Double blast, p.13
Double Blast, page 13
“Courtney says Fiona’s working from home,” Granny said, “but I heard she had her face lifted and she’s hiding out till it calms down some.”
“Why would someone who never shows her face have it lifted?”
“Like I said. Strange bird, that one.”
“So who’s running the bank?”
“Courtney,” Granny said.
“Is Courtney qualified or capable of running a bank?”
“Well, she used to run the Hallmark store at the Greenville Mall. And you know it had to be busier than the bank.”
“Why did Courtney leave her Hallmark job? I thought she loved it.”
“The Hallmark store closed down,” Granny said. “So Fiona hired her.”
“Back up a little,” I said. “I wasn’t really asking what Fiona’s up to now, because I really don’t care.” I’d gone to see her when I first rolled back into town to ask about Florida and it hadn’t gone well. In fact, it had gone miserably. She’d opened the door, taken one look at me, and slammed it in my face without speaking. It was as if the very sight of me triggered a panic attack in her. I’d seen her several times around town since then, each time eliciting the same fight, flight, or flee reaction. Why? I had no idea. And enough time had passed that I’d stopped worrying about it. The bank robbery, on the other hand, I continued to worry about. “What I want to know is how she ended up running the bank her husband robbed.”
“Have you asked your daddy?”
“I have, Granny, and he shut me down.”
“I’ll tell you if you won’t tell him I told you,” she said. “There’s a reason people say to let a sleeping dog lie.”
“I won’t say a word.”
My grandmother explained that after Eli Atwell saved Fiona from being burned at the stake in Town Square, Pine Apple had to accept her back into the fold when Eli went on to singlehandedly save Pine Apple Bank & Trust. He did it by moving the assets of Atwell Aviation—a third-generation manufacturing facility located another small city away, Prattville, employing more than three hundred southcentral Alabama residents—from Regions Bank in Conecuh, Alabama, to Pine Apple Bank & Trust. To include all the financial transactions resulting from the adding of polyurethane blocks to aluminum frames, covering the units with fire-retardant fabric, topping them off with cloth or leather, then shipping the finished seats to Boeing, Airbus, Gulfstream, Cessna, and Learjet to be installed in airplanes. All that money landed at Pine Apple Bank & Trust, along with the then-unheard-of practice of direct deposit payroll, thus keeping the Pine Apple cash flowing. And all under one condition. Eli would keep Pine Apple alive if, and only if, Fiona Simmons was absolved of all responsibility related to the heist the feds had already declared she had nothing to do with, never asked again where the missing money was, and allowed to run the bank full of his money. Because Fiona was the only officer of the bank left standing. If Pine Apple wanted to stay on the map they were barely on to begin with, they had to agree: Fiona Simmons was innocent and she would run the bank.
They agreed.
And six weeks after that, just two weeks after his second deployment to Kuwait, Eli was killed. Months of red tape later, and after a twenty-one-gun salute service at Alabama National Cemetery in Birmingham attended by all of Pine Apple, Eli’s remains were quietly shipped home to Wilcox County, then quietly laid to rest at Carter’s Funeral Home and Cemetery.
“What about Florida, Granny? Where’s she been all this time?”
“No one knows,” she’d said. “That girl took off and, as far as I know, hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”
Until a dozen years later when she showed up in a chicken wing truck.
With Eddie Crawford’s son.
And there I was too.
Wondering why Florida Simmons was on my parents’ porch.
FOURTEEN
With a sigh, I sat down in the rocking chair beside her. She passed me a plastic wine glass, then a wine bottle. It was Boone’s Farm Fuzzy Navel. I couldn’t help but laugh, barely recognizing the sound, because laughter had left me two days earlier. Boone’s Farm had been gone from my life for almost two decades.
I poured.
We clinked.
I almost choked on the first sip. “How old is this?”
“I bought it this morning.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she said. “They still make it. But now it’s twelve dollars a bottle.”
“Inflation.”
I tried another sip. It was no better than the first.
“Keep going,” Florida said. “Third sip and it’ll taste like high school.”
Third sip, it didn’t. To me, high school tasted like Wednesday lunch: chopped beef steak drizzled with brown gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes with more brown gravy, yeast rolls, and chocolate icebox pie. The cheap wine tasted like peach baby food stirred into sour orange juice. And on the subject of all things tasty, I said, “I guess you brought Cheetos?”
It was her turn to laugh. “Oh, how soon they forget. The deal is and has always been that I steal the Boone’s Farm, you bring the Cheetos.”
I turned to her, making direct eye contact. “Did you steal this wine?”
“No, Mrs. Law Enforcement. I bought it up the street.”
Up the street in Pine Apple was the next small town over. “Camden?”
“Camden Fine Wine.”
“To fine wine.”
We clinked again.
