Georgia Rules

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  After lunch, Mama tried to get me to go with her “in search of civilization.”

  “You aren’t the only one going through real-life withdrawals. Only place I’ve been in four days is the grocery store. I need to see people. Real, live people. Come with me. It’ll do you good, too. We’ll go exploring.”

  I weaseled out of it by saying I didn’t get to run yet, since I’d gotten delayed when I met Deacon outside that barn. The truth was, I wanted to scope out all the stuff left behind in the house without her hovering and making snide comments about my daddy’s family. As soon as she peeled out of the driveway, I walked from room to room, trying out mismatched chairs and sitting on an ancient couch that was so stiff it could have been used as a diving board.

  Portraits of my ancestors hung everywhere—ancestors I’d never even known about. Mama said the pictures were coming down the minute the movers brought our stuff from Georgia. She didn’t like them all staring at her—said it made her feel judged. “They’re all so stuffy,” she’d complained.

  I lifted one from the wall and checked the back. Along the bottom, written in faded ink, it said Alexander Austin, 1879. Most all of them had legible writing and were lined up around the rooms in order of year, starting with Alexander on the wall below the staircase and ending with Micah in the front hallway. But none of those people smiled. Not one. It was the most unsmiling family I’d ever seen.

  Upstairs, in my room, was the only photo I had of my daddy. It was taken when I was about six, the year after Mama and Peter got married, and the only time my daddy came to see me in Georgia. We’d been at some kind of fair with a carousel. My daddy stood almost as tall as the pole coming out of the middle of the horse I rode—white, with a flowing pink mane and tail, and a golden saddle. He’d wrapped his giant hands around my waist and held on while we went around and around. After the ride was over, he paid a photographer for two copies of the picture he took of us and gave one to me. The other he’d tucked inside his shirt pocket. I’d slipped mine inside the waistband of my shorts and walked carefully to my room when I got home so it wouldn’t fall out. Since that day, the picture has lived in the one place I knew Mama would never look—inside a book.

  I got that photo and carried it around the house, holding it up next to each of the sketched portraits, trying to compare the people on the walls to the man in the photo. It was hard to tell if there was any likeness. It was even harder to see anything of myself in those people. I happened to like smiling.

  There was only one portrait in the front room, which Mama called a “parlor” and had ruled off-limits to me. She said the furniture in there was valuable, and if we got in a pickle about money, she could sell something to tide us over. But once I opened the doors and saw that lone portrait hanging over the piano, I had no choice. I had to go in. That person was smiling.

  Ever so carefully, I lifted the carved gold frame from the wall and checked the back. Benjamin Austin, 1942. He looked more like my daddy than any of the others, partially due to the mass of wild hair springing from all over his head, and partially because he smiled like he had a secret. That one time my daddy had come to Georgia, Mama’d made a big deal after he left about the way he’d let his hair grow “all long and shaggy.” In my shadowy picture, his eyes were focused downward, on me, but his mouth curved up into a tiny smile, like he was pleased with himself for something no one else knew about.

  Looking at the two of them, my daddy and Benjamin, my heart did that little drop thing, the same way it did when I had to leave Atlanta without saying good-bye to Irene. Maybe I was finally feeling some sadness over his passing. Maybe I wasn’t flawed after all. And maybe, while I was stuck here in Vermont, I could learn a little something about him and eventually even have a good cry.

  FOUR

  Unless you happen to like to sweat—which I do not unless it comes after a good run—spending July outside in Vermont is a lot nicer than swimming through the humidity that suffocates Atlanta, where I sweltered every year from March until Thanksgiving. But now I found myself drawn to the front porch early each morning by cool breezes and the chatter of a million different birds singing in the field and trees.

  Mama rarely got up before ten, so the only other early morning sound came from Deacon’s truck rumbling down the driveway when he and Quince left. The quiet made my insides calm in a way I never remembered feeling. It was a nice break from the constant hubbub of living in a big city. There were a couple of times, when a colorful bird flew by or the sweet scent of the baby-pink flowers growing in the yard floated past my nose, that I thought it was a shame to have to give up this place at the end of the year. It might be nice to get away from Atlanta and come sit on this breezy porch every summer.

  About two weeks after we arrived, a mail truck sputtered and chugged up the long driveway and stopped in front of the house. The mail guy got out and carried a white envelope with red and blue stripes to the door. Mama must have been on the lookout for him. It wasn’t ten o’clock yet, but she was up and waiting. She flung the door open, snatched the envelope from his hand, and slammed the door shut without saying a word.

  The man looked at his clipboard and grumbled, then raised his hand to knock.

  “Wait!” I said. “I’ll sign.”

  He turned to look where I was sitting on the porch swing. “Oh, I didn’t see you theyah—can you sign for her?”

  He talked funny. I walked across the porch and reached for the pen.

  “I’m her daughter—is that okay?”

  “Just sign theyah,” he said, pointing to a line at the bottom.

  I figured “theyah” meant “there,” so I scribbled my name, then went back to the swing while he squinted and studied my signature.

  “We have different last names,” I said.

  “Ayuh, I sorted that out. What’s your name?”

  Was I supposed to give a stranger my name, even if he was the mailman? He tapped his pen on the clipboard.

  “I need to know so I can print it.”

  “Oh, right. Maggie Austin.”

  “M-a-g-g-i-e Austin,” he said, writing it out as he spoke. “Ah, that makes sense. You must be Johnny Austin’s daugh-tah.”

  Johnny Austin’s daughter.

  I was Johnny Austin’s daughter. That’s the first time I remembered ever hearing someone say it like that. I pushed the floor with my toe and made the bench swing rock again.

  Johnny Austin’s daughter.

  “Well, welcome to Vermont, Maggie Austin. I’m Jeffrey. Your dad was one of my favorite people. He didn’t get out much, but we had some good talks heyah on the porch, when I could catch him.”

  His mouth twitched into a half smile. I sat still, like a mute, until finally he did a little wave and trotted off down the steps.

  The next morning Mama was up early again. I heard her making noise in the kitchen before nine and went in to find her with her nose inside a shiny green bag of coffee.

  “One thing I’ll say about Vermont, they do sell some fine coffee,” she said.

  She scooped some grounds from the bag and dumped them into a filter, poured water into the back of the coffeemaker, and turned it on. The smell of java filled the kitchen.

  “And what are you up to today, sugar?”

  Her cheerfulness this early was unsettling. “I want to go to the library. Can you take me?”

  She got her mug from the cabinet and examined the inside, like she expected a spider to crawl out. “Library? What do you want to go to a library for?”

  “I’m tired of sitting on the porch every day. Besides, I happen to like books, remember?”

  “You brought books, remember?”

  “I don’t have any about Vermont. If we’re going to be stuck here a whole year, I want to learn about things. Like those trees out there in the woods. Why do they have white bark?”

  “Now how would I know that?”

  “Exactly. And since we don’t have the internet yet—”

  “Internet, in
ternet, internet,” she said. “I want it as much as you do, but can’t you think about something else? What do you think people did before the internet, little missy?”

  I stared at her, not believing she’d walked herself right into that trap. “They went to the library, and they read books.”

  “Psshhh,” she said, flipping her hand. “I can’t take you today. I have an important errand on my agenda. You’ll have to suffer through another day on that porch.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She poured coffee into the mug, then placed her palm against my cheek and smiled. “I’m not telling. It’s a surprise. A going-away gift to us from Peter.”

  “I don’t feel like surprises.”

  “Well, I don’t feel like arguing, and since I’m in charge of us, I win.”

  Two hours later, Mama waved playfully as she pulled out of the driveway. I gave her the hairy-eyeball look and pushed the porch swing so hard with my foot I thought the rusty old chain holding it up might break. Wouldn’t that serve her right, coming home to a daughter lying on the front porch, tangled up in a bunch of chains, all because she wouldn’t take her to the library.

  FIVE

  The next morning Mama still wouldn’t tell me what her supersecret errand was the day before, but she did agree to drive me to town. We passed the library three times before realizing that the yellow house on the corner with baskets of pink and purple flowers dripping all over the porch railing was not someone’s home but actually the address we’d been looking for. Back in Atlanta every library looked the same: low gray buildings and cement walkways, automatic revolving doors and security cameras pointed at the entrance. The front door of this library was propped wide open.

  Mama scanned the three-story house and rolled her eyes. “Small-town America at its finest.” She handed me a white envelope. “You’ll need these to get a library card. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  She drove away with the windows down and music blaring. It wasn’t like Mama to drop and run. I couldn’t decide if I felt dumped or free. After she turned the corner, I walked up the steps and past two white pillars and baskets of green ferns, then stopped short, startled by the words on a simple bronze plaque hanging next to the open door.

  TOWNE LIBRARY, AND THE BOOKS WITHIN, WERE MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF JOHNNY AUSTIN AND ARE DEDICATED TO HIS MEMORY.

  My Johnny Austin? My eyes moved left to right. I read the words over and again, but each time they said the same thing. My daddy had donated a library to this town. An entire library. What kind of kid doesn’t know that about her own blood relative?

  I stalled, giving myself a second to ponder this before going inside, when a large, boisterous family swarmed up the steps behind me, chattering and laughing, completely unaware I was in their path. There wasn’t anything I could do but get shuffled along with them until they split up and left me standing in a room unlike any library I’d ever imagined.

  It was like being in the middle of someone’s living room, someone who loved books and comfortable places to read. Colorful sofas and chairs were grouped around coffee tables decorated with little vases of fresh flowers and framed photographs. In between the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, tall, thin windows shed light everywhere. There was not one tubular, headache-producing fluorescent bulb to be seen. And the books. So many books my fingers quivered.

  The sweet smell of leather binding and flowers, and the homey feel of the library, made me forget about the plaque outside. I scouted out the first floor, a large, open area, with the exception of a circle of desks in the middle of the room. A wide staircase in the back led one flight up. The second floor felt more like a regular library, with row after row of bookshelves in one giant room, and people hunched over computers on two narrow tables at the far end. Internet!

