By Invitation Only Read online

  “Yes. I’m starting to appreciate them more and more,” she said. “Can I help you get dinner on the table?”

  “Why don’t you sit right there and I’ll get us some tea?”

  “Oh, that would be so nice.”

  “Have you seen Floyd?”

  “Yes, he came by to say hello.”

  He said more than hello, I’d guess.

  “Good, well. Well, don’t move.”

  Of course I intended to serve her iced tea infused with peach syrup, just as I had the first time we met. And even though we were going to eat supper shortly, I thought I’d slice a little pound cake too. I put a few strawberries on the plate as well. The color was so pretty.

  When I came back out to the porch with the tray, she jumped in surprise. “Oh, Diane! I didn’t mean for you to go to so much trouble!”

  “It’s no trouble at all. It’s just how we do things around here and always have.”

  “It’s so civilized,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “I just thought it would be nice for us to share a moment before everyone gathers to eat.”

  I poured tea and handed her the glass. I filled a glass for myself and took a seat in the rocker next to hers.

  “This is Miss Virnell’s pound cake. Have a pinch,” I said.

  “That’s so southern to say ‘have a pinch,’” she said, pinching a piece of cake and popping it in her mouth. “I love it. This cake is a sin.”

  “There was a time when many southern wives had a pound cake in their kitchens in case someone dropped by for a visit.”

  “It must have been so nice to grow up here,” she said. “It’s so pretty it makes you forget about the outside world. I’ve never had a garden.”

  “Gardening is a great meditation. It was nice growing up here. I’ll have to take you out to the old plantation, Magnolia Gardens.”

  “Oh! I’ve never seen a plantation.”

  “Magnolia is a gem. There are so many astonishing flowers in bloom, they call it a romantic garden or an extravagant liar because it was designed to make us forget our humdrum life.”

  “What an idea! I’d love to visit. And I’d love to have a humdrum life.”

  “I’ll bet. Wonderful. Maybe we can grab a few hours on Monday. That’s our slowest day.”

  “Great. This has been some six months, hasn’t it?”

  “I’ll say it has. How are you doing? Are you okay?”

  “I’m getting used to my new life, and in an odd way, the whole disaster has been a real learning experience.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You think if you marry the right guy that you never have to worry about anything.”

  “Finding the right guy isn’t so easy,” she said. “You’ve got Alden. He’s an angel.”

  “Yes, but I made him interview for the job for ages.”

  “You know, when you’re married to a powerful man, there are all these ridiculous expectations placed on you. My whole life revolved around what I thought Alejandro wanted me to do or to be. I never gave much thought to what I might like to do. Or who I’d like to become.”

  “Do you feel different now?”

  “Well, for the first time I can hear myself talking. I’ve been pretty much a jerk for so many decades, I don’t know if I can dig myself out entirely. I’m just glad all those people are out of my life. They can go think what they want to think.”

  “They’re probably going to anyway,” I said.

  “Agreed. Anyway, it was a shallow life filled with phony people. It had to be the best this and the most expensive that. Ridiculous. Now I feel like every day is a new day, but as long as I’m in Chicago, it’s hard to reinvent myself.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I said, “We’re going to be grandmothers. What do you think?”

  “Now, that’s important! I am so excited I could come out of my skin,” she said. “But the first person that calls me granny gets a black eye.”

  “Agreed. I can’t wait to see who this baby is! What do you want to be called?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want to be called?”

  “I don’t know either. Probably time to give it some thought,” I said.

  “I was three weeks early when I delivered Shelby,” she said.

  We looked up to see Floyd approaching with Fred and Shelby. Floyd had a ceramic dish with something in it and Fred carried a handbasket of vegetables. Shelby was waddling.

  “Y’all ready for some supper?” Floyd said. “I’m gonna put this pork loin and this corn on the grill.”

  It was almost dusk, my favorite time of day. The heat of the day was past and darkness had not yet found us. During the summer months there was an evening light that stayed with us long after the sun set, sometimes until almost nine o’clock.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got in there, Fred,” I said.

