“Well, when I was a little girl, all I wanted was a puppy. You know, something to hug and love and take care of. But my daddy said no. He was a strict man. He said it was all he could do to keep the farm going, and he always said we didn’t have the money for another mouth to feed that didn’t earn its keep.”
I realized my hands had torn a bit of chocolate bread off the piece that Cora had put on my plate. The moment it touched my lips, I felt a wave of warmth wash over my entire body. It was that good.
Cora paused and gave me an expectant look.
I nodded. “I’m listening!”
“Well, one morning my mother took me to town with her. Oh, I must have been about nine or ten years old. We stopped by the hardware store to pick up a case of jelly jars, and they had a basket of guinea eggs sitting by the woodstove—a nickel each! And they came with instructions for hatching, too. Well, lo and behold, my mother bought me one of those eggs, and I kept it cupped in my hot little hands the whole way home.
“For weeks I hovered over that darn egg like its own mama, making sure it didn’t get too cold or too hot, keeping the air around it all nice and moist with a little misting bottle, and talking a blue streak to it. I even sang hymns to it on Sunday morning! My daddy just shook his head. He said it would never work and it was a waste of a good nickel, and he said the poor thing would just die in its shell without a real hen to hatch it proper.
“Well, Dixie, guess what? My daddy was dead wrong. That little guinea grew up to be big as a watermelon, and she followed me everywhere, pecking at my shoelaces and hopping up on my shoulder. Oh, my goodness, I loved that little bird. And she ate ticks and fleas in the yard and laid eggs, too, so my daddy couldn’t say Buddy didn’t earn her keep.”
She slid her cup toward me and I filled it from the teakettle. I looked down at my plate and my piece of chocolate bread was completely gone. There was nothing left but a few crumbs, which I picked up with the tip of my finger like a bird pecking at seed on the ground.
Cora was watching me. I said, “Okay, then what happened?”
“One day I came home from school, and Buddy was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere. She especially liked to roost in one of the apple trees we had out behind the house, but she wasn’t there, so finally I found my poor mother upstairs. She was in bed with all her clothes on, taking a nap in the middle of the day, and I can tell you nothing like that had ever happened before. Right off the bat, I knew something was wrong.”
Her eyes turned misty. “Turned out my daddy had killed poor Buddy. Wrung her neck. And not only that, but he was expecting my mother to make guinea stew for supper. He told me he was sorry, but that it was high time I learned a lesson, and that lesson was: don’t ever get too attached to anything, and that way you can’t ever get hurt.”
She gave me a little nod and then popped a bite of chocolate bread in her mouth with a little wink.
I was staring at her with my jaw hanging open and my eyes wide as saucers. I said, “That’s it?”
She nodded. “That’s all she wrote.”
I looked over at Kate, who appeared to have dozed off in the middle of the story, her teacup perched precariously on her lap. I said, “Cora, that is hands down the most depressing story I have ever heard in my entire life.”
Her eyes sparkled as a tiny smile played across her lips.
“I know it.”
29
Halfway down the driveway, I thought I saw fireflies flickering in the leaves and branches deep in the woods, but as I pulled the Bronco into the carport next to Paco’s truck, I realized what I’d seen was the tiki torches around the perimeter of the courtyard. The big table in the middle was crowded with glassware and china, and Michael and Paco were buzzing around inside their kitchen. I raised both my hands over my head and did a little victory dance in the car before I got out, then I bounced up the steps to my apartment two at a time. As soon as I got inside, I threw off all my clothes and collapsed on the bed.
I hadn’t been lying there five seconds when I heard a tiny plaintive, “Meep?”
Ella Fitzgerald’s not allowed outside by herself. She won’t run away—she’s just as much a homebody as I am—but it’s way too dangerous out here for a cat. Being an island, the Key is safe from the occasional panther or alligator our landlocked neighbors may have to contend with, but there’s a whole cadre of predators up above: owls, eagles, falcons, ospreys, and red-tailed hawks. They patrol the sky like fur-seeking drones in search of four-legged critters, so Ella’s only allowed outside when there’s human supervision.
I sat up, thinking maybe Michael had brought her over so she wouldn’t slip out the kitchen door while they were setting the table, but then I looked up to see her big tawny eyes staring down at me from the window that runs along the top of my bedroom wall. She was sitting on the sill outside. I slid the screen open and she hopped down onto the bed and stretched herself into a fluffy Halloween cat.
“Ella, who said you could go outside this time of night by yourself?”
She said, “Thrrrrr,” as I sat down next to her, and then she gave the back of my hand a sandpapery kiss and purred like a tiny jackhammer as she crawled into my lap. That’s the thing about cats. It’s hard to be in a bad mood around them. You can feel as cold and lonely as a piece of dry toast, but the minute you hear that soft purring, something opens up inside you and makes the world seem like a nice place to be after all.
There were clumps of wet sand between her toes, which meant she’d probably been down on the beach hunting for crabs and minnows. I took her into the bathroom and rinsed her paws under the tap, which she did not appreciate one bit but didn’t put up too much of a fight, and then I dried her off with a spare towel. I was about to put her down when I caught the scent of something delicious wafting up from downstairs. I looked at Ella. She was cradled in my arms, her nose and whiskers quivering.
I said, “You hear it, too? Is that Michael calling us down for dinner? Okay, let’s go see.”
She twisted out of my arms and ran ahead into the closet, where she licked her damp paws with a vaguely accusing look in her eye while I put on a yellow V-neck tee and a pair of soft faded jeans, the cuffs of which I rolled up over my calves—I was already thinking I might take a nice quiet walk along the beach before dinner. Then we both scampered out and down the steps.
There was a cornflower-blue cloth laid over the table on the deck, with the silver candelabra that’s usually on our grandmother’s piano holding court over an artful arrangement of china and wineglasses, all reflecting the dancing flames of the tiki torches. There was a long white platter heaped with Paco’s white bean and radish salad, topped with paper-thin slices of red onion, chunks of fresh mango, capers, and chopped parsley.
I couldn’t resist. I picked a piece of mango out and popped it in my mouth, at which point I think I actually moaned out loud.
“Dixie!”
Michael was standing behind me watching me lick my fingers like Ella cleaning her paws. I must have jumped a foot in the air.
He frowned. “Funny, I don’t remember announcing dinner.”
“I know, but Michael, I’m totally starving.”
He had a ceramic bowl the size of a satellite dish balanced in one hand and a bottle of white wine in the other. He said, “Good for you. Now I want you to back away from the table, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away until I say it’s ready.”
I glanced longingly at the bowl he was holding. There was a mound of pencil-thin asparagus stalks, all lined up with their tips pointed at me and glistening with melted butter, resting on a bed of baby greens sprinkled with toasted pine nuts. Next to that was a heap of crispy sweet-potato fries, sprinkled with ground pepper and freshly grated parmesan cheese. For a brief moment I estimated the size and weight of the bowl, trying to figure out how far I could run with it before he caught me.