Sweet Tea and Sympathy

  By five, the Allanson service was in full swing. As the funeral home’s chief accompanist, Tootie had arrived earlier to plink gentle hymns on the piano as background music to the mourning. She’d stopped by the office to drop off a Tupperware container full of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and a pat on Margot’s head.

  For someone who was not used to casual affection or home-cooked meals, this was a bewildering gesture that made Margot close the office door and hide—work, she was working. She was being highly productive, studying a program that would allow her to launch an online tribute wall for the funeral home. She’d found the program while she was still in Chicago, researching ways she could be effective in this new job. She was not hiding like a little girl afraid of grandmotherly affection.

  Margot took off her reading glasses and rubbed her hands over her eyes, fully aware that she’d sweated off her makeup hours before. She’d shed the suit jacket and her shoes and was drinking water because she didn’t think her kidneys could stand much more of Leslie’s coffee.

  She was exhausted, but she felt like she’d put in a good day’s work. She’d averted most of Bob’s verbal disasters. She’d learned the scheduling process and the paperwork she was allowed to file with the state. She’d only contributed fifty cents to the swear jar.

  A rough baritone sounded from the doorway. “You favor your mama. I always figured you would. You looked just like her, even when you were a baby.”

  Margot wasn’t sure what she expected in Stan McCready. Maybe some hungover Bible-salesman type in a slick black suit and a gold cross tie tack, talking widows into more expensive caskets than they could afford. But Stan McCready was wearing navy dress pants and a blue button-down that looked fresh out of the package. He had the same look as the haunted lumberjack, that down-to-the-quick hurt that shaped his whole frame. Up close, he was basically a human basset hound. Big, sad brown eyes bracketed by puffy bags and a mouth that naturally turned down. She recognized the square chin and the bow shape of his lips as her own, and for the first time in her life she disliked her own face.

  “I brought ya some sweet tea. Used to love it when you were little. Ya’d pitch a fit if I didn’t stick a second straw in my glass at restaurants so we could share. I used to call you my little Sweet Tea.” He quietly set a tall glass, already wet with condensation, on her desk. “Drove your mama crazy.”

  His speech was clear, she noted, and he didn’t smell like booze, new or stale. So Duffy’s tales of sobriety rang true. Good for him, she supposed, though it seemed to hurt a little more, knowing he’d sobered up after her mother left and still hadn’t reached out to Margot. It almost made it worse.

  Margot would not avert her eyes. She would not show distress. She was fine. She would show him that she was fine. She cleared her throat and reached her hand out, clenching her forearm to keep it from shaking. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  Stan frowned at her outstretched limb as if she were offering him a dead fish. “Well, it’s not like we’ve never seen each other before.”

  “Not that I can remember,” she said, not intending that edge of accusation to color her voice.

  “Yeah, well, that’s how things worked out, I guess,” Stan grumbled. “I was sorry to hear your mama passed. Nobody told me, or I might have come up for the service.”

  “I didn’t know how to contact you,” she said honestly.

  There was a considerable effort rippling over his face, a fight to try to keep his expression neutral. “Well, you’re here now, I suppose that’s what counts.”

  “Not for long, though,” she said, smiling that polite but cold public smile that didn’t involve any teeth. “As much as I appreciate the opportunity to work here, I’m lining up interviews in other cities.”

  And then she took a drink of the iced tea to wet her parched throat and immediately spat it back into the glass. It was so thick and sickly sweet that for a second she thought she’d drunk maple syrup.

  “Why?” Margot wheezed, gagging.

  “What’s wrong?” Stan demanded. “Ya have one of them food allergies?”

  “No! I have functioning taste buds.” Margot reached into her purse and swiped her mouth with a tissue. “You gave this to a child?”

  “You loved it!” he protested. “What did your mama give you, growin’ up? French spring water?”

  “No, it’s fine. I didn’t know you could make diabetes in liquid form, but now I do, so . . . learning experiences all around.” Margot shuddered. So much for dignity and reserve.

