So the frame and glass and the stupid picture of me and my dead fiancé had long since been taken away by the garbage man. As had all the other pictures I had in albums upstairs. As had my wedding gown that I didn’t get to wear that I kept for some ridiculous reason, that cost a mint but I didn’t even give it to Goodwill or anything.
No one needed that bad juju.
So the garbage man took it to where it belonged. The dump.
At my fake-innocent question as to what frame they were referring to, Ty-Ty’s eyes slid to Tack. Mine did too.
He was looking at his boots.
In the years I’d known Tack Allen, I’d learned all the meanings of him looking at his boots. These were threefold.
One, he didn’t want Ty-Ty to see he found her amusing and this was solely when she was ticked at him which she would not find amusing that he found amusing but he mostly always did.
Two, he was ticked at one of his kids—the older two, Rush and Tabby, that he’d had with another woman—not Cutter and Rider, the boys he had with Tyra. As an older dad on his second time around, he had all the patience in the world with Cut and Rider. This was good, seeing as they were still little boys, but they were also total hooligans (and thus why they weren’t with us right then, ruining a relaxing dinner, but with Big Petey, a vintage member of the MC, likely destroying his house). Tack being ticked at Rush and Tab came rarer now, as they were older, and he looked at his boots when he was trying to stop himself from shouting or, maybe, strangling them.
Three, he was with Tyra and me and—for whatever reason we were squabbling, gossiping or giggling—he was not going to get involved.
Luckily, my eyes went back to Tyra before hers came to me.
I tried to come up with an answer to anything she might say.
Surprisingly, she didn’t say anything. Not about the frame or my lie.
Instead, she said, “Nothing, honey,” as she walked to me, wrapped her arms around me, tighter than usual, and gave me a long hug. “Thanks for dinner,” she said in my ear.
“Yeah, babe, good food,” Tack called to me from his place at the door, and my eyes moved over Tyra’s shoulder to him.
I smiled.
Tack did not.
He tipped up his chin but his gaze stayed glued to mine, intense. Somewhat like how Hop looked at me, minus the admiration and, obviously, the sex or foreplay, but adding open contemplation I had a really bad feeling about.
Tyra let me go and I tore my eyes from Tack to smile into hers.
“Thanks for coming,” I said to her and I chanced looking back at her husband.
“Don’t have to thank me for sittin’ down at a table with two beautiful women and good, bona fide, Southern cooking,” Tack replied and, finally, I smiled a genuine smile.
One thing my mom didn’t try to leave behind in Tennessee was her cooking. She did it all the time and she taught me and Elissa how to do it like her momma did with her and Mamaw’s mom did with her and so on.
She did this because she often tried to be a good mom. She also did this because it was tradition. But it stunk because I knew she did this mostly because Dad loved her cooking. Or, more aptly, he loved that whenever they had dinner parties, people would shower him (yes, him) with glowing compliments about how he was smart enough to marry a woman who knew how to make honest-to-goodness, down-home meals.
Needless to say, learning to cook in the Southern tradition, I grew up in Connecticut but I didn’t know you could steam vegetables until I moved to Denver. As far as I knew, they were either fried in an iron skillet with butter or breaded or battered and dropped in hot fat.
Luckily, I had the metabolism of a sixteen-year-old high school point guard.
Also luckily, my cooking was good enough for Tack to mention it (again) and get everyone’s mind off the frame.
“Anytime, anything you want, Tack. Just call and your wish is my command,” I offered as Tyra and I walked to him at the door.
“Don’t offer that. He does most of the cooking. He’ll be over three times a week to get a break,” Tyra told me, a smile in her voice.
I kept my mouth shut mostly because having them come over three times a week would be fine by me, and I didn’t want them to know that. It would expose too much. But the truth was, I’d run an advertising agency and I’d rush home and fry chicken and make a pecan pie from scratch all the way down to the crust if it meant three nights of not being alone, watching TV or worse, what I’d been doing lately: listening to Bob Seger’s slow songs with candles burning and doing everything to ignore the gaping void in my belly, which meant I did nothing but think of the gaping void in my belly.
“Next time, my turn,” Tack rumbled, bending to touch his lips to my cheek.