  A lady who was restocking shelves looked up and smiled at me. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Am I allowed to use the computers to go on the internet?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Use your library card downstairs to reserve a time. They’re full right now, but maybe in an hour.”

  “Thank you.”

  She turned back to her cart. If I got a card now, I’d have to hand over all my identification papers. If someone made the connection between my name and my daddy’s, they might ask me a bunch of questions I didn’t know how to answer and I’d feel stupid. I wasn’t ready to feel stupid. I wanted to explore.

  I started up another staircase that took me to the kids’ section on a third floor. A room to the left had a sign that said Teen and Young Adult. The room to the right had one that said Picture Books and Early Readers. But above me, in the middle of the ceiling, was a glass dome made from dozens of small windowpanes, each one framed in white wood. Sunshine and blue sky spilled through the glass. Tips of leafy branches surrounded the edges, making a green snowflake pattern around the border. I gaped at it with my head tilted back, wondering why every building in the world didn’t have a window on the ceiling. It was so beautiful.

  A man came up beside me and cleared his throat. His name tag said his name was Jeremy.

  “Oh, hello,” I said.

  “You’ve never been up heyah I take it?”

  “No, sir, I haven’t.”

  “It’s a beauty, that one, ayuh? He was a masteh.”

  He sounded like Jeffrey the mailman—times ten.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The ahh-tist. The one who painted it.”

  “Painted what?”

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Up theyah.”

  I tipped my head back and looked up at the glass dome and the sky.

  “You thought it was real, ayuh?”

  “It’s not?”

  Jeremy motioned for me to follow. “Look heyah.”

  He pointed out a window. Clouds had moved in and dappled the air. Everything that had been blue before was now that in-between lavender color that happens when rain clouds get between the earth and the sky. I went back to stand underneath the bright blue dome again and squinted.

  “The leaves are all different, and they don’t move. That’s how you tell,” Jeremy said.

  He was right. Not one leaf breathed. Each one was a unique example from different trees. In just the few short weeks since I’d been in Vermont, I could already make the distinction between a heart-shaped birch leaf and a lobed oak.

  “Who painted it?” I asked.

  Jeremy smiled and turned his palms up. “Local ahh-tist. Same one as donated this place. Johnny Austin. Bit of a recluse. Died in the spring. Tragedy.”

  I stared up at the ceiling and shuddered.

  SIX

  I did want that library card after all. I had to get on the internet and do two things: get in touch with Irene and do a search for Johnny Austin. My feet barely touched the stairs as I raced to the second floor, gripping the envelope so tight it scrunched in the middle. Just as I hit the last step, a redheaded boy with a cart full of books stopped right in front of me. I grabbed the bottom of the banister with both hands and tried to stop my momentum, but the lower half of my body flung around and slammed into his cart.

  Books took to the air like startled birds. My hands ripped from the wood and I landed with my face planted on a copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The boy stood over me, holding tight to the cart, his mouth twisted into a humiliating smile.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Apparently.”

  He reached his free hand out to help me up, but instead I crawled on the floor, gathering books as fast as I could, and stacked them in piles on the stairs.

  “You don’t have to do that, I’ve got it,” he said. “They’ll be in the way there.”

  He was right. The towers of books in the middle of the stairs made for a surefire booby trap. He waved his hand as if to say I was free to keep moving, but I couldn’t stop staring at his red, red hair. I’d never seen anyone with hair that color. Pomegranate red, not
carrot orange.

  Mama’s voice whispered in my ear. Don’t gape, it’s unattractive. We don’t do that.

  Impulsively, I held out my envelope. “I’m going downstairs for a library card.”

  A woman as thin as a willow branch rushed over and snatched the envelope away before the boy could take it.

  “I’ll help her,” she said. She let a little puff of air escape from her lips and looked at me. “You have to have an adult sign you up. James isn’t eighteen yet.”

  James rolled his eyes and grinned.

  “Sorry,” I said, pulling myself up.

  Library Lady wiggled her finger. “I’m Miss Hilly. Follow me.”

  Downstairs, she spread my personal papers all over a desk right smack in the middle of that big room where anyone could walk up and read them. She studied each page from top to bottom, eyed each photo ID suspiciously, and checked the way I looked now against a four-year-old passport photo from when we’d gone to Greece. She squished her eyebrows together, then peered back at the papers. You’d think I was applying to work at the CIA.

  A couple of people lined up behind me, their arms loaded with books.

  “Magnolia G. Austin,” she said thoughtfully. “Are you related?”

  There it was. I kept my arms straight at my side and gave her a blank expression.

  She shook her head. “No, of course not. One minute.”

  What did that mean, Of course not?

  Miss Hilly scrunched, then unscrunched her forehead. Her fingers slowly click-click-clicked on the keyboard. She twisted her mouth funny, bent down to get close to the screen, checked one of my documents again, then finally reached into a little machine and pulled out a brand-new green and white library card.

  Magnollia G. Austin, it read.

  With two l’s.

  She’d misspelled it. For real. She was a librarian, and she’d misspelled my name. I handed it back to her.

  “I’m sorry, but Magnolia only has one l, not two,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  My face flushed. “Yes, ma’am, one l.”