  Stan lost the fight and his frown lines deepened. “So, Tootie said you got yourself crosswise with your job. I wouldn’t let it worry ya. It happens to everybody.”

  “Unless you work with your family, of course,” Margot retorted, and she immediately regretted the bitter tone of her voice. She didn’t want to lose her grip on the indifference she was trying so hard to exude. She didn’t want him to know she was bitter or angry. She didn’t want him to know how much she still hurt. She wanted him to know that her stepfather had taken care of her, for the most part. That she’d been just fine without Stan, thank you very much, and she didn’t need him now.

  Glancing at the clock, she stood, slipping into her jacket. “Yes, I lost my job. And, again, I appreciate your family allowing me to come here to work until I can find something else. It’s very kind of you all.”

  “It’s not kindness to take care of your family,” he spluttered. “That’s what families do.”

  Margot’s sharp hazel eyes cut right through him. What would he know about taking care of a family? He’d given her away, signed away his rights to her. He’d just let her mother leave without a fight. How had Stan McCready slept at night, not knowing where his baby girl was, whether she was happy or safe or being raised well? How did he just go on living like she had never been there?

  Margot felt an unexpected tide of angry words rising in her throat like bile. She gritted her teeth to keep them down, until she thought she heard her molars crack. Unfortunately, clamping down on her verbal pyrotechnics meant she’d completely lost control over that polite, distant smile and was full-on glaring at Stan. She shook her head, tamping down the anger and focusing on the calming visuals that had helped her through meetings with Dianne Deschanel, who changed the theme of her anniversary gala twice in one martini-soaked afternoon three days before the party.

  “I’d like to schedule a lunch with you, sometime soon, if you have the time,” she said, careful to keep her tone even and professional. She wasn’t a little girl begging for her father’s attention. She was a grown woman, damn it, and she would handle this like one.

  Stan’s already furrowed brow wrinkled. “Well, you don’t have to talk about it like it’s a business meetin’. If you don’t want to have lunch with me, you don’t have to.”

  “I never said I didn’t want to,” she said, an iron grip on her facial muscles to keep her expression neutral. “I invited you for a reason.”

  “And what reason is that?” he asked.

  “Hey there, Uncle Stan!” Frankie bounded into the office without her lab coat and perched on Bob’s desk, swinging her Converse-clad feet. “Dad says he needs you upstairs. Something about avoiding uncomfortable confrontations between Miss Barbara’s boyfriends at the viewing. They’re blamin’ each other for her early demise.”

  Stan bit out a curse, stopping it short with a guilty look at Frankie. Frankie smiled beatifically.

  “I’ll meet ya here, tomorrow around noon,” Stan told Margot. “We’ll go to the Rise and Shine.”

  Margot made a noncommittal noise. As her father walked away, she pinched the bridge of her nose and willed away the tension headache gathering behind her eyes.

  “Well, that was the world’s most awkward lunch invitation,” Frankie said, biting her lip and nodding.

  “I don’t think I was handling my introduction very well,” Margot said, closing her eyes so she didn’t have to see Frankie’s wide blue peepers all sad and sympathe
tic.

  “Eh, it wasn’t that bad, compared to some of the hissy fits we’ve had thrown in this place,” Frankie said. “That’s why the walls are soundproofed. But not the air vents. If you’re going to have an argument in here, close the vents.”

  Margot glanced up to find that the air vents above her desk were indeed closed, despite the heat. “That is an important piece of information, thank you.”

  “So how about we go home, wash off the funeral smell, and I take you to meet our cousin Marianne for a ‘you survived your first day’ beer?” Frankie offered brightly.

  “I don’t know,” Margot said. “I’m really very tired. And I don’t know if I can handle meeting more new relatives. And I don’t drink beer.”

  “Yeah, if my mama asks, I don’t drink beer, either,” Frankie said with a snort. “Come on. Dad says you’ve busted your butt today. You deserve a break. And you should meet Marianne on her own, when her boys aren’t around. The poor thing never has a hot meal or a completed sentence when her youngest is on a tear. Besides, the Dirty Deer is the hottest nightspot in town! It will be fun!”