  There was corn, tomatoes, a handful of basil, and some eggs. Oh, and a bottle of vodka.

  “What are the eggs for?” I said.

  “Cocktails!” Floyd said.

  “Eggs for cocktails? Are they hard-boiled?” I asked.

  “Yep,” Fred said, grinning.

  “Why are you grinning like that?” Susan said. “What am I missing?”

  “You’ll see,” he said. “Can I make you a big old vodka on the rocks?”

  Susan looked at her wristwatch.

  “Well, it is close to seven o’clock,” she said. “So yes, please.”

  “Y’all stay right here on the porch, ladies. Shelby? You too,” Fred said. “The men have dinner handled.”

  “Y’all have seen enough action for one day,” Floyd said.

  They went inside and slammed the door behind themselves.

  A few seconds later I heard my mother’s voice yelling, “I imagine it was time to get up anyway!”

  All of us giggled.

  “I can’t teach Floyd anything he doesn’t want to learn,” I said.

  “Alejandro was the same way. Do you want to hear something crazy?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We specialize in crazy around here.”

  “Frederick says southerners pride themselves on crazy family members,” Shelby said.

  “Ahem!” Susan said.

  “Sorry, Mom, you were going to tell us something.”

  “I went to see your father the afternoon after he was arraigned and he apologized for being such a crook and womanizer and for ruining my life. And he told me to take up tennis. Tennis! He told me I could use his racket. Wasn’t that nice?”

  “How weird!” Shelby said.

  “He was under a lot of stress,” I said.

  “The case that held his racket was jammed with hundred-dollar bills.”

  “What? What did you do?” Diane said.

  “I told the federal marshals if they wanted to play tennis, they shouldn’t miss the racket in the hall closet. I said, it’s probably worth a lot of money.”

  “Oh, that’s hilarious!” Diane said.

  “And there was one more attempt on Alejandro’s part to hide money, at least one more that I know of. Nadia could have a trunk of cash for all I know. Remember all that wine he had delivered for the rehearsal party?”

  I had wondered what she did about that. So had Floyd. But we had never said a word.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I found out it was worth over a million dollars,” Susan said.

  “Mom! Whoa! Are you kidding? That’s totally crazy!”

  “Actually, Floyd was the one who tipped me off. He called me and said, ‘Look, don’t think there’s not going to be some furious auditing that goes on in the aftermath of this.’ I had my lawyer verify its worth and then we notified the FBI. I had no idea.”

  I said, “You have to believe he was just trying to leave you with some resources. I mean, it was against the law, but he probably wasn’t thinking straight at that point.”

  “I wondered where it went. I thought maybe you moved it to the storage rooms
downstairs,” Shelby said. “We didn’t even taste it!”

  “You can’t drink alcohol anyway, little lady,” Susan said.

  “True,” Shelby said. “Still.”

  “At some point someone would have found out the cases were not accounted for. Anyway, the point is, you think you know someone and you don’t,” Susan said. “Your brother is the greatest.”

  “He’s pretty special all right,” I said and thought, Floyd! You old rascal, you! You do care about Susan. I was staying out of that one.

  The door opened and it was Floyd, with Susan’s cocktail and three eggs in a bowl with the saltshaker and a knife.

  “Thanks, Floyd,” Susan said, taking a demure sip, which was surprising. “Ah! It’s the jet fuel from your friend!”

  “Special occasion,” he said, peeling away the shell on one of the eggs. Then he held it in a napkin in his hand, poised to slice it in half with his knife. “Y’all ready?”

  “Fire away!” I said.

  He sliced it in half and stood back, showing it to all of us. The yolk was bloodred.

  “Is it blood?” Susan asked.

  “Nope! Ha! How do you like that!” he said.

  “What in the world did you do? Dye it?” Susan said.

  “Cool!” Shelby said. “But eggs make me gag right now.”

  “Understood,” Floyd said. “Who wants to try it?”

  I looked at Susan. “Should we be the guinea pigs?”

  “Why not? I think it’s weirdly sort of beautiful.”

  We each took a half, sprinkled a little salt over it, and took a bite. The flavor had a hint of something—was it cayenne?

  “Delicious!” I said. “Okay, how’d you do it?”

  “I was watching Chef’s Table on Netflix and they had this guy on, Dan Barber. He owns a restaurant in New York called Blue Hill at Stone Barns.”

  “I’ve met him,” Susan said.

  “Hey, no big-timing the natives,” Floyd said.

  “You tell her, Uncle Floyd!” Shelby said.

  “Well, I have,” Susan said.

  Shelby rolled her eyes.

  “Anyway, he’s all involved with engineering seeds for flavor instead of simply longevity or disease resistance. Super interesting fellow. So, he was working with a man who makes chicken feed, and they figured out that if you feed a chicken high-carotenoid peppers, it turns their yolks red. Pretty cool, huh?”

  “You should sell them to Alden when he’s doing deviled eggs for a catering gig,” I said.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “Anyway, I share his farming philosophy on a lot of issues. He helped develop a new squash called honeynut. Very flavorful. I just ordered some seeds from him for some other things.”

  “Do you grow that squash?” Susan asked.

  “No, but we’re going to!” he said. “I’m gonna throw this pork loin on the fire.”

  “He’s awesome,” Shelby said, watching Floyd go down the stairs.

  “He sure is,” Susan said.

  “I heard that!” Floyd said. He looked at us up on the porch and smiled at Susan. “You’re right. I am.”

  Mom came out to the porch.

  “Please don’t give him a fat head,” I said. “I have to live with him.”

  “He already has one,” Mom said.

  Chapter 29

  OMG!

  “We could not have anticipated this,” Floyd said.

  “I can’t stand this!” Virnell said.

  “Yes, we can. We are a strong family,” Diane said.

  june 14, 2017

  Floyd, Mom, and I had just finished lunch and we were going back to the store. We stopped to look at the sky. We had just been saying to each other how wonderful it had been to have Fred and Shelby for a few days, and if anyone had ever needed a change of scenery, it was Susan.

  “She’s coming around, isn’t she?” I said.

  “Well, Lady Di, she sure had her sails trimmed, didn’t she?”

  “She sure did,” I said. “Smells like rain.”

  “Yeah. Look at those clouds. We need it.”

  It was June and hurricane season had officially begun. But so far all we had had were occasional and short-lived late-afternoon thunder boomers. The peach trees needed extra watering to help them plump up to harvest. Everything else did as well. We had our own well for irrigation, but it was good for only so long. We needed rain. It was overcast and gloomy and a storm was brewing all around. I was standing on the porch with Floyd, feeling the wind picking up. The temperature was dropping quickly.

  “I’m gonna put Isabella and her friends in the barn. You’d better be sure Gus is inside.”

  “Right.”

  Still, we stood there, watching. It was a fast-moving storm, with steel-colored, low-hanging clouds blanketing the Lowcountry as far as we could see in every direction. The rumbling was so loud, we could barely hear each other. Fat raindrops began to fall; there were loud cracks of lightning, one after another. Floyd all but jumped off the porch and began running toward the barn.

  “Go inside the house, Mom. Right now,” I said.

  Frightened by the proximity of the lightning, she hurried back in the house. I turned the rocking chairs on the porch over and took down the wind chime. Then I moved the pots on the steps into the foundation bushes so they wouldn’t blow away. Suddenly there was a gust of wind that had to be over fifty miles per hour. The rain hurt, it was pelting me so hard. I looked up over beyond the barn where the peach grove stood and I saw something I’d only ever read about. The cloud that stretched the length of the grove and beyond was opened on the bottom in the middle, as though it had been slit from by an unseen machete. It dropped a bomb of rain filled with lightning bolts on the orchard. I was holding on to the rail of the front steps with all the strength I had in me because the wind threatened to take me to Oz. Crouching for safety, I was completely transfixed. The cloud continued dumping what I can only describe as a rain bomb on the grove for just a few minutes more and then it was gone. A few minutes later the entire storm had moved through. I was soaked to my skin and shaking in fear.

