Never Say Never

by Lisa Wingate

  Could be it takes something like a storm blowing through to put a shine back on the things you look right past every day. When Glorietta blew me and the gals back to Daily, our little hometown sure had a shine on it. The Daily folk come out for us like we were the stars of a ticker tape parade!

  I said a little prayer of thanks, and then, of course, I got to work. When you been given a busload of people to feed and bed down, you can’t sit around prayin’ for long. One thing you can count on in our little town is that we know how to roll out the Daily hospitality. Usually, everybody’ll get involved, and just about everybody sure did on this night. Pastor Harve and his bunch from the little church out on Caney Creek cooked up a mess of barbecue, the Methodist ladies made dessert, and the Presbyterians brought over drinks and ice, while the Baptist men cleaned out space in the fellowship hall there and started laying out air mattresses.

  Meantime, Betty Prine and that snooty bunch from the Daily Literary Society didn’t do anything except send over a plate of cookies someone’d took out of their freezer. They put a big ol’ sign on them that said Compliments of the Daily Literary Society so everybody’d know they’d pitched in. Not a one of them showed up to help.

  We got all the guests fixed up for the night without the Literary Society pitching in, anyhow. Even though it was gonna be close quarters, it was better than them shelters in Dallas. On the TV, they were talking about how the shelters were packed to overflowing, and every hotel full, too. The reports about the storm didn’t look good, either. They showed flooding and power lines down, and buildings knocked flat to rubble some places. Down on I-10, there was a house sittin’ smack in the middle of the interstate—a whole house, just like in The Wizard of Oz. Sounded like it might be weeks before the roads were all cleared and the power was back on. After one of the stations showed high water levels down around Landee Bayou, Sister Mona fell on her knees and started cryin’, and I knew she was afraid they wouldn’t have much to go home to.

  Somethin’ like that’ll sure make you look around at your old suit of clothes and be grateful for it, I’ll tell you. Before Imagene, Lucy, and me parted ways, the three of us hugged so hard we sounded like the lunch rush at the old folks’ home—bones and joints crackling and poppin’ all over the place.

  “Ronald’d be here if he knew,” Imagene whispered close to my ear. I guess she’d seen me call home earlier to check if Ronald was back.

  I just nodded and hugged Imagene again and sent her on her way, then I went back in the shop and finished cleaning up the last of the food and sweeping the floor by the door, where everybody’d tracked in mud. Finally, I hunted down Kai’s duffle bag so I could take it home to her. Once that was in hand, I couldn’t find anything else to do, and Sister Mona was trying to chase me out the door. “I’m’ma say you oughta get on home and get some sleep, cher,” she said from the stairs while she was helping old Obeline up to the second floor to bed. “Hooo-ee! You gotta be tired.”

  “I don’t sleep much.” I knew when I got home I’d just lay around with my eyes sprung open. So many things were on my mind that it just kept spinning merry-go-round style, questions and worries goin’ up and down like iron horses, popping in and out of sight.

  My thoughts kept whirlin’ while I was telling Sister Mona goodnight and headin’ home. Guess Ronald just planned to take off down the river the whole time I was gone on my cruise. The thought hurt me in a deep, tender place I didn’t let myself go very often. Least he coulda told me, so I wouldn’ta bothered to fix all that food and leave it in the refrigerator… .

  I felt low, walking in the door, and I was glad Kai was there and the place wasn’t empty. Inside the house, the TV was on the Weather Channel and Kai was on the sofa, fast asleep. She still had her shoes right by her, like she hadn’t moved far since she come in. She must’ve showered, though, because her hair was laying over her shoulder in long, silky blond strands and she was wearing an old T-shirt and sweats that’d been sitting in the rag pile by the washing machine. Poor thing. Kemp should’ve found her some better clothes to change into than that. What in the world was he thinkin’?

