Deacon looked at her meekly and shrugged. “Bags? We can’t find the bags.”
“Young lady, did you hear me? I’ve been waiting!”
Mama swung around when she heard the man talk to me that way and marched toward him, her fist clenched like she was about to belt him a good one in the mouth. I couldn’t make my feet move to stop her. It was like they’d been superglued to the floor.
The look on her face must have scared him off because he ducked around a corner before she got halfway there. She didn’t follow him, though. She stopped and bent down in front of the aspirin shelf, opened a drawer underneath, and pulled out a stack of brown paper bags. Then she stalked back to the front of the store and slapped them on the counter in front of Deacon.
“I just happened to be here last week when they decided to move the bags and make room for more syrup in the back,” she said. Then she threw her tiny purse on the stool and turned to face the crowd of people who were waiting to be checked out.
“Hi, y’all,” she said, real loud. “Welcome to our store. I’m so glad you stopped by. I know you’re wondering what a pretty girl like me with a southern accent is doing way up here in Vermont running this country store when I could be traveling the world—am I right?”
She grabbed a green cup from behind the counter and filled it with fresh coffee.
“Here you go, hon,” she said, handing it to a lady in line. “Do you like cream? Sugar? Just black? Okay, then, enjoy. It’s on the house.”
Customers who’d been crowding the far aisles came up with their baskets full of trinkets and treasures when they heard the lady with the super-southern accent talking.
“I’ll tell you why I decided this was my life’s calling,” she said. “It’s because of you”—she pointed to a man who’d been grumbling about the size of tomatoes—“and you”—she nodded at a lady who had literally stamped her foot not three minutes before when I wasn’t fast enough to help her—“and you, you sweet little thang.” She handed a fussy toddler a toy from the shelf.
Then she flipped open a brown bag and started throwing a customer’s items in it, all the while telling the most amazing stories about how she’d traveled the world, looking for just the right place to settle down and raise her daughter—this is when she pointed at me. She went on and on, spinning the most incredible tales about visiting the Taj Mahal and Buckingham Palace—she called it BuckingTON Palace, but I don’t think anyone caught it—while Deacon smiled to himself and kept punching keys on the register.
If I didn’t know she was my own mama, I’d be mesmerized, too. She was beautiful and young and dressed up all fancy like she just stepped out of a fashion magazine, and she was working that accent like nobody’s business. She made every person in that store feel like they were the most important customer of the day. Everyone was greeted with a giant “Howdy!” or “Hi, y’all!” and she just kept right on talking.
One woman, who came in for toothpaste, left with a new red sweater because Mama told her it would go perfect with her green eyes. I don’t know how she even knew they were green because the woman had those odd, old-lady eyelids that sucked in the lashes and dropped down over her eyeballs. Mama even made up some story about the person who hand knit that sweater and most of the clothes in the store.
“Well, except for the nighties, of course, those are flannel, because it gets so chilly up here in Vermont at night. We locals all wear flannel.” She crossed her arms over her chest and pretended to shiver. “Brrrr.” Two women left the line and came back with nightgowns with moose and bears all over them.
“You know, those are exactly the ones I would have picked out for you. And I went to fashion design school in college, so I know what looks right.”
The ladies blushed, paid for their purchases, and walked out smiling.
Mama kept up her shenanigans for two solid hours without so much as stopping to catch her breath. One by one, I helped customers while she worked her magic on the others and bagged items for Deacon in between. I’d never seen her do so many things at one time in my life.
At two o’clock there was a lull in the store for ten whole minutes. When the last customer walked out, Deacon plunked down on the stool and started laughing so hard his shoulders shook. When he could talk again, he looked at Mama and said, “Well, well, Delilah, who would have thought? You are something else.”
Mama acted all fake surprised, like she had no idea what he was talking about, then put a hand on her hip and smiled smugly. “And don’t you ever forget it, either.”
I stood in the middle of the candy and syrup aisle and finally let loose the flood of tears that had been building up since we’d opened the store.
“What’s wrong with you, sugar?”
“Those people were all so mad before you got here. It was awful, they were so mean, and then they were so nice. How did you do it?”
“Well, shoot, the same way I always get through the tough times, sugar. I faked it.”
Mama pulled stuff together and made sandwiches for me and Deacon. While we scarfed them down, she got out the dustpan and broom and cleaned up so when customers started trickling back in, the place had less of a hurricane look.
“I’m going to the big grocery store,” she said, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “You both deserve a nice home-cooked meal after this.”
She was halfway out the door when she stopped and called over her shoulder, “That means you, too, Deacon. Dinner’s at seven.”
