Hand-Me-Down Love (18 page)

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The last time Sean
texted Marla, saying simply “I’m okay,” she didn’t text him
back. He couldn’t blame her for that. He had dropped off the edge
of the world. He had to keep going, maybe until he reached the bottom
of the world and worked himself back up.

One Saturday night
in mid-June, Sean sat on his barstool and Crystal waited on him. They
had talked a lot at that point, telling each other just about
everything about their lives. But Sean had never mentioned Marla to
her. That felt sacred to him somehow. Pete didn’t come in that
night, which wasn’t worrisome. He sometimes didn’t show up, but
Sean was always glad when he did. But he didn’t that night.

“
I get off when
the bar closes,” Crystal said that Saturday night. “You want to
go somewhere else after?”

Sean didn’t know
where Crystal was going with that. “Like where?” he asked.

“
Well, I know a
place near here that’s spectacular at night. The moon shines on it
and it’s like you’re in another world. And, I see it’s a full
moon tonight, so it’s perfect.”

Sean couldn’t
think of a reason not to go. He wished he had Cody with him, but he
didn’t.

“
Okay. Sounds
interesting.”

A few minutes later,
the bar closed and Crystal walked from behind the bar taking her
apron off and slinging it on the counter. She jangled keys in her
hand. “I’ll drive,” she said.

Sean and Crystal
walked out of the bar into the small parking lot. She led him to a VW
and he crammed himself into the passenger side. “This is a cool
car,” he said.

“
Thanks. I got it
when I was in college and never could let go of it. It’s a ’68.”

Crystal drove away
from the bar and down the main road. They drove for about ten miles
or so—Sean wasn’t sure—before Crystal turned off at a sign that
said Saligu Forest. The asphalt road soon turned to dirt, but Crystal
kept going.

“
Do you know where
you’re going?” Sean asked, concerned.

“
Oh, yeah. I used
to come out here all the time when I was in high school. Told my
parents I was spending the night with my friend and came out here
camping with my boyfriend. I’ve been here lots of times. Don’t
worry.”

She navigated the VW
through what looked like a spaghetti of roads and Sean knew he
couldn’t have found his way out of there if he had to. After a few
minutes on the dirt roads, Crystal said, “There it is,” and
turned the VW onto a narrower road, more like a wide path really, and
drove another minute. She pulled over to the side of the road.

“
We’re here,”
she said. She reached into the tiny backseat and pulled out a large
flashlight. She groped around and pulled out what looked like a
rolled up blanket with straps around it. What had Sean gotten himself
into? “Just follow me,” she said getting out of the car. Sean got
out and walked over to Crystal, who had the flashlight on and was
shining it onto what looked like a path in the woods. What choice did
Sean have but to follow her?

Chapter
Nineteen

Marla didn’t know
what to think about Sean anymore. It’s true, she could have called
him, she could have emailed him, or she could have texted him. But
she didn’t. His lack of contact told her that he wanted to be out
of touch. One night in April she missed him so much, was so concerned
about him, that she thought of driving to McGinley’s Gap and
searching him out. She thought about that idea for hours that night
as she tossed and turned. By morning, she had given up on it. She
realized her presence would probably be an intrusion on Sean and the
process he was going through. She had to leave him alone.

And then Michael had
come by the shop, and he kept coming by over the weeks that followed.
He was the same old Michael, still wanting to visit bars. But he was
different, too. He was, after all, a very successful businessman, and
that was attractive to Marla. He took her to nightclubs in Mobile,
where they danced the night away. Or to Gulf Shores, where they
visited pubs and bars and restaurants.

It was a lot of
activity in Marla’s quiet life, but she needed the distraction.
Michael had started taking her arm and holding her hand and she let
him. She was starving for companionship. He started kissing her when
he took her back to the shop, and she let him. But she didn’t
invite him up to her apartment—she just couldn’t do that—and he
never pushed her.

By late May, it
began to dawn on Marla that Sean might not ever come back to Bay
Point. He had been gone so long and he was out of touch with Marla
and she was out of touch with him. She began to think that their love
affair had just been a reaction to everything that had happened,
their horrible loss. And they had been bound together by that loss,
reaching out to each other for the only comfort they could find. She
hadn’t forgotten that she promised Meredith she would look after
Sean, but how could she do that if he wasn’t even there? She had
done her best, but he was gone now. He didn’t need her to look
after him.

One of Marla’s
hardest days came on June Third, Meredith’s birthday. She had
turned twenty-eight last year on that day, days before her death.
Marla wanted to commemorate Meredith’s birthday and decided the
only way was to make her sister’s gumbo. She went to a fishmonger
on the bay and bought fresh shrimp and lump crabmeat. She went to the
grocery store for the spices and vegetables. She went home with her
ingredients and didn’t have a clue what to do.

“
I can’t believe
I’ve forgotten what to do,” Marla said out loud in her kitchen.
She sat at the table and wracked her brains for the recipe. She went
online and researched gumbo recipes. There were thousands of them,
but none of them seemed right. There was something special, or
secret, that she was forgetting but for the life of her she couldn’t
remember what it was. She needed to get it right for Meredith. What
kind of commemoration would it be if she couldn’t get it right?

As she sat there at
the table an idea began to form in her mind. Maybe Meredith had
written the recipe down and stuck it in her main cookbook. She was
always sticking recipes in there, though she rarely had to refer to
them. Marla had just packed the cookbooks up without looking at them
and had them carted off in a box to the storeroom. But what if
Meredith’s gumbo recipe was in there, stuck between the pages of a
cookbook? There’s only one way to find out, Marla thought. She
grabbed her purse and headed down the stairs and out the door of the
shop.