  As soon as I got to the sewing room, I answered my own question. There was Kemp, flopped out across the bed with one leg hanging off and his head dangling. I knew right away what’d happened. That boy’d laid down there when he was moving the boxes, and that was all she wrote. Kemp could fall asleep quicker than any normal human. Once he did it, you couldn’t wake him up, either. Those fellas he played with on the baseball teams pulled all kinds of tricks on him. They’d pick him up and put him in the hotel lobby, or throw him in the pool, or cart him to the ball field and lay him out on home plate. One time, he woke up in a car headed to the beach in the dead of winter. He pretended to stay asleep until they got there, and then he surprised the boys and pushed the rest of them in the freezing water. Kemp could give as good as he got, usually.

  Somebody—Kai, I guessed—had covered him with a blanket, which was real sweet, considerin’ he took her bed.

  I looked at that boy and shook my head, thinking, Some Prince Charming you turned out to be. Left the girl to sleep on the sofa and here you are in the bed. Honestly, if that boy ever found a girl who’d put up with him, it’d be a miracle. Over the years, there’d been a lot of gals gawk at Kemp the way Kai did yesterday. He was a looker. Always had been. Most of the way through high school, and even after that, he was mixed up with the gal next door, Jenny Mayfield, but he was goofy as a bat and his mind always turned back to baseball, and after a while that drove every girl crazy, even Jenny. When it comes right down to it, a gal wants to be more important than a game.

  You couldn’t explain that to Kemp, though. He was just like his daddy. Stubborn as the day is long. All my brother could see as a young man was rodeo—right up until the minute he walked into a street dance and met Kemp’s mama, and he couldn’t get a ring on her quick enough. After she died, he just went back to rodeo, dragging Lauren and Kemp along behind him. Maybe that was why Kemp had such a vagabond way about him. He never minded all that traveling around with the baseball teams, and he was willin’ to go through surgery after surgery and spend his evenings with his elbow in a bucket of ice water just to keep his arm going.

  It’s hard to get a girl when you have a bucket of ice water stuck on your arm. I told him that a time or two, but he didn’t listen. Aunt Netta, right now I’ve got my mind on the game, he’d say.

  So far, Kemp was good at baseball, but that boy was a washout in terms of producing chubby-cheeked babies for me to bounce on my knee. At least his sister looked promising since she’d fell head over heels and moved out to California to be near her beau, Nate Heath. I figured any time now I’d be hearing they’d decided to slip off to one of them Elvis wedding chapels in Las Vegas and tie the knot.

  Looking at Kemp, asleep there with his boots on and his mouth hanging open, I had a feeling it wasn’t gonna be near as easy with him. But then, matchmaking ain’t a business for the fainthearted. A real matchmaker’s gotta like a challenge.

  I pulled Kemp’s boots off and pushed his leg up onto the bed, then took off his cap and hung it on the post. He mumbled “Go to second! Go to second!” in his sleep, and I just patted him and kissed his forehead, the way I used to years ago. I went off to bed, wondering what in the world was gonna happen when it was time for spring training and he got the bug again. After the last surgery, the doctors told him if he hurt the arm again, there wouldn’t be a thing they could do for it, and it could cause him trouble all his life, and he wouldn’t even be able to throw batting practice for the high-school kids. I didn’t want to see him get his hopes set on pro ball, then end up crushed one more time. At least right now, he had the coaching job at Daily High. If he went back and tried the minors again, he might end up with nothing at all.

  When I put on my nightclothes and slipped into bed, I didn’t feel snug and happy to be home, like I thought I would. A case of the blues slipped over me, and I laid there with it sittin
g on my chest like a overweight house cat. In a minute, I understood why.

  I was lonesome in my own house. And I had been for a long time.

  The clock downstairs struck four in the morning, and outside the dogs were barking when I finally closed my eyes. The sound took my mind away to the bayou, where Mamee’s old hounds stood at the edge of the water and howled at the johnboats passing by. Off in the swamp, other dogs answered as their masters gathered their gator gigs and crawdad seines, and headed out to gather up what the bayou had to give. Mamee was beside me on the porch. She closed her eyes, deep and black as the shadows themselves, and took in air that hung heavy with damp soil and Spanish moss, and saltwater flowin’ in the Gulf. Around us, the bayou sang a lullaby of wind and cypress, callin’ me home to the dogleg and my mama’s people.

