Reunion Beach by Elin Hilderbrand (best ebook reader under 100 .TXT) 📗

of a cow and it actually tastes like real butter because it is what it says it is in the first place.”

“No false advertising.”

“Nope.”

“You worried about your figure?”

“Until the end. Old habits die hard, Pat. Remember, I once won a can of paint at the Charleston Jamboree when I was twelve years old and guessed the weight of a flatbed truck. It’s my superpower. I can tell what things weigh from fifty feet.”

“You’d better get a new superpower. We are weightless here.”

“Isn’t that wonderful? How exciting. Well, then I will not try to slim down my cornbread recipe.”

“There’s only one way to settle this.”

“We can settle it?”

“You bake. I bake. Then we round up some judges.” Pat looks around. “I’m not asking Kurt Vonnegut to judge our cornbread.”

“He wouldn’t anyway. Looks like he’s still annoyed from this angle.”

“He’s actually a lot of fun.”

“How about Tennessee Williams? I’ve been dying to talk New Orleans with him.”

“But you’re from Charleston.”

“I can talk New Orleans when forced. And I can force him to talk Charleston.” Dottie waves at Tennessee Williams. “Cajun this and that. I’m good at it.”

“I can talk New Orleans, too.”

“So go over and ask him to judge.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I get nervous around souls I admire.”

“You’re never nervous around me.”

“Exactly.”

“Don’t test me, Pat. What about Ada Boni? The famous cook—Italian chef—she wrote The Talisman.”

“I know who she is. She’s been dead so long it would take us an eternity to find her. Did you use her cookbook?”

“Only an eighth of it.”

“You’re not your genetics any longer.”

“But I just found out that I’m part Italian.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re air and sky now.”

“And memory.” Dottie turned to Pat. “Which is why we must bake.”

“Bliss needs no sustenance.”

“I don’t know about that. There’s more to baking cornbread than eating it.”

“Is there?”

“There’s the whisking, and the greasing of the pan . . .”

“The skillet.”

“Your skillet. There’s the pleasure of pouring the batter. The scent of the house when it’s baking. It’s that clean scent of a summer field right before harvest. We bake to remember.”

“Dot,” Pat said impatiently.

“All right, all right. I bake to win. I’m new here. I flew in on the wings of Number Two. Okay? I promise to let go of my life when I’m ready to let go. I mean it. Truly.”

“We need a chef to judge.”

“Who’s the cat who ran Cordon Bleu?”

“There are thousands of those high-end chefs. And none of them are interested in cornbread.”

“We need someone who knows cornbread.”

“Not many of those here.”

“Oh, come on. Southern writers are a genre. Like ripped from the headlines movies on Lifetime—too many to count and not enough years to watch them all. I bet if we name the writers, they’ll show up. The Southern chefs! Mama Dips! Miss Peacock from Decatur! What about the fiction types?”

“Who? Do you mean William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Reynolds Price, and Eudora Welty? Haven’t seen any of them around.”

“They’re not social, that’s why.”

“Even if they were, they wouldn’t come here.”

“This is a very prestigious establishment. Look around, Pat. You can’t do better than this.”

“So choose your judge.”

Dottie waved her arms from left to right, including the tables and the length of the bar. “You take that half. I’ll take this half.”

“Fine,” Pat said.

Pat and Dottie split up to find the best judge. Soon, the clouds shifted and a new soul appeared in the entrance.

“Where am I? Look at this place.” An attractive soul entered the bar. It was apparent she was pretty even though her ectoplasm was fading. A black chemise, pearls, and high heels were almost all that was left of her. She shoved her black horn-rimmed glasses up her nose and squinted. “Is this the writer’s bar?” she asked as she sat down. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll have a Pimm’s cup.”

“A girl that orders a Pimm’s Cup is a true girl raised in the South. Is that you, Julia Evans Reed?”

Julia spun around on her bar stool. “Dottie Frank?”

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you think? I’m writing an article for Garden & Gun.”

“I have a subscription! Everything that’s important or anything interesting that happens in the American South is in Garden & Gun these days. So what are you writing about?”

“That’s a joke, Dottie. There are no more articles to write. No more books. This is the end of the line.”

“Oh, right.” Dottie sat down on the stool next to Julia.

“This is sort of a forced retirement deal.”

“It’s so final.” Dottie sighed.

“Yes, it is.”

Dottie turned to face Julia. “I didn’t know you were sick.”

“You didn’t? There was a post on Instagram. But evidently no one read it. Not one person. That just proves nobody reads the copy on social media. They go straight for the videos of double-jointed me doing the shimmy at a Boxing Day lunch at the River Road Country Club in Greenville. Nobody ever reads the captions even after you spend an hour and a half trying to come up with something pithy for the post. If you want to keep a secret, just put it in the captions on IGTV. I actually wrote exactly what was wrong with me, but I might as well have written, Help, I’m being robbed. I don’t know these people and they’re draining the liquor, because no one ever mentioned the post to me, but of course thousands liked it. Ugh. Like this is what I would like to say to them.”

“I would have told everyone I was sick had I the opportunity. I appreciate sympathy. Pity should be an expensive perfume and it should have the scent of my neck,” Dottie said.

“What are you drinking?”

“Vodka because I don’t swell.”

“You won’t feel anything going forward. I’m here ten minutes and know that for certain.”

Pat joined the ladies. “Hello, Julia.”

“Aren’t you shocked she’s here?”

“Nothing surprises me, Dottie.”

“Any luck finding a judge?”

“Nope.”

“Judge for what?” Julia asked.

“A cornbread competition.”

“I know more about cornbread than I do about any other subject. I mean it. I’ll be the judge.”

“Pat, Julia said she’d judge. Where do we get the stuff? I need ingredients.”

“The ingredients