Southern Fried

Chapter 1Psst. Hey, hey you up there. Yep, you, you looking down all confused like. I know we’re not supposed to talk, you and me, but, heck, if I’m gonna be in it up to my ears, might as well take as many innocent bystanders right along with me, right? Not that you look all that innocent, mind you, but still. Anyway, the s**t already hit the fan—f**k it, fans, plural—and damn if I didn’t leave my s**t-smock back in New York. Who knew it would come in handy, right? I mean, funerals are sad and all, but they’re not supposed to be friggin’ deadly. Least not for those of us still around to witness them, that is. Granny, on the other hand, well now, it couldn’t have been more deadly for her, I suppose. Still, from what those nice people down at the mortuary told me, she was the prettiest corpse you ever laid eyes on, which, considering she was ninety when she kicked that proverbial bucket, that’s really saying something. Heck, they said that by the time they were done with her, she didn’t look a day over sixty. Kind of bitter irony, I suppose: looking your best and never getting a chance to see it. Though with Granny, I wouldn’t put it past her. She was probably hovering over the service the entire time. “Wait a darn minute,” I bet she was hollering over to that angel, Gabriel. “Yeah, yeah, I see your damn light; just hold your horses. Gotta find out what these folks really thought of me.” Truth was, it wasn’t a whole hell of a lot. People respected her, for sure, but love is such a strong word. And so is hate. Oh, I certainly loved her, of course, but she was my granny. Only family I ever really had. But she was more of an acquired taste. Sort of like escargot. I mean, you can cover it up with rich sauces and charge a pretty penny for it, but when it comes right down to it, you’re still just eating a bunch of snails. That was Granny, all right: a bit of a slug with one damn fine, pretty shell. Sorry, Granny, but I’m not saying anything that anyone couldn’t easily find out for themselves. I mean, you just had to listen to the scuttlebutt outside the funeral home if you wanted to get yourself an earful. Not that they weren’t trying to keep it from me, her only living relative and supposed heir to her fortune, though. Except, I heard it just the same. Loud and clear. Wait, wait. You caught that supposed heir, huh? Well, and rightly so. See, I assumed everything was coming to me, too. Like I said, we were all each other had, in terms of blood. My parents, my mom being Granny’s only daughter, see, both of them were killed in a car accident when I was just a baby. No other family from what I’d been told. No aunts or uncles, maybe some distant cousins nobody ever talked about. No one sending Christmas cards who wasn’t on the payroll, though. So the estate should’ve come to me. Lock, stock, and barrel. Smoking barrel, as it turned out. Cue the doom and gloom music. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. I mean, you have to be wondering why this is the first time I’d been back home in nearly ten years, right? Well, that was Granny’s doing, too. Come to think of it, everything was Granny’s doing. Always was. And based on the reading of her will, would be for quite some time to come. “Nothing for you down here, Trip,” she told me, way back when, a week shy of my eighteenth birthday as she packed me up and shipped me off, first and last time she ever stepped foot inside an airport. “Just me and a bunch of pissy servants out in the middle of nowhere. Best for you to go up North, get yourself a decent education.” Not that I had a choice, really. Once she made up her mind, that was all she wrote. Besides, she was right. Granny lived deep, deep inside the South Carolina low country, and that’s about as deep as a fellow can get, the nearest neighbor a good several miles away down a barely paved road. More alligators than people in those parts. Still, it was the first time I’d been away, and I was pretty near terrified. And the North? Granny was a die-hard southerner. Most I heard about the North was that it was full of people who talked too loud, too fast, and ate with their mouths open. Meaning, about all I could picture were folks with really strong jaws. Plus, there wasn’t a Baptist in the bunch. Least not her kind of Baptist. But, like I said, that’s what she wanted for me and that’s what I got. A kiss and a hug and a wallet full of cash, and I was on my merry way. New York City. And, man, did I ever take a bite out of that apple. Sucked it dry, seeds and all. Two college degrees, a handful of ex boyfriends, and a closet full of Marc Jacobs later, and, wham, you got yourself the man standing before you today. All traces of the South were wiped clean the hell away. Mostly. Which is why, getting off that plane in Savannah, I felt like a fish out of water. Catfish, if I had my way. Southern fried. Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it? Anyway, not like me and Granny didn’t see each other in all that time. She’d get her chauffeur to drive her up to Atlanta, fly me down, meet me at the Peachtree Hotel, get us a couple of suites overlooking the city. She’d take me shopping, catch me up on her antics, and try to pry me for mine. Though good luck with that, right? Would’ve put her in her grave way before her ninetieth birthday, let me tell you. A boy can antic the hell on out in New York City. Antic enough to leak on over to New Jersey, for that matter. Suffice it to say, Granny got the watered-down version. Buckets of water, really. Oh, she knew I was gay, and all. Would’ve taken a whole ocean to water that little tidbit down. And let me tell you, there’d still be some flame left over. Still, the Southern Baptist in her got put on the back burner when it came to the gay stuff. Granny was a veritable fag hag when she wanted to be, in fact. Dragged me to more than my share of gay bars in Midtown Atlanta. Queen of the ball, she was. Queen of the queens of the ball, to be exact. But that was the side of Granny only I ever got to see, when she let her hair down, kicked up her heels—orthopedic though they were. Back at the mansion, and yes, it was as southern as Tara ever was, she was a prim and proper and very, very bible-toting lady: hair in a bun, blouse buttoned up to her neck, lips pursed, eyes steely gray. The woman put the fear of God into you, she did. Me included, most times. And man, was it ever hard to go back there, what with her gone. Place was soulless. All shell, the snail now in nothing but plain, old wood. I gulped, standing on the porch, a trail of sweat bee-lining down my face, luggage off to the side. Then I rang the bell, I Wish I Was in Dixie chiming from within as I took a deep breath, the fragrant smell of magnolia blossoms wafting languidly up my nostrils, jasmine close behind. “Old times there are not forgotten,” I sang, tapping my foot as the door creaked open. “Trip, that you?” came the familiar voice, her head poking out, a smile spreading wide across her dark, round face. My smile instantly matched hers. “Pearl?” I managed, my heart very nearly bursting at the seams. The door continued moving open. “Who else would it be, boy?” She held out her arms to me, rolls of fat dangling down, swinging like a pendulum. I ran in and gave her a hug, face buried in layers of cotton and breast. She smelled like fresh cut corn and okra, a splash of vanilla with a dash of Kentucky bourbon. She smelled, in fact, like my childhood. Her arms closed in tight, the hug like a vise as a tear streamed down her cheek before tickling my forehead. “You’re looking good, Pearl,” I managed, voice muffled. She laughed. “All you seeing is titty, boy,” she chided, slapping me on the shoulder. “Well, could be worse,” I retorted, backing up an inch. “You could be much taller and I could be much shorter.” She paused, letting that image splash across her brain. Then she laughed and smacked me twice as hard. “You’re a foul talking boy, Trip Jackson. Who taught you how to talk that way?” She winked and led me inside. “My lips are sealed,” I replied, closing the door behind me, the smell of magnolia replaced by Pine Sol, jasmine by fresh baked biscuits. “You got strawberry jam to go with those?” I asked, head craning from side to side, taking it all in after being away for so very long. “With butter and honey,” she told me, grabbing my hand and leading me inside the belly of the beast, not a stick of furniture moved in well over a decade, and all of it clean as a whistle, not a speck of dust to be found. Pearl saw me staring and nodded. “She’s gone in body only, sugar. I swear, I think she’s still around watching me like she always did. Making sure I keep it just like she likes it. Fussy old biddy.” I laughed, despite myself. “That any way to talk about the dead, Pearl?” We walked into the kitchen, the yeasty aroma so intoxicating it very nearly made me hard in my jeans. Then she replied to my question. “Trust me, boy, that’s saying it nicely.” She moved to the oven and removed the tray of biscuits, flaky and perfect, just a smidgen of brown around the edges. She cut one open for me, a puff of steam rising up before she smeared a slab of butter on top, a swirl of honey, a glob of jam over it all. Then she served it to me on Granny’s favorite china, a glass of whole milk set to the side. I smiled wide. “It’s a miracle her heart didn’t go out long before now,” I remarked, taking in Lord only knew how much cholesterol and fat—gleefully, mind you. It went down smooth as silk, blocking several arteries along its murderous path. Pearl returned my smile with one of her own, big and white against a sea of honey-colored brown. “Boy, it’s a miracle her liver didn’t go out long before that. Only reason she died was because we plum ran out of that Jack Daniels of hers.” She made the sign of the cross over her chest. “God rest her soul.” “And bless her liver, too,” I added, mimicking the gesture. “Amen.” She joined me at the kitchen table, two biscuits to my one. “Funeral’s tomorrow, huh?” I asked, almost in a whisper. She merely nodded. “Hard to believe she’s gone.” Again, the nod, half a biscuit downed. “Then what happens, Pearl?” I looked at her like I did when I was a little boy when I broke something, something Granny was going to be awfully pissed about me breaking. Pearl always knew the right thing to say to comfort me. Sadly, I wasn’t a boy any longer, much as I felt like one right at that moment. She swallowed and then gulped. “Her attorney is in London. Can’t get back until a couple of days from now. He’s got the will in a safe up in Charleston, and then there’ll be a reading as soon as he retrieves it and brings it on down here. That what you meant by then what happens?” she asked in between another hearty bite. I swallowed, too, but not because I had a thick slab of biscuit gliding down my throat. “I suppose. I mean, it is a pretty big estate, huh?” She craned her head this way and that, multiple chins sloshing about as she started in on biscuit number two. “I think that’s what you’d call a gross understatement, Trip.” She laughed, crumbs flying to and fro. See, in terms of money, Granny was rich as Rockefeller and twice as ornery. My family had always been rich, going back to the Civil War. Rich from cotton. Fields and fields of it. All spared from Grant’s torch. Marched right on past us and decided on Atlanta instead. Thank goodness. Anyway, the house stayed put, every last white column and stick of silver of it, all of it passed down, down, down—stopping dead in its tracks with me, I supposed. There’s that bitter irony again, right? Last living relative is queer as a three-dollar bill, which, needless to say, they didn’t have in confederate money. The genes were staying put in my, well, jeans, so to speak. Still, I’d never laid eyes on Granny’s will before. The inheritance was all assumption on my part and would be until the lawyer arrived.