  Margot pulled a face that was glorious in its skepticism.

  “Okay, so it’s the only nightspot in town since they closed down the Shoreline Restaurant,” Frankie admitted. “It was the first place to go when the water started droppin’. The rich folks couldn’t moor their boats up at the dock anymore. But the Deer has great appetizers and it’s basically the only place in town for people our age to get together and try to match up our parts.”

  “Ew.”

  “Come on, it will be a bonding experience,” Frankie said, tugging at her sleeve. “I’ll buy you all the possum eggs you can eat.”

  “Is that a food?”

  Frankie waggled her eyebrows and dashed out of the office.

  “Frankie. That’s not an answer. Frankie!” Margot called after her.

  MUCH TO MARGOT’S relief, possum eggs were just potato skins stuffed with smoked pulled pork, cheese, and bacon. And deep-fried. Because Georgia.

  The Dirty Deer was one of the few brick buildings in town, low-slung with a leering neon-blue deer leaping over its sign. The dim interior smelled of smoked meat and cigarettes. It was crowded with high, scarred wood cocktail tables, all occupied by locals chowing down on barbecue and drinking brew. Frankie was dressed in a more subtle after-work ensemble of dark jeans and a Pacific Rim kaiju T-shirt, with rhinestone T-Rex clips in her pigtails. Margot felt overdressed in her little red print wrap dress, but it was the first thing she’d laid her hands on when she’d reached into her closet, and Frankie hadn’t given her much time to change before throwing her into the car.

  The smoky haze took on the bright red of the neon beer signs, giving the barroom a surprisingly cheerful glow. A small figure waved frantically from across the crowd. Frankie laughed and waved back. Marianne was built like an old-school Vargas pinup. She was all lush curves, except for her tiny waist—downright unfair, considering she’d had two kids. For what Margot assumed was a rare night out with the girls, her cousin had kept the makeup on her heart-shaped face simple, playing up bee-stung lips with a bit of coral gloss and wide blue eyes with a touch of mascara.

  “Hey!” Marianne gave Frankie a quick cheek kiss and turned to Margot, taking her hand and pumping it like a Shake Weight. “I’m so glad to meet you!”

  Margot smiled, the sort of warm, genuine smile you could offer only when given such a greeting. But before she could answer, a tall brunette in a bright blue Dirty Deer T-shirt sidled up to the table with an order pad in hand. “Hey, girls! What can I get ya?”

  “Hey there, Sierra. We’ll take a round of iced teas to start and then get down to the serious drinkin’ when you bring our food.” Frankie jerked her thumb toward Margot. “And this one needs to try some possum eggs before she dies. It’s on the bucket list that she didn’t even know she had.”

  “Will do,” Sierra said, nodding. She glanced at Margot. “Sweet or unsweet?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Do you want sweet tea or unsweetened?” Sierra asked kindly.

  “Oh, actually, I think I’ll stick with water.”

  “Suit yourself.” Sierra shrugged, then pointed at Marianne and Frankie, respectively. “Half-sweet and insanely sweet, right?”

  The McCready girls nodded, pleased that the waitress remembered. Sierra shouted out a warning to a girl in her twenties who should have known better than to crawl on top of a pool table to make a difficult shot, and bustled across the room to stop her.

  “What is the deal with ‘sweet or unsweet’?” Margot asked. “Why can’t they just bring you unsweetened iced tea and let you add sweeteners yourself?”

  “For proper Southern sweet tea, you have to add the sugar to the brew while it’s still hot. It lets the sugar dissolve evenly and you get a better-tasting drink,” Marianne told her. “You can’t do that at the table with a couple of packets of Splenda.”

  Margot nodded. “All right. Can we talk about the fact that all women here, regardless of marital status, are called ‘Miss’?”

  “It means that you recognize that you’re younger than the person you’re talkin’ to, or that you’re not familiar enough to be on a completely first-name basis,” Frankie said. “It’s a mark of respect. If you jump right to a first-name basis without permission, it’s a sign you weren’t raised right. Y’all don’t do that up north?”

