Georgia Rules

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  She put the card close to her face, then shrugged. “Look at that—let me do it again.”

  This time she typed slower than cold honey dripping from a spoon, checking each letter before tapping the key. The line of people behind me grew longer. I could feel their eyes boring into my back.

  “Magnolia G. Austin,” she said.

  Each time she said it, the people in line got more restless. We’d been at this now for at least fifteen minutes. A cranky kid wound himself up into a full-blown tantrum. His mother put their books on one of the coffee tables and left.

  “What’s the G for?”

  “Grace,” I whispered. “You can just put Maggie, if you want. Maggie with two g’s.”

  “No, no, it has to be the same. Magnolia,” she said again. “Like the tree?”

  I’d never had this much trouble with something so simple as a library card in Georgia. Of course, back home Mama would have come inside and handled the whole thing herself. The new Vermont Mama was tossing me from the nest rather abruptly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Someone behind me giggled. Library Lady grinned like we were best friends. “Don’t listen to them. I think your accent is adorable.”

  Finally, finally, she handed me the card. I turned and barreled out the door. I didn’t want to get on the internet anymore. All I wanted was to hide until Mama came to pick me up. And more than ever, I wanted to be back in Atlanta where I knew what to do, where no one cared about my name, my accent, or my father.

  SEVEN

  The next day a yellow moving van made its way slowly up to our house. The driveway wasn’t that steep, not like a giant hill, but it was long and in one spot curved sharply to the right. In the elbow of the curve, a fat old oak tree looked like someone had taken a giant razor and scraped off a bunch of bark, exposing the flesh in the exact spot where a car might come too close. The driver was trying hard to avoid leaving streaks of paint on the tree.

  Mama ran from the house, trotting down the steps, saying, “Oh, thank God, thank God” to herself, as if the perils of living without her own belongings had almost sent her to an early grave. She ran right past me and waved her hands frantically, directing the driver to pull close to the front porch. I have to admit, I experienced a flicker of excitement myself, knowing my own pictures and pillows and the rest of my books would be here. But on the heels of that came a vision of Mama ripping down the portraits and replacing my ancestors with stuff Peter had let her take from the house in Georgia. Stuff that didn’t mean anything.

  I ran inside, slipped into the parlor to grab Benjamin off the wall, and lugged him all the way upstairs to my room, stashing him in the back of my closet.

  “Sorry, Benjamin, it’s only temporary.” I moved a flattened box in front of him so no one peeking in my closet would see that I’d hidden him there.

  The movers finished before lunch. Mama’s cherry-colored love seat sat in the center of the huge family room, like a tiny neon light in the middle of the Arabian desert. The mismatched chairs and hard couch had disappeared. Stacked boxes created paths for us to move between the rooms.

  “We’ll deal with all that stuff later,” Mama said from the kitchen. She unwrapped china plates as gently as one might unfold the petals of a daffodil. “Look, sugar, our things are here.”

  I’d never paid much attention to Mama’s attachment to “things” before, but right then it really bothered me. It wasn’t like the china had been passed down from her grandmother. It was all stuff Peter let her buy with his credit card. It could be replaced as easily as it was purchased, unlike the paintings of my ancestors.

  “What are you going to do with the portraits?” I asked.

  Her face clouded over. “Something. I don’t know. I don’t care about them today.”

  She smiled at a gold-rimmed saucer and put it on the counter next to her set of those little tiny cups people use to drink that really strong coffee. Mama said that stuff was thick as mud and tasted like the bottom of a horse stall, but she always made sure those cups were brought out of the cabinet when company came for dinner.

  “Maybe the library would like them,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  She hadn’t even heard me.

  “Because my daddy donated the library to the town, so maybe they’d want them.”

  “Good.” She set a creamer and sugar bowl on the counter. “Maybe they’ll come pick them up. You can ask next time you’re there.”

  I got up close to her face. “Did you even know he donated that library?”

