Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi

by Nanci Kincaid

  “Guilty.” He smiled.

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you?” She seemed jumpy and fiddled with the hem of her T-shirt as she spoke. “You know, maybe when you get off work?” She had the slightest perspiration above her top lip. She was definitely nervous. It was definitely attractive.

  “We can talk now. Why not?” He took off his apron with the carne asada stains and the spilled beer on it and laid it on an empty table. He reached for her hand and led her through the tiny, hot kitchen, where Maria and some of her relatives were shouting at each other in Mexican slang. They usually kept the kitchen door open to the alley in hopes that maybe some air might stir. Truely led Jesse out into the alley and closed the kitchen door to the loud complaints of the kitchen help. It was dark in the alley except for a dim streetlight down on the corner. Jesse’s hand was sweaty in his. “I guess you must wonder …” she started to explain.

  On instinct Truely stepped nearer her, pressing her body against the kitchen wall with his own, touching first her face, then her cool, tangled hair. He began kissing her. At first she seemed startled, even resistant for a moment, as if she might bolt and run. But the moment passed and she leaned into Truely, pulling him close. Truely had kissed plenty of girls. But this was not the same. This was something else entirely. For a couple of seconds she pulled away and looked at him. “Why didn’t you call me?” She sounded genuinely bewildered.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said.

  This was an experience Truely had only ever heard about from dead poets and awful cornball movies that made him cry no matter how hard he tried not to. He had dismissed both as foolish. But being near Jesse this way made him want to surrender his soul, to plead guilty to something he could never take back. He was ready to change his mind about any vague plans he’d ever had before touching this woman. Truely felt his future ricochet out before him in small shock waves. He knew his life was about to unfold in some new direction, but was too distracted by the warmth of her body to care.

  Maria pushed the kitchen door open, saying, “Arriba, arriba. Está más caliente en la cocina.”

  The door flew open and banged hard against Truely’s back, nearly knocking the two of them to the ground. Truely barely noticed. But it embarrassed Jesse, Maria standing there in her soiled apron, wagging her finger, scolding them. Jesse began to laugh.

  “Bad timing, Maria,” Truely said. “Muy mal.”

  “Bastante.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss him, then wiped her hands on the dirty apron and said, “Come eat now, niño. Bring the girl. We close up soon.”

  “You hungry?” Truely asked Jesse.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  “I hope you like tacos.”

  And as luck would have it, she did.

  THEY’D BEEN TOGETHER a few months when Truely invited Jesse to his sister’s house for the holidays. He was a little nervous about it. If he’d had his way maybe he’d have preferred to take her home to Mississippi, but his parents had spent the last two Christmases at Courtney’s house. It was the new Noonan family Christmas tradition — his mother and daddy, Hastings and Courtney’s special guests, not required to lift a finger. Back home in Hinds County his daddy didn’t even climb on the roof anymore and string flashing lights around the eaves of the house, or strap that old plastic Santa to the chimney like he used to. His mother said she was glad, since she worried he might slip and fall off the roof and break a bone. “We don’t need all those decorations anymore anyway, just the two of us, out on a county road like that,” she said. “Your daddy puts up a little tree in the den and I bake a little bit. We’re content with that.”

  Truely felt a twinge of regret. He had loved those Christmases back home. It was different at Courtney’s house. A million times nicer in every way. But somehow not quite as good. Maybe it was just a matter of growing up — of having to. “This is almost too perfect,” Jesse had whispered when they walked into Courtney’s fabulously decorated house. “Like life inside a Christmas card.”

  Truely would later feel that witnessing Courtney’s life had helped Jesse fall in love with him — that she began to imagine that they could have the same sort of happiness and prosperity, live the same sort of gentle and generous life that his sister did. He didn’t really care what it was that had made Jesse love him. He was just so damn happy about it that he didn’t want to ask a lot of questions and risk ruining things.