  “No. And I am now sure I have offended ninety percent of the people I’ve met since I arrived in town,” Margot said, pursing her lips.

  “So, Margot,” Marianne said. “It’s nice to meet you. Again. Sort of. My mama says we were thick as thieves when we were little.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything from my time here.”

  “Not your fault,” Marianne said. “Besides, we’re here now and it gives us a chance to talk away from the rest of the family. Because, well . . .”

  “We don’t know a damn thing about you,” Frankie interjected.

  Marianne shushed her. “Frankie!”

  “What? You’re the one relative we have that we know nothing about, and in our family, that feels like a pretty big hole. So we wanted to ask you a bunch of questions, but Marianne here was afraid you’d feel like you were in a job interview or something.”

  Sierra delivered the drinks and Frankie picked up a menu and wordlessly pointed to a couple of items. Sierra nodded and sauntered away.

  “Actually, considering the fact that I’m trying to get job interviews, this could be good practice.”

  “So, basic stuff: Where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school? What did you study? What kind of music did you favor? Are you a reader or a movie girl? Romantic history—boring or completely sordid and nastier than I would expect of someone who dresses like a newscaster?” Frankie ticked the subjects off on her fingers. “And, most important, because this will determine whether we can truly be close friends or just cousins who tolerate each other—do you like mutant-sea-creature movies, yes or no?”

  “Not everyone has to like Sharktopus as much as you do, Frances!” Marianne groaned, rolling her eyes.

  Margot frowned. “I dress like a newscaster?”

  “A really classy one,” Frankie assured her. “Like the kind who would interview Michelle Obama on a morning show.”

  “Um, I’ll get to your many, many . . . many questions in a minute, but I’ve just got to say—you seem really upbeat for someone who . . .”

  “Works with corpses all day?” Frankie supplied.

  Margot pursed her carefully glossed lips. “I’m trying to think of a nicer way to phrase it.”

  Frankie snorted. “When I was around eight, I got really sick. Leukemia, a scary, rare form of it. I went through chemo, went bald by age ten. I had to go to St. Jude’s for treatment and everything. I was lucky, though. Uncle Stan was able to donate bone marrow. And then Duffy a couple of years later. Uncle Stan would have done it again, but the first procedure was too hard o
n him.”

  “Really? Stan?” Margot frowned. A bone marrow transplant for a sick kid? This did not match up with the wrung-out, selfish drunk narrative.

  Frankie nodded, her purple highlights flashing in the harsh light. “He was one of the first people to get tested. We were lucky I got matched up so easily. And now, I’ve got triple the McCready runnin’ around in my veins, which makes me extra terrifyin’.”

  “It really does,” Marianne deadpanned, subtly touching her temple and grimacing. Frankie didn’t even look over at her cousin while she slapped her arm. “She has all of the stubbornness of Uncle Stan and the creative stupidity of my brother, with none of the self-preservation instincts.”

  “Anyway, I spent a good part of my formative years staring my mortality in the face. And when I was twelve or so, I decided that I had to stop being scared of it, because otherwise I was gonna spend my life too scared to live it. So I went downstairs to the prep rooms and spent a lot of time with Uncle Junior, Duff and Marianne’s daddy. He served as the undertaker before me. He taught me everything I know about takin’ proper care of the bodies, givin’ them dignity, makin’ them look like themselves, so their loved ones have something to comfort them before the burial. Death spent too much time scarin’ me when I was a kid, so I’m gonna spend my adult years giving it the finger.”

  “And the clothes and hair?” Margot asked. “Is that part of your ‘finger’ strategy?”

  “The clothes are chosen to mess with the locals,” Marianne said. Frankie opened her mouth to protest, but Marianne countered, “You have bookmarks in your Internet browser marked ‘clothing vendors to piss off the locals.’ ”

  Frankie shrugged. “They call me Dr. Frankenstein, I might as well dress the part of the town weirdo. And as for the hair, after spending a couple of years without hair, I promised myself that I would never limit myself to one style or color. If I want purple hair, damn it, I’m gonna have it.”