by R. R. Banks
I reached into the basket and started pulling out plates and bowls of food. Some of them I could tell what they were immediately, but others I figured were relatively new offerings and I was going to have to consult with the menu to figure out what exactly it was that he had served us. I started arranging the plates on the quilt, ran out of room, and handed the last couple to Richard, who placed them beside him.
“What is all this?” he asked.
“The specialties of Bubba Ray’s Rojo Cuelo Cantina,” I said.
“Rojo Cuelo Cantina?” Richard asked as if he thought, or maybe hoped, that he had heard me wrong.
I nodded.
“Yep. His grandfather was from Mexico. At least that’s what they call it. Truth is, his daddy ran off after sticking up a Wells-Fargo truck and took his mama with him, not knowing that she was pregnant. She ended up having him there after they had changed their names and started working as avocado pickers.”
“They became migrant workers…in Mexico?” Richard asked. I nodded, and he nodded back, hoping to find some common ground in the gesture. “What did they change their name to?”
“Ramirez,” I said.
“Ramirez. Bubba Ray Ramirez.”
“Yep. So, when the heat died down they came back here, his grandfather got married, had a son, who had a son, and there we have Bubba Ray.”
“Bubba Ray. Bubba Ray Ramirez.”
“Yes.”
“That has a nice ring to it.”
“Well, their time in Mexico apparently gave them more than just their musical names. They picked up an affinity for the food there and when they came back here, Bubba Ray’s great-grandfather decided he was going to open the first-ever Mexican restaurant in Whiskey Hollow. You can imagine how well that went over. So, they started tweaking the recipes a little at a time and by the time that Bubba Ray took over, he completely switched up the menu to the delightful creations that you see here today. Mexican Southern fusion.”
“That sounds promising.”
I laughed as he turned over the menu and scanned the listed items.
“Country Quesadilla and Warm Creamy Salsa?” he asked.
I gestured toward a plate and bowl beside me.
“Just don’t call it a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. He hates that.”
“What is it then?”
“It’s a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup,” I told him. “But there’s just the one piece of bread and it has some chili peppers and fancy cheeses in it.”
“You know,” he said, “I think I’ll try some of those Thick-Style Chips,” he said.
I picked up a plate of flattened, fried biscuits and a small bowl of melted pimento cheese.
“You have to try the queso,” I told him. “The secret to really enjoying a meal from Bubba Ray’s is that you have to deconstruct. You get your food and then you have to kind of take it apart into its individual elements before you can really understand it.”
“He does know that the name of the restaurant is wrong, right? I’ve taken immersion Spanish classes for work and I can tell you for certain that that’s not right.”
“Bubba Ray might be exceedingly proud of his faux-Mexican heritage, but it didn’t inspire him enough to get through the two years of high school Spanish. He does, however, watch all of his sports broadcasts in Spanish.”
“He does?” Richard asked, sounding surprised.
“Yep. He has absolutely no idea how soccer is played or who is leading the league in baseball this year.”
“Good thing there aren’t any bookies around here.”
I nodded my acknowledgement and handed him half of a Chicken and Waffles Taco.
“Jeb and I have a history you know,” I said, catching sight of the embroidery on his shirt again.
“You do?” he asked, looking around to try to find a place to set the food and then looking back at me.
“Mmm-hmmm. We were supposed to get married.”
“You were engaged to Jeb?” he asked.
All the polishing and finishing and decorum in the world couldn’t cover up the horror in those words.
“Not exactly,” I said. “We were born right around the same time and our fathers decided that it would be just perfect for us to get married when we grew up. That way we could combine all of the land and our family’s assets, and climb right to the top of the grand power struggle that is Whiskey Hollow.”
“You could have been Lula,” he said.
I nodded.
“I could have,” I said. “So, you see, I understand social pressures.”
“I see that,” Richard said. “What happened with Jeb?”
“It just didn’t work out,” I said. “Too many family politics. Different values. I wanted to get the hell out of here and he wanted to stay forever. I couldn’t stand being near him for more than five minutes and the thought of waking up beside him even once made my stomach turn. You know, classic conflicts.”
Richard laughed and took a bite of one of the chips. He gave a somewhat surprised sound of approval and swallowed.
“The romantic tragedy of our times,” he said.
“Speaking of which,” I said, knowing a good segue when I heard it. “How is Flora?”
He winced and lowered the plate of food he held to his lap. He finished chewing the bite of taco-seasoned fried chicken in his mouth and let out a long breath.
“That’s actually what I came here to talk to you about.”
I braced myself, feeling the fun rapport that we had managed to find again drain away. Before he could open his mouth again, though, we heard whooping and hollering coming from across the field and the squealing of ATVs cutting through the grass.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Just a couple of teenagers out to wreak havoc and enjoy the summer night,” I said. “Probably hopped up on moonshine.”
