“That’s true,” I nodded.
“Val told me about the contest,” Tom said. “Every year, her mom wins it. How does she do it?”
“I don’t rightly know,” Dale said, looking around warily. “She uses some secret ingredient can’t nobody ever figure out. But I know. It’s –”
Mom stumbled into the kitchen in her fuzzy pink bathrobe. I thought I saw Dale’s heart darn near leap out of his chest. Apparently, she didn’t overhear his last remark, because she allowed Dale to go on living.
“Where’s my coffee?” she said in lieu of morning pleasantries.
“I’ll get it,” I said and turned to pour her a cup. “You guys can go get the do –”
When I turned back around, the guys were gone. The screen door slammed. Dust danced in glimmering in circles in the air current caused by their wake. I sighed and handed my mother her cup.
“Here you go, Mom.”
“’Bout time,” she grumbled and plopped her impressive rear end into her chair at the head of the dining room table.
“I guess I’ll go into town and do some shopping this morning.”
“What?” Mom scowled. “No. I need you here.”
“But I thought you were going to make your fruitcake.”
Mom eyed me with suspicion. “Who told you that?”
“The...uh...Dale.”
Mom’s eyes grew squinty with paranoia. “Huh. I hope he didn’t go tellin’ the whole world about it. People’s always after my recipe, you know.” Mom took a sip of her coffee and made a sour face. “I need more sugar.”
The irony made me smile inside. “I know.”
“What did you say?”
“I mean, I know people want your secret recipe.” I took her cup over to the counter and added more sugar. “That’s why I’m surprised you want me here. You’ve never asked me to help before.”
“Well, this year’s gonna be a little different.”
“How?” I asked, handing her back her cup.
“You’ll see.”
Mom studied the newspaper while I studied her. Finally, I heard the golf cart roll up. The guys were back with the donuts.
“Y’all get my crullers?” Mom hollered through the wall. As if in reply, a car horn sounded from the yard. Mom’s face grew red with anger. “I told yore Uncle Jake a hundred times not to honk his horn at us like we was common trash!”
Mom heaved herself from the chair. I followed her outside onto the porch. Tom and Dale stood by an old, rusty-red Ford pickup. Tom was holding a box of donuts while Dale spoke to a man in a cammo hat and shirt. The man was, of course, my Uncle Jake.
“Old fool,” Mom spat, and waddled back toward the kitchen.
I walked out into the yard to hear what the men had to say.
“You bring ol’ Daisy with you?” Dale asked Uncle Jake.
“Yep.”
“Who’s Daisy? A dog?” Tom asked.
“Nope. She’s my good ol’ reliable Mossberg shotgun.” Uncle Jake pulled up a rifle. He pointed the barrel toward the roof of his truck cabin and patted the stock fondly.
“Oh,” said Tom. “Why a Mossberg?”
“She’s the best at takin’ a full choke,” Uncle Jake explained.
“Single-aught, number-eight buckshot?” Dale asked, then poked his glasses up higher on his nose.
“I figured ten, given our prey,” said Jake.
“So, what are we hunting?” Tom asked. “Wild turkey?”
Both old men laughed out loud.
“Naw, son,” Uncle Jake said. “We gonna shoot us down a Christmas tree.”
Chapter Nineteen
AS TOM RODE OFF IN a dilapidated pickup truck to go shoot a Christmas tree with a legally blind Hostage and my unstable Uncle Jake, a twinge of panic shot through me. But it wasn’t for Tom. It was for myself. I was now alone and defenseless against an armed and ready Lucille Jolly Short.
“Well, we best get to it.” Mom rocked twice, then heaved her substantial girth up from her chair at the kitchen table. She smoothed her frizzy grey perm with one hand and sighed. She left her drained coffee cup and the empty donut box for me to deal with and waddled toward the pantry closet. As she fiddled around in the cupboard, from behind she looked like a fuzzy, pink grandmomma bear.
She pulled a sack of flour from the shelf and turned around. “I got enough ingredients you can make you one, too, Valiant.”
“I don’t need to, Mom. I already made my fruitcake.”
