Oops, Wrong Bride? Fine. No Wedding. novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Tradd Street

I came out of the kitchen wiping my hands on my apron.

"What kind of cake, Mrs. Mattox?"

"Your mother's lemon cake. Two layers. It's for two people." She paused. "And I'd like it to say 'Oops.'"

Emmy made a noise.

"Who's it for?" I said.

Mrs. Mattox looked at the case and not at me.

"My son," she said. "The older one. I'll pick it up tomorrow at noon, and you'll drive it with me, because I don't know the way to his yard."

"You've never been?"

"Not once in nine years." She opened her handbag and laid three crisp hundreds on the glass. "Keep the change, Miss Gatling."

On Sunday at one o'clock, a black town car crawled down the shell road at Shem Creek with a cake on my lap.

Mrs. Mattox sat beside me with her ankles crossed.

She looked out at the sheds and the travel lift like they were the surface of the moon.

Hayes came out from under the hull with sawdust in his beard.

He saw his mother get out of the car.

He didn't move.

She walked across the yard in her cream pumps, over oyster shells and wood curls, and stopped in front of him.

I came behind her with the cake box.

"Hello, Hayes."

"Mother."

She nodded at me.

I opened the box and held it out.

Two layers, pale yellow, one sugar magnolia, and across the top in my best script: Oops.

Hayes looked at the cake for a long time.

Then he looked at his mother.

"You ordered this."

"Miss Gatling wrote it. I paid for it." Mrs. Mattox's chin came up. "I don't have her talent for saying things in public. So I bought a cake that does."

"I told you not to come back to my house," she said. "Twice. I was wrong both times. I was wrong about her." She didn't look at me. "I raised your brother to laugh when I laughed, and he's the one who had to stand up in church about it."

Hayes didn't say anything.

"I'd like to come to dinner," she said. "Once in a while. If you'll have me."

"Here," Hayes said. "Not your house. Here, at my table, with her at it."

"I understand."

"And you apologize to her first. Out loud. In front of my crew."

His mother turned around.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she looked at four men in sweaty T-shirts around a half-planked boat, pretending not to listen.

"Miss Gatling," she said. "I billed you for your own reception. I laughed in that church. I tried to buy your mother's bakery out from under you. I'm sorry."

"Liza," I said. "You can call me Liza."

"Liza." She tried it like a new shoe. "And while I'm being honest, since it's apparently the fashion."

She turned back to Hayes.

"Your father's lawyer tells me you finally spent some of that trust."

Hayes went very still.

"On a house on Tradd Street," Mrs. Mattox said. "In July. At the asking price, which Gene Gatling should be ashamed of."

I turned and stared at him.

"Hayes."

He rubbed the back of his neck with a sawdusty hand.

"Your dad listed it the week after the tasting," he said. "I had a lawyer buy it through a company so he wouldn't know. I wasn't going to tell you till the bakery was settled."

"You bought my mother's house."

"I bought your house," he said. "The deed's in your name. Has been since July."

The crew wasn't pretending anymore. They'd all turned around.

I put the cake box down on a sawhorse because my hands had stopped working.

"I can't take a house from you."

"It's not from me. It's from her." He nodded at the sky, or at my mother, or at nothing. "Your dad promised it to you in a hospital. I just made him keep it."

"Then I'm paying rent."

"Liza."

"Nine hundred a month," I said. "Same as the loft. Or no deal."

He looked at me the way he had in May, wiping his hands on a rag.

Then he laughed, the whole-face laugh, and his mother looked at him like she'd never seen it before.

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

That night the Tradd Street house was dark and empty and smelled like Shelby's candles.

The pink neon sign was gone. A pale rectangle on the wallpaper over the stairs showed where it had hung.

Hayes carried my mother's portrait up from the truck and hung it back on the nail where it belonged.

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