The Usual Family Mayhem

Chapter Ten

Micah called at seven-fifty the next morning. I was not a morning person. He didn’t seem to care.

He said he needed a Friday status. I hadn’t done anything that required a status check so far in this job. If actually doing work meant wake-up calls before nine I might go back to eating my free bagel, playing games on my phone, and waiting to be fired.

After another half hour in bed and a cup of coffee, I went outside. Actually, I took a shower and ate a muffin before declaring I needed fresh air. A legitimate excuse in this household. Celia used the phrase all the time. She thought the whole world needed fresh air.

As a kid she’d kick me out of the house in search of sun and oxygen. That worked in North Carolina for most of the year. It’s lucky we never lived in Alaska or somewhere equally frigid.

In addition to the riot of flowers and the raised vegetable beds, my favorite thing in the yard was the gazebo. It sat in the back corner framed by two flowering dogwood trees. A trail of pavers led to the white octagonal structure.

This wasn’t just any old gazebo. No, Gram had gone all out. She claimed every Southern home needed one. Since none of our neighbors had one, I was skeptical about that being a rule.

Electricity. String lights. A beverage refrigerator. An enormous outdoor sectional sofa. A serving table. A buffet. An ottoman. This thing had all the trimmings, which made it the perfect place for me to sneak away and study the ledger I’d photographed.

Knowing Jackson, tonight he’d break out a lecture on privacy and appropriate boundaries. He’d likely add a shot or two about my supposed tendency to exaggerate. While all of that was valid, I had to hold my ground until we had more intel on the weird things happening with Gram and Celia. I needed to be ready. He was a fact guy. He couldn’t be won over by charm. I knew because I’d tried that for almost a decade before finally giving up.

An hour and one bottle of water later and I found the smoking gun. Not really but I wanted to think of it that way. I’d only photographed a few months of the ledger. Two deliveries had stars in that last column on the pages I grabbed. One was for Abigail Burns. The other was for Delilah Rhine.

In addition to having a spectacular name, Delilah had a dead husband. He died of a heart attack. A heart attack that happened one day after the delivery of a chess pie and other assorted goodies from Mags’ Desserts. Unrelated, but in case anyone wondered the key ingredient in that Southern classic was vinegar. Gram told me that once as if she were passing down a family secret.

Right now, I didn’t care about the ingredients. I cared about the timing of Delilah’s delivery. Having two pies with a special star next to them delivered to two households with recently dead husbands qualified as a pretty big coincidence. Okay, that was a stretch, but still. Even Jackson with his big brain and tendency to ignore what the rest of us called a gut feeling would see the possible connection. I hoped.

“Here’s some tea.”

“Shit!”

On instinct, I threw my cell and nearly dove under the sectional. “You scared the crap out of me.”

Celia laughed. “Clearly.”

My heart thundered hard enough for the neighbors to hear it. “I . . . uh . . . yeah.”

Where the hell was my phone? I remembered holding it, then she snuck up on me. Kudos to me for having the instinct to lash out when attacked, but the phone had the incriminating, totally inappropriate, gathered through snooping photos on it, so I needed to beat Celia to finding it.

“This is for you.”

The ice cubes clinked when she held out a glass. “Don’t worry. It’s herbal tea, not that sweet tea crap Mags likes to drink.”

I closed the notebook I’d been using because I didn’t want her to see my scribbles but mostly because I needed to put all of my energy into responding to that shocking statement. “Celia Windsor, have you been pretending to like sweet tea to make Gram happy? Like, for twenty years?”

“Of course.”

I delivered my best fake gasp. “That’s outrageous.”

“She adds so much sugar my teeth tingle when I drink it, but I sip it anyway because it makes her happy.”

Celia sat down next to me on the sectional. “In return, she’ll share a cherry pie with me even though she detests cherries.”

“Damn.”

I made an exploding gesture with my hand. “I have to rethink everything I thought I knew about this household.”

“I figured you were old enough to hear the truth.”

She reached down and picked up my phone.

The force of the adrenaline running through me threatened to knock me over.

“Here you go.”

She handed it over without looking at the screen. Of course she did. Celia was big on privacy. Fresh air and privacy.

That made one of us. “You could—and hear me out on this—tell Gram the truth about the tea. Like I did.”

“Oh, no.”

Celia shook her head. “I remember that day.”

Who could forget it?

“I have a good excuse. You see, right after we first met, Mags served me sweet tea and a piece of her lemon chiffon pie and, well, it was early in our relationship. I didn’t want to be negative, so I drank two glasses of her tea.”

That was pretty adorable. I could almost see Gram trying to woo Celia with baked goods. “You condemned yourself to a life of sweet tea misery because once, long ago, you were determined to get on Gram’s good side.”

“We never lie about the big stuff. Only cherry pie and sweet tea.”

Celia glanced at the notebook on my lap. “Are you writing stories?”

Was I . . . ? “What?”

She treated me to an encouraging smile like she’d done for most of my life. “You wrote your first story at seven.”

In crayon on construction paper. Even designed the cover, which highlighted my complete lack of drawing skills. “‘The Great Possum Race.’”

“I think you revised it four times. You read it to us over and over again.”

“Well, it was a masterpiece.”

“True.”

Celia laughed. “Mags bragged about it for a year. She bragged about all the stories you wrote. Talked about your potential.”

Gram was supportive but she wasn’t the type to hand out praise over nothing. I’d been chasing her approval since I moved in. “Does she talk about the part where I can’t keep a job?”

“I’m afraid the law school issue was our fault.”

Celia had alluded to this many times over the last two years. I dropped out of law school right after Gram went to the hospital. There was a connection of sorts. Almost losing Gram made me reexamine my priorities and law school didn’t make the list. That wasn’t Gram and Celia’s fault. It was law school’s fault.

“You’ve struggled because you’ve been in the wrong career,” she said.

No one bothered to tell me that before. “Meaning?”

“With your vivid imagination you’re a born storyteller. When you were younger Mags feared you’d become a con artist or something because of the grand stories in your head.”

She shrugged. “Happily, that didn’t happen.”

I hadn’t moved off the job comment. “How does writing translate into a paying job? It would be helpful to know because I don’t have a clue.”

Celia stayed quiet for a few extra beats. Long enough for the hesitation to be obvious. “I know what I think you’d be happiest doing, but you have to figure that out for yourself.”

Maybe it wasn’t too late to try that con artist thing. “Could you give me a hint?”

“I already did.”

She sighed. “So, fried chicken for dinner?”

Crap. Right. I forgot to give her a heads-up. “Can we bump that one night? I’m supposed to have dinner with Jackson.”

“Really?”

The question consisted of one word but came loaded with an unspoken opinion.

“Is that a bad idea?”

She patted my knee. “I think it’s a great idea.”

Uh, okay. “Are we talking in code?”

“I’m happy you’re home.”

With that Celia stood up.

I couldn’t exactly admit that I was in town for a business deal. One that, without her knowledge or permission, involved her. But I couldn’t forget her not-so-subtle hint that I hadn’t found my thing in life yet, probably because her sweet tea admission threw me off.

It was interesting how Celia and Gram hid bad news but didn’t shy away from offering their advice. They came right out with it whether, in the case of a safe sex talk at thirteen, it made me squirm, or it was a general life lesson. They believed in preparing me for the real world.

I’d listened to about a billion speeches about bad men over the years. Never accept a drink from someone you don’t know. Walk home in pairs. Never let him get you alone in a car. Pay for the ride share. The list went on and on. Yet here, when I needed details and direction, Celia clammed up.

First job: tackle the business issue.

Second: figure out what I was supposed to be when I grew up.