Beach Town (34 page)

When he was satisfied the bacon had rendered enough fat, he added the chopped vegetables to the skillet and turned the heat down a notch.

“Smells great,” Greer said, sipping her beer. “Don't think I've ever had shrimp and grits.”

“We're just getting started,” Eb said. He opened the door of a battered oak Hoosier cabinet to reveal a row of cans, and picked out a couple.

“What have you got there?”

“Ro-Tel tomatoes with green chili peppers. There isn't much a can of this won't improve.” He held up a can with a blue label. “This one's chicken stock. Sometimes, if I'm getting fancy, I'll use vegetable stock or canned seafood stock instead, but I don't have any up here, and I don't feel like going downstairs to the store to get some, so chicken broth it is.”

“I wouldn't want you to get fancy on my account,” Greer said.

He gave her a wry smile. “That didn't come out the way I intended. You know? I'm, uh, I'm trying to find a way to say I'm sorry for being such a dick, as Allie would put it.”

“It's okay. I get that you were trying to protect her. That's a good thing.”

“She's almost eighteen. Ginny says it's too late to protect her from all the bad stuff in the world. But I can't seem to make myself stop trying.”

Greer hesitated, then got up and brushed her lips against his cheek. “That's what I like about you.”

She noted that Eb didn't kiss her back, but he also didn't try to fend her off with the wooden spoon in his hand.

“Really?”

She sat back down at the counter. “That, and your adorable dog.”

Eb poured the chicken broth into the skillet, releasing a cloud of fragrant steam into the air. He stirred vigorously, then dumped in the can of tomatoes and stirred again, before turning the heat down.

He lifted the lid on a large pan on the back burner and looked inside.

“Now I could use your help.”

Greer moved over to the stove.

“Can you watch these?” he asked.

She looked down into a pot of bubbling white grain. “What am I watching for?”

Eb handed her a wooden spoon. “Just keep stirring and don't let the grits burn. We had a nice lady who used to cashier in the store for years. Sweetest little old gal you'd ever meet. One night, Thelma was fixing supper, and she got a phone call from her mama in Tallahassee. She asked her husband to watch the grits. But when she came back into the kitchen, sure enough, the sorry slacker had wandered off to watch the ball game, and let 'em burn. Thelma dumped the whole pot on his head and walked out the door and never went back.”

Greer eyed him suspiciously, but kept stirring. “Is that some kind of local folk humor?”

“Absolutely not.”

While she stirred and stared at the grits, Eb set the table with thick white restaurant plates and shallow soup bowls. He tossed together a salad of romaine lettuce and blood red tomatoes with cucumbers and purple onions, and whisked together a quick vinaigrette.

“Homemade dressing. Looks like you
are
getting fancy on my account,” Greer said.

“No. Fancy would be if I ran downstairs and got buttermilk to make ranch dressing,” he corrected her. “This is just easy. And good. How are my grits coming?”

She held up the wooden spoon for him to inspect.

He nodded approval. “Almost there. Keep stirring.”

Now Eb moved over to his side of the stove and added the peeled shrimp to the pan of gravy.

“Three minutes,” he advised. “Just three minutes on the heat, until the shrimp tails have barely begun to curl up.”

*   *   *

Greer scraped up the last bit of grits and gravy with the side of her fork and sighed happily as she pushed her chair back from the table. “So, so good. Where'd you learn to cook like that?”

“Here and there,” Eb said, sipping his beer. “My mom taught school, and she didn't have any daughters, so she taught Jared and me enough so we could start dinner before she got home from work most nights. I also make a mean pot roast and a decent lasagna.”

“And what did Jared make?”

“Excuses.” He stood abruptly and started clearing their plates. Gunter stayed right on his heels, until Eb tossed him a dog biscuit from a jar on the countertop.

“Let me do the dishes, since you cooked,” Greer said.

She filled the sink with hot, soapy water and dumped in the dishes and silverware while Eb leaned against the counter and supervised.