Derrick and the
movers had packed the furniture in the back of the storeroom and the
boxes in the front, making Marla’s job a lot easier. She wouldn’t
have been able to move the furniture around to get to boxes.
Thankfully, she’d had the forethought to label each box but she had
to move a lot of them around before she found the boxes labeled
“kitchen.” The first box she opened had Marla’s pots and pans,
a gift from Sean on their first wedding anniversary. She remembered
Meredith had been so excited to get the set, which was very high
quality. Marla shoved that box out of the way. The second box held
kitchen utensils and dish towels. Marla was beginning to wonder if
she’d labeled the box with cookbooks. Two boxes later, she found
it. It wasn’t labeled “cookbooks,” it just said “kitchen.”
But the entire box was cookbooks. Julia Child’s
The Way to Cook
,
The Joy of Cooking, Cooking on the Bayou
.

There were about
twenty books in the box and Meredith picked up each one, inspecting
it for slips of paper. She picked up the red plaid Better Homes and
Gardens Cookbook, the “go-to” if you have a question, Meredith
had always said. When Marla opened the book, recipes written on paper
or cut out from magazines began to slip out. This is the one, if
it’s even here, Marla decided. She put the book under her arm,
ready to leave. As she was closing the storeroom door, a little table
caught her eye. It was one that Marla had painted herself, in a brick
red color, and given to Meredith as a gift for one of her birthdays.
Meredith had always used it as her bedside table. Something told
Marla to go over to the table. It was irrational, but she was driven
to the table.

She opened the one
drawer. Inside, she found a clothbound book. She opened it randomly
and her eyes read the top of the page. “Dear Diary,” it said.
Marla closed the book and took it with her. Why hadn’t she checked
that drawer before they moved the table? She didn’t know. She
guessed that the movers had just picked it up and moved it and Marla
had been too busy with packing to even notice.

Marla put the diary
on the table in the living room. She wanted time without distractions
to read it. It did cross her mind that it was private, Meredith’s
diary, and maybe she shouldn’t read it. But she knew she was going
to.

At the kitchen
table, Marla flipped through the cookbook, taking out each piece of
paper or cut-out that she saw. When she was finished, she had a pile
of them. She picked up each one and studied it. Meredith wouldn’t
have put them in there if she hadn’t thought the recipe was worth
something, that it was a recipe she might try and then put her own
spin on it, as she always did.

Halfway through the
stack, Marla picked up a piece of paper that had been torn off of a
little spiral notebook, one of those that had the spirals at the top
and you might keep in your purse to make notes on. “Gumbo” it
said at the top in Meredith’s handwriting. Marla couldn’t believe
her luck. She studied the recipe and found what she had been
forgetting. Cook the roux until it is “the color of mahogany,” it
said. “This will take a while so don’t walk away,” it said. It
was like Meredith was speaking to her all over again, walking her
through the gumbo recipe. “Put the chopped vegetables in the roux,”
it said. Marla had forgotten that too, and hadn’t seen that
instruction in all of the recipes she’d looked at online. She was
ready to cook.

First, she peeled
the shrimp, something anyone living on the bay knew how to do. She
put the shells in a stock pot with water and turned the stove eye on
high. While the shells were boiling, she cut up the onions, celery,
and bell peppers and put them in a bowl. Then she started the most
important part, the roux.

She put oil into a
big pot and when it was hot she added the flour. This was the hard
part. Marla stood at the stove for a long time, scraping the roux
with a wooden spoon—Meredith’s recipe said to use a wooden spoon.
It seemed like forever, but finally the roux began to darken. She
thought back on the night Meredith had walked her through the gumbo,
step by step. How she had stood beside her at the stove saying, “Keep
scraping it. It’s got to be the color of mahogany.” So Marla
listened to Meredith in her mind, and she kept scraping until the
roux was the color of mahogany.

“
It’s not
burned,” she heard Meredith saying. “It’s toasted.”

Marla threw the
chopped vegetables into the roux and stirred them around. She kept
her eye on them, stirring them frequently. When they looked slightly
softened, she strained the shrimp broth into a large bowl. The roux
hissed when she poured the shrimp stock in. She stirred the mixture
with the wooden spoon. “And now, you are home free,” Meredith
said in her memory.

Marla put the Cajun
seasoning in the palm of her hand, the way Meredith had shown her.
“You can only go wrong if you don’t put enough,” she had said.
Marla threw two palm-fulls into the pot. She put in another two
palm-fulls of Old Bay seasoning. She added the stewed tomatoes and
let the pot simmer.

After about thirty
minutes, Marla put the frozen okra slices, the lump crab meat, and
the andouille sausage in the pot. “Put the shrimp in last,”
Meredith told her. Finally, she did add the peeled shrimp and a few
minutes later, it was done. Marla ladled the gumbo into a bowl. “To
you, Meredith,” she said, lifting her spoon before putting it in
her mouth. The smell and flavor of the gumbo brought back sweet
memories of her big sister. She cried as she ate her gumbo. When she
was finished, she put the leftovers in several containers and put
them in the freezer.

Marla sat down on
the couch—the same couch she and Sean had first made love on, but
she tried not to think about that—and opened the diary.

Chapter
Twenty

Meredith’s
Diary

May 5, 2005

Dear Diary,

LOL! That’s what
I’ve decided to call you even though Lindsey said it’s a journal.
I’m calling you Dear Diary like I did when I was in elementary
school and had a pink My Little Pony diary with a lock. That lock
wasn’t much good because Marla opened it without any trouble and
read it. I was so mad at her for that.

I guess this is a
continuation of that long-ago diary, so it’s still the same Dear
Diary, right?