  I could hear Mamee singing on the hill where the two big magnolia trees framed the lane. I knew the story of those trees—one was planted the day my grandparents married, to celebrate their weddin’, and the other was planted when their baby girl, my mama, was born. Mamee’s folks’d always figured she’d marry that boy from the next farm and join the places together, so I always imagined that first magnolia tree was planted on a happy day, but after Mamee told me about Macerio, I wondered.

  In my dream, she tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear her. The wind whipped her voice away. It pulled me back, and back, and back, until Mamee was small, like a little doll under those big ol’ trees. Her hands were cupped to her mouth, but the storm had turned to a hurricane, rain and wind washin’ away everything.

  My body jerked, and I knew I was in my bed. Mamee’s voice, the homeplace, the rice field were gone. The dream faded, and I slipped deeper into the dark, into a quiet place where I couldn’t see the magnolia trees or the field. I slid into the watery silence. I wanted to stay there, to float in the black still, as Mamee called it. She sang an old song sometimes about a young chambermaid who lost her master in battle. When the girl heard about his death, she laid on his bed, closed her eyes, drifted into the black still, and never rose again.

  In the mornin’, I woke up feeling like maybe home was a dream, and sooner or later I’d open my eyes and find myself still in the old hurricane church, or on the bus, or in the van, or maybe just getting ready to head off with Imagene and Lucy on the cruise. Maybe we hadn’t even left yet and I’d dreamed the whole hurricane and Kai, Ernest and his hound dog, and the bus. It was like something I’d dream, us ending up in such a spot, and then the men from Daily coming in to rescue us. On Pearly Parsons’ post-auger truck, of all things.

  Kemp riding up top of the post drill with a chain saw in his hand …

  Heavens to Betsy!

  Imagene and Lucy would get a laugh out of this for sure. When we headed off on our cruise today, I’d tell them all about it.

  The microwave beeped in the kitchen, the pans rattled, and I realized I was smelling something. Coffee. I smelled coffee. I could hear the pot gurglin’.

  No way Ronald would be up getting in the cookware or running the coffee maker. Far as I could ever tell, he didn’t even know where the water went in that thing.

  What in the world …

  I got up, zipped on my old housedress, and trundled across the floor. My legs were stiff—more than usual—and my body ached like I’d danced the jitterbug with a market steer. Right by my bedroom door, in a neat little stack near the hamper, was a pile of muddy clothes. The ones I’d laid out to start off on our cruise.

  I stood looking at them, thinking, That wasn’t any dream, Donetta. All that really happened. Right then, I looked back at the clock by the bed. Good gravy! Here you are sleepin’ in past six thirty and you got people to feed!

  When I got to the hall by the kitchen, I heard voices. Kemp’s and Kai’s. Then the sizzle of bacon hitting the pan. Six slices, and the pan was too hot.

  “Ouch!” Kemp must’ve been standing too close to the stove.

  “Turn the burner down some.” Kai’s voice had a little laugh in it, so that I wondered what they’d been talking about before I got within earshot. I stopped there in the hall, but I wasn’t eavesdropping.

  Really, I wasn’t.

  It was research.

  “Ouch! Shoot! Dadgumit!” Kemp said again. I smelled bacon smoke. That bacon would be black around the edges when he got done with it.

  “Are you sure you’re qualified to operate that thing?”

  Well, isn’t she a sassy little miss this mornin’? I didn’t think she had it in her.

  “I’ll have you know I come from a distinguished line of culinary experts.”

  Listen at him with all the big words. Culinary experts! That boy couldn’t cook his way out of a TV dinner tray. The only thing Kemp knew about cooking was how to put a hot dog on a fork at deer camp. If it wasn’t for me feeding him, he’da starved to death after he moved back to Daily, probably.

  “Want to do the biscuits instead?” Kai offered, and there was a big heap of sugar in that voice. “They have instructions on the can.”

  “Very funny.” My boy turned the bacon and said, “Ouch! –Dadgumit!” again. “I’ve seen this done before.” My, but he was laying on the charm this mornin’. Good for him, but if he thought he was ever gonna impress a gal with his cooking … well … that boy was what we used to call good lookin’ but no good at cookin’.

