A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet Page 3

  Not too long after that—less than a year after the Unfortunate Housecoat Incident, as my husband and I refer to it—Martha called to tell us that Rubena had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. It was the first time in my married life when I could remember hearing sadness in Martha’s voice. Oh, she remained upbeat and positive and unfailingly cheerful when she and Rubena were together, but make no mistake: she was absolutely devastated. On top of the other challenges of the last few years—taking care of her mother, dealing with Sissie’s accompanying health concerns, eventually coming to terms with the fact that Sissie needed to be in a nursing home—the news of her lifelong best friend’s terminal illness hit Martha hard. Whenever we talked and I asked Martha how she was handling it all, she always responded the same way:

  “It’s a lot, Sophie. It’s just a lot.”

  And it was.

  Martha and Rubena continued to get out and about as much as they could, and once a week or so, if Rubena felt up to it, Martha would still drive them to the Western Sizzlin. It was their little tradition. All the waiters and waitresses knew them by name—so did the cooks in the kitchen, for that matter—and they always made sure “Miss Martha” and “Miss Rubena” had plenty of sweet tea with their meals and plenty of coffee with their desserts. From time to time the young girl who worked at the cash register would even wrap a hot cinnamon roll in a napkin for Martha and hand it to her after she’d paid for her meal. Martha always tried to press an extra dollar or two into the girl’s hand, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “It’s just for you, Miss Martha,” the cashier would say. “We know how much you love our cinnamon rolls.”

  I don’t know if that sweet girl had any idea how Martha’s heart was breaking as she watched her oldest and dearest friend battle cancer. But I can promise you that, in the simplest and most profound way, those cinnamon rolls meant the world to Martha. They really did.

  The shopping trips and dinner trips slowed down as Rubena’s condition worsened. And about six months after she received her diagnosis, Rubena went to be with Jesus. She was like a sister to Martha until the very end.

  Martha would tell you even now that she would have never wanted her dear friend to suffer, that it makes her smile to think of Rubena in heaven. She would tell you how grateful she is for the blessing of having a lifelong friend who, for the better part of seventy years, had been a supportive, encouraging example of Christlike love.

  But she would also tell you that she misses her friend every single day, that she feels lonely sometimes when she goes to the Belks and doesn’t have to run over to the dresses section to check a size for Rubena. And she would tell you that she’d give anything if they could leave the mall together and eat dinner at the Western Sizzlin just one more time.

  A couple of years ago I was sitting at the bar in Martha’s kitchen, eating a piece of caramel cake while Martha was on the phone making supper plans with a friend. When she hung up, Martha walked over to where I was sitting, and she had a smile as wide as Texas on her face.

  “Well,” she said, “that was Mary Ann. I think some of the girls and I are going to eat supper at the Western Sizzlin tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, really?” I asked, pushing away my plate and wondering if it would just smack of irony if I asked Martha for a post–caramel cake Diet Coke.

  “Yes! We are!” Martha answered. “You know how I love their petite sirloin. And sometimes after I visit Mother at the nursing home, I like to swing by the Western Sizzlin and pick up a to-go plate and bring it back here. And do you know that darlin’ cashier still wraps up a cinnamon roll and gives it to me? I try to pay! I really do try to pay! But she always says, ‘Miss Martha, I know how you love them, and I know . . .’”

  Martha’s voice trailed off at the end of her sentence. I didn’t really understand why, so as I opened the cabinet to grab a glass, I said, “What? She knows what?”

  Martha cleared her throat. “‘I know how you miss your friend,’ she says. She says, ‘Miss Martha, I know how you miss your friend.’”

  We sat in silence for a second, and I wondered what that would feel like. I thought about Emma Kate and Marion and Daphne and the rest of my friends—friends who have been a part of my life for so long—and I thought about how hard it would be to lose them.

  “But,” Martha piped up, “tomorrow night I’ll go with the girls. It’ll be so much fun! Just more fun! And I know that some of them would rather eat at the Outbacks, but I do like the Western Sizzlin. You know how I like it there! Their portions are absolutely perfect! Oh, I surely do like it there.”

