her family for generations anyway. In retrospect, it didn’t seem like she got such a sweet deal.

I finally separated enough felt and packed it in a canvas tote bag with my glue gun.

The phone rang. It was probably Leslie, because no one else ever called. It was.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Is Mom awake?”

She sounded terrible, as though she’d been crying.

“Are you all right?”

“Just put Momma on the phone, okay?”

“Hang on,” I said. Sure, sweetheart, anything you want, princess . . .

I put the phone on the counter and went down the hall to peek in our mother’s room. Before I got there, I heard the snoring. Great God in heaven, that woman could snore like every hog in hell was singing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I went back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver.