The deck table was set with thick pottery plates and black-handled flatware. Salad waited in a big wooden bowl for me to toss with vinaigrette Michael had made. A chilled bottle of wine was already open, ready for me to pour into two stemmed glasses. Along with going inside and getting the scalloped potatoes from the oven, those were my jobs. Michael’s job was to stand by the grill and watch the meat so he could catch the exact moment when it was at the perfect stage of medium rare. It was our brother-sister routine perfected over many years.
Michael laid the meat on the oiled grill, and we both smiled at the sizzling sound it made. I knew Michael thought of our grandfather every time he heard that sound, same as I did. Our granddad had loved to grill as much as Michael does. He was the one who’d taught Michael to count the seconds he could hold his hand over the heat, and to slap the meat on when he could count to ten without yelping in pain.
I tossed the salad, poured wine, and scurried into the kitchen to get the pan of potatoes from the oven. Michael studied the meat, turned it once, pushed on it with a thumb to see how much it resisted. That’s another test our grandfather taught him. When he thought it pushed back about like an athlete’s thigh muscle would, he transferred it to a wooden board waiting by the grill and covered it loosely with foil.
He left it there and took his chair at the table. “We’ll let it sit awhile before I slice it.”
He always says that. For all his adult life, Michael has grilled flank steak and then said, “We’ll let it sit awhile before I slice it.” He says that because that’s what our grandfather always said, and every time he says it and we wait for the steak’s juices to settle in, we feel as if our grandfather is there with us. Maybe he is.
When Michael judged that enough time had passed, he went back to the grill and put Ella’s portion on a plate and set it on the floor—cats shouldn’t have anything with onion in it, so he hadn’t marinated it. She had already hopped to the deck floor with twitching whiskers, and attacked her chunk of beef with all the ferocity of a wild feline leaping on a small rodent in the woods. Cats love to pretend like that.
Michael picked up one of his knives that he keeps so sharp that I don’t like to even get close to them. He sliced the steak very thin and on the diagonal because it’s more tender that way. He piled several slices on our plates and moistened them with some of the marinade he’d heated on the grill. I added a scoop of scalloped potatoes from the casserole dish.
I had stopped thinking about Briana and the murder. I had stopped thinking about Guidry and Ethan. I had stopped thinking completely and simply let myself be.
Some moments are so perfect you wish you could freeze them forever. Right then, sitting under a pink-flushed sky and preparing to share a delicious meal with my big brother and Ella, was one of those moments.
13
While we ate, Michael filled me in on his last twenty-four-hour hitch. A fire had broken out in a mall restaurant kitchen during the night and threatened to spread to its neighbors. It had taken several hours to get it completely extinguished, then more time to get their equipment back on the truck. Then just as they got back to the station, another call had come in, for a residential fire. It had taken the rest of the night to get that put out and to make sure no sparks had drifted to the tinder-dry vegetation in a wooded area behind the house. Following that, there’d been a kitchen grease fire that had singed some cupboards before they got there.
Out of the blue, I said, “Michael, do you remember how Mom used to dress?”
His eyes narrowed. “I remember the times she was too drunk to get dressed.”
“I mean her sense of style. She had great taste, you have to give her that. Things like when to stop with the jewelry, or the handbag that matches the shoes. No matter how carelessly she might have seemed to choose what she wore, it was all carefully considered so nothing was done to excess and everything looked fresh and original. That takes an innate sense of style.”
“You think that makes up for everything else?”
I took a deep breath. Michael has more bitter memories of our mother than I do because he bore the brunt of her alcoholic carelessness.
“I talked to a dressmaker today who knew Mom when she was young. She said Mom was just desperate to get away from here.”
“Well, she got away.”
I could tell Michael was in no mood to talk about our mother and how she had deserted us. To tell the truth, I was surprised that I was having softer feelings toward a woman who had walked out on us when we were already reeling from the loss of our father. Of course, she had been reeling, too, from the loss of a husband.
Unlike my fashionable mother’s, my own wardrobe tended to consist of whatever was clean, comfortable, and available. I had always liked the idea that my mother would have wept if she’d known how little she had influenced me, but perhaps she had influenced me more than I realized. Who knows whether our choices are inspired by unconscious desires to emulate or to reject? I wanted to think that I was past adolescent rebellion, but it occurred to me that I might be as stuck in contrariness as my mother had been stuck in a backwater town with nobody to admire her taste in fashion except the snowy egrets and the steely-eyed herons.
I said, “Were you able to get any sleep after you came home?”
Michael’s face relaxed. “Some, but I’m beat. I’m going to bed early.”
I did an internal debate. I’m a grown woman, and I can come and go from my own apartment any time I please, thank you very much. But I’m also a member of a family, and if my car drives off at a time when I’m usually crawling in bed, I’ll cause unnecessary worry.
I said, “I’m going to meet the Trillins at the airport later tonight. Their house won’t be ready for them to sleep in until tomorrow, so I’m taking them to the Ritz.”
He chewed for a moment, and I could tell he had some questions, but he was too tired to ask them.
He said, “Must be a bad feeling to know somebody got killed in your house.”
That was all we said about it. After we finished eating and cleaning up, I kissed Michael and Ella good night and skipped upstairs with a clean conscience.
When I called Cupcake’s cell phone I expected to leave a message, but he answered. He and Jancey were in the Charlotte airport waiting for their connection to Sarasota. He sounded stunned, as if he’d just been hit upside the head with a two-by-four.
He said, “We’re watching the news about that woman in our house. I don’t understand any of it.”
I said, “We have to talk. I’m going to meet you in the terminal when you get off the plane. There will probably be a ton of reporters in the arrival area, so we’ll skip baggage claim and leave by the front entrance.”
“We checked all our bags.”
“You can send somebody to get your luggage tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Shock and confusion had made him docile.
I told him I would give him and Jancey all the information I had when we were together, and ended the call. All I had to do now was get dressed in something more appropriate for traipsing through an airport and make the forty-five-minute drive to SRQ.
In case the bridge was up that connects the Key to the mainland, I left early. I wore white linen slacks and a fitted black knit top, espadrilles, and a coral beaded bracelet. I had on lipstick and looked like somebody who knew what the heck she was doing. I slung a slouchy bag over my shoulder, held the remote in one hand so I could lower the shutters as I went down the stairs, and stepped out on the porch.