  Then she grinned and said, “They don’t always have enough peaches in their cobbler, though.”

  But don’t tell anyone that she said that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When the Fine China Is, Um, Refining

  WHEN MAMA AND DADDY got engaged, Mama selected Rosenthal’s Hillside as their fine china pattern. Even now Sister and I talk about how absolutely stunning it is. The plates are creamy white, rimmed in gold, with small yellow, light pink, and purple flowers circling a delicate hot-pink rose in the center. It’s timeless, elegant, and every bit as beautiful as it was when Mama picked it out in January 1954.

  For the first ten years of Mama and Daddy’s marriage, Mama used her Rosenthal Hillside to set a fabulous table. She’s always loved to entertain, and I can only imagine the dinner parties she and Daddy had with the Chandlers, the Guys, the Waltons, and the Murrells, among others. They no doubt had a ball as they ate and laughed and carried on, and I can just picture Mama, at the end of one of her delicious meals, serving coffee with her Hillside cups and saucers while the ladies nibbled at homemade strawberry shortcake and the men moved to the chairs in the living room so they could comfortably solve the world’s problems.

  In the mid ’60s Mama and Daddy built a house out in the country, about eight miles from town, and though the area is well populated now, it was the middle of nowhere back then. The house sat off the road on about twelve acres, and it was a perfect place to enjoy a little breathing room and raise their two children. (Since I’m ten years younger than my closest sibling, I wasn’t even a blip on their radar back then.)

  Mama took great care getting her Rosenthal ready for the move, taking extra time to wrap each cup and saucer in layer upon layer of tissue paper so it wouldn’t rattle or break after she put the box in her car. Mama’s packing skills are legendary and the subject of equal measures of amusement and reverence in our family. When Mama wrapped up my own fine china when my husband, son, and I moved into our current house, the coffee cups were so elaborately bound that I needed an X-ACTO knife to release them from their packing-tape prison. I certainly wasn’t surprised; when I was in college, there were a few times when Mama sent a care package I was certain I’d never be able to open. I just didn’t possess those levels of superhuman strength.

  Seriously. It’s not a package from my mama unless you break a sweat trying to get into it.

  So even though I wasn’t alive when Mama meticulously packed her Rosenthal for the big move to the country, there’s not a doubt in my mind that she had every intention of handling those dishes with the utmost care. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she’d planned to gingerly place the box on the front seat of her car and secure it with the seat belt.

  Precious cargo, you understand.

  Well, at some point during the move, Daddy filled the back of his truck with boxes so he could take them to the new house. He and Uncle Bill were handling most of the moving duties, and anything that was fragile was supposed to go in Mama’s car. All the durable, sturdy stuff got thrown in the back of the truck.

  Unfortunately, though, what neither Mama nor Daddy realized was that an errant box—one that was full of Mama’s beloved Rosenthal Hillside cups and saucers—had gotten mixed in with the boxes of kitchen utensils and decorative pillows and garden tools in the back of Daddy’s truck. That carefully packed china was no match for an old truck and a bumpy di
rt road, and you’d better believe that when Mama eventually realized how her prized porcelain had traveled to the new house, she made a beeline for the box. As soon as she began to unpack it, she discovered that those cups and saucers were nothing more than chips and shards.

  Now, I’ve never known my mama to harbor unforgiveness toward anyone, but the accidental destruction of all that gorgeous Rosenthal china was a sanctifying experience for her. Mama has always found comfort in Scripture, and I daresay that if she hadn’t trusted so deeply in the book of James’s admonition to “count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,” those broken cups and saucers might have caused a permanent rift in her marriage, as well as a touch of the post-traumatic stress disorder.

  And to be perfectly honest, I think Mama may have struggled for a day or two with the end of that verse, which assures us that our trials ultimately mold us into people who are “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

  Because GUESS WHAT, JAMES? SHE WAS STILL LACKING THOSE ROSENTHAL CUPS AND SAUCERS.