The soundtrack of our reunion was the rhythmic creaks of the wood porch slats beneath the rocking chairs and crickets. That’s how long it took for the real conversation to start. Half a bottle of Fuzzy Navel and crickets out in full force. And they were singing from the trees. Probably because they had no bushes to hide in. It was a sound I hadn’t heard in the longest—crickets—and at that point, I’d had just enough Boone’s Farm for my mind to wander, trying to remember if I’d ever heard a cricket in Biloxi. Mississippi felt like home. I’d married there, had three babies there, loved where we lived, loved my job there, but it took crickets and cheap wine to make me finally feel at home again in Alabama.
She kicked things off. “I see you’ve replaced me.”
“Fantasy,” I said. “She’s the very best.”
“Who’s she hiding from?”
“What makes you think she’s hiding?”
“She’s in Pine Apple. Why would she be here otherwise?”
I didn’t want the conversation to end before Florida told me why we were having it, so I didn’t ask who she was hiding from.
“Where’d your husband go?” she asked.
“To my sister’s,” I answered.
“Good.”
“You’d like my husband.” Even to my own ears, I sounded defensive. “Everyone likes my husband.”
“I was thinking more of Meredith.” She swirled her wine in the glass and gave it a hard look before finishing it off. “Her hair is probably on fire after three days of juggling four-year-olds and a baby.”
“I’ve been a little busy.”
“Yes, you have,” Florida said. “Where’s Meredith’s daughter? I haven’t seen her helping chase children.”
“Riley?” My favorite niece. My only niece. “Cheer camp at Alabama.”
“Roll Tide Alabama?”
“The same,” I said.
“Bad timing for her to be away.”
“As opposed to good timing for you to be present?”
We rocked.
She said, “Your children are beautiful, by the way.”
I said, “So is yours.”
“I can’t take credit.”
“You should. Where’s he hiding?” I asked.
“He isn’t,” she said. “He’s spending time with my mother.”
“And she’s a hider.”
“Exactly.”
“Florida?” I turned to her. “What happened to your mother?”
“What do you mean?”
“Way back when—”
“Do you really want to go way back when, Davis?”
Truthfully, no part of me wanted to go way back when. I had quite enough present day to deal with. Although had I stepped through that ancient door, I’d have asked if she knew what I’d ever done to her mother to deserve having a door slammed in my face. But I didn’t. So we rocked until she said, “I can’t get over how everyone thinks he looks like Eddie Crawford.”
I had several options. I chose, “And you don’t?”
“Maybe I did when he was born, but that was twelve years ago. I never look at him and see anyone else. He’s his own person. Your daughters don’t look a bit like you,” she said. “Is it in the front of your brain at all times that they look like someone else?”
Bex and Quinn got almost every ounce of their DNA from Bradley. And what Florida said made perfect sense, although I’d never had the occasion to realize it. I thought about how much they looked like their father and how little they looked like me often when they were newborns, seeing my husband in their sky-blue eyes, but it took no time for them to grow into their own little people. Not mirrored extensions of Bradley. “You’re right,” I said. “It isn’t something I ever think about unless someone brings it up. But if I were introducing the girls to a town of four hundred busybodies where everyone knew Bradley, and the girls looked just like him, I wouldn’t be so surprised if people noticed.”
She didn’t respond.
“In fact, Florida, I might have planned it that way.”
“Why might you have done that?”
“To get it out there,” I said. “To get it over with.”
“I came back because I had to, Davis, not to get anything over with. Besides,” she added, “a lot of people look like Eddie. Dark hair, dark eyes. And it’s been a million years.”
“You just said it’d been twelve.”
The tinge of frost trailing off my voice settled over us. And her next word would be her first and last acknowledging I was married to Eddie at the time his son was conceived. “Davis—”
“Don’t.” I stopped her. “It didn’t matter then, Florida, and it doesn’t matter now.”
I meant every word.
She knew it.
So we rocked.
I wasn’t quite sure where to go from there. I chose, “How is your mother?”
She stopped rocking. “I tell you what. We’ll talk about my mother for a while, then we’ll talk about yours. Or we could skip the mother talk.” She held out a crooked pinkie finger.
I pinkie promised to skip the mother chat, which might not have tasted like high school, but it sure felt like high school.
We rocked.
“Florida?”
“Yes?”
“Did you come here to tell me you’re dropping out of the chicken wing cookoff?”
“Not so much.” She split another four inches of Boone’s Farm between our glasses. “Why would I drop out? Because every other food truck is dropping out? My plan is to wait until I’m the last truck standing. Then I win.”
“I remember that about you.”
“What?”
“That you love to win.”
“Says the winner of life.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“Look at you,” she said. “The gorgeous husband. The beautiful children. The big house, big job, big money, big life.”
“How would you know how big my house is?”
“For one, I practically live next door.”
Biloxi and Mobile were an hour’s drive apart.
“And for two,” she said, “I spend a week in Biloxi every year.”
“Oh, really?”
“Cruisin’ the Coast? The collector car show?”
“I’m familiar.”
“You can find me in the food truck park at Edgewater Mall.”
“So you really are in the chicken wing business?”