Mom eyed me with her usual suspicion. “You did, now, did you? Let me see it.”
I went out to Tom’s SUV and fished the cake from the cooler. Mom stood in the open front door and watched me like a frizzy-haired hawk.
“Looks like a brick,” she said as I walked up with it. “Lemme feel how heavy it is.”
I handed the fruitcake to her. She unwrapped it and took a sniff.
“Dawson!” Mom yelled.
Confused, I turned to see an old blue tick hound come running up the driveway. I turned back around just in time to see my mother lob my fruitcake into the yard. The dog was on it in half a second.
“Mom!” I screeched. “Why’d you do that?”
“They’s the new rules, Val. Can’t nobody bring no already-made cake with ‘em. You got to prove you done baked it yourself.”
“But....”
“Come on now, let’s get to it.”
I gave my half-devoured fruitcake one last, forlorn glance, then followed the fuzzy pink cake-killer into the kitchen, as helpless and frustrated as a kid about to get a whupping for something she didn’t do. Mom pointed a lazy finger at two pint-sized containers of candied fruit on the counter.
“Pick out all them green ones.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Get all them green-colored ones out of the fruit.”
“But...they all taste the same,” I argued.
“I didn’t ask for no commentary, missy. Your father, Justas, hated the green ‘uns. It’s cause a him I win every year.”
I opened the lid of one of the containers. Plastic-looking neon-orange, red, yellow and green gelatinous globs shone back at me. “That’s the secret? No green candied fruits?”
Mom sneered at me. “That ain’t exactly what I said, now, was it?”
Sullen faced, I picked out the green chunks of fruit and tossed them in a bowl as my mother measured out flour and sugar to make two batches of batter.
“Now watch careful-like, Valiant, and do what I do.” she said. I took my place in front of the kitchen counter, two feet to Mom’s right, beside a mixing bowl and ingredients she’d set out for me to use.
“A cup and a half of self-rising flour,” she said, and dumped it into her bowl.
I wet a fingertip and touched the flour Mom had measured out for me. I tasted the powder clinging to my finger. It was bland, dry and almost flavorless. I dumped it into the bowl.
“Add a half teaspoon a salt,” Mom said.
I poured some salt and repeated my taste test. I looked over at Mom. She was grinning like a rotten jack o’ lantern.
“Can’t be too careful nowadays,” she laughed. “Things can go bad sittin’ on a shelf too long.”
I was pouring half a teaspoon of vanilla into a measuring spoon when Mom dropped the bomb on me.
“I guess you heard Annie’s datin’ your ex-husband Ricky.”
I steeled my nerves and didn’t spill a drop. Disappointment flickered across her face. “Yeah,” I said with all the nonchalance I could muster. “Tammy told me.”
Mom’s superiority complex skipped a beat. “When did you see Tammy?”
I stirred my batter casually. “She came to visit me last week. Didn’t you know?”
Mom didn’t say a word after that. She poured a cup of pecans on a cutting board and hacked away at them with the zeal of Lizzie Borden. In silence, we stirred our batters, added our fruits and nuts, and poured our batter into loaf pans. I popped both into the oven as Mom sulked and pretended to r
ead the Jackson County Gazette’s comics, or as she called them, the “funny papers.” I dawdled around, taking my time to clean the kitchen so no “funny business” could go down on my poor, innocent fruitcake while it baked.
“When the guys get back from hunting, they’re gonna be hungry, Mom. Do you have something planned for lunch?”
Mom looked up from her paper and grinned in a way that made me question my own personal safety.
“I got your favorite, Val. Look in the freezer.”
I opened the freezer door, trying to hide my trepidation. Inside was a stack of chicken pot pies. If it had been a stack of dog crap, I would have been less aggravated. Mom didn’t know with absolute certainty that I hated the taste of dog crap.
“Pot pies? Really, Mom? You know I hate them.”
Mom looked to the left, her face a model of feigned innocence. “Oh. Is it you that hates ‘em? I guess I got you mixed up with somebody else.”
I wasn’t falling for it. I knew it was a ploy to get me to go to IGA and leave her alone with my half-baked cake. Nothing doing. “That’s okay. I’ll call Tom and have him bring something back for me.”