  Clearly James wasn’t privy to the details of Mama’s harrowing china ordeal when he wrote his epistle.

  Naturally, Mama recovered. Laughed about it, even. She contented herself with her remaining Rosenthal Hillside salad and dinner plates, and I’ll have you know that she still uses them, almost fifty years later.

  The Lord always leaves a remnant, you know.

  I’m pretty sure that James would agree.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Saga of the Homemade Biscuits

  MY DADDY HAS NEVER been big on cooking. In fact, my sister and brother and I have always said that if, heaven forbid, something should happen to Mama, Daddy will have to remarry or else he’ll starve. I hope that doesn’t sound harsh, because I really don’t mean it that way. It’s just that while some men enjoy getting in the kitchen and spreading their culinary wings, my daddy is not one of them. He much prefers to spread his culinary wings while sitting at the dining room table and enjoying the food that my mama has lovingly prepared for him.

  And for the record, Mama has lovingly prepared that food for him for almost sixty years. The math involved in that level of cooking dedication blows my mind, because three hot meals a day times 350 days a year (I’m allowing for some days off for travel and such) times sixty years equals roughly 63,000 meals, at which point you have to conclude that it might be appropriate at this stage in Mama’s life for somebody to give her a bottomless gift card to the Cracker Barrel.

  In all fairness, though, I should mention that Daddy has been known to pitch in with the cooking duties from time to time, like when he would help Mama shell peas from the garden or man the grill when we were having company. When I was in junior high, he even decided that he was going to learn to make biscuits—a topic that is still so sensitive with Mama that I’m almost afraid to mention it. Since we’re coming up on almost thirty years since the event, though, I’m going to throw caution to the wind and tell you about it.

  For many years my daddy worked faithfully as the Cooperative Extension agent in my hometown. Since his job required him to spend a good bit of time traveling from one end of the county to the other, advising local farmers and gardeners about their crops and lawns and soil and what-have-you, he frequently benefited from the generosity of some wonderful Southern cooks. More often than not, he’d come home with a batch of squash pickles from a lady who lived in a nearby community or a Tupperware container full of chow-chow from a man who farmed near the state line or a mason jar of plum jelly from a widowed woman out at the reservoir. Now that I’m older, I can recognize those homemade delicacies as flat-out treasures, and today I’d pay cash money for a small sample of any of them. But when I was growing up, I really didn’t understand why some homemade strawberry preserves from Mrs. Nicholson, our faithful church pianist, were such a big deal to Mama and Daddy.

  Youth is wasted on the young, I’m afraid.

  On more than one occasion Daddy told us that there was an older lady—we’ll call her Mrs. Cunningham—from Myrtlewood whose homemade biscuits were nothing short of legendary, and after Daddy spoke at Mrs. Cunningham’s Community Development Club meeting one day and sampled those biscuits, he sort of offhandedly mentioned to her that he’d love to know how to make them. In retrospect, the very notion that Daddy showed any interest in knowing how to make biscuits strikes me as a clear indication that he must have been in the throes of a midlife crisis, only instead of going the stereotypical midlife crisis route and buying a convertible, he went the country boy route and figured he’d learn to whip up a Southern mealtime staple.

  It was totally uncharacteristic behavior on his part. That’s all I’m saying.

  Anyway, Daddy and Mrs. Cunningham set up a time for her to show him how to make those biscuits, and Daddy never said anything about the biscuit-making tutorial to Mama because quite frankly he couldn’t fathom that she’d care. Mama has always been super laid back about Daddy’s work and golf and sports interests—she just doesn’t put a whole lot of demands on his time (which, by the way, is part of the reason her two daughters tend to err on the side of fiercely independent)—so it probably didn’t occur to Daddy to bring Mama in the biscuit loop.

  Well.