“Moonshine?”
“I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it when you were picking out Big Blue here,” I said. “Cletus’s Clementine Moonshine. His pride and joy. It’s that little twist of clementine at the end that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. He bottles it up and gives it out at Christmas. That’s how most of the teenagers get a hold of it. The bottles make wonderful doorstops. Tie-downs for picnic blankets. Window cleaner. Not so much adult consumption.”
I could see Richard’s face fall and I tilted my head at him.
“What?” I asked.
He turned and pushed the sliding window on the back of the cabin open. He reached inside and came up a second later with a bottle of moonshine. I laughed.
“You bought a bottle?” I asked.
He reached in again and came out with another.
“I bought two.”
I threw back my head and laughed harder, pressing my hand to the side of my belly.
“I thought that we could celebrate,” he said.
“Celebrate what?”
“How close we are to the baby being born.”
“You bought unregulated moonshine to celebrate a still-pregnant woman?”
“It probably wasn’t the best choice.”
I shook my head.
“No. Probably not.”
He sat the bottles down beside him and leaned slightly closer to me.
“I wanted to talk to you about what happened that night at the restaurant,” he said.
The smile melted from my face and I shook my head.
“I don’t think that we have anything else that we need to talk about, Richard. I saw you and Flora together at the hotel. I don’t need any of the pandering or the big sweeping romantic explanations. You and I had fun. You needed a little break from her and I was convenient. I understand. We don’t believe so much in the fairy tales out here.”
“Rue, that’s not what happened.”
“Of course, it is. She got cold feet about the baby and left, so I was the warm body you needed to get you through, but when she changed her mind, you realized that she really was w
hat you wanted. After all, she’s what you’ve been looking forward to your whole life.”
“I wouldn’t really say I’ve been looking forward to it.”
“Well, she’s what you’ve expected. It’s easier to just go with what you know. I get that. It’s your future. It’s your baby. What I felt, or what I thought that you felt, doesn’t matter.”
“But Rue, that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you…”
I shook my head, a wistful smile coming to my lips and a veil of tears covering my eyes.
“When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to make me oatmeal raisin cookies. There was nothing like coming into the house and smelling Grammyma’s cookies baking. They were my favorite thing in the world. Then one day I came home and there was a big plate of oatmeal raisin cookies sitting on the counter. When I reached for one, though, she told me that they weren’t for me. She had made them for a friend of hers from church. I was really upset, but there was nothing that I could do. She didn’t make them for me.”
“I don’t think I’m following you,” Richard said.
I sighed painfully.
“Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you want something or how much you think that you should have it. Sometimes, it’s just not meant to be yours.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rue
I wished that I could get out of the truck and run away. I didn’t want to be a part of this moment any longer. When I looked up at Richard, though, he didn’t look upset like I would expect him to. Instead, he had the hint of a smile on his lips.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “You do have it. Or at least you could, if you want it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I saw you with Flora at the hotel. I saw the way that she was hugging you.”
“She was hugging me goodbye,” Richard said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Richard tried to come toward me through all of the food and reached for my hand.
“Flora had changed her mind,” he said, and I felt my heart sink. “But not about the baby. Just about me. It was a complete surprise when she called me that day. I didn’t even know that she was back in the city. I had absolutely no intention of seeing her, but she said that it was really important that we meet, that it had to do with the baby. As horrible as it sounds, until that moment I hadn’t even thought about the fact that she still had anything to do with the baby. She had been gone for so long that I had just put it behind me that she was still legally involved. When she reminded me of that I knew that I needed to see her. The plan was to meet her at her hotel, iron everything out, and then still get to the restaurant in time for our date.”
“So, what happened? What do you mean she changed her mind about you, but not the baby?”
“When I got to the hotel I could tell that she was scheming from the first second I saw her. She was wearing one of my favorite dresses and the perfume that I got her for her birthday last year.”
I held up a hand, squeezing my eyes closed for a brief moment.
“I really don’t need to hear all of this,” I said.
“The point is, none of that mattered to me. I didn’t care what she looked like or smelled like or even anything that she had to say.”
“What did she have to say?”
“She told me that she had been thinking a lot about us since she had been gone and realized that we had had a good thing going before we decided that we were going to have a baby. She saw all of the other people our age getting married and having these perfect lives, and she realized that she wasn’t going to get by in society without a husband, much less maintain the position that she wanted by not having me.”
“How romantic,” I said bitterly.
“Exactly.”
“So, what? She told you that she was jealous of all of the other people because they were married, and she realized that she had made a royal screw up by leaving you.”
