Georgia Rules

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  IRENE: Same as every year. OMG, guess what? Remember Randy, that new guy at the club with the blond hair that falls in his face like he’s a secret spy and doesn’t want anyone to see his eyes? Wanna know why he does that? Guess!

  ME: He’s a secret spy and doesn’t want anyone to see his eyes?

  IRENE: Okay, dork. No to the spy, but YES to the eye! He’s missing one entire eyeball!!!!!

  ME: Only thing worse than losing an entire eyeball would be losing half of one. What does it look like?

  IRENE: He has a glass eye. Just happened last year, so he’s kind of shy about it, but guess what? I LIIIIIIKE him!

  ME: Just LIIIIIIKE? That’s not much, Ireneeee.

  IRENE: LOL. He’s coming over. We’re going to the club to swim. I can’t wait to see if he leaves the eye in.

  ME: Be sure to keep me posted on that.

  IRENE: What do you do up there? Is there a club? Have you started running yet?

  ME: No, I’m not even registered for school. But I went swimming for the first time.

  This was partially a lie, seeing as how I went with people who were swimming, but didn’t actually swim myself. The truth would leave me open to Irene’s questions and judgment, which could be plentiful. She was a little like Mama that way.

  IRENE: Where? With who?

  ME: A guy named James, he’s in high school. We swam in a river across this field near my house—

  IRENE: A river? Eewwwwww. That sounds gross. I don’t even like it when they don’t put enough chlorine in the pool at the club, but a river?

  ME: I know, it creeped me out at first, but it was clean. I mean, it is Vermont. There isn’t even pollution here. Not like Atlanta. And guess what, James has FIVE sisters! Isn’t that cray-cray?

  IRENE: Is he hot?

  ME: No! I mean, he’s old. I think he’s going to be a senior. But he’s just, he’s James. He has super-red hair and he’s missing a leg.

  IRENE: Yuck. And he went swimming with you?

  ME: He has a fake leg. It’s not any grosser than a glass eyeball.

  IRENE: Did he take it off when he went in?

  ME: Duh.

  IRENE: Shut up. What did you wear?

  ME: My bathing suit.

  Another lie. I was on a roll.

  IRENE: Still the same one from last year? I thought we discussed this.

  ME: I didn’t get the new one yet.

  IRENE: I can’t believe that thing still fits. Wasn’t it too small up top?

  I looked down at my flat chest. Irene had always drawn a different kind of attention than me. She was one of those girls who blossomed early. For whatever reason, it made her feel good to point this out.

  ME: No, not really.

  IRENE: Wanna see my new bathing suit?

  I rolled my eyes extra big.

  ME: Sure.

  A picture popped up. We used to laugh about kids who took selfies, but Irene had worked it to the max. Her hair was bundled on top of her head with little blond tendrils tumbling down around her ears. She had one hand on her waist, one hip stuck out, and her back arched. The bottom of her bikini was barely more than ribbons tied together.

  ME: Do your parents know you’re wearing that thing at the club?

  IRENE: What’s wrong with it?

  ME: It’s a little revealing.

  IRENE: What, are you jealous? Worried your one-legged bf might like me better?

  ME: A) He’s not my boyfriend, and B) we are seven whole states away. If I had a boyfriend, you wouldn’t be a threat.

  IRENE: If you say so.

  ME: I say so.

  I could see she was typing, then pausing, then typing again. I fiddled with the pink envelope.

  IRENE: I gotta go, Randy’s coming soon. I have to shave my legs.

  Shave her legs? Since when?

  ME: Have fun.

  IRENE: Yeah, bye.

  ME: Bye.

  I closed the laptop and watched the trees wave in a breeze out the window. It had only been five weeks since I’d seen her, but Irene had probably already moved on to a new group of friends. Maybe even girls with cleavage. I knew that last “bye” was for more than just our chat, but it didn’t devastate me like I would have expected. In fact, it’s possible I was a little relieved.