  I still don’t know the exact chain of events, but somehow a reporter from The Myrtlewood Tribune found out that Daddy had asked Mrs. Cunningham to show him how to make biscuits. The reporter thought it might be fun to document the cooking lesson for the paper, so she tagged along when Daddy learned how to fix those storied biscuits. About a week later—on a Wednesday, I believe—the lead story on the front page of the “People” section was how Mrs. Cunningham shared her biscuit-making secrets with the local Cooperative Extension agent (that would be Daddy). There was an assortment of pictures, too—Daddy rolling out the dough, Daddy listening attentively to Mrs. Cunningham, Daddy admiring a cast-iron skillet filled with tall, fluffy biscuits. It was a delightful article.

  Or so I thought.

  For all my life, you see, my mama has been a gracious, even-tempered lady. From my perspective, at least, she’s been in the same mood for the better part of forty years.

  (Whereas I have a tendency to get a little worked up and stressed out and high strung from time to time.)

  (And when I say “from time to time,” of course, what I mean is “on a daily basis.”)

  My mama, on the other hand, is calm, patient, and steady. I’m sure the daily rigors of motherhood frustrated her every once in a while, but she rarely showed it. As a matter of fact, the only time I can remember her raising her voice for more than a few seconds was when I was nine and served as an acolyte in church with my cousin Paige. After Paige and I fulfilled our candle-lighting responsibilities, we took our seats in the center of the front pew and proceeded to practice our limited sign language skills for the remainder of the service. Since Paige and I didn’t know any signs for words, we spelled out everything letter by letter.

  D-O Y-O-U W-A-N-T T-O G-O S-W-I-M-M-I-N-G A-F-T-E-R C-H-U-R-C-H?

  N-O. I T-H-I-N-K W-E S-H-O-U-L-D W-A-L-K T-O J-I-T-N-E-Y J-U-N-I-O-R A-N-D G-E-T I-C-E-E-S!

  O-K. D-I-D Y-O-U S-E-E S-C-O-T-T B-A-I-O O-N T-V L-A-S-T N-I-G-H-T?

  Oh, we were just as tickled as we could be by our resourcefulness because, you see, technically we weren’t talking in church. To our eleven- and nine-year-old selves, that was the genius part of the whole sign language plan. Mama and my aunt Choxie, however, were none too pleased with our failure to respond to the icy glares they were sending our way from the choir loft, and within about thirty minutes of that afternoon’s Sunday lunch, I’d gained two valuable bits of insight: (1) not only could my mama raise her voice, she could raise it effectively while swatting my rear end with a Bolo paddle, and (2) if I ever had any intention of waving my hands around in church like that again, it had better be the result of a fresh move of the Holy Spirit.

  And let’s be honest. We were members of a conservative Methodist church where peopl
e cut their eyes and stared if someone said, “Amen!” during the preacher’s sermon. So even if there had been a fresh move of the Holy Spirit that caused me to wave my hands, the expected response would be, “Quench it, sister, and be reverent.”

  JOHN WESLEY WOULD WANT IT THAT WAY.

  All that to say, Sign Language Sunday taught me that Mama definitely had the capacity for some righteous indignation, and several years later I got another glimpse of it when she opened her copy of The Myrtlewood Tribune and saw the article about Daddy learning to make biscuits with Mrs. Cunningham. I’d never really understood the expression “It made her blood run cold,” but that Wednesday I witnessed it. As Mama read all about Daddy’s Great Big Biscuit Adventure, the color drained from her face, and her lips tightened in a look of utter indignation.

  “Well,” she remarked in a low, level tone as she slowly folded up the newspaper and set it on the kitchen counter, “I have never. I have NEVER.”

  I was an oblivious teenager at the time, so I had no idea why she was upset. I was also too young to pry too deeply into my mama’s business, so I tried not to cross any parent/child boundaries when I said, “Mama? You okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she answered. But those pursed lips told another story.

  Later that afternoon I was able to piece together the problem when I overheard/eavesdropped on a phone conversation between Mama and Chox. Mama was as indignant as I’d ever heard her.

  “The thing is, Chox,” she began, “I resent it. I resent the whole thing, to tell you the truth. I mean, what am I supposed to say to people when I go to the Winn-Dixie? How am I supposed to respond?”