“Did you think someone loaned me a chicken wing truck?” she asked. “Yes. I’m in the chicken wing business. I’d been hired to conduct a study on strategies to optimize poultry nutrition—”
She kept going with something about the negative economic viability of poultry farming, which was why the co-op that hired her paid her with a chicken wing truck, but I was only half listening because I realized the chicken wing cookoff had been a setup. Pine Apple Bank & Trust, who in no way appreciated its customers, planted the chicken-wing seed by bringing in a food truck at the height of the Women’s Society’s potato salad-cake-pie dilemma. It had nothing to do with my mother’s winning streak and everything to do with sneaking, or luring, Florida back to Pine Apple in her chicken wing truck. Not wanting to give her information she might not have, I didn’t go there. Instead, I went with, “Do you even like chicken wings?”
“I do not.”
“So tell me again why you drive a chicken wing truck?”
“After you tell me how you ended up living in a casino.”
“That’s a long story.”
“Same here,” she said. “A long story.”
“What’s the long boring story called?”
She tilted her head my way.
“Your story,” I explained. “What’s the title of your story?”
She said, “Babies change lives.”
That they did.
We rocked.
“So you’ve seen my house?” I asked. “How’d that happen?”
“I didn’t break in and tiptoe through while you were sleeping, if that’s what you’re thinking. Mr. Google told me your husband, his wife, and their children lived at the Bellissimo,” she said. “And it’s the biggest house I’ve ever seen.”
“I have a lot of housemates.”
We rocked.
“So you come to Biloxi once a year, knowing I live there, and have never stopped by to say hi.”
“I thought it best to not dredge up old ghosts.”
“Yet here we are.”
We rocked.
We drank Boone’s Farm.
“I have a question for you, Davis.”
I had another one for her too. “Shoot.”
“How is it you tangled with Eddie Crawford for years—” nearby, an owl hooted, probably celebrating her finally getting to the good stuff “—years and years,” she went on, “even marrying him twice, and came out of it unscathed? Meanwhile, there’s me, who didn’t speak ten words to him in high school, and I have to live with him for the rest of mine.”
Just then, the Boone’s Farm kicked in. “Are you kidding me?” I slapped the arm of my rocker. “Is that why you’re here? You’re moving in with Eddie? You’re going to live in the middle of the Gulf?”
Her Boone’s Farm kicked in. Her head fell back with wild laughter. I remembered that about her too. “No!” Her head came down. The laughter didn’t stop. “I hope I’m never in the same room with Eddie again. I couldn’t live with him for five minutes. How does that man even live with himself?”
“I don’t know how he made it through the birth canal. So I don’t have an answer.”
We rocked.
“Do you think it’s Bea’s fault?” she asked.
“Is what Bea’s fault?”
“How pathetic Eddie is. Isn’t it always the mother’s fault?”
I tucked that away for later—Florida blamed her mother, for what, I wasn’t sure—to say, “I’m not sure I’d call Eddie pathetic. He has a room-temp IQ, he’s never met a social skill, and he won’t stop stealing cars from me, but how can he truly be pathetic if he doesn’t know he’s pathetic? Doesn’t there have to be some level of awareness?”
“Maybe you’re right and he’s not pathetic,” Dr. Boone’s Farm, Therapist in a Bottle, said. Then went on to say, “Maybe there are parts of our pasts when we were pathetic, and we associate him with those times, and pathetically project it onto him.”
“Deep thoughts.”
We rocked.
“He looks just like Eddie, Florida.”
“Established. And thank the Lord.”
“He’d be just as cute if he looked like you.”
“His feet look like mine.” She shot out a muddy flip-flopped foot as evidence. “And I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “I meant he could have looked like Bea. Or Eddie’s dad. That huge nose on that man.” She snapped her fingers having found the corner of her brain where Eddie’s father’s name lived. “Melvin. What ever happened to Melvin, by the way?”
“You haven’t heard?” I asked. “It’s old news. Seems like someone would have told you.”
“I haven’t spoken a word to anyone in Pine Apple in all these years. Who would have told me?”
“Someone told you Meredith has a daughter,” I said. “My niece, Riley. So you must have a Pine Apple connection.”
“I do,” she said. “Facebook.”
“Is that how you found out about the chicken wing cookoff?”
She rolled her head in a yes-and-no way.
“How did you know Eddie had moved out of town?”
“Facebook.”
“How did you know Bea would be out of town?” I answered my own question. “Facebook.”
She nodded. “The Pine Apple Neighborhood page.”
“Stalker.”
She laughed.
And we rocked.
“So what did happen to Melvin?” she asked.
“He left Bea, moved to Austin, married a man named Randy, and as far as I know, is living happily ever after.”
“That is unreal,” she said, “and not on Facebook.”
We rocked.
“You know what else wasn’t on Facebook, Davis?”
“No.”
“That your father would be away, and you would be here in his place.”
“If it helps any,” I said, “I was just as shocked to see you as you were to see me.”
“Here’s to shockers.”
We clinked.
“Davis, there’s something else I can’t find on Facebook.”
“What?”
“When will Bea be back?”
“I think you’re in the clear for the next few days.”
“Has something happened?” she asked.
“Why? What have you heard?”
