Sweet Tea and Sympathy Page 3

  “Everybody?” Margot whimpered.

  THE MCCREADY FAMILY had a compound.

  An honest-to-God backwoods compound.

  Duffy had called it that with absolutely no irony.

  The ride to Lake Sackett started optimistically enough. Atlanta was a bustling metropolis, almost comparable to Chicago. Margot recognized various department stores and clothing shops, so at least she wasn’t stuck in a fashion desert. But then the buildings got a little less polished and fewer and farther between. Pretty soon, all she could see whizzing by were scrubby pines and sunbaked red clay, broken up by the occasional run-down gas station or pecan stand.

  She had never been this far away from any city. She’d never felt so alone or out of place. And she wasn’t entirely sure this whole Aunt Tootie job offer wasn’t some sort of ruse to lure her into the middle of nowhere so her paternal family could sacrifice her to Lake Sackett’s forest god like something out of The Wicker Man.

  While she was suffering this crisis of identity, Duffy continued to chatter to fill the silence. Where was her father? Duffy seemed nice enough, but there was this unspoken distance between them, the strange knowledge that they should know each other better but didn’t, for reasons beyond either of their control.

  “We didn’t want to crowd you. Tootie said you weren’t used to a big family fuss. We figured it would already be pretty overwhelming for ya, new state, new place, and all. Everybody’s at Mr. Allanson’s visitation—working as usual—so you have some time to settle in, get some sleep before you go through the full McCready roll call.”

  Some small part of Margot would admit that she was relieved. She didn’t think she’d be able to handle meeting the entire family en masse at the moment. She’d barely handled meeting Duffy, and he’d been insistently sweet. She also noted that he hadn’t mentioned where Stan was, that he hadn’t even made an excuse for her father not being present. What did that mean? Had her father not even tried to make it to see her for the first time in almost thirty years?

  Margot realized Duffy was staring at her with an expression both troubled and expectant. She tried to muster some semblance of a polite smile and said, “Thank you, that’s very considerate.”

  “You’ll meet ’em all soon enough. Grandpa E.J.J. couldn’t be more pleased. He wanted to add you to the company letterhead right away, but we convinced him that might be jumping the gun a little.”

  “Grandpa E.J.J.?”

  “Technically, he’s Earl Edward McCready the Third, but everybody called him Earl Junior Junior. E.J.J. My dad was called Junior. And my mom said the whole damn thing was becoming too confusin’ so they named me after her side of the family, the McDuffs.”

  “So my grandfather’s name is Earl?”

  “No, E.J.J. is my grandpa. Your grandpa was his cousin, Jack. He and Grandpa E.J.J. were the ones who really got the business thrivin’.”

  “I think I’m going to need a chart,” she muttered.

  “It’s actually not that hard to remember. McCreadys have lived in Sackett County since before there was a lake. Our branch comes from a pair of brothers, John and Earl Jr. Now, back in 1916, Earl came home from World War I minus several toes and half an ass cheek and built a little bait shop on the shore of the lake selling night crawlers, plus homemade lemonade and sandwiches that his wife, Kate, made. Now, John never had much interest in fishing, but he could make the sturdiest cabinets you ever saw. The Spanish flu epidemic hit Lake Sackett real hard. John had to stop makin’ cabinets and start makin’ coffins. And it turned out he was an even better coffin maker than he was a cabinetmaker. With all the coffins the town needed—”

  “Due to a plague decimating the town’s population?”

  Duffy smiled brightly—perhaps too brightly, in light of the pandemic discussion. “Yep. With all the extra orders, John had to have more space to work and Earl let him use the back of his store as a workshop. They’d always gotten along real well and liked having each other nearby as they worked. The bait shop grew, because people loved Kate’s sandwiches and Earl’s fishing stories. And the coffin business took off, because, well, everybody dies eventually. Earl and Kate had E.J.J. John and Ellie had Jack. They all added to the business over time, offering full funeral services and guided fishing tours and such. And they added their own kids with Sarah and Tootie—my dad, Junior, came from E.J.J., obviously. Your dad, Stan, and Uncle Bob came from Jack, who passed on years ago. Bob and his wife have our cousin, Frankie. My parents have my sister, Marianne, and me—clearly the better child. My dad passed away about five years ago. Mom’s still a bit touchy on the subject. Marianne’s the only one of our generation to get married and have kids, so far. She and her husband, Carl, have two boys, Nate and Aiden.”

  “I will definitely need a chart,” she said.

  “Marianne already made you one. She hung it up in your cabin.” Duffy gave her a goofy half smile. “It’s a lot to take in, but you’ll get it. The most important thing to remember: Nate’s a biter.”

  “I will try to remember that,” she promised. “So I noticed that you didn’t mention Stan with a second wife or more kids. Um, I guess my father never remarried?”

  “No.” For the first time in their acquaintance, Duffy’s expression was not the picture of boyish excitement. He looked almost offended on Stan’s behalf that Margot was questioning her father’s loyalty. “He never even looked at another woman after your mama left.”

  Margot frowned. She’d been counting on some sort of story about a cruel stepmother who wouldn’t let her father contact his only daughter. As a child, she’d spent a lot of nights coming up with elaborate reasons why her father never called or wrote. He was a spy. He was an amnesiac prince. He was in the Witness Protection Program. Gerald was a decent man who had always treated her civilly, if a bit coldly. But she’d needed some reason to excuse Stan’s silence. And then her mother had given her the full awful explanation about Stan’s drinking. Margot had spent years in therapy—sessions starting in college that she’d never told her mother about—working through those excuses. And to find that there was no story, no spies, no amnesia, no evil stepmother? It was more than a little deflating, especially when he’d failed to come pick her up. He’d finally had the chance to start making up for years of absence and he hadn’t shown up.

  “He’s been sober for a long time, you know,” Duffy added. “We had a big party for his twenty-year chip and everything. Mama said he was a real mess when we were little. Hell, nobody really blamed your mama all that much for takin’ off. I mean, it sucked she never let us see you, but Stan was in no shape to be a daddy to you. We understood that. We just wish she woulda told us where she was goin’ with you so we knew you were all right. And it still took years after that for him to clean up. But once he got on the path, he stayed on it. Hasn’t had a drink since.”

  “Good for him,” Margot said blandly. “So, is there a reason my father isn’t here to pick me up?”

  Duffy glanced into the rearview mirror and switched lanes, as if he was stalling. “Uh, well, I think he’s seein’ to Barbara Lynn Grady. He got called to pick her up a couple of hours ago. It’s a bit of an occupational hazard. Death doesn’t stop for holidays or airport pickups. He probably won’t be home until late tonight.”

  Margot nodded. While she was hurt that she wouldn’t see her father that day, she was also oddly relieved. And then she felt guilty for being impossible to please. To distract herself from these rapidly realigning feelings, she pulled out her iPhone and checked her messages.

  “Oh, you’re gonna have a hard time gettin’ much of a signal up here,” Duffy said, waving his large, calloused hands at her smartphone. “It’s better closer to town, but the hills between us and Atlanta make it pretty hard for the towers to get through.”

  She dropped her phone in her carry-on bag. “Of course.”

  “So, Grandma Tootie says that you’re going to start tomorrow. She said you didn’t seem the type to want to take time off to r
est after your move. E.J.J. is going to do his best to teach you all he knows about the ‘people’ side of the business. Uncle Bob is a dab hand at handlin’ the logistics: paperwork for the coffins, the cremations, arranging the burials, workin’ with the police on traffic arrangements, and all that. But he’s all thumbs with non-McCready people, even if he’s known ’em all his life. If you’re not family, he just blurts out the most accidentally offensive things you can think of, because he doesn’t know what to say. And that is not the guy you want talkin’ you through one of the roughest times in your life.”

  Margot swallowed heavily. She hadn’t thought that part of the job through, dealing with those who were handling the deaths of their loved ones. She’d thought her job would mostly involve ordering flowers and discussing casket linings. She was used to guiding clients through happy occasions. She’d been to only a handful of funerals herself.

  No, no doubts. Margot could do this. It wasn’t as if she knew these people. She didn’t have to worry about what they thought of her handling of their grief. Hell, she’d gotten Miriam Schram through two “thank God the divorce is final” parties, including a custom piñata made to look like her soon to be ex-husband. Margot could handle funerals.

  “How does that work, exactly?” she asked, watching as the trees became thicker and the roads seemed to get steeper. “The two businesses together. Don’t the bereaved bring down the festive vacation mood for the boaters? Aren’t the mourners offended by coolers and pool noodles being carted through the parking lot?”

  “The way your grandpa Jack set up the parking lot, they come in through totally different entrances, plus the boaters tend to stick to the lake side of the building anyway. And people seem to like the novelty of it, the tradition. Knowing that yeah, today might suck and you’re going through something hard, but better days are coming, and eventually, you’re going to be back to living. And Frankie likes to think the funerals help remind the boaters not to be jackasses about wearin’ their life vests.”

  “Does it?”

  Duffy pulled a frown. “Not particularly. No.”

  Duffy easily guided the truck around a bend in the road and a huge glittering blue-green lakefront came into view. For the first time in about a week, Margot’s smile was genuine. Lake Sackett seemed to be shaped like a fern, all irregular inlets with the occasional tiny island breaking up the glassy expanse of water. The water was teeming with sailboats and speedboats towing water-skiers and inner tubes full of screaming kids.

  “Crowded,” Margot observed, searching the shoreline for resorts and hotels. But she could find only small clusters of cabins here and there along those oddly shaped bays.

  “Nah, this is nothin’,” he said. “You should have seen it a few years ago, when the tourists were really flockin’ in. This is the dregs. It’s drivin’ Uncle Bob just about nuts. Him and the town council, they’re pullin’ out what little hair they’ve got left trying to figure out how to get them back.”

  “Why? Where did they go?”

  “Here we are.” Duffy ignored the question and nodded his head toward two stone columns that seemed to pop up from out of nowhere. The neatly masoned columns, each with MCCREADY carved into the rock in bold letters, flanked a gravel drive nearly hidden by the thick trees.

  “The old family compound,” Duffy said, steering the truck over bumps and craters in the drive as if they were nothing. Meanwhile, Margot bounced her head off the passenger-side window hard enough to make her teeth rattle. “McCreadys first cleared it as a homestead back in the 1840s. Barely held on to it over the years, to be honest. Turns out we’re good at fishing and burying people—we are not great at farming. It wasn’t lakefront back then, mind you. We were lucky that the water stopped short of the houses when they dammed up the river in the fifties to make the lake. A lot of people were ‘encouraged’ by the Corps of Engineers to move along. It’s made for what you might call a historically ingrained distrust of outsiders.”

  “Oh, good.” The corners of Margot’s mouth tilted up, but by the time she’d finished forming the expression, it was enough to make Duffy recoil.

  “Hey, now, you’re not an outsider. You’re a McCready. Even if people in town don’t know you, they’re gonna know you. Know what I mean?”

  Margot drew back against her seat. This was a mistake. She needed to tell Duffy to turn the truck around and take her right back to the airport because there was no way she could plan funerals and be some sort of minor redneck celebrity.

  And she was about to tell him just that when they drove over another rut and she whacked her head against the window again. She opened her eyes just as they topped a rise in the gravel. The trees seemed to melt away to reveal a chain of log cabins grouped along the lakeshore, centering around one large two-story cabin. Each one seemed to have its own personality while sticking to the rustic aesthetic. There was just enough space between so the occupants would have some privacy but still be able to shout for help when the bands of roving rednecks inevitably raided the countryside. Each cabin had flower boxes blooming with yellow and purple Johnny-jump-ups and trailing fuchsias. The cabins had obviously spread out, with new ones added over time, from a huge log structure with a wraparound porch and three eaved windows springing from the roof. Each was recently painted and neatly kept, except for a slightly dingy-looking yellow cottage with a peeling green shingle roof at the end of the road.

  Duffy eased the truck past the main house and parked in front of an adorable specimen with a bright blue door. He reached behind the seat to pick up her suitcase, but she opened the back door and grabbed it. “I’ve got it, thank you.”