  “It’s harder than it seems,” he said, making excuses.

  “Lots of things are.” I heard the silverware drawer rattling, and after a minute she started to giggle.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  She giggled some more. “I can’t get the biscuits open, either.”

  Good gravy, the girl can’t even open a can of whop biscuits. Even Ronald can do that. The only reason I had those canned biscuits in the fridge was so if Ronald got hungry for food cooked fresh, there’d be something he could make.

  Surely even Kemp knew enough to cook them things. The boy had survived on his own through four years at college and six years playing baseball.

  “I thought you said the biscuits came with instructions.”

  Maybe he don’t. Maybe he don’t know how to operate a biscuit can. Dear me.

  “It says ‘Push at seam with knife,’ ” she pointed out. “I’m pushing at the seam with a knife, but nothing’s happening.”

  I took a step closer to the kitchen. My fingers started twitching. I wanted to get my hands on the cooking.

  “Here, like this,” I heard Kemp say, and then smack, he whopped that biscuit can on the counter and boom, it exploded open.

  “Holy mackerel!” Kai sounded impressed. “Is it supposed to do that?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” His voice was low, like they were standing real close.

  “About the biscuits?” It didn’t sound like she was talking about biscuits at all. That kind of voice said, Hey there, handsome.

  “Yeah … the … uhhh … biscuits.”

  Forget breakfast, son, you got a live one in the pan. Turn up the heat… .

  Nobody said anything for a minute, and if it wasn’t for that squeaky board in the kitchen doorway, I’da tiptoed up and peeked around the corner.

  “You know, you don’t exactly … cook for yourself … on a cruise ship.” Her voice was breathless and heavy.

  “Guess not.”

  “Actually, I don’t know anything about cooking.”

  “Yeah, me either.”

  “Really? I couldn’t tell.” Kai’s laugh was soft and low, and so was his. I took a step back toward my room, since it sounded so cozy in there. Might be the best thing I could do was go on back to bed so as not to ruin what was cookin’ in the kitchen, all on its own.

  I heard biscuits slapping into the dish and Kai giggling again. “Whose idea was it to make breakfast, anyway?”

  “Yours.”

  Kai gave a cute little cough. “Mine?”

  “You said the least I could do was cook you breakfast.”

  “Well, you did st
eal my bed.”

  Things got quiet again, and I made myself take another step backward. A good matchmaker knows that sometimes the best thing to do is just get out of the way. There was some cookin’ going on in the kitchen. It didn’t have much to do with food, but there was some cookin’ going on. I could feel the heat all the way down the hall.

  I could even smell the smoke.

  Oh heavens!

  I really did smell smoke.

  Chapter 16

  Kai Miller

  The black cloud billowing down the hall must have awakened Donetta, because by the time the smoke detector went off, she was in the kitchen.

  “Good gravy!” she gasped, yanking the flaming pot off the stove. “Y’all don’t have to cook. I’da done it.” That was probably a nice way of saying, Get out of my kitchen before you blow something up. She was actually pretty calm, considering that we’d almost burned the place down. “Watch out, hon,” she warned as she took the flaming pot and headed for the carport door.

  I looked at Kemp, and he shrugged with his palms raised, then picked up the bacon box and looked at the label, as if this were somehow the bacon’s fault. “Guess we could start over.” He opened the cabinet, searching for another pan.

  Donetta had other ideas, and one thing I’d learned about Donetta in our short time together was that her ideas became your ideas whether you planned for them to or not. She wanted Kemp and me to get dressed and go have breakfast at the Daily Café, even though it was only a little after six thirty, and as Kemp pointed out, the café didn’t open until seven.

  “Now, hon,” she admonished. “You know that’s just for regular folks. We ain’t regular.”

  Kemp’s lips curved into a smirk. “They’ve got medication for that now.”

  Bracing a hand on her hip, his aunt hiked up one side of her housedress, revealing a skinny white leg with a fuzzy sock balled at the bottom. “Kempner Rollins, you just quit that being smart, y’hear?” She grabbed a wooden spatula and shook it at him, spraying bacon grease across the kitchen. “I’m about ready to medication you.”