The Almost Sisters

  Only I knew exactly how deep Wattie’s complicity had been sixty years ago, but everybody knew that she helped Birchie move the trunk. She had stolen my rental car and wrecked it trying to protect Birchie. Birchie was the one most in the wrong, but Wattie was vulnerable in ways Birchie had never been, that I would never be, and it was this injustice that shook me.

  “Come after her, then, you racist trash,” I said now, and tilted my chin up to match Martina’s insolent angle. I thought of Wattie’s vehement insistence that her sons and their families not come back to Birchville now, juxtaposed with Martina Mack, het up enough to aim a salt-loaded shotgun at well-to-do white children. What would she aim at quick-tempered Stephen if he came to his mother’s defense? What would Cody do, with a badge to back his gun? Wattie had seen where this was headed long before I had, and she’d decided to keep her family out of the line of fire. She was placing her frail, soft body between her sixty-something, grown-ass sons and trouble. Motherhood, it seemed, was a lifelong gig, and I felt my heart swell to bursting pride at her valor. She’d meant to face the Second South alone, but now I’d been unblinded. “She’ll take you down. We all will. And don’t you dare think we’ll fight alongside Wattie because we own some piece of her. She isn’t ours. She’s us.”

  I stalked away past the loblolly pine tree, hung with a hundred white crisscross banners that shone pale in the moonlight. I was savagely glad to leave the house marked and marred behind me in this way, if only until morning. The Mack family had left crosses of their own in yards, years back. I turned by the tree, stepping into its shadow with my outsize black shirt swirling around me.

  She called after me, “You better make them kids come clean this up! You hear me! You better!”

  And I would, too. I’d come down and watch them do it and ask Birchie and Wattie to come as well. The town needed to see us making the kids do what was right. I needed every human from my South to stand behind us. Maybe they would. After all, Wattie was beloved at Redemption, and at First Baptist only twenty or so people had moved to sit behind Martina Mack.

  On the other hand, the seats behind my family had not exactly filled to bursting. I’d been heartened to see that some of the younger members of the church, led by Jim and Polly Fincher, had moved into the Partridges’ regular pew, right behind ours. The dear old Partridges themselves had simply moved back a row and stayed. We had at least five more families than Martina Mack. Still, most of the congregation had packed itself uncomfortably into the center seats, uncertain. Undecided.

  I felt my shoulders squaring. I wasn’t twelve years old anymore. I was a Birch in Birchville. My brown-skinned son would be a Birch in Birchville, too, yet he would be nothing but that ugly word to trash like Cody Mack. He could not live in the town as I knew it. He would not live in the South or even America as I knew it. I hadn’t truly understood how deep and old and dangerous this was, until tonight.

  We couldn’t hide up in our house and wait for them to choose. This was a war. An old, old war that had started before I was born and would likely not be finished in my lifetime, but I had to fight it. I was going to have to learn to fight it.

  16

  I stomped toward home so deep in thought that I almost jumped out of my skin when Lavender materialized out of Martina’s darkened side yard.

  “You took her down hard! You are such a badass,” she told me, grabbing my hand. She’d circled back and heard the fight then. Good.

  “Don’t say ‘ass,’” I chided, which wasn’t very Cool Aunt of me, but I was firmly on the mother side of the pond right now. I was mothered up, mothered out, enmothered in such fierce, protective rage on Digby’s behalf. My son was growing bigger and thumpier every day. He would be born, and I was seeing with fresh eyes the world he would be born into. “And also, do not ever, you hear me, sneak out in the middle of the night to meet a boy. You should be home already, not hanging out in the wee hours of the night listening to me shriek like a harpy at a little old lady. You are going to be so grounded.”

  She shrugged, unconcerned, swinging our hands between us. “Totes worth it.”

  I shook my head. Well, maybe to thirteen it was. Hugh was very, very cute. I took a cleansing breath, feeling a bit better with my niece’s hand in mine. I secretly loved that she had called me a badass, loved that she was on my side. More than that, she was on Digby’s side. I hoped hard that her whole generation would be like her.