  “You have trust issues in relation to your luggage, huh?” Duffy observed.

  “I don’t mean any offense,” she told him. “I just . . . This is so sad, but I don’t have much left in the world. I sold a lot of my things before the move.”

  Duffy grinned. “Well, this place is all yours. It’s one of the newer additions, used to be my sister’s until she and Carl got married.”

  He opened the cabin door and ushered her through. The cabin was basically an overgrown dollhouse, like one of those trendy tiny homes without the pretentious storage solutions. There was one room divided into kitchen and living space, with one bedroom off to the left. A folding privacy screen, painted like the green mountains surrounding the lake, separated the bathroom from the bedroom. Margot got a look at the fairly new soaking tub, with its handheld showerhead but no shower curtain. She suspected it had been chosen because it was the only thing that would fit into the tiny plumbing footprint. “That is going to be an adjustment.”

  At this point, she was just glad there was a functioning toilet.

  A few of the things she’d shipped here were already arranged around the cabin. Some of her clothes hung in the wardrobe. Her Northwestern mugs were washed and ready on the counter of the kitchenette.

  “Tootie put the linens and towels out for ya. You should be all set.” Duffy backed toward the door. “Well, I’ll leave you to your unpacking. Get plenty of sleep tonight. You’ll start your training first thing tomorrow. No worries. Bob’s real patient. Hardly ever gets ruffled, not even when both of Curtis Taggerty’s wives showed up to make his arrangements.”

  “Ex-wife versus current wife drama?” Margot asked with a yawn.

  “No, they were both his current wives,” Duffy said, shaking his head. “They just didn’t know it.”

  “I would give that the reaction it deserves if I wasn’t so tired,” Margot said as she hung her suit bag in the tiny closet. Somehow, leaving a few things in her suitcase helped her feel like this wasn’t a long-term situation, like she could throw her stuff in her bag at any time and use her open-ended ticket back to Chicago.

  “Also, I’ve meant to ask: what grown adult woman allows people to call her ‘Tootie’?”

  Duffy snorted, his big blue eyes twinkling. “Her real name is Eloise. When she was little, she took these tap-dancing lessons and that was one of
the songs they learned the basics to. ‘A tootie-tah, a tootie-tah, a tootie-tah-tah.’ And she would just drive her whole family nuts, tapping up and down the hallway, up and down the stairs, up and down the sidewalk. ‘A tootie-tah, a tootie-tah, a tootie-tah-tah.’ They started calling her ‘Tootie’ to try to tease her out of it. But she’s so stubborn, the name-calling just made her do it more. And eventually the name just stuck. Heck, we don’t even call her ‘grandma.’ She’s always been Tootie.”

  “Well, when your name is Tootie, what other qualifiers do you need?”

  “That about covers it,” Duffy said. “The spare key’s on your nightstand there. And if you hear something that sounds like two rocks being banged together, don’t panic. It’s mostly harmless, just . . . don’t go outside on your own. Really, it would be better if you just waited for one of us to come get you in the morning.”

  “Okay,” Margot said, flopping down onto the mattress, making the springs squeal. The sheets smelled freshly laundered, that airy clean scent that came only from drying on a line in the sun. She’d smelled it once that she could remember, when her mother’s Whirlpool dryer broke down and the appliance store took two whole days to deliver an upgraded replacement. The blue-and-green quilt was handmade, she could tell from the irregularity of the fabrics and the stitching. And she tried not to be touched that these strangers had taken the time to make her bed with sun-bleached sheets and an heirloom coverlet, but she was.

  Her great-aunt had put a much-loved quilt on her bed, but her father hadn’t even bothered to pick her up at the airport. That helped squelch the warm fuzzy feeling spreading across her chest. He didn’t want to see her. After all this time, when he finally had the chance, he still didn’t want to see her. Why did that hurt so much? She was a grown woman. She didn’t need her “real” daddy to hug her and kiss her boo-boos. So why did the rejection leave an acidic burn that made her rub the heel of her hand against her sternum in the search for a deep breath?