Trouble was, I had to fetch my cellphone from the back bedroom. I kept my eyes glued to Mom until my craning neck could stretch no more, then I ran down the hallway to Tom’s bedroom. I grabbed my purse like a marathon baton and raced to the kitchen. I figured I’d been gone seven seconds tops. In that time, somehow my poor, feeble mother with the bad back and aching feet had managed to get up from her chair, cross the dining room and put on oven mitts. I caught her with those grubby mitts on the oven door.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“Checkin’ on the cakes,” she said, and smiled like an angel. “They’s brownin’ up nice. Have a look.”
Guilt washed over me. I peeked inside the oven at the fruitcakes. “They smell good.” I offered, along with a weak smile.
Mom eyed me like the resident evil genius she was. “Yep, Valiant. They sure do.”
I FELT AS IF I’D AGED a year when the buzzer on the oven finally went off, announcing our fruitcakes were done.
“Happy birthday, Valiant,” Mom said from her chair.
My skin crawled. Could she read my mind? “What do you mean, Mom?”
“It was your real birthday, yesterday, wat’n it?”
I’d forgotten all about it. When Justas had found me on the side of the road and convinced Lucille to keep me, Lucille had thought it would be funny to make my birthday April Fools’ Day. When they’d gone to town hall and claimed I was their own flesh and blood, April 1 had been officially recorded on my birth certificate. Ever since, I’d celebrated my birthday on that day. But two years ago, I’d found out I’d actually been born on December 22nd of the previous year. Turned out, I was even older than I’d thought.
“Oh. Yeah. I guess you’re right, Mom. Yesterday was my birthday.”
“I didn’t get you nothin’.”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t expecting anything.”
I pulled the cakes out of the oven and set them on the stove top to cool. When I turned around, Mom was behind me. Her mouth opened as if she was going to say something, but the rusty creak of the screen door sounded instead.
“We’re back!” Tom’s voice called from the front of the house. “Smells good in here!”
“Did you stop by the Tater Shack?” I called back.
“Yes,” Tom said as he walked into the kitchen. “Here’s lunch.” Tom dropped three large paper bags on the dining room table. His sea-green eyes shone with delight. “I’m going to go help Dale and Jake bring in the tree!”
“Oh! You found one!” I said.
My mother laughed. “Yeah, they ain’t too hard to spot in all them woods, Valiant.”
Tom gave me a sympathetic smile and disappeared out the door. I set plates around the table for lunch while Mom did her best to get in my way. I was pouring the tea when Tom and Dale came tromping in like two proud warriors, dragging the fragrant, six-foot long top of a pine tree behind them.
“Where you want this, Lucille?” Dale asked.
“Same place as always,” she said, annoyed at being interrupted from reading the paper.
“We’ll lean it in the corner for now,” Dale said, “‘til I can fetch the stand out of the attic.”
Tom took hold of the tree top and stood it in the corner of the living room, next to my mother’s hideous couch. Then he came up behind me and gave me a big hug. He whispered, “Miss me?” in my ear, then released his hold.
“Sure did.”
Tom pointed at a dried-up fruitcake in the kitchen windowsill. “Is that your fruitcake?”
I sighed. “No. Mine’s in a dog’s stomach.”
“What?”
I shook my head. “Not now. I’ll tell you later.”
“Then what’s that?” he nodded toward the windowsill.
“It’s the contest trophy. For winning the fruitcake competition. I told you Mom’s had it since 1989. Well, it’s been sitting in that windowsill the whole time. It’s petrified.”
“It looks like there’s a piece missing out of it,” Tom said.
“That’s right,” Dale piped up. He picked up the mummified fruitcake and held it two inches from his thick glasses. “That there’s where Jake sawed off a piece back in ‘93. Darn near had to be hospitalized.”
“What? That’s crazy!” Tom said. His face was a confusion of disgust and bewilderment.
Dale shrugged. “Some people’d call it love.”
“What do you mean?” Tom asked.