“How about you? I know your mother was an actress. What was that like? Did she do normal mom kinds of stuff with you? Cooking and all that? Or maybe you had maids and a chef, since she was a big star?”

“No.”

“No, what?”

“No, there was nothing normal about how Lise raised me. No, she didn't teach me how to cook. After my dad left, we moved in with Dearie—that's my grandmother. She worked, too, so we ate a lot of tuna noodle casserole and take-out Chinese. And no, sorry to burst your Hollywood fantasy bubble, but we never had a maid. Lise's stardom lasted just long enough for her to move us into a bungalow of our own before the show got canceled. I became the maid. And the chef.”

“You mentioned your dad. Is he still living?”

“Actually, he's living right here in Florida, in Alachua. I saw him last weekend, for the first time in nearly thirty years.”

“How did it go?”

“Swell. He wants to buy me a pony and take me to Disney World for my birthday.”

Eb took the skillet from her. “Here, let me do that. You'll ruin your manicure.”

“Too late.” Greer held up her hands, with their short-clipped, workmanlike nails. But she stepped aside and let him take over.

“Seems like you're still pretty angry at your folks,” he said, plunging the skillet back into the sink. “You're thirty-five, right? Isn't it time for you to let go of all that crap?”

“That depends on your point of view. Most of my life, my mother let me believe my father was a deadbeat dad who walked away from his family responsibilities when I was five. He never paid child support, that I knew of, and aside from a couple lame visits at Christmas and birthdays while I was still a kid, he never attempted to see me.

“Then, shortly before she got sick, for reasons I still don't understand, Lise and Clint—that's my dad—befriended each other on Facebook. She started dropping heavy hints that she wanted me to contact him, and being Lise, she even gave him my contact information. He texted and called me, and finally, last Sunday, I dropped in and saw him.”

“And?” Eb prompted.

“And nothing. I granted Lise her deathbed wish. As far as I'm concerned, I've done my duty. Clint apparently hopes for more. He showed up at the casino shoot on Friday.”

“Kind of a nice gesture, wasn't it?”

“He has a picture car business—he supplies oddball vehicles for film and television shoots, and he was delivering an old Crown Vic for
Beach Town.
”

“And you weren't exactly thrilled to see him, I take it?”

“I was in the middle of working a twelve-hour day and he wanted to take me out to lunch. Besides, he wants what I can't give.”

“Forgiveness?”

“I just can't … conjure up warm and fuzzy. Not after all this time.”

“Still, isn't he about all the family you have left?” Eb asked.

“Dearie's alive and kicking. That's plenty of family for me,” Greer countered. “Anyway, what about you? You're, what, forty-one? Why are you still so mad at your brother?”

“Who says I'm angry? Jared is who he is. I accept it. I deal with it. There's no anger.”

“When did you last talk to him?”

“I don't know. We're not pen pals.”

Greer found a dish towel and began drying the plates and bowls. “Allie seems to think her dad was framed, or railroaded. Is that possible?”

“No.” Eb shook his head vigorously. “We saw the video. The undercover FDLE guy had film of Jared writing scrips for OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin, in exchange for a fistful of twenties. It was a pill mill. They nailed him dead to rights. Which is why Jared pled out in exchange for a lesser sentence. After he ratted out the real doctor supposedly running the clinic.”

“Does Allie know that?”

“She was only twelve when he was arrested, and thirteen when he went away. It wasn't something we wanted to get into with her at the time. She'd been traumatized enough, getting handed back and forth between her mom and dad and her grandparents, like a cast-off pair of shoes or something. Ginny and I wanted her to have some stability in her life. We told her Jared had committed a crime, and left it at that. She didn't ask a lot of questions.”

Greer thought back to her own childhood and teen years. She'd never asked Dearie or Lise many questions about her parents' marriage, because even at six she sensed the subject was taboo. But that had never stopped her from wondering. And brooding. And blaming.

“Were you and your brother ever close?”

“I don't know.” He held up the skillet and examined it, then plunged it back into the water, mounting a renewed attack with the steel wool. “Why does it matter?”

