Prize of a Lifetime. Donna Hill
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seemed to stop: honking horns, music blasting from car windows and she couldn’t imagine that the police and the fire department could possibly be called as often as they were in New York. It was a great city to visit, but she could never live there.
The bright blue-and-gold awning with the double C logo for Carrington Caterers loomed ahead. Sasha slowed, eyeing the street for an open parking space, the closer to the front the better. She zipped her midnight-blue Honda into a spot vacated by a gas-guzzling Suburban, beating out a Lexus by a mere bumper.
Sasha bit back a chuckle and kept her eyes straight ahead as the Lexus crawled by her. She could almost feel the cuss words bouncing off her driver’s-side window. She turned off the car, gathered her purse and tote bag and went inside as quickly as she could, eager to get out of the sticky heat and into the cool interior of the family domain.
CC had been in business for more than twenty years, starting off in her mother Grace’s kitchen on Kennisaw Road where she did “favors” for close friends who were having small gatherings or surprise family events. Grace Carrington’s homemade soul-food dinners and desserts became so popular that she outgrew her kitchen and rented the space CC now occupied. Once they were old enough, Sasha and her younger sister, Tristan, helped out. Their dad, Frank, who also knew his way around a stove, handled the books and the deliveries.
Fortunately, the recession had been kind to them. While many businesses in downtown Savannah were suffering or had closed, CC still managed to do well, all things considered, and maintained a profit. Grace firmly believed that food was the best comforter in good times and more so in bad. However, with more people becoming health-conscious and a flurry of government studies on obesity in the U.S., Sasha had been trying to convince her mother and her sister to broaden their menu to include some healthy alternatives. She urged them to serve more than the fried, buttered, gravy-laden, ham-hock-seasoned, sugar-coated foods that CC had built its reputation on. Grace and Tristan were not interested.
Sasha opened the heavy wood door and was greeted by the mouth-watering aroma of CC’s famous seasoned collard greens. Her stomach jumped in delight, but she fought back the urge. For the past four months she’d quietly embarked upon a lifestyle change, cutting back or eliminating many of the foods she’d grown up on. It was a struggle, but she was slowly winning the battle, having lost nearly twenty pounds for her efforts. Her mother’s high blood pressure, her sister huffing and puffing over the simplest activity, not to mention her Aunt Shelia’s heart attack a year earlier had put Sasha on notice. She’d gone from a solid size eighteen to a curvaceous size fourteen. She had plans, and she wanted to be around to see them fulfilled, and if she had to take her mother and her sister with her kicking and screaming, she was going to make sure that they were around to enjoy her success.
“Hey, Charise. My mom around?” Charise was Sasha’s first cousin on her mother’s side, her Aunt Shelia’s daughter. She came in after school to help out a couple of days a week.
Charise was busy on her iPhone. She didn’t make a move without it, and she barely glanced up. “In the back.” She angled her head toward the kitchen.
“Thanks. How’s school?” She patted her cousin’s shoulder as she came around the front counter.
“Graduate next year,” Charise said, as if by rote.
Sasha smiled, shook her head and walked toward the kitchen. At least Charise was still in school and didn’t have an infant on her hip like so many of the young girls in the city.
“Hey, Mom.”
Grace looked up for an instant from her task of rolling dough for the crust of her famous peach cobbler. “Hey, baby. Hand me that brown sugar,” she said with a slight lift of her double chin.
Sasha did as she was asked to the tune of banging pots and stirring spoons coming from the other side of the wall that divided the baking area from the ovens, supervised by Clyde, the only person who wasn’t family that Grace allowed in her kitchen. “Hey, Clyde,” she called out.
Clyde poked his head out, his dark brown face gleaming with sweat. He flashed her a toothy grin. “Hey, yourself. How you be?” His eyes rolled up and down her body. “Get any thinner you gone blow away.” He chuckled.
“I doubt it,” she tossed back. The Hasting women were all “big-boned” as they liked to call themselves. Her mother’s sisters, Linda and Shelia, were both double-Ds and size twenty-plus. Her grandmother had been big, too, and Sasha’s sister, Tristan, was well on her way to winning top prize. Sasha worried about all of them, but they swore that their men loved it and no one could pay them enough to pass up a good meal.
“So when are you leaving?” her mother asked, not interested in hearing another one of Sasha’s lectures on food.
Sasha leaned her hip against the counter. “My flight to Antigua leaves at seven tomorrow night.”
“You sure picked a fine time to take off on vacation. You know this is a busy time of year for us, with graduations and weddings,” her mother complained as she wiped sweat from her brow with a paper towel.
“I know. But if I don’t take my vacation now I won’t get a chance to go.”
“I still don’t know why you have to go to some island.”
Sasha had no intention of telling her family the real reason for her trip. If things didn’t work out, she didn’t want to hear “I told you so.”
Sasha went to the sink and washed her hands. She moved next to her mother and began kneading dough for the pies. “I know this is a busy time, Mom,” she began, “but this is really important to me.”
Her mother turned and looked at her daughter curiously. Her brows drew together. “What’s so important about a vacation in Antigua?”
Sasha drew in a breath. “It’s just that I’ve planned this for a while. I can’t back out now. This is the first time I’ve been out of the country.” Her voice began to bubble with enthusiasm even as she hoped her mother would share in her excitement.
Grace’s full lips were tightly pursed before the glimmer of a smile loosened them. “Be sure to bring me something. And I don’t mean a T-shirt,” she warned, wagging a rolling pin at Sasha.
The two women laughed.
“I promise I’ll do better than a T-shirt.” Sasha rolled out some dough. “Is Tristan stopping by? I was hoping to say goodbye.”
Grace shook her head slowly as she poured fresh peaches into the pan. “I sure wish you would talk to your sister. Tristan won’t listen to me.”
Sasha stopped rolling the dough and looked at her mother. “What happened now?”
“Gary again…staying out until all hours. Won’t hardly talk to Tristan. She’s making herself crazy, crying all the time.” Her mother’s heavy chest heaved as she took a breath.
“I’ll talk to her. I’ll give her a call before I leave.”
“Thank you, baby. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Sasha offered a faint smile as they worked side by side. What her mother really meant was that she depended on Sasha for everything, she always had. It was Sasha who had taken care of the house and her younger sister while their parents built the business. Even after Sasha and Tristan were old enough to help out, it was up to Sasha to make sure that Tristan was looked after, got up in time for school, dressed, did her homework, ate and attended her activities.
She must have done a pretty lousy job, Sasha thought, seeing as how Tristan had wound up with a creep like Gary. A part of her felt guilty for leaving, but it was finally time that she did something for herself.
After they’d finished with the pies, Sasha prepared to leave.
“I’ll call you before I leave. Okay?” She kissed her mother’s cheek. “If I’m not running behind, I’ll try to swing by before I go to the airport. I want to see Daddy.”
“He