  FIFTEEN

  Back in Georgia, the thing I was known best for, other than being the only long-term friend Irene ever had, was my running. I wasn’t curvy or clever with boys or pretty in a glamorous way. The only reason anyone knew my name was because the newspaper wrote an article about school sports and said I was the fastest sixth grader in all of Atlanta.

  Rummaging through a box, I found my old running shorts, my field day T-shirt, and a fake bronze medal at the end of a loop of red, white, and blue ribbon. High Point Field Day Champion, it read. I dressed quickly for a run, then stuck my head through the loop and let the medallion hang against my chest. Hands on hips, legs spread apart, chin up, shoulders back, eyes strong, I took on the Wonder Woman pose. My coach made us do that every day before practice. She said it would give us the self-esteem of champions.

  Outside, I took another deep breath and drew in the sweet scent of summer. Except for the blue cap overhead, and the occasional pastel flower that hadn’t wilted, the whole earth had turned a thousand different shades of green. I followed the split-rail fence, jogging until I got to the far end of the field where a three-sided pony shed stood empty in the corner. Old, dried leaves had scattered across the dirt floor, and a few straggly pieces of hay clung to the bottom of a metal rack on the wall.

  A breeze blew soft and cool on the back of my neck. I stretched my legs one at a time, then started off slowly into the woods, watching to place my feet carefully on solid ground. I was used to running on a level surface; it would be easy to twist an ankle here.

  Remnants of a path spread between the trees. I ran along it, beneath scattered white birch and past dogwood laced with red berries in place of pink blooms. The deeper I moved into the woods, the more I felt a part of them, of the trees and earth and sky, and less like some girl transplanted from a city twelve hundred miles away.

  The soil turned spongy under my feet. Every so often an area heavy with undergrowth gave way to a patch of sweet grass, soft like a baby’s breath. Ribbons of light wound through the trees, touching everything in their way with a hint of gold. Finally, after running more than I had in almost a month, I gave in to aching lungs and stopped to gulp air that was fresh, damp, and comforting.

  A woodpecker drilled holes, stopped, and drilled again. A chorus of birds sang their distinct songs. The only one I recognized was a wood thrush, and I knew that sound because it had been Peter’s favorite on a songbird app he had on his phone. A stone wall started out of nowhere and disappeared past a place where the earth took a dive out of sight.

  My heart still pounding, I followed the wall through the woods until it dwindled to a sad pile of rocks at the fringe of a glen where the path, too, disappeared. Trees with rough, gray bark grew far enough apart so the sunlight fell in waves instead of patches. The larger trees had metal pails hanging from their trunks.

  Just ahead, an old, swayback building with two chimneys was almost hidden beneath tangled layers of vine and ivy. Barely visible along one side was a stretch of windowpanes crusted with layers of dirt. I pushed away heavy growth, snapped twigs underfoot, and trampled yellow-bloomed weeds to reach a door. Kicking away vines that had built up around the base, I pulled it open just wide enough to squeeze through.

  The inside was one large room with a wall-to-wall fireplace that smelled faintly of old smoke and something sweet. Wood plank shelving held an assortment of dusty glass bottles and jugs: blue and green and brown. Two massive cast-iron pots sat by the fireplace. I tapped one with my foot. A bevy of spiders scattered, disappearing between the wall and the floor. Light slanted through the crack in the door, highlighting particles of dust floating gently in the air.

  The length of the room was taken up by a long
wooden table, with a solitary, straight-backed chair sitting at an angle, as if someone had just gotten up and walked away. I sat down and ran my hand over the top of the table, as if maybe by feel I could know who had lived, or worked, here, and how long it might have been since the place had been useful.

  Like on a Ouija board, my fingertips moved to grooves carved into the wood. I leaned close, trying to see in the dim light, and followed the pattern whittled into the corner with my fingers. A heart shape surrounded three sets of initials: JA + DA = MGA

  Johnny Austin + Delilah Austin = Magnolia Grace Austin.

