Mary Ellen examined the small paintings in the little makeshift studio that was really just the back half of her laundry room. Winifred Kitteridge had called her more than once over the last several weeks to arrange a time to retrieve them, leaving a message on her home phone and even stopping by the King Street store when Mary Ellen was running a package to the post office for Gene. Somehow Mary Ellen couldn’t bring herself to return the call.
She had touched up the frayed corner of Charles’s canvas, and she had set both paintings in a simple, handsome gilded frame, two and a half inches wide. She had weathered the gilding with a little gray paint so that it matched the murky brown-green of the scene. And so that the figures stood out—she in a wide-brimmed straw hat and sundress, Meg in a bathing suit, her hair in a ponytail. Each of them reeling in a crab at the end of a rope knotted around a chicken neck.
It was time to give them back, she knew. But she was disappointed in how little she had gleaned by staring at the brushstrokes, by examining the light, the shadows, the figures in motion. Part of her wanted to rip the canvases apart and throw them in the trash can. She could tell Winifred there had been an accident. She had been knocked down by an enormous dog who had mauled the paintings. Or they had fallen out into the street just as a horse-drawn carriage full of tourists trampled over them.
Somehow she couldn’t bear the idea of them hanging in a newfangled beach house as if pulled from an interior decorator’s inventory and hung smartly in some small corner or in an overdone powder room where they would gather dust nine months out of the year. They were artifacts of her life, and because they were art, she expected them to eventually tell her something. To speak the way an antique often does through its markings, its builder’s imprint, its period legs, its wood type, the nicks and cracks across its surface. Every antique had a story to tell, and if you studied it long enough, you could hear it.
She left them on her worktable and went down to check on the chicken she was boiling in a pot. She planned to make chicken noodle soup and cream cheese biscuits for dinner. Comfort food. Ever since she’d heard about Marney’s illness and Julia’s trip down, she’d had a knot in her stomach, and the only thing that seemed to comfort her—even in the heat of June—was soup.
As she peeled carrots at her sink, she noticed how parched her hydrangeas looked, not to mention her potted tomato plants she was experimenting with this season. She put on her straw hat and headed out to the garden where she unwound her hose and began to water the tomatoes.
She thought she heard a knock, ever so faintly beneath the hiss of the hose. Then there was an unmistakable, “Yoo-hoooooo! Mrs. Bennett?”
She peered around the corner of her house to see Winifred Kitteridge calling from the front piazza. “Are you in the garden?” She watched as the woman came down from the piazza and headed toward the driveway, which led to the back gate.
Mary Ellen dropped the hose and raced to the opposite side of the yard where she crouched down and shimmied behind the pittosporum bushes.
She felt the brim of her hat crack, and then she looked down at her dirty white canvas espadrilles. What in the world was she doing hiding in her garden? If Winifred found her, what a fool she would look like. She didn’t care. She just didn’t care. She would give the woman her paintings . . . just not quite yet. She needed a few more days with them.
Mary Ellen watched as the woman opened the picket fence and, with the nerve that only someone from off could muster, walked into the back garden.
Winifred was dressed to the nines in a taupe designer suit and nude pumps. She sported a large pair of square tortoiseshell sunglasses that seemed to cover a good half of her face and made her look more like an insect than a lady. Mary Ellen listened as she called her name before reaching down to the hose, which was still dripping.
“Are you back here?” Winifred Kitteridge said. “I need my paintings before my guests arrive this weekend. It’s been over six weeks.”
As Winifred Kitteridge walked across the garden, Mary Ellen crouched deeper and deeper into the pittosporum bushes. She went so far into them she feared she might fall out on the other side and land right in Nate Gallagher’s garden, just behind his pink sweetheart rosebush. She was surprised Luther hadn’t already sniffed her out.
Winifred came awfully close to the pittosporum bushes. She clucked her tongue. “Where is that crazy woman?” And then, after a long sixty seconds, the woman turned on her heels and walked back toward the picket fence that led to the driveway. When Mary Ellen heard the click of the gate, she exhaled.
Still, she thought it would be smartest to wait until she could hear the start of Winifred’s engine, so she stayed crouched down a few more minutes, becoming suddenly aware of a strange sound. It was muffled, but she could make it out. It was the sound of a man weeping. A sound that always unnerved her.
She crouched farther down on all fours and crawled into Nate’s garden where she peered through the thorny limbs of the sweetheart rosebush. And there she saw Nate, on the back steps, his whiskery face in his large speckled hands, which also held a large dog collar. The two plates on the dog collar clanged together as his shoulders shuddered, and as he rubbed his eyes before looking up at the sky and then back down.