“Jake done it to smuggle a piece to his wife, May. So’s she could figure out what the winning ingredients was. But Lucille caught him. Made Jake swaller that rock-hard chunk whole before he could leave the kitchen.”
Lucille looked up from her paper and laughed. “I sure did.”
Tom turned to me for help, his expression too muddled to read.
I sighed. “I told you this was a competition, Tom. My relatives will do anything to get that trophy.”
“But why? Excuse me, but it’s...ugly.”
“They don’t want it for its looks, Tom,” Mom said. “They want it for the braggin’ rights. That trophy makes me queen of the family. I can’t have nobody come steal it and find out my secret recipe, now can I?”
Tom looked like a deer in the headlights.
I smiled. “Congratulations, Tom. Now you know why Uncle Jake won’t set foot in the house anymore.”
A BIT OLDER AND WISER, after lunch Tom kept himself busy and out of Mom’s way. He fetched the Christmas tree stand and a couple of boxes of decorations from the attic. He also helped Dale set up the tree in the corner of the living room. As for me, I kept an eye on my fruitcake. Once it had cooled down enough, I waited until my mother went to the restroom and set my plan in motion. I doused it good with spiced rum, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and hid it in the back of the closet in the spare bedroom where Tom was staying. When Mom came out and saw it was missing, she didn’t say a word.
Later that evening, after washing up the dinner dishes together, Tom and I went for a long walk in the twilight. We held hands as we followed the twin ruts in the orange-clay road that passed by my mother’s house.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Tom.
“Okay. You?”
“I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but I feel homesick. That’s weird, isn’t it? To be here where I grew up, but feel somehow so far from home?”
“No, it’s not weird at all.”
“It’s not?”
Tom hugged me to his chest. “You know the old saying, ‘You can never go home.’”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Why is that?”
“I guess because home is never how we expect it to be, Val. What we think are memories are actually just ideas we’ve played over and over until we’ve idealized them in our minds.”
“You mean like a fairytale?”
“Sort of. I’ve learned over my years o
f interviewing witnesses that memories can be faulty, no matter how much we believe they’re true. So it stands to reason that home’s never the way we remember it, Val, because it never really was that way to begin with.”
“Huh. I never thought about it like that.” I grinned up at Tom. “That’s pretty deep for a cop.”
Tom kissed me on the nose. “Besides, we both know who your real family is.”
“Yeah.” Those dang tears tried to fill my eyes again. It was becoming an annoying habit of late.
THE SKY HAD GROWN DARK by the time Tom and I arrived back at the house from our walk. Mom and Dale were stretched out in their twin recliners, watching their “programs” at an ear-splitting volume. Tom and I walked in and caught the last minute of Let’s Make a Deal. A woman dressed like a lizard won a moped for having a boiled egg in her purse. As she jumped up and down with over-exuberance, Dale switched off the TV.
“Guess that’s it for another day,” he said. “Did y’all happen to see the dog when you was out?”
“No,” Tom and I said together.
“He’s been laid out on the front porch all day,” Mom said.
“Somethin’ wrong with Dawson?” Dale asked. “He didn’t touch his supper.”
Mom looked me dead in the eye. “Huh. I don’t know what could ‘a got into him.”
Chapter Twenty
I WOKE UP ON THE COUCH feeling surprised I was still in one piece. I survived a whole day at my mother’s place. Just two more days to go before Christmas. I can do this!
I rolled off the sofa and padded into the kitchen to make coffee. When I opened the pantry door, a box of cornflakes fell to the floor, giving my heart a jump-start for the morning. The cabinets, normally a somewhat-organized jumble, were in complete chaos. Someone had rifled through the shelves.
I thought about my fruitcake and grinned with smugness. Mom had done her best to track it down. But for once, I’d outwitted her. It was tucked safely away in the back of a closet, guarded overnight by a handsome cop. Even Tom himself didn’t know he was on fruitcake security patrol. I was afraid my mother would find a way to pry the information out of him. I’d waited until Tom was showering last night to sneak into his bedroom and pour another quarter-cup of rum on the fugitive fruitcake. I looked up at the clock. It was now due for another basting....
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