  His voice was there again, all around me, so real I could almost hear it.

  “We’re going to carve our initials here, Magnolia Grace, so we’ll be together forever, no matter what.”

  SIXTEEN

  Deacon was pulling out of the driveway when he saw me coming up the hill an hour later. He stopped the truck and leaned out the window. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said between gulps of air. “Just needed to run.”

  “Bet it’s different running through those woods than on a track.”

  “Yeah, I had to be careful. Lots of rocks and stuff. How’d you know I ran track?”

  He chuckled. “Your mama may not like me much, but she does like bragging on you. How far did you get?”

  “Down to that old building.”

  “Ah.”

  I rested my hands on the open truck window. “What is that place?”

  “It’s the original sugar shack from your family’s maple sugaring business.”

  “My family’s what?”

  “Maple sugaring. The Austins made syrup for generations. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No. I don’t know much about them except they didn’t smile when they had portraits done.”

  Deacon laughed and looked toward the house. Mama’s car was still gone. “Got any place you have to be soon?”

  “Nope.”

  “Climb in. I’ll show you something.”

  I was covered head to toe with an assortment of woodsy things. Grass clung to my shoelaces, my ankles were coated with dirt, and I had already pulled a leaf from my hair.

  “Don’t you want me to shower before I get in your truck?”

  “Quince and I don’t mind—she’ll move for you.” He patted the seat and Quince obediently scooted close to Deacon.

  “Okay.”

  We took a right out of the driveway and bounced and bumped and jostled along the road heading away from town.

  “I think your truck needs some fixing,” I said, holding tight to the dashboard.

  “Suspension,” he said. “I kinda like it this way. Only the strong survive.”

  I flattened my hand over the top of my head so it didn’t smash into the roof. “I’m happy for you.”

  A stop sign jumped out from the thick bushes like a bull’s-eye. We turned right and drove past trees on both sides that were so tall, and so lush, they almost met above the middle of the road. Ten bumpy minutes later, Deacon took another right onto an unmarked dirt road cutting straight through a jungle of trees. Deep ruts slowed us to a crawl until the road dead-ended in front of a long, gray building, as generous as any strip mall in Atlanta. I counted eight chimneys rising from the roof.

  “What is this place?”

  He shifted the truck into park. “This was what the Austin family’s maple sugaring business turned into.”

  I rolled the window down with the crank handle and watched the forest beside me. Humidity seeped in, thick as fog, piggybacking the musty smell of wood and wildlife and greens. There were no pails attached to these trees, and no path to take me deep into the middle. Except for the opening where the building stood like a unwelcome guest, these woods had grown wild, carpeted with fallen limbs and skinny ferns nearly smothered by a knee-high quilt of last year’s leaves.

  “Why’s it so far from the farm?”

  Deacon rested his arms across the top of the steering wheel and looked out the front window. “You know how big four thousand acres is? Your father’s family made maple syrup for over a hundred years. Started out in that little sugar shack you found today. In the early part of spring, there’d be buckets hanging from those trees full of sap. They’d dump it into big containers and haul them by horse and sleigh to the shack, then boil it down over a fire and make syrup. Your grandfather wanted to modernize, he wanted to make more money. He built this place up and installed miles of rubber tubing and shiny equipment so everything happened faster. He ran it that way for close to fifty years.”

  “Was my grandfather named Benjamin?”

  “No, that was your great-grandfather. Benjamin never would have made it all into something like this. Your grandfather’s name was Brandon.”

  “Why did this place get closed down?”

  “Your father didn’t like it, said the new processes made maple syrup taste like paper money. He loved the old place, and those woods. There’s a poem that always makes me think of him, something about men being too gentle to live among wolves. Anyway, he wanted to paint and his parents wanted him to learn the business. He was miserable, so he left. Same story happens all the time. He didn’t come back until after his parents died. You and your mama showed up not long after. When you left, first thing he did was shut this place down.”

  “What happened to the people who worked here?”

  “He made sure we were all taken care of.”