Mary Ellen’s heart thumped in her chest. She was well acquainted with despair, and she knew that Nate was grieving, and she felt for him—deeply. Something had happened to his companion. To his best friend. And when someone was despairing—even if it was your brusque Yankee neighbor—there was only one thing to do: make food and deliver it discreetly.
She shimmied out of the rosebush and crawled back through the pittosporum bushes to her garden. She stood up, wiped the black dirt off of her hands and knees, and headed to the house where she washed her hands and started putting the final touches on the chicken noodle soup before whipping up some of her famous cream cheese biscuits.
By late afternoon she walked quietly over to Nate’s house with a bamboo tray containing a large container of chicken noodle soup, a mixed greens salad with goat cheese and pecans, biscuits wrapped in tinfoil, and a large piece of chocolate chess pie that Jane Anne had brought over yesterday.
She had half a mind to knock on the door, drop the tray, and run. But she didn’t. She waited several minutes until she could hear him clearing his throat and unlocking the door.
He narrowed his fuzzy gray eyebrows as he opened the door. Then he looked at the tray full of food and back to her.
“How did you know?”
“A neighbor knows sometimes.” She smiled tentatively.
He gave a half smile back and opened the door a little wider. “Please, come in.”
NATE GALLAGHER’S HOME WAS BEAUTIFUL. SHE’D BEEN in the house several times before when a large Catholic family inhabited it, but she hadn’t set foot it in since his arrival a few years ago. As far as she knew, he never entertained.
It was full of antiques and stunning paintings and pottery, blue pottery, everywhere—on chest tops, on tables, hanging on walls.
“May I offer you some tea or a glass of wine?”
“Tea would be lovely. Thank you.”
He gestured for her to sit in the ornate living room, then he took the tray from her and walked back to the kitchen.
She examined the parlor before he returned with two glasses of iced tea. With the exception of Luther’s well-worn bed by the hearth, the room was exquisite. There was a magenta silk striped Chippendale sofa with large, fluffy pale blue silk pillows, two pale blue velvet-covered baroque-style chairs with a small baroque gilded table between them, a large Victorian-style chest and desk, a seventeenth-century mirror, and dozens of small and large paintings.
On the coffee table beside a few blue pottery pieces there were two photographs: One of Nate and what must be his children and grandchildren. It was a very large crew, almost everyone freckled and redheaded. And one of what must have been a much younger version of him in a sailor uniform next to a beautiful redheaded woman he held tightly in his arms.
He handed her the glass of tea and sat down in one of the chairs. She noticed a smudge of dirt still on her knee, rubbed it off, and took a sip of the drink. Unsweet, naturally. But still, rather refreshing.
“You’re quite the collector,” she said. “These are some beautiful baroque and Victorian pieces.” She dabbed the linen napkin on her lips. “And I ought to know—I’ve been working in antiques for twenty years.”
He looked around the room and shrugged. “My wife was a collector.”
Mary Ellen pointed to the photo. “Is this her?”
He nodded. “Yeah. She passed away just before we moved here.” He took a hearty sip of his tea and readjusted himself. “I wanted to build a log cabin in Montana and retire there, but she wanted to retire to Charleston. She loved the beach and warm weather. She loved the aesthetics and the arts. She was quite a successful potter.”
“So you came here? For her?”
He wiped his brow. “I guess I did.” He looked around the room. In a sense, he seemed so out of place there, this scruffy, whiskery man amid all of these beautiful pieces. But he looked quite at home. As if these were the artifacts of his life, a life that had contained love and family and hope for a long future together.
She inhaled and cocked her head. “What happened to Luther?”
The man’s big blue eyes watered and he turned away. “A truck hit him. Coming right down Rutledge Avenue.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let him off the leash, but I loved to see him roam free. I could hardly keep up with him anymore, and he needed his exercise.”
“I’m so sorry, Nate.” She took another sip of the tart tea as he swallowed back a tear.
He stared for a long time at the back of his hand and then turned to her. “The soup smells delicious.”
She smiled and straightened up. A visitor never wanted to stay too long, especially when someone was mourning. She moved to the edge of her seat. “Well, what’s the cliché? It’s good for the soul.”
“Blood soup, my mother used to call it.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “She was a first-generation Irish Catholic, and whenever we got sick she’d make us blood soup, which meant chicken noodle.” He let out a gruff chuckle. “One time my kid brother, Emmet, looked into the pot and said, ‘Where’s the blood, Ma?’ She batted him on the nose and said, ‘It’s good for your blood. It feeds your marrow and kills the germs. There’s no blood in the soup, Em’.”
Mary Ellen laughed. “Well, she was right. I think I read an article a few years back about some scientists who studied its effects.” She shook her head. “I forget the details.”
