A Place to Call Home

by Deborah Smith

  “I don’t want a lot of people overhearing. Where’s Amanda?”

  “She left for summer camp yesterday,” Mama said quickly. “And Josh is in Atlanta.”

  “As usual,” Daddy said.

  I exhaled. I’d settled a crucial preliminary problem. Josh. We had to get home and deal with Josh in private and in person. “Where’s Miz Mac?” I asked. “Still nearby?”

  “Miz Mac always eavesdrops,” Mama said. “So there’s no point worrying about her. Honey, what’s going on? You and Roan are coming home, aren’t you? Tell me. Tell me and your daddy straight out.”

  “We’re coming back,” Roan interjected. “I’m giving you my word on it.”

  “Roan,” Mama and Daddy said in unison. “It’s good to hear you,” Daddy went on. “We’ll take you at your word anytime. All right?”

  “That’s good to know,” Roan replied evenly.

  “What’s in Alaska?” Daddy asked.

  I hesitated. “It’s not a what, it’s a who.”

  “Besides Roan?”

  “Because of Roan.”

  Silence. Mama said quietly, “Roan, you wouldn’t have asked Claire to meet somebody unless you thought she’d be happy about it. So I’m assuming this who isn’t a wife.”

  “Not even a girlfriend,” Roan answered in a strangled voice. Mama’s approach could be disorienting.

  “Then you’ve got a child. Or children.”

  Silence. Roan looked at Matthew. “You could say that.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  “Never been married.”

  “I see.”

  “Hold on,” I said loudly. I was shaking. So was Tweet. Matthew was tugging his ears and Roan was as tense as a stone wall. “Mama. Daddy.” I took a deep breath. “He brought me here to meet Matthew.”

  “Who?” Daddy asked.

  Oh, God. “Matthew. Uncle Pete’s Matthew. Roan located Sally McClendon years ago. She died and he adopted Matthew. That’s why he’s been so secretive. Matthew.” There, in a hard nutshell, was the story.

  More silence. Matthew’s expression went from hopeful to desperate. “They don’t even remember me,” he muttered. He dug his hands into his knees and stared at the phone. We all did.

  Then came a soft wail of delight. “Is he there?” Mama shrieked. “Matthew? Is Matthew right there?”

  Matthew’s mouth opened and shut. “I’m … I am here,” he said, inching closer to the phone. “Hello.”

  Mama said, “Oh, thank you, Lord,” in a soft, high-pitched voice at least a dozen times, and then there were noises, and eventually we heard Daddy in the background calling out, “I had to change phones, she had to sit down on the floor, but she’s okay—”

  “I don’t care how this happened, I don’t care what happened, or where or how or who or anything else right now,” Mama yelled tearfully, “but y’all bring Matthew here, you bring him here, you bring him home with you.”

  “Bring the boy home,” Daddy said in a gravelly voice. He had obviously snatched up Mama’s phone—his voice was clear and rang as beautifully as a brass bell. “It’s a miracle. Come home and worry about explaining it later.”

  Tweet started sobbing, and Matthew had tears on his face, and Roan and I sat there together on the couch, relieved by one small victory but too worried to relax. This was only a beginning.

  I told Mama and Daddy I’d call when we got to Ten Jumps. That we’d bring Matthew and Tweet to the farm for supper. “Don’t invite anybody, please,” I urged. “Let’s not rush the whole crowd at ’em right away. We’d need name tags and a genealogy chart, and it’d just be overwhelming.”

  “Okay,” Mama said too blithely.

  Matthew and Tweet transferred their menagerie of dogs and birds to the temporary care of trusted co-workers at the wildlife center, then we packed and caught a jet bound for Seattle the next afternoon. Matthew popped a bottle of champagne during the flight. “To Sullivans and Delaneys,” he said. Tweet laughed and pointed at me. “You do that just like Matthew. Only he does it when he’s upset.”

  “What?”

  She laughed harder. “You pull on your ears.”

  Roan and I were astonished and anguished over a chain of events happening too quickly for the facts. What Matthew didn’t know would hurt him. The more I brooded over Josh’s betrayals, the angrier I became. He could keep his cowardly secret and let everybody go on believing a he, or he could confess to Matthew and the family.