  Hastings had hit dozens of home runs in real estate and Courtney was his living proof. They’d bought acreage in Monte Soreno and built a handsome stone house on a hillside. Truely had been as dazzled as anybody. He’d never seen anything like it. Here, Courtney showcased Hastings’ success and good taste — especially at the holidays. Courtney always went all out for the holidays. She’d learned that from their mother and daddy. Jesse got into it too in an appreciative way, like an audience member at a great theatrical performance.

  Their first holiday together was great. Food, frolic and festivity. Gifts and gratitude. Roaring fires and candlelight dinners, mornings walking Courtney’s dogs through the woods, afternoons in town dropping big bills into the Salvation Army buckets, four childless adults scoping out the Toys “R” Us and hauling the loot over to the Toys for Tots bins.

  His parents arrived from Mississippi two days before Christmas Eve bringing homemade divinity sweating in aluminum foil, fresh shelled pecans to butter and roast, and deer sausage his daddy had had especially ground. They brought modest gifts for everyone wrapped in inexpensive Christmas paper with stick-on bows — socks, underwear, mimeographed recipe books put out by the women from the Hinds County Baptist Church, a sack of bulbs for the garden, Christmas tree ornaments made out of pine cones sprayed silver with red ribbons hand tied — and were happily embarrassed by the elaborate gifts Courtney had waiting for them under the tree — a leather jacket for his daddy, diamond earrings for his mother. Truely appreciated seeing his parents spoiled a little. He loved Courtney for going to the trouble and Hastings for encouraging her.

  He and Jesse, newly in love, projected forward to the lives that awaited them full of holidays just like this — only with lots of kids and pets and socially responsible giving and elves and reindeer and all of the wonders of believing in miracles and living a purposeful life.

  IT WAS JESSE who proposed to Truely. He had been waiting until the time was perfect, plotting some sort of magical moment they would always cherish, when one afternoon when Truely picked Jesse up after school where she was teaching fourth grade, she got in the car, dropped her satchel to the floor and said, “True, let’s get married. You want to?”

  He married her in her parents’ backyard. It was a small, simple wedding, just family and a few significant friends. His parents had flown out and been quiet and gracious. He was proud of them. He knew they didn’t like being in even a small sea of strangers — something that rarely ever happened back home in Hinds County. Courtney bought his daddy a new black suit — and he let her. She helped her mother chose a beige dress and took her to have her hair done. To Truely’s surprise his mother liked being fussed over. Anything Courtney suggested — earrings, perfume, manicure — his mother agreed to and enjoyed. His parents stayed with Courtney and Hastings, something they seemed to have become comfortable doing.

  Truely’s wedding day was a blur, really. At one point Jaxon, after a bit too much champagne, had put his arm around Truely and said, “Man, if Jesse messes this up, that’s it for her. I mean it. I’ve forgiven Jesse a lot, but I won’t forgive her if she breaks my guy’s heart. She needs to get it right this time.” Truely had never heard Jaxon talk this way about Jesse. He was stunned and irritated, but Melissa came and scolded him for drinking too much and led him away — and so he let it go. Jaxon was a beer drinker. He needed to stay away from the hard stuff.

  Naturally Jesse looked beautiful on their wedding day. Courtney talked her into getting her makeup done professionally for the occasion. He hadn’t wanted her to do it, but Courtney convinced
her that the wedding photos would be better if she was professionally made up. Jesse wore her mother’s yellowing wedding dress and flowers in her hair. She started her period the night before, unexpectedly, at the rehearsal dinner. Her skin broke out a little too. Then on the day of the wedding she cried when she saw that the wedding cake was not exactly what they had ordered.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.” It was like the refrain of a song he was singing.

  “Jitters, I guess,” she explained to Truely. “You only get married once, you know. You want everything right.”

  “Everything is right,” he said.

  “Of course. Yes, everything really is right.” She put her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulder. “You’re right, True. I know that. I’m sorry.”

  “A woman should never be sorry on her wedding day,” he teased.