We closed the store at four o’clock, which was an hour early even for a Sunday. Deacon said we’d earned our keep. “You did well, Maggie. You really stepped up to the plate.”
“I don’t feel as much of a failure like I did yesterday, but that’s mostly because of Mama.”
He laughed. “That was something to see, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. It was kind of crazy, but she helped us out, right?”
“She sure did. It will be a great story to tell Kori and Sue when they get home.”
“Yeah.”
The reminder that the family was gone made me think of Biz, lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Boston felt very far away.
“Is there anything else I should do to help Biz?”
Deacon shifted his truck into drive and pulled down the driveway. “Wouldn’t hurt to pray.”
“Like in a church?”
“You can pray anywhere.”
“I’m not sure how.”
“Just start talking. God hears everything.”
“What if I mess it up?”
“No such thing. And remember, Biz is still with us. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
I liked the way that sounded. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
He dropped me off by the front porch. My feet landed on the soft grass, and my legs quivered like they used to when I’d line up at the start of a race. As exhausted as I was from two days in that store, I needed to run. I needed to inhale the musky scent of fallen leaves that lay brown and moist under my feet. I needed to be where my legs rose from the soil, where my daddy had carved our initials into a table so we’d be together forever. I needed to be at the one place that always felt the same.
I took off down the field toward the birch trees, inhaling air that held the sweet smell of apples and decaying earth. Late-day sun pushed through red and orange foliage, dappling the gray stone wall in a pinwheel of color, but I didn’t stop to look. I couldn’t stop until I got all the way to the sugar shack and dropped into the chair, out of breath, and lay my cheek over the heart in the wood.
Closing my eyes against salty tears, I listened to the silence for a moment, then whispered, “Dear God—”
TWENTY-FIVE
On Monday, Mama said if I could help run a store like I did over the weekend, I could sure get myself back to school. It was my first time being there without any of the Parker kids around and I felt like I was missing my left arm. Even Deacon’s office door was closed tight. I was on my own.
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br /> At lunch I sat on the steps outside with my paper sack in my lap. Two of Sonnet’s art friends watched me from the little-kid playground. The tall one said something to the short one, and they walked toward me together.
“It’s Maggie, right?” the tall one asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Aspen. This is Jane. We’re friends with Sonnet.”
Jane had a purple streak in otherwise white hair.
“Hi,” I said.
“Sonnet texted us. She said you were really brave,” Jane said.
“Sonnet said that?”
They both nodded.
“We knew your dad.”
Everybody knew him, I thought. Everybody but me.
Aspen held up her lunch bag. “Can we sit with you?”
“Sure.”
Did that mean I should move over so they could sit next to each other? Or make them sandwich me? Sandwich it was. Aspen sat on my left, Jane on my right. They pulled food out of their bags and talked as if we ate together every day.
“What did you bring?” Jane asked.
Aspen passed a tiny jar filled with some kind of crunchy stuff to Jane, who took it and sniffed.
“God, isn’t that what you had yesterday? And the day before?”
“Yeah. Mom’s so proud of herself for making granola I’ll probably have to eat it every day for a year. Man, what I’d do for a Girl Scout cookie.” She picked through the jar, pulling out dried berries and almonds.
Jane unwrapped a stack of cucumber circles and carrot sticks, and stuck her nose near a tiny plastic tub of hummus. “Yuck.”
I pulled out a plastic ziplock bag stuffed with Thin Mints and Savannah Smiles. Aspen and Jane’s eyes grew big.
“You guys can have them.”
“Are you sure?” That was Jane.
Aspen grabbed the bag. “Of course she’s sure—didn’t you hear her?”
“Wow, thanks. This is awesome. Your mom gave you these?”
“I make my own lunch.”
“Lucky.”
They split the cookies up and chewed happily while I ate my half peanut butter and honey sandwich. Jane licked Savannah Smiles powder from her fingers.
“You’re cool.”
“Yeah,” said Aspen.
This was how Biz and Lucy might be when they were teenagers, I thought. My stomach twisted. Would Biz even get to high school? There’d been no word since Saturday.
“We got to go with Sonnet to your dad’s house once,” Jane said.
“Because we’re art students, in case you were wondering why.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Aspen leaned in and lowered her voice. “He let us see the magnolias.”
They watched me like a dog waiting for a ball to be thrown. I smiled and stuffed the leftover crust of my sandwich inside the bag.
Jane looked at me suspiciously. “Your name is Magnolia Grace, right? They’re you?”
The only thing I could do was nod. I had nothing else. My name was Magnolia Grace, but whether “they” were me or not I couldn’t say, since I didn’t know what “they” were.