“I'm just trying to understand the family dynamic here. I was an only child. I used to ache for a big brother or a little sister. One year, I told my mom I wanted Santa to bring me a baby. That's all I asked for. A baby.”

“And what happened?”

“That was the year Lise told me there was no Santa. And then she went on to explain in graphic detail where real babies actually come from. I was eight.”

“That's messed up,” Eb said. He scraped out the last of the grits into the trash, then set the pan in the sink. “We'll let that soak.”

He went to the refrigerator and brought out two more bottles of beer, uncapping both and handing one to Greer.

They sat back down at the kitchen counter. Greer sipped her beer and waited. Gunter waited too, sitting upright, his pudgy body quivering with anticipation.

“Jared was always the golden boy,” Eb said finally. “He never had to work at anything. He was smart, a gifted athlete, and sharp as a tack. He'd get into trouble, but he could always manage to talk his way out of it. It was always somebody else's fault. And everybody bought that, including my parents, because Jared could make you believe the sky was green, when you knew damn well it was really blue.”

“He was the favorite? Did you resent him?”

“He was my big brother. I idolized him.”

“Until?”

Eb reached down and picked up the dachshund, who'd been sniffing his ankles. He rubbed the top of the dog's head, and stroked his long, silky ears.

“I was in ninth grade. My parents went away for the weekend and left Jared in charge. He was supposed to drop me at school in the morning and pick me up after football practice. He did drop me at school, but that was the last I saw of him. He ditched school, ditched me. I had to walk three miles home, after running drills in ninety-plus heat for three hours. When I got home, he was gone. In my mom's car. I didn't know what to think. Hell, I thought maybe he'd been in an accident or something. All weekend I was terrified he was dead.”

“Obviously not. Where'd he go?”

“He and his buddies went to Gainesville, to a frat party. Jared was only a junior, but he was already being recruited by every school in the SEC, including UF. When he got back home that Sunday, a couple hours ahead of my parents, the whole front end of my mom's car was bashed in. He and his buddies had gotten hammered, and he'd managed to rear-end another car at an off-campus bar. Of course, he persuaded my parents that somebody had backed into him at the mall.”

“Somebody else's fault,” Greer said.

“Eventually, I figured out there was something really wrong with my brother. One day I went to the library, and somehow I found a book called the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
DSM, it's called. They wouldn't let me check it out, so I sat there all afternoon, and I read that thing front to back, until I figured out that my big brother was a classic sociopath.”

Greer winced at the description.

Eb's long fingers massaged Gunter's head. The dog rewarded him with a lavish slurp on the chin.

“You said Jared went to med school?”

“Offshore. He'd bounced around to several colleges, dropping out or flunking out. We never got the straight story. My parents wrote the checks and Jared cashed 'em. They totally believed every lie he ever told them. Right up until he went to prison.”

“That must have broken their hearts.”

“It broke my mom's heart, for sure. Dad had already started showing signs of dementia, so I'm not sure he actually understood what was going on.”

“How did he and Allie's mother end up together?”

“Amanda hooked up with Jared when he was home on one of his ‘breaks' from school. When she found out she was pregnant, Jared flatly denied the baby was his, claimed she'd been sleeping with his best friend—which, by the way, was true. Of course, once Allie was born, and it was obvious she was a Thibadeaux, he changed his tune. They got married when Allie was four, but by the time she was five, the marriage was over.”

“The same age as me, when my parents split,” Greer blurted.

“The difference is, you had a mother who stayed put, and raised you,” Eb said. “Amanda had zero maternal instincts. And
her
mother had even less. Allie ping-ponged between Amanda and her relatives for years.”

“Until you moved back to Cypress Key and took her on as one of your projects,” Greer said. “Like the store, and running the town.”

“Allie isn't a project,” he said sharply. “I'll admit, I was terrified at the prospect of raising a kid, especially a little girl. Sarah and I wanted kids, but then she got sick.” He shook his head. “I'm not perfect, and neither is Ginny, but we're doing the best we can for Allie.”