  I almost wished he’d deny the whole thing and we could get away with never mentioning it to anyone. But if Josh denied Matthew, Roan would be more brutal than anyone else; I really believed he’d ruin my brother in revenge.

  We stayed in Seattle overnight, at Roan’s house, but were besieged by phone calls from home—conversations with my parents, with Grandma Dottie, with all of my brothers except Josh, who was still out of town, and with cousins, aunts, uncles—they were all excited and pleased, and many of them wanted to talk to Matthew, and to Tweet, who grew so flustered by all the attention, she retreated into a discussion of viral poultry diseases with Daddy.

  I asked Mama and Daddy to warn the family that one subject was absolutely off limits in these conversations: Roan. He listened to the rest of us chatter on the phone and I think he felt his happiness was being carved away from him in painful slivers; his biggest fear at the moment was that someone would mention his past to Matthew.

  Thankfully, everyone seemed so humbled by what he’d done—taking Matthew to raise, doing so well by him, and bringing him back, to boot—that it was embarrassing to mention the past. I’m sure no one was eager to tell Matthew, a former outcast himself, how the family had ignored Roanie Sullivan, then warily embraced him, then discarded him. It was easy to warn the family off that subject, at least during the first flush of homecoming.

  Matthew was ecstatic. “It’s turning out to be so easy,” he said to me out of Roan’s earshot. He had a bewildered expression. “I don’t understand why Bigger worried so much all these years. I think he’s so cynical about people that he twisted this family thing out of perspective.” Matthew sighed and nodded wisely. “You know, I’ve decided he was just born with the kind of personality that looks every gift horse in the mouth.”

  I almost said, He’s got good reason to believe that behind every gift horse there’s a horse’s ass, but I didn’t want to encourage the discussion. Roan deserved to explain himself to Matthew in his own way, when he was ready.

  Ready or not, he’d have no choice soon.

  “I need a stiffer drink than this tonight,” Roan complained in the shadows of a small balcony outside his bedroom door. “And I don’t say that very often.” He tossed the remnants of a beer away. I sat between his bare legs on the balcony’s cedar floor, naked except for the large Navajo blanket we shared. I tried to meditate on the slow chuckle of the fountain in his garden.

  “Here, you can have the rest of mine.” I twisted inside the blanket and his arms and held my shot glass of bourbon to his lips. He took the rim between his teeth and tossed the bourbon into his throat. “No hands,” I noted as I retrieved my glass. “You learned that trick in a bar.”

  “No. I learned it when Matthew was still in diapers. Change enough dirty diapers and you can learn to drink, eat, or sign your name without using your hands. You learn not to forget and put your fingers near your mouth.”

  I tried to laugh, but I could imagine him all too well, fifteen or sixteen years old, a rough-looking, skinny, hulking teenage boy taking care of a child. “I love you,” I said simply. “I love you more now than I did when we were kids, and more than I did when you came back a few weeks ago, and more than yesterday. And more than this morning.”

  He curved his head around mine and kissed me. “Are you a little bit drunk?” he teased gruffly.

  “Maybe. But that only makes me clear on what I really feel. I need to make you believe we’ll be okay back at home. Matthew will hear about Big Roan. About the past. About us. There’s no g
etting away from that. But we’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t ask for many guarantees. I’ll tell you what I want. I want to laugh with you. Sit and look at you. Wake up with nothing to think about but how warm and smooth you feel against me. I want us to be peaceful with each other. Be together and make a life together. All of this has been worth it, if we can have that.”

  “We can. I promise you. Sometimes it takes me a while to make good on my promises, but—”

  “I’m not as good at waiting as I used to be,” he said. “And I’m not looking forward to tomorrow.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  Grandpa was waiting in spirit, spectral and supportive, directing me to take Roan and his lost great-grandson home.

  The metallic green DOT marker proclaimed the J. H. Maloney Memorial Intersection where the four-lane ended in the foothills and the state route turned west. This was the path first taken by pioneer Maloneys and Delaneys along an ancient Cherokee trail toward Dunderry. Sitting stiffly beside Roan in the backseat of a limousine we’d hired at the Atlanta airport, I watched Matthew and Tweet, who sat across from us. He hadn’t stopped gazing raptly out his window since our driver turned off the interstate. “Which Maloney was J. H.?” he asked.