  “Do people still say totes?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure. But just, like, ironically,” she told me. “Do me and Hugh really have to go back and fix her yard up?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, and speaking of ironic, I was engaging in some next-level irony right now, wasn’t I?

  I’d decided to protect Birchie, even though she’d done the worst thing that a human being could do. She’d taken a life. I was firmly on Wattie’s side, too, and Wattie had helped her hide the body. But would I let my equally beloved niece get away with some petty vandalism against roaring jackasses? Apparently not.

  Lavender blew a raspberry. “She deserved it, though.”

  “Oh, totes,” I said, very California, and she laughed. “I’ll help you clean up.”

  We were at the end of Pine Street now, where it bumped into the square. We turned and headed down the pavement on the side with the old houses. The streetlights were on the other side, by the square itself, but I thought for this conversation we could use a little shadow.

  As we passed the Darian house, I paused to check the side yard, to be sure the other budding felon had made it home safely. The ladder was gone, and Hugh’s window was closed. I took these as good signs.

  Lavender, looking up at the dark window, said, “He wanted to wait with me. I told him I’d be safe with you, and you might kill him.”

  “I might still, but not for rolling Martina’s house. That boy is too old for you,” I said. I was calmer, and I thought Digby had calmed, too. He spun in a slow pinwheel at my center.

  “It’s not like that,” she said. “We’re just friends.”

  “It’s actually a lot like that, or you would have invited Jeffrey along on your midnight ramble,” I said. I shot her some side-eye, but she said nothing. It was a very telling silence. “Be his friend in the living room with your mom right upstairs and me in the kitchen. Be friends at Cupcake Heaven with Jeffrey there, too. Don’t be friends alone at two a.m. You aren’t ready for that kind of nighttime friend.”

  “Okay,” she said, too flip and immediate for me to believe for one red second that she meant it. But when she spoke again, she was serious. “It’s just that Hugh gets it, you know? I swear we aren’t all flirty or talking gushy crap. We talk about, like, our lives. Real stuff. My dad and his mom. Jeffrey gets too upset. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but me and Hugh, we do want to.”

  This was supposed to reassure me, but it didn’t. She was too young to know yet that their conversations about the things that mattered most were far more dangerous. They were the conversational equivalent of tequila, a faster path to intimacy than flirting ever could be. She pulled on my hand, tugging us toward Birchie’s darkened house. The porch light was off, and only the living-room window had a faint glow to it. Wattie always left one of the side-table lamps burning, to deter all the burglars Birchville didn’t have. I pulled Lav to the side, thinking we should go around to the back door. It was unlocked, and I thought we had a better chance of sneaking in that way. I didn’t want to risk waking up our exhausted old ladies. Much less Rachel. I’d had enough ballistics for one night.

  We turned, but something caught the corner of my eye. Something in the deep shadows of Birchie’s porch. I stopped dead, staring up the hill. I could barely make out the figure of a man. He was sitting in the porch swing. The light was off, and the moon was setting, but he was silhouetted against that faint golden glow from Wattie’s lamp.

  I recognized him as the shadow I’d seen earlier, flashing past the gate when I was in the graveyard. It hadn’t been m
y imagination or a dog after all. It had been this guy. I could see those points on the top of his head that looked a bit like tiny ears.

  There was a crazy moment, hardly longer than a heartbeat, when I knew, I simply knew that it was Batman. Somehow he’d learned that there was a Digby and the news had mattered to him in every way that was right. He’d come racing across the state line, Georgia to Alabama, hurrying to see about his son.

  Lavender had stopped with me. She said, “What?” too loud, in a nervous voice. “Why did we stop? You look spooked.”

  The figure on the porch started and stood up when she spoke. The guy was tall like Batman, but maybe too tall, and definitely too broad across the shoulders. Too bulky. I felt an odd sink of mingled relief and disappointment as he came to the stairs and started down them, toward us. Lavender heard him, and when she saw him, she went dead still, too.

  “Daddy?” she said.

  Once she said it, I recognized him. He’d gained a little weight in the two weeks he’d been MIA. The points on the top of his head were his messy curls. I hadn’t seen him without his hair blown out into that sportsy flop across his forehead, not for years.