  I turned to see Alden getting out of his car.

  “Oh, God! Diane! Are you okay?”

  I couldn’t even answer. He put his arms around me. I was still shaking.

  “Let’s get you inside,” he said. “I was on my way here and I saw the microburst. It seemed to be right over your farm. I came as fast as I could. That wind had to be a hundred miles per hour!”

  We went up the steps and inside. There was no electricity.

  “I’m okay,” I finally said. “Please. Go find Floyd. He was running down the road to the barn to put up the cows. I just want to know he’s okay.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I was in the hall, dripping, a puddle of water at my feet, not yet fully comprehending what had just happened. As Alden said, it was a microburst. I had never seen one and I hoped I never would again. I hurried to put on dry clothes and combed my wet hair into a ponytail.

  “Mom!” I yelled, pulling on barn boots. “Where are you?”

  “Coming! Coming! We lost power.” She took a look at me and said, “You didn’t have the sense to get out of the rain?”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “I’m going down to the orchard to see what happened. I’ve got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.”

  I jumped in my SUV and gunned it, driving down the road at a pace that was surely unsafe. Inside of a minute, my worst fear was realized. The peach orchard had been leveled to the ground. There stood Floyd next to Alden. Alden’s arm was flung around Floyd’s shoulder. It looked like an actual bomb had been detonated. Over five hundred peach trees, fully loaded with semiripened fruit, were lying in splinters, flung in every direction. Hail the size of baseballs was strewn everywhere. The packing sheds, never considered an architectural prize by anyone, were flattened. The storm had not impacted the barn or the strawberry fields. Only the peaches.

 
; “Oh, no!” I said. “This is a complete disaster.”

  “Come on,” Alden said. “Let’s all go get drunk.”

  Alden had never been drunk in his life. I didn’t know that I had either. But Floyd? He kept a box of Goody’s Powder in his house at all times.

  “Excellent idea,” Floyd said. “But first, we have to notify our insurance company.”

  “I’ll call them,” I said. “The power’s out.”

  “Okay. Then I have to call my foreman to get over here right away, take some pictures, and assess the damage to see if we can salvage anything. Then we can crawl in the bag.”

  “This is unbelievable,” I said.

  We’d had crop insurance through the USDA for as long as I could remember. I didn’t know what our deductible was. I had the paperwork in my files. Then I recalled that I had just renewed our policy a few months ago. We were covered.

  “I can’t believe you’re so calm,” Alden said.

  Floyd looked at him and shook his head.

  “Alden, my man, when you’re a farmer, you learn to take the good with the bad. This would be the bad. And believe me, I’m anything but calm.”

  “Want to stay for supper?” I said to Alden.

  “Sure. Why don’t I go get us some steaks? Seems like we need a solid meal to fortify ourselves.”

  “I haven’t had steak in a while. That sounds great. Get a box of red wine too.”

  Alden looked from Floyd to me to see if Floyd was kidding.

  “He’s not a connoisseur,” I said. “He drinks beer and vodka.”

  “Not at the same time,” Floyd said. “I’m gonna go shower up while there’s still light. I’ll see you at the house in a bit.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Let me see what I can find. I’ll be back soon.”

  I gave Alden a ride back to the house, where his car stood with the door left open. “Would you like me to come with you to tell Miss Virnell?”

  “No, but thanks. She’s going to be upset, and she wouldn’t want to show it in front of you.”

  He looked a little hurt, but then he said, “Of course. I understand. I’ll be back in an hour or less.”

  “You’re a sweetheart,” I said. “Thanks.” I gave him a kiss on his cheek and watched him get in his car and drive away.