  Your great-grandfather, I thought furtively.

  “My grandfather,” I said. “Grandpa Joseph. He and some of his brothers planted the grove of willows over there behind that convenience store. Their great-grandfather built a stagecoach inn there in the late 1800s. Not long after Grandpa Joseph and his brothers planted the willows, the inn burned down, and they built a gas station and general store. He and his cousin Harriet O’Brien ran it for a few years. It was the only gas station in the county then. Daddy bought Mama a Coke at the gas station when they had their first date. Nobody suspected they were dating because he was eighteen and she was only fourteen, and your Great-Grandmother Elizabeth Delaney would have locked Mama in a cellar if she’d known about them. Daddy hid Mama under a blanket in the front seat of his Ford and—”

  “Are there as many Maloneys as there are Delaneys?” Tweet asked weakly.

  “More Maloneys, actually. Anyway, Grandpa Joe always claimed he knew Daddy had Marybeth Delaney stashed in the Ford, but he pretended not to notice. Daddy took Mama down to the willow grove and they drank Cokes. It was a dangerous romantic rebellion at the time.”

  “I need a chart to keep track of all the Delaneys,” Tweet noted, laughing. “I’ll have to memorize Matthew’s family tree.”

  “Oooh, we’ve got charts. Lots of charts.” Just not the ones you expect.

  She poked Roan’s knee. “Tell us something interesting about the Sullivan history.”

  I clasped his hand, supportive and protective, and wondered if any of this was worth what it would tear down. Roan’s eyes narrowed as we flashed by the Chamber of Commerce’s large, handsome wooden sign set among a carefully landscaped island of azaleas and begonias.

  WELCOME TO DUNDERRY, GEORGIA! A LITTLE BIT OF IRELAND IN THE MOUNTAINS! POPULATION 15,287. INCORPORATED 1839. IRENE DELANEY BOGGS, MAYOR, CITY OF DUNDERRY, HOLT T. MALONEY, DUNDERRY COUNTY COMMISSIONER.

  “Bigger?” Matthew prodded, because Roan had not offered a word in response. Roan finally said, “My old man won a Silver Star in Korea.”

  Matthew gaped at him. I did, too. I’d never known. I don’t think anyone knew. Matthew shook his head. “Why haven’t you ever told me that? I mean, I knew he lost a leg in the war, but I didn’t know he was a hero. What happened to his medal?”

  Roan stared out the tinted limousine window, tucked my hand against his chest, gripping tightly—A hero? I could imagine him thinking. They probably confused my old man with somebody else. “I buried it with him,” he said.

  We weren’t even home yet and the past was already catching up with him. With all of us.

  Roan’s crew had finished transforming the muddy, mile-long trail to Ten Jumps into a perfectly graded and graveled lane with pretty wooden bridges over the two creek crossings along its path. Small Latchakoochee EMC markers designated the new, buried power line along the road’s right shoulder, along with a small sign designating an underground phone line.

  I faced forward tensely as the limousine lumbered down the narrow road. A hawk sailed along in front of the car for a few yards; a woodpecker swept across the road at one point and then a half-dozen fat wild turkey hens ambled from a huckleberry thicket in front of us. It was as if every species of fowl sensed the arrival of a bird-loving friend. Tweet opened the limousine’s sunroof and stood up, pounding the rooftop with her hands as she clucked at the turkey hens. “Matthew, look,” she called. They traded places. “There’s a couple of deer,” he said, pointing. He dropped back into his seat. “Bigger, this place is incredible. I love it.”

  “Wait until you see the cabin and the lake,” Roan said quietly. “You’ll never have to ask anybody in this neighborhood for a place to stay. I fixed up the cabin so you’d have something to call your own, if you came here. If you and Tweet really like it and you want it, it’s yours.” Roan looked at me. I nodded, finally comprehending another reason he’d bought Ten Jumps. A person needed to own land, he thought, to be taken seriously in Dunderry. He’d bought status for himself—and more important to Roan, he’d bought status for Matthew.

  “Roan,” Tweet said tearfully, gently. Matthew reached over and affectionately shoved Roan on one arm. “This is your property, Bigger. You’ve always told me how you loved to explore around here.”

