FORTY-SIX
reeve
“Hey.”
I open one eye to see Cam striding into my room. He yanks the blankets off me.
“You better get your ass out of bed. Lunch at the Forrester family compound begins in fifty-nine minutes.”
I squint at the clock: 11:01. “Let me sleep, dude. It’s my only break.”
“You slept for twelve hours. Get up and let’s go.”
“I wouldn’t call that sleep.” I roll over and sit on the edge of the bed. I swear I haven’t had a solid night of sleep since the last time I talked to Jade. She’s always in my head, and when I’m asleep, she’s somewhere in my dreams. “Listen, Cam, I think I’m gonna skip the visit today. Tell Minnie sorry, but I’m just not up for it.”
“Not gonna fly. I talked to her an hour ago and she was running around the kitchen like a nutjob, making dessert for our visit. If you don’t show up, she’ll kill me.” Cam’s mom has been insistent for weeks we toast to the end of our football season—and my Heisman dreams—on the eve of my leaving for the ceremony, and the day has arrived. TomorrowI fly to New York, and the next day I either win or lose the Heisman Trophy.
“Minnie baked? She can’t turn on an oven.”
“Once in a while. I think the last time was before I met you.”
My stomach growls. “What’d she bake?”
“‘My boys’ favorites!’” Cam says in a high-pitched, Southern-accented imitation of his mom. “Pecan pie and lemon icebox pie.”
“Those aremyfavorites. You hate pie.”
“And she still tries to deny you’re the favorite. Now let’s go, Golden Boy.”
I’m grouchy about leaving my bed until we walk into Cam’s house and I smell the familiar scent—like cinnamon but better—and I remember I love it here.
Minnie glides in wearing a dress, heels, and a crisp, pale-pink apron that’s clearly never seen a single grain of flour. She greets us with enthusiastic hugs and runs through her well-worn list of compliments about what handsome, strong, and all-around outstanding specimens of masculinity we are. Cam quietly endures it, but I smile so she’ll keep going. It doesn’t matter that she’s been saying it since I was an awkward string bean of a seventh grader; it never gets old.
“Lay it on extra thick for him, Ma,” Cam tells her. “Your boy’s nursing his first broken heart.”
Minnie gasps. “No.”
“I told you I wasn’t seeing that girl anymore,” I say.
“Well, sure, that’s practically the nightly news. But a broken heart? Truly?”
“Thanks, Cam.”
“As I live and breathe,” Minnie declares. “Well, can’t say I have much experience with that, but I do know that food fixes all the soul’s ails, so let’s move to the kitchen. Youboys want to join me in a little afternoon bourbon?” She leads us down the hall and into the spotless white kitchen.
Cam nods at the near-empty rocks glass on the counter. “Looks like you got an early start to your afternoon.”
She looks briefly sheepish, then tosses him a smile. “Afternoon, morning. It’s all the same in this house.”
We eat and drink and I go hard on Minnie’s pies, which taste almost as good as they look. Minnie’s fired up about attending the Heisman ceremony Saturday, and even though I’m sick to death of Heisman talk, she keeps the focus on her outfit, her hotel reservation, and, well, herself, so I make it through the conversation without the old stomach churn.
It feels so good to be home, back to the one place that hasn’t changed. When I was in high school, I pretty much treated this place like a hotel, an easy thing considering the staff the Forresters kept on hand to maintain perfect working order. I told myself this house was my home base, but not my home, even when I wanted it to be.
I knew once I went to college and I was a legal adult with a dorm room and a cafeteria to pick up where this place left off, I wouldn’t be coming back. That idea lasted until fall break of freshman year, when Cam came home without me and Minnie cried because she thought I didn’t want to be part of their family anymore. I guess I’m still working on believing she’ll always feel that way.
Later, when Cam falls asleep on the couch in front of the TV, Minnie finds me upstairs in my old bedroom, which hasn’t changed since I graduated from high school except for the new carpeting and the football she’s placed in a glass display cube from my junior year, when I threw for four hundred yards.
“This old house feels alive again when you boys come home,” she tells me. “Just like old times.”