“Yes, but she didn’t want to go back to what we had been. She wanted to go back before that. She wanted to go back before what she thinks is the point when everything went wrong between us.”
“When you decided to have a baby,” I said.
“Yes. She thinks that I put too much pressure on her to start a family and then when we found out that she couldn’t get pregnant, it just made things worse between us. The thing is, though…that was a lie.”
“What?” I asked, shocked by what he was telling me.
He nodded.
“I didn’t tell you before, because I didn’t know if it would matter to you, but I found out that she lied to me about it. When she went to the doctor she actually found out that she was perfectly fine.”
“Why did she lie to you about that?”
“When I called her out for it she said that even then she wasn’t convinced about the whole having a baby idea. She decided to lie about not being able to have a baby hoping that I would feel sorry for her and drop the whole idea. When I mentioned that we could consider surrogacy, she didn’t really have any way to argue with it. She had made such a fuss about wanting to be a mother, saying that she didn’t want to do a baby contract would only seem strange. I think she hoped that either the process wouldn’t work, or she could pretend to be so devastated by the whole thing that I would give up on it.”
I shook my head.
“I’m sorry, I’m not following you. Why does any of this matter?”
“When we met at the hotel she said that she wanted us to go back to before all of that and be just us again. We could go forward with our formal engagement, get married, and move on with our lives. She even suggested that one day we could have a baby of our own.”
“But what about this baby?” I asked, rubbing my belly where I could feel the baby rolling around in response to the spicy food I had eaten.
Richard reached into his pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. He handed it to me and I took it with shaking hands, unfolding it before looking down at it because I worried that if I looked at it for even a few seconds before opening it I never would. When I looked down I saw that it was a photocopy of a legal document, the letterhead indicating that it was from the surrogacy lawyer that we had been using. I read through it, my heart beating faster the further I got through the complex legal jargon. I read through it twice more before I dared look at the bottom of the page. When I did, my breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t dare allow myself to believe that I understood what those words said.
“She gave this to you?” I asked, my voice powdery.
Richard nodded.
“It completely releases her of all parental rights to the child. In essence, it says that she is no longer a part of the contract agreement and that she is to have no further involvement or obligations. She told me that she wanted me to sign one as well and get you to sign further papers nullifying the original contract. We would still pay you the full amount of the contract fee and all of your expenses, plus and extra inconvenience fee.”
“Inconvenience fee?” I asked, horrified just by the way that that sounded. “Because it’s just an inconvenience to suddenly have the people who wanted me to be pregnant in the first place to suddenly decide that they don’t want the baby?”
“According to her,” Richard said. “But that just shows even more the type of person that she is. She even suggested that we could help you find some sort of alternative situation.”
“Like farming out the baby to another couple?” I shuddered with the anger that was building through me. “So, is this what you came here to tell me? That Flora wants you back as long as you don’t come with a baby in tow, and that you want me to sign papers saying that you can just abandon the baby that you made and leave me to figure out what to do with it?”
****
Richard
I could see the pain and anger in Rue’s eyes and it was cutting through me. I never wanted to see that, I never wanted her to go through a single moment of heartache.
/> “Rue, I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Don’t you see? I don’t want you to be left with the baby, and I don’t want to be either. This is our baby, and I want us to raise her together.”
There were a few moments when she just stared back at me as if she didn’t fully understand what I was saying to her. Then I saw her eyes widen slightly.
“You do?” she asked.
I nodded, pushing some of the plates out of the way so that I could get closer to her.
“Of course, I do. I never stopped wanting to. I meant every single word I said to you when I told you that I saw our lives together and that I couldn’t imagine anyone being the mother of my child but you. I told Flora that it didn’t matter what she said or what she thought, that we were never going to have a life together. I told her that we had never really had a life together at all, and that there was nothing that either of us could do to try to force that to happen between us.” I slid closer to Rue and took her hands. “I told her that I was in love and that I couldn’t imagine going through life without that woman, or the baby I hoped we would raise together.”
“You did?” she asked, her voice filled with tears and barely above a whisper.
“I did. Lying to me about not being able to have a baby is the best thing that Flora ever did for me because it led me to you. I knew from the first moment that I saw you, even on a security camera screen, that there was something about you that was different, something that was special that I needed to know. Something inside me even then knew that finding you was the key to me having a happy life. I didn’t handle things the way that I should have. I shouldn’t have gone to see her without talking to you first. I should have made sure that you knew what was going on from the very first moment that I realized she had lied to me. I can’t do anything about that now. I can’t go back and fix those mistakes, though there is nothing in this world that I would like more than if I could. But I’m here with you now. I can look at you. I can touch you. I can tell you finally that I love you and I want more than I could ever express to you for us to be the family that we were always meant to be.”