  But it was Jake all the same, and the moment he heard Lav’s voice, he sped up. He hurried down the stairs, and Lav tore her hand out of mine and ran, so fast she was like a teeny Flash in the waning moonlight. He reached the bottom step and started running, too. They met in the middle of the yard. She swarmed up him, and at the same time he was lifting her, and she wrapped her arms tight around his neck. Her feet dangled in the air, and one of her sandals had dropped off onto the ground. She didn’t seem to notice. I could hear that she was saying something, too choked by crying for me to make out the words. That was okay. They weren’t for me.

  Watching them from the road, I felt a small pang for Hugh, because that was done. She might not know it yet, but I did. Jake swayed gently, as if he held a fussy baby instead of a half-grown girl.

  He said, “Hush, sweetie, hush. I’m here now,” and she was still talking and crying all incoherent with her face buried in his neck.

  I looked around for Jake’s truck and spotted it across the road. He must have just arrived when I’d seen his shadow cross the cemetery gate.

  I climbed up the steep slope of the yard, angling toward them. Up close he looked worse. He had big bags under his eyes, and his skin had an unhealthy sheen, as if he’d been living on Swanson’s and bourbon without Rachel there to infuse him with wild-caught salmon and organic beets.

  “It’s okay,” he said to Lav, but his eyes were on me.

  “If you guys want to talk out here on the porch swing, I’ll leave the back door unlocked,” I said quietly.

  I tried very hard to sound gracious, and welcoming, and unsour, because this was a good thing. He’d done better than call. He had come, and I could see that it was what she needed.

  “Thank you,” he said, all meaningful, like he was thanking me for more than the unlocked door.

  “No need,” I said, and it did come out sour. Too bad. I tilted my head pointedly at Lav and said to him, “I didn’t do anything for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He was still rocking his daughter, holding her tight, but his eyes were locked on mine, his so wide with sincerity I could practically see white all around the iris. “I panicked and I ran. It was wrong, and I’m so damn sorry. I shouldn’t have disappeared like that.”

  His face was puffy from the weight gain and, I guessed, some heavy drinking. It softened his chiseled jaw. Add the hair sticking up in little poinks and he looked almost more like my old friend JJ than like Jake. It made me wonder if his plan to flee to Portland had ever been about creating a third life. Perhaps his recent setbacks had instead cracked him open, exposed the raw boy he’d packed away under caring about football, and playing golf, and booming, manly laughter. Maybe he’d just been running. Cowardly more than ice cold.

  Lavender said a muffled “It’s okay” into his neck, but he hadn’t been talking to his daughter.

  Not entirely anyway.

  Beneath the Jake who was saying he was sorry to his child, I could see JJ, fat and dorky and hopelessly in love with Rachel, talking to seventeen-year-old me. It was twenty years too late and doing double duty as an apology to Lavender, and it hardly covered everything. He was still the same jackass who’d breezed into my parents’ Christmas party, almost knocking me sideways, shame-running past me with bravado to get to Rachel. On the other hand, he was finally acknowledging that I had been hurt. That he had hurt me. He was attempting to put paid to an old, old debt here, with shitty coin, but still trying. Perhaps it was the only coin he had.

  “You’re doing the right thing now,” I told him, and it hardly sounded grudging at all. “That counts.”

  JJ took my words as forgiveness. I saw naked gratitude writ plain on his face, and to my surprise I realized I had actually meant them as forgiveness. He swayed quietly for another moment with his girl in his arms. Forgiving him was like balm on an old hurt place, and it felt sweeter than his apology. Sweeter even than the moment I’d said all the things I’d held in my mouth for twenty angry years. Forgiving him felt like relief.

  He set Lav down. She was snuffling, and she kept her arms looped around his waist, her wet face pressed into his side.

  “Let yourselves in when you’re ready, but be quiet. My grandmother isn’t well, and she’s sleeping,” I said, and left them to it.

  I went around the house to the back stairs. Damn JJ, I thought, but with less rancor than I would have thought it four minutes prior.