  She looked at me like I was silly. “Your daddy did all sorts of crazy things, sugar. It doesn’t surprise me one bit. If you want them to go to the library, that’s fine. They’re yours. Otherwise they’re going to live in that barn until next July when we move, because decorating is my department.”

  Deacon and Quince stopped by that afternoon with an envelope for Mama. “This is for August,” he said. “Thought you might want it early.”

  Her eyes flashed and her whole body stiffened. She glanced quickly at me, then stuffed the envelope inside a drawer and slammed it shut.

  “Thank you.”

  For all her proper manners, the one thing Mama never could control was the way she changed when someone humiliated her. I had no idea what Deacon might have done, but it didn’t matter. There was no reasoning with her when she got like that in her head. That icy voice of hers gave her away.

  “Is there anything you need help getting moved? Any boxes you want me to take upstairs?” Deacon asked.

  She turned her back to him. “We’re fine.” Short, clipped words.

  “Okay, if anything comes up, you know where I am.”

  Mama rolled her eyes. “Indeed we do.”

  “Wait!” I said. “Can you help me?”

  Mama’s head flew up. “With what?”

  “Moving the portraits to the barn.”

  She stared like she had no idea what I was talking about, even though we’d just had the conversation a few hours before.

  “They’ll be out of your way,” I said quickly.

  She shrugged and cut a straight line with a knife across the top of a box. “Suit yourself.”

  There were seven portraits, not including Benjamin, who might be suffocating up in my closet. I brought each one to the front porch, and Deacon carried them across the yard with Quince trotting at his heels. When he came for the last one, I followed them all the way inside the barn.

  It was dark and cool in there. The smell of turpentine and something sweet lingered in the air. The whole middle was empty, just a broad floor made from smooth, creamy stones. Two wooden sawhorses and a bunch of rusty tools leaned against a wall. Near an opening in the back, a blue tractor faced out to the field, with clumps of green grass clinging to the wheels. Patches of sunlight pushed through dusty windowpanes, spreading streaks of yellow across the stones.

  I tilted my head back and followed a three-quarter walkway around the second floor, turning a full 360 degrees. It felt like standing in an old church, one where God had been waiting for me a long, long time.

  “I like it in here,” I whispered. “I like it a lot.”

  Deacon watched me, still holding the last portrait.

  “It’s like I should remember,” I said. “We lived here for a few months when I was little. But I don’t remember this place.”

  “Not everything needs a visual memory,” he said. “Sometimes moments come to us by smell or sound or even taste.”

  He leaned the picture against a wall near the others, then climbed a staircase and returned with a tarp. “I’ll get boxes tomorrow and move them upstairs. They’ll be there whenever you decide what to do with them.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry Mama was rude.”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay. She’d rather be in charge of her own money, but I’m the trustee. It’s my job to see to it things are done according to the way your father wanted.”

  “You’re the trustee
?”

  “I am.”

  “I thought a trustee was someone official, like from a bank, or a lawyer. Not just a regular person.”

  Deacon laughed. “Glad to know I’m regular. I’ve wondered for a long time. A trustee just means I handle the aspects of your father’s estate where you and this farm are concerned. Your mama will either get used to it or she won’t. But don’t worry about me.”

  I walked slowly back to the house, thinking about what Deacon had said. Feeling obligated to another person humiliated Mama, and when Mama was humiliated, she lashed out. That mean streak of hers had embarrassed me more than once in my life, like the time a new track coach chewed me out in front of all the parents for getting a bad grade, which meant I couldn’t compete. Mama’d lit into her so fierce that woman could probably still feel the burn. But, like she had told me, living in Vermont was only for one year. A person can do almost anything for a year.

  That night, while Mama was in the shower, I wrote a quick letter to Peter. I wanted to let him know we didn’t have internet yet, in case he was wondering why I hadn’t emailed. On the last line I said, “We have an extra bedroom, just in case you and Albert ever want to come visit.” I wrote out his name and our old address on an envelope and ran down the driveway in my slippers to put it in the mailbox and flip the little red flag up. Just to be safe, I’d stuck four stamps across the top so it would go fast, all the way to Georgia.

  EIGHT

  A few days later that redheaded boy from the library came strolling up the driveway, leading a mule and trailed by a bunch of girls in assorted sizes and colors. The second I saw that flash of red hair against the background of green trees by the road, I leaped from the porch swing and made a mad dash for the front door, hoping to disappear before he caught sight of me. No such luck.

  “Look, James, there she is!” One of the girls had spotted me.

  James smiled and waved. How the heck did he know where I lived? Now I had to be polite. I started over to meet them, but stopped short at the bottom of the porch steps when I saw a shiny stick thing stuck to his leg, making him limp.

  “Hi, Maggie with two g’s,” he said.

  I couldn’t answer. I just couldn’t, because it wasn’t something stuck to his leg, there was no leg. I hadn’t noticed at the library when he was wearing jeans, but now, in shorts, I saw he was missing part of one leg from just above where a knee should have been.

  A chunky girl with thick bangs cut straight across her forehead watched me staring.

  “I don’t think she’s ever seen someone who lost a leg before.”

  I forced my eyes to move to James’s face. Two girls on the back of the mule snickered, and heat rose up my neck. I wished I’d agreed to go with Mama to pick out paint colors. I even wished she’d come home right then. I’d have to help her carry the buckets into the house, these people would have to leave, and this awkward moment would be over.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare.”

  James hadn’t stopped smiling. “It’s okay, it’s not really lost.”

  All four girls giggled.

  “It’s not?”

  “Nope, I know exactly where it is,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yup. Buried in the backyard alongside two cats, one guinea pig, and Rugby. That was our dog. He died right after we buried the leg.”

  The girls laughed together. I hate that feeling, being the odd one on the outside looking in. It was the same way Irene made me feel when she wanted to be mean, which happened whenever her big brother was nasty to her. The two girls slid off the mule’s back and stood with the others. I wanted to run inside and never come out again.

  “Buried?” I sounded like a frog croaking.

  James sat down in the grass and unbuckled the silver thing from his thigh. A black sneaker poked off the other end.

  “Take a look,” he said, holding the whole contraption out. “Go ahead.”

  I shrank back and crossed my arms over my chest. “That’s okay—thank you anyway.”

  The chunky girl took the leg from James and knocked her knuckles just above the sneaker. “It’s titanium. It’s really cool.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  She passed the leg back to James and thrust her hands on her hips. “You’re Magnolia Grace.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, I’m Biz and I have two moms.”

  Nothing—ever—in any of Mama’s manners lessons I’d endured over the years could have prepared me for how to answer an introduction like that. Especially coming from a little kid who looked like she might be going into first grade in the fall. If so, this was no ordinary first grader.

  Biz pulled another girl forward who looked a little older than me. She was the exact opposite of Biz; tall, with straight black hair and large brown eyes that slanted slightly at the corners.

  “This is my sister Sonnet,” she said. “But she’s not Portuguese.”

  Biz and Sonnet giggled.

  A girl with tawny skin and wiry brown hair as wild as Benjamin’s raised her hand. “I’m Kendra,” she said.

  Then the tiniest girl stepped beside James and studied me with clear, blue eyes under a mop of tight, yellow curls. James ruffled the top of her head.

  “This is Lucy, the baby.”

  Lucy dug her elbow into his thigh. “I’m not a baby. I’m five and three quarters. I only look little because I was a preemie and my birth mother left me at the hospital so my real moms could come and get me.”

  Preemie? Birth mother? What five-and-three-quarter-aged kid knew those kinds of things, let alone said them out loud?

  “And there’s one more sister,” Biz said. “Haily.”

  “She’s at the store today,” James said.