Then she put down her glass and stood. “Well, I know you are probably tired and want some time to yourself.”
He stood with her. “Want to have a bowl with me? Out in the garden? There’s plenty and it would be nice not to eat alone.”
Mary Ellen hesitated. She came up with two valid excuses in her mind, but when she opened her mouth she couldn’t seem to muster the nerve to utter them. She knew all too well what it was like to eat alone, especially when you were grieving.
“Sure,” was the word that came out of her mouth. Then she turned toward Nate’s kitchen. “Let me help you get it set up.”
MARY ELLEN HAD A NICE EARLY DINNER WITH NATE on the porch where she told him about Charles and the girls and her work at the Berkowitz store, and he told her about his late wife, Patricia, and their four children, Nate, Emmett, Jeannie, and Lese, who lived all over the country: one in Manhattan, one in Orlando, one in Omaha, and one in San Francisco. He had eleven grandchildren too.
As Nate walked Mary Ellen home, she could just feel Jane Anne peering from behind her drapes across the street, and as soon as she got home, her phone was abuzz.
“Spill it,” Jane Anne said after she answered the call.
“He lost his dog, Jane Anne. So I took him some soup and he asked if I would stay and have some.”
Mary Ellen could hear Jane Anne sucking her teeth. “Now, come on. He’s human, and he’s our neighbor. I know he’s not the nicest one, but we Southern ladies must be kind and charitable.”
“Oh, get off your high horse now.”
Mary Ellen chuckled. “All right, all right.” She was suddenly overcome with a need to make a phone call.
“Let me call you back in ten,” she said.
“You better. I want to know what his house was like. And what happened to that beast.”
“I will,” Mary Ellen said.
Then she took her Day-Timer and walked upstairs to her studio where she looked at the paintings as she dialed Winifred Kitteridge’s number.
“Hello?” the woman said.
“Hello, Ms. Kitteridge. This is Mary Ellen Bennett.”
“Oh, thank goodness!”
“I’m sorry I’ve been difficult to reach. I do apologize. But I’m happy to report that the paintings are ready, and I’m going to give you a twenty percent discount because it took me so long.”
“Well.” The woman cleared her throat. “That’s very kind of you. When can I pick them up?”
“Anytime tomorrow or this week. They’ll be in the studio in the back of the store.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Winifred Kitteridge said. “And you’re pleased with how they turned out?”
Mary Ellen rubbed her hands across the old rough canvas. If she had any hope of healing and moving forward, she had to let go of this old life, even the mystery of why and how it all fell apart.
“Very pleased,” she said. “Very pleased, indeed.”
AFTER SHE HUNG UP SHE CALLED JANE ANNE AND GAVE her the scoop about Nate and suggested they invite him out on their next Collateral Damage dinner, at which she scoffed but then said, “Well, it would certainly liven things up.”
When she said good night to Jane Anne, the phone rang once more.
“Mama, it’s Julia.”
“Hi, darling!” she said. “How in the world is it going?”
“Well, I’ve got the kids with me right now, but I was calling to see if I could come over for dinner on Thursday night. Glenda and Skeeter have agreed to watch them.”
Mary Ellen’s heart soared and in her mind she was already planning the menu. “Wonderful, sweetheart. I’ll call your sister and see if she can come.”
“Sounds good, Mama. Does six work?”
“Anytime works,” Mary Ellen said. “Six is perfect.”
“See you then!” said her eldest daughter. “I’m looking forward to it, Mama.”
Mary Ellen hung up the telephone and peered out of her laundry room/studio window over the garden. Her hose was spread out haphazardly from the afternoon’s escapade and her tomatoes still needed some water.
She went downstairs, turned on the porch lights, and as the moths began to flit around the lights, she filled the potted plants until they were overflowing. Though the humidity and the city streetlamps obscured the view of the night sky, she could still make out the moon above the rooftops, waxing toward full above Savage Street and Tradd Street and the harbor itself.
She turned off the hose and carefully coiled it up before slapping the dirt off of her hand. Then she walked out to the center of her garden and gazed up, thankful that while the earth could shift beneath you, and your story could take a sharp and unexpected turn, some things could be counted on. Some things were steady and loyal and reliable.
Mary Ellen wanted what everyone wants—to be loved, to be precious, to be adored. And in that moment she felt the hand of God, looming larger than even the moon. It was resting on her cheek, tenderly, the way it had when she was a girl singing in the children’s choir of her daddy’s parish, St. John’s Episcopal on West Macon Street in Savannah. And the hand she now felt just might be enough, she hoped, to move her out of her grief and on with the rest of her life.