  Still, if he’d gotten here a scant half hour earlier, he might have caught his own daughter on the way out, and I wouldn’t have to help kids pull dew-soaked shreds of TP off Martina Mack’s gardenia bush tomorrow. He hadn’t gotten into his car and headed for Birchville immediately, though. Not like Rachel. He’d stewed for a few hours, waffling, trying to decide. As if coming for his grieving, worried kid were a decision and not the only open course.

  Forgiveness or not, I thought Apologizing Ken was still a jackass. Sure, there were worse fathers in the world. Jake didn’t beat his family or smoke crank, but that was setting the bar pretty low. Jake’s run at fatherhood seemed to me a bit like eating chalk. It wasn’t toxic. It wouldn’t kill anybody, but that didn’t make it delicious.

  Still, I thought of Lavender’s face when she’d recognized him. The way she’d run to him, and even the way he’d caught her up, like he was welcoming a missing piece back to his body, as if his own wayward hand had finger-walked home and barnacled itself onto his wrist again. Maybe, when it came to fathers, kind-of-a-jackass beat an absence.

  I wouldn’t know for sure. I’d only known the absence.

  I went inside, flipping both switches by the door to turn on the back-porch floodlight and the brass chandelier over the breakfast-nook table for them.

  Jake would need a nap, but I had no idea where on earth we could put him. The Princess Room? Lavender could tuck in with her mother. Although it might be moot. When Rachel woke up and found him here, we might all be cleaning dew-soaked shreds of Jake off our own gardenia bushes.

  I retreated to my nest in the sewing room, even though I was so jazzed up that there was no way I was going to fall asleep. I’d walked home half expecting to find Cody Mack here, waiting for me in his cop car. Maybe he hadn’t been on duty, or maybe he was smart enough to know that firing a gun at children trumped toilet paper on a pine tree. Of course, the night wasn’t over. He could still ring the doorbell and arrest me for vandalism.

  My sketchbook sat on the Singer table, open to the picture that had upset Rachel. I sat down and looked at my version of the ruined town square. On the right, Violet cuddled the apocalyptic Batkitten. She was in the world as Violence had left it, a place that had no next, and I had a sudden impulse to put some hope in it. To put a kid in it. What I wanted to do now was draw in Digby.

  I picked up the pencil, and I plopped my boy right down in the middle of Vio
lence’s world. I didn’t draw him as a fetus or even a new baby. Babies all looked the same to me, like cute potatoes. I drew Digby as he might look in five years or so, when the swaybacked potbelly shape of toddlerhood elongated into straight, thin lines. By age five Digby would have his own distinctive face.

  I gave him my high cheekbones, my straight, serious brow line, and my deep-set eyes. I let him have the Batman’s lush lashes—you’re welcome, kid—and his straight, wide nose. I added a dark stubble of close-shorn little-boy hair. I was working in pencil now, but when I drew him in color, he’d have warm brown skin that seemed lit from inside, like good bourbon. I could see it.

  Digby took shape on the scant surviving grass, wearing miniature work boots and khaki shorts, his bare legs thin as strings, each with a knotty knee in the middle. He had a confident stance, with a touch of swagger in it. His hands were tucked into his pockets, and the set of his shoulders was easy, maybe even brave. He was in a scary place, but he was smiling anyway, because the pencil was in my hand and I willed it to be so. I looked at this bright, confident boy, standing on the largest patch of grass that I could make for him in Violet’s ruined park.

  Digby in the Second South, I thought.

  Through the wall I could hear faint voices and the clink of pans in the kitchen. While I was working, Lavender and her father had come in. They were talking quietly, making eggs or cocoa.

  I went back to my drawing. Digby’s jawline wasn’t right. It was too round. I wanted it to be shaped more like the Batman’s. Softer, younger, but still similar.

  I turned to my laptop and navigated to Batman’s profile page. His privacy settings were so lax, I could have gone through his whole photo album. That felt stalkery, so I opened up his profile pics instead. I’d likely find close-ups of his face there, and I only needed a couple of good angles to get Digby’s jawline right.