  Other than those two conversations he didn’t remember much. He couldn’t tell you much about their vows, or who came, or what they wore or ate or said. If they didn’t have an album of photos he would hardly remember a thing. All he knew was it was the happiest, most significant day of his life.

  AFTER HE AND JESSE were married the holiday rituals continued. Well, actually they improved. Hastings and Courtney moved a couple of times, their houses constantly upgraded. Some of the holiday traditions were fine-tuned too. Courtney and Jesse combined their philanthropic passions and began more elaborate Christmas shopping rituals for needy kids. Days of dumping random gifts in the Toys for Tots bins were over. They shopped for the poorer kids in Jesse’s classroom now, as always, but they also got lists of wishes and sizes from Mrs. Leong at the Department of Social Services over in San Jose and every merchant Angel Tree in town and set out to buy every item on every list. These invisible children with troubled lives became the primary focus of the holidays, overshadowing Christmas dinner or the opening of gifts or midnight church service — or anything.

  Courtney and Jesse threw themselves into it wholeheartedly. They sat in the kitchen and plotted for hours, baked cookies in the shapes of snowflakes and bells, stuffed the turkey with corn-bread and pecans, wrapped gifts and more gifts, addressed last-minute cards, sipped wine, whispered and laughed. That was the real music of the season, their contagious laughter.

  Six

  TRUELY MADE PREDICTABILITY into a lucrative career. He respected predictability — he didn’t apologize for that. Before they were even out of college he and Jaxon, his partner at TuBros Inc., had engineered a computer programming service that enabled people — and later businesses — to access vast amounts of public information relative to their existing or potential customers: what kind of cars they drove, what sort of items they bought regularly, restaurants they frequented, places they traveled, causes they donated to, names and ages of their children. It had begun innocently enough. Jaxon’s divorced mother was dating some guy he didn’t like and he set out to discover what he could about the dubious suitor. He called it a security check. Sure enough the guy was trouble — although to Jaxon’s dismay the bad news did not deter his lonely mother.

  It was unbelievable what you could find out about a person. It was just for kicks at first, to see if they could do it, tap into the public domain online. Less than eight years later, when they sold their company, Snoop.com, for millions of dollars, no one was more amazed than Truely. He was twenty-eight at the time and would never have to work again. Except he really liked to work.

  He and Jaxon had since formed a new start-up, and at this very moment they had an offer on the table to buy them out again, which they had no interest in accepting. This time they had designed an ergodynamic chair with a computer and all manner of technologically induced comfort installed in the actual structure of the furniture. You could work without a desk, sitting in perfect lumbar position, get a push-button massage, or a heat pack if you liked, flip your laptop out of the chair arm, and go to work. There was a cup holder that would keep your coffee hot or your water cold. The first round of prototypes was exciting.

  The idea had come from Truely watching the way Jesse set up to do her schoolwork at night. She never sat at a desk. Instead she had a big comfortable chair that folded into assorted positions — and reclined for napping. She had it rigged up with her heating pad for when she had cramps, a car massage thing she had gotten for Christmas, her laptop, a pouch full of paperwork, and a snap-on cup holder where she kept her bottled water. She claimed to hate the chair because it was so ugly, but she couldn’t bring herself to part with it. She sat there nearly every night grading papers and preparing for the next day. Truely thought if it worked for her — this recliner/workstation — then maybe it would work for other people.

  They consulted a chiropractor and a young high-tech furniture designer. The collaboration had been pretty wild. A long shot at best. In the beginning they had advertised their first clumsy attempt at the chair on TV, an amateurish infomercial. Within a year they had sold thousands of these high-tech chairs and were invited to debut at a prestigious tech show in Las Vegas. Now they were improving the product, diversifying it, paying homage to the high art of good design. Who said you needed to sit upright at a desk to be productive anyway? Not in the new, casual, free-thinking, high-tech world. People were looking for ways to be comfortable while they worked. To reduce strain on their necks and backs, to eliminate carpal tunnel syndrome and chronic stress. It wasn’t hard to figure out what people needed next. They were people.