  “She’s ‘working,’” Biz said, air-quoting the word working.

  Kendra rolled her eyes. “Working means she’s waiting for this boy to show up so she can flirt!”

  “She has a bf! That means boyfriend,” Lucy chimed in.

  “The girls are more excited about him than Haily is,” James said.

  “Not me,” grumbled Kendra. “Sonnet doesn’t care either.”

  Sonnet nodded silently.

  “What store?” I asked.

  “Our moms own Parker’s Country Store just this side of town. You’ll get to meet them soon,” said James.

  “That’s how we knew you were here,” Lucy said.

  My head flipped from one kid to another, settling on James. “Do I know them?”

  “No, Deacon helps them at the store a few days a week,” he said. “He told us back when he first found out you were coming.”

  Biz crossed her arms over her chest. “Yeah, but he said we had to wait for you to get settled before we came over.”

  Lucy crossed her arms like Biz. “Yeah. Settled means at least two weeks. Sometimes more, like with you.”

  Kendra nudged James. “We have to go.”

  Lucy and Biz started talking at the same time.

  “Aren’t you going to ask her?”

  “It’s getting hot.”

  “I’m itchy. I wanna go.”

  Lucy tried to yank off her T-shirt. James quickly pulled it down over her body. “Okay, okay.”

  “Ask her!” Biz demanded.

  “We’re on our way to the river to swim. Wanna go with us?”

  And then I was crowded into the middle of a circle of James and the two littlest girls, who talked at the same time, telling me about the rope swing at the river, and who was the best swimmer and the worst, and all the reasons I should come with them, and how we could go to their house afterward and eat all the ice cream we wanted because their moms owned the store. Sonnet stood apart, watching us and scribbling something in a pocket-sized notebook.

  “I’d have to ask and Mama’s not home,” I said, secretly relieved. There were so many of them.

  “You say I funny, like there’s an a with it,” Biz chided.

  Lucy elbowed her. “S
hhh.”

  I didn’t want to go with them. I didn’t want to have to wait and introduce Mama to this strange family and see her try to hide her disapproval. She’d be real nice to their faces, but afterward, when it was just the two of us, she’d call them bumpkins. When she learned they had two moms, she might call them something worse. Mama’s judgment of other people always made me feel less than, like I probably came up short in her eyes too.

  But I didn’t have a choice about asking or not because right then, a brand-new, fire-engine-red Mustang convertible spewed gravel under shiny black tires on the driveway and came to a screeching halt in front of the house.

  Mama was back.

  NINE

  She got out of the car, her head wrapped in a turquoise scarf, wearing sunglasses as big as the whole state of Georgia, and lipstick that matched the Mustang. When she saw all of us standing there, including the mule, she lowered her sun shades and raised her eyebrows. My stomach dropped to my feet. This was going to be awful.

  “Is that your mom?” Biz could barely breathe. “She looks like a movie star!”

  Mama made her way around the side of the car and sashayed across the yard, waving one arm in the air. “Well, hi, y’all! Sugar, do we have our first guests?”

  Her pointy high heels sank into the grass, almost causing her to trip and fall. “Oops, silly me!” She slipped off the shoes one at a time and tiptoed barefoot toward us. “I hope that dog of Deacon’s has its own private place for you know what other than in our grass!”

  Lucy and Kendra giggled. Sonnet pulled the pencil from behind her ear and scribbled in the tiny notebook again. Biz’s eyes popped.

  “And she’s so nice!” she said.

  Wait for it, I thought. Just wait.

  Mama stopped short when she saw James’s leg. Or no leg. Or thing that was there instead of a leg. And she stared. With her mouth open. Just the way she’d always said made me look like trailer trash. I pleaded with my eyes for her to stop, but she didn’t see because her attention was aimed only on the titanium stick attached to the black sneaker.

  “Mama. Mama!”

  She startled and looked around, like she’d just noticed all of them. “Oh! Excuse me.”