  “You worked here?”

  Deacon nodded. “Started in college, which I didn’t finish until your father closed this place down. He made it possible for me to go back and even get my master’s degree.”

  “You have a master’s degree?”

  Deacon chuckled. “I may look a little rough around the edges, but, yes, I got my master’s in counseling.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound rude, I was just surprised.”

  “Don’t worry, it still surprises me.”

  “I thought you worked at the store with Sue and Kori.”

  “I do, a few afternoons a week. More in the summer. The rest of the time I’m the guidance counselor at your school.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. Deacon would be at my school. That was comforting.

  “It’s a small town,” he said. “Pretty soon you’ll know who is who, and who works where and when, just like the rest of us.”

  “This man at the library knew all about my daddy. He called him a recluse.”

  “A lot of people called him that. But he was a good man. He did a lot for this community.”

  “Like donating the library?”

  He nodded. “Like donating the library.”

  “I wish I could have known him.”

  “Well, that’s why you’re here now. So you’ll know who he was before you decide what to do about the farm.”

  I turned my attention back to the old maple factory. I didn’t feel comfortable telling him I already knew we were selling it. “What’s this place used for now?”

  “Nothing. A lot of businesspeople tried to buy it over the years, but your daddy wouldn’t sell. Not until he knew whether you wanted it. Of course, he died before he could find out. So it sits.”

  It was late afternoon when Deacon let me off in front of the house. We’d gone home a roundabout way and stopped at his favorite hot dog stand. The smell of sauerkraut and mustard still clung to my shirt. I waited for his cottage door to close, then turned and let my feet take me back to those woods, back to the sugar shack in the maple grove my daddy had loved.

  When I got there, the sun was sinking behind the trees. Dusky shadows replaced the golden light from earlier in the day when the sun was high. I moved from tree to tree and touched the metal buckets, lifting the lid on one to smell inside. Then I stood in the middle of that grove, closed my eyes, and inhaled sharply. It was easy to imagine wafts of smoke drifting from the chimneys of the sugar shack, gray and almost sticky with sweet. My feet felt rooted into the earth. I had come from this place. This is where
I was always meant to be. Where I belonged.

  Maybe Mama’d been right. Georgia was fading now. A new, exciting idea edged into my mind. A possibility. What would have to happen for us to be able to stay right here in Vermont?

  The next day, another letter came for me, this time from Peter. Slipping my thumb under the edge, I tore the envelope open and pulled out a single piece of plain white paper folded into thirds. A check floated to the floor, but all I could look at was the painfully short note on the page it had been wrapped in.

  Thank you for your letter. Good to hear all is well.

  Peter

  That was it. Just those twelve words and the check. It was like God, or the universe, was making sure I understood there wasn’t anything left for us back in Georgia. Everything I needed was right here.

  SEVENTEEN

  A few days later James drove over in his truck with Biz and Lucy and an invitation to dinner. Mama answered the door and accepted on my behalf before even asking me. It was just as well; I was restless, and the image of poor little Lucy’s crying face had stayed in my head ever since they’d dropped me off the other day. Besides, Mama’d already told me she was making clam chowder for us. I hate clam chowder.

  The girls scrunched up next to me on the ride home. I was pretty sure that wasn’t legal either, since we had to wrap one seat belt around the three of us, but I didn’t ask. I kind of liked the way they adored me already.

  “We have to meet you to the moms first,” Lucy said.

  “Introduce her,” Biz corrected. “We have to introduce her.”

  “Okay, but then we’re going to take you—”

  Biz held her palm over Lucy’s mouth. “Quiet! It’s a surprise!”

  “Oh good, I like surprises,” I said.

  “Girls, you’re going to make Maggie want to run home as soon as we get there,” James said. “They haven’t stopped talking about you for days.”

  “I’m sure that thrilled Kendra and Sonnet.”

  “Don’t pay attention to them,” he said. “They’re both a little on the self-centered side.”

  “Yeah,” Biz said with authority.