  Truely hadn’t expected his career to skyrocket this way. His success was based on accessing and selling predictability in one form or another. He was the idea man. Jaxon made things happen. But money didn’t buy happiness in all realms. This wasn’t a news flash. Truely didn’t consider himself a guy who needed to learn this lesson since he felt he’d been born already knowing it. It seemed a lesson better suited to other guys, who were inclined to be slow learners. And yet, here he was, beginning to prove what he had been born knowing.

  For example, when his daddy got sick it didn’t matter how much money was in Truely’s bank account, he couldn’t buy his daddy’s way back to health. Instead he bought him a riding lawn-mower, which he accepted and appreciated. He also tried to buy his daddy a new truck. He had never had a new truck in his life, always a used one he bought cheap out of a classified ad and had to rebuild and coax into running — but he refused to accept it. “I don’t need a truck,” he said. “I got a truck.”

  He and Jesse took a cue from his daddy. Even after the Snoop .com buyout they continued living their simple lives in the same downtown loft. Jesse continued to teach in the public schools. Truely got up and threw on some jeans every morning and headed to his downtown office on Mariposa Street in the warehouse district on the bay, and once or twice a week drove over to San Jose to their Silicon Valley high-rise offices there. Of course, he and Jesse traveled and vacationed at a new level, she bought some nicer things for their loft, he got himself the pickup truck of his dreams — even if his daddy didn’t want one, he did — although he rarely took it out of the garage. They helped out Jesse’s family a little, paid her brother’s college tuition, endowed the library at Jesse’s elementary school, gave money to good causes. Truely had taken advice from Hastings and invested in real estate — some office buildings and two small apartment complexes, a couple of large plots of undeveloped acreage. They’d had some medical expenses too — a luxury of sorts — but otherwise success had not changed their lives that much. As Jaxon liked to say, “Money doesn’t cure you of worry — it just changes what you worry about.”

  Seven

  HIS DADDY HAD BEEN OUT of the hospital several weeks and was doing a lot better. Truely had spoken to his mother only two days before and it sounded to him like some of the music had come back into her voice. She recounted all that his daddy had eaten that day. “His appetite is back,” she announced.

  She went on to describe the two of them sitting together out in the yard that afternoo
n watching as a flock of wild geese landed in the pond. Earlier in the week his daddy had felt well enough to go to church. That same afternoon, after lunch, he’d gotten on his new riding lawnmower and driven himself around the yard, pausing to pick up any fallen twigs or paper litter that had blown into the yard, sort of cleaning things up. “He likes that riding lawnmower you got him,” his mother told Truely.

  When she called days later to say his daddy had taken a turn for the worse and Truely and Jesse needed to come home to Mississippi right away — just as quick as they could — it caught him by surprise.

  THE DAY OF HIS DADDY’S FUNERAL, Courtney gave Truely a couple of her Valium. “Stay by Mother’s side,” she told him. “She needs you.” He was at his best when he had a specific assignment and knew exactly what was expected of him. He flourished inside those parameters. He didn’t know how, but Courtney and he both made it through the service and burial without falling apart. It didn’t hurt that Jesse and Hastings were watching them like hawks, ready to rescue them anytime rescue was required. That helped. They’d miraculously managed to be appropriately gracious and grateful to the friends and neighbors who came to mourn their daddy’s death with them.

  This included Mrs. Seacrest, his old American history teacher, an attractive, middle-aged woman, and the only person in all of Hinds County and maybe the world that Truely had ever really hated. She had been a good teacher who made him work for his grade. She’d made history seem relevant and America seem destined for greatness — two things he’d liked believing. He struggled for a B in her class. He’d actually respected her then. His hatred had come later, after Courtney had moved to California, when he had inadvertently witnessed a hateful aspect of Mrs. Seacrest’s own personal history that repulsed him. He’d ended up in a virtual fistfight with his daddy over it too. He had despised the woman ever since — and made it no secret.