  Hid here, tried not to starve here, I thought miserably. But Matthew didn’t know that history either. “No, Dunshinnog is Roan’s place,” I said, meeting Roan’s somber, mercury-quick gaze. “The mountain. Up high. The long view. That’s our special place.”

  When we reached the cabin, a flock of mallards rose from the lake and a tiny spotted fawn bounded after a doe who’d been nibbling the expensive sodded grass of the yard.

  Matthew and Tweet exclaimed over it all and rushed from the car. They hurried down to stand at the lake, talking excitedly and gesturing at the scenery—a sanctuary of water, purple-and-gold sunset, and forest rising on mountain slopes. I wished we could lock it around us.

  Roan tipped our driver and the limousine pulled away. Roan and I stood beside the luggage, sharing unspoken dread and a sense of the inevitable. The hot, soft whisper of the evening breeze crept over us. He looked at the cabin and then, for answers, at me.

  More had been done since we left, and not by Wolfgang’s crew. A fieldstone pathway led to the porch and the yard was a kaleidoscope of freshly planted shrubs and flowers. Four white rocking chairs sat on the porch, behind hanging baskets lush with ferns.

  “The family’s been here.” I nodded toward a late-model sedan in the yard. “You needed a car here, so Uncle Eugene sent one from his dealership.”

  Roan’s reaction pulled away all the years for a split second and suddenly I saw him as he’d been on his birthday, the time we surprised him with a cake and gifts. The brief flash of surprise and appreciation was quickly shuttered.

  “Mama and Daddy left a few gifts in the cabin, too,” I told him. “I loaned them the key you gave me.”

  He said nothing as we went up the walkway. The door was unlocked, and when we stepped inside, we found an enormous vase of white daisies set on the fireplace hearth and the room smelling of fresh pine and cedar sachet.

  We went into the newly added kitchen and I opened the refrigerator door. It was packed with food. I opened a cupboard. The shelves were stacked with handsome earthenware dishes colored in whirls of burgundy and gold. “Mama made this set of dishes. She finished them last month. She says they’re the best work she’s ever done. They were promised to a fine-crafts shop in North Carolina. One of the boutiques that sell her work. But she wants you to have them. ‘From my hands to his heart,’ she said.” I faced him. “They did this for you. It’s just one of the small ways they can show how they feel about you and what you did for Matthew.”

 
He leaned against a countertop and ran his hands through his hair. We gazed out the window, watching Matthew and Tweet by the lake. “Your family may wish they’d burned this place down after they learn the truth about him,” he said.

  I turned away. “I need to call the farm. Mama and Daddy are waiting.”

  We heard the sound of a car. “They’re not waiting for a call,” Roan said with a tired smile. “They probably had most of the family stationed near the main roads with binoculars. Probably had Alvin’s deputies hidden in the woods. They knew the second we got here.”

  I sagged a little. “Probably. But it’s good. They’re enthusiastic.”

  We walked outside. Mama and Daddy had just stopped their car in the yard. “I was right,” Roan said. “They couldn’t wait until—”

  His voice trailed off as the car doors opened. Mama got out and stared, emotionally riveted, at Matthew and Tweet. Daddy stood with his legs braced apart on the cabin’s new lawn, looking from them to us.

  And Josh walked down the slope to the lake, toward Matthew, who gazed back along with Tweet, half smiling but obviously puzzled by the stranger headed his way.

  His father. No. Not here, now, like this.

  I felt as if my heart had stopped.

  Roan moved so quickly, he was striding down to intercept Josh before I realized I was stumbling forward without my cane, murmuring frantically under my breath, “He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know,” as if I could stop time with an obvious plea on Matthew’s behalf.

  “Mama, what do y’all think you’re doing?” I called out. She reached one hand toward me and the other, ineffectually, toward Josh’s back as he advanced toward Matthew. Her eyes lit up with joy and anxiety. “Honey, it’ll be all right,” she called to me. “We couldn’t keep Josh away after he heard about Matthew, but, hon, I promise that you and Roan will understand why he’s here with us after you learn the real story—”

  “You know?” I stared at her. “You and Daddy already know about Josh?”

  Mama stared at me in return. Then her hand rose to her mouth. She pivoted and went to Daddy. “Holt,” she said urgently. “Roan and Claire know about Josh and Matthew.”