“He hardly let anybody see them, you know, but since we’re friends with Sonnet, and he and Sonnet were like this . . .” She crossed her middle finger over her forefinger and held it up in front of my face.
“Right,” I said.
Yes, I knew my daddy and Sonnet were “like this.” I knew she was there when he died and that whole family, who were now together in Boston without me, grieved for him when I couldn’t. I knew he painted the ceiling of the library he donated, and some man had called him an ahh-tist. I knew Jeffrey said he didn’t get out much, and Deacon said he loved the woods and the old sugar shack. I also knew that these girls, like everyone else in the universe, knew more about my own daddy than I ever would.
I got up without saying anything and walked away.
TWENTY-SIX
By the time I got home that afternoon, my feathers were ruffled enough that I decided to confront Mama. I deserved to know more about my own daddy. I’d been respectful of her needs the whole time we lived in Georgia and hadn’t pushed when she shushed my questions. Now we were in Vermont. The rules were different. But she wasn’t home. Neither was Deacon. He was at the store and I was agitated enough that I didn’t want to go help him. I wanted to help myself.
I threw my backpack on the porch, crossed the yard, went inside the barn, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Two big doors in front of the landing had been pinned open ever since I got to Vermont. Deacon said the loft was used to store hay, back when the farm had working horses. They had cut it in the fields, then used a pulley to haul each bale up through the opening, and fed it to the horses all winter.
Outside those doors, blue sky pushed gray-ridged clouds swiftly away. Past the trees lining our road, blocks of wheat-colored fields—bordered by crimson, orange, and green—made the earth look like a patchwork quilt. In the distance, two red silos dotted the view, and even farther out I could see the blue sliver of a lake.
I could have stayed right there and looked at that view until the sun set, but I was on a mission. I hadn’t seen my ancestor portraits since the day Deacon and I carried them out of the house, and I wanted to sit with them. They belonged to me. Not just the portraits, but the people. They were all I had left of my real family. No matter how close I ever got to the Parkers, I’d never really be one of them.
Partway around the walkway was a door that opened to a dark room. I reached in and flipped the light switch on the wall. Boxes with Austin Ancestor Portraits written in black marker sat in the middle of the floor. They were taped shut across the top.
More boxes, the same shape and size, were stacked in rows behind them. The tape across the first one had peeled off and fallen to one side. I carefully stripped it away, reached into a thousand pink Styrofoam peanuts, and lifted out a framed landscape with his signature across the bottom. Johnny Austin.
Styrofoam flew everywhere. Little balls stuck to my jeans, blew across the floor, and clung to the canvas. I carried the landscape to the light in front of the open doors and held it up. It was exactly the same as the scene outside. He’d painted the view from the second floor of that barn—the rolling hills, the two silos, even the strip of blue water in the distance.
I don’t know much about art, but I could tell his was different. Something about the colors not being too bright, and the way light shone so everything on one side looked soft. Not in a Hallmark card kind of way, in a real way, like an invitation to step inside the scene. I turned it over. On the back it said The Georgia View.
All the other boxes were taped up tight, and labeled on the side like this:
JA/Vermont Draft Horses and Sleigh;
JA/Flooded Covered Bridge;
JA/Birches;
JA/Sugaring Done the Old Way.
No mention of a magnolia. Not one. What were Aspen and Jane talking about?
I shoved the boxes back in place, chased Styrofoam peanuts across the floor, and went in search of a trash can to hide them. Technically, everything in this barn was mine. I should be allowed up here, but it felt like snooping. No need for a piece of Styrofoam to give me away.
In the corner, an olive-green tarp lay over something that could have been a trash bin. I lifted the corner and peeked, hoping it wasn’t home to a bunch of bats or something equally creepy. Underneath the tarp was a wooden crate, sectioned inside by slats of wood that protected a series of unframed canvases. Carefully, I pulled one out and leaned it against the wall. My breath caught. This was nothing like the landscapes. This canvas was painted in deep shades of navy and plum, chocolate, evergreen, and a smoky pink. The dense background was broken up only by the image of a small girl in a white dress running beneath a tree that had thick, shiny leaves on branches loaded with cups of creamy magnolia blooms.
There were seven canvases total. They were all almost the same: a magnolia tree, a dark background, and a girl who looked slightly older with
each one. The last one was unfinished, with smudges of the dark colors and a few magnolia blooms at the top. Underneath the flowers was the outline of a tall, faceless girl running with her arms stretched out and palms up.
Purple lights darted past my eyes. I put a hand to the wall to steady myself, and his voice was there again.
“I’m going to paint you, Magnolia Grace,” he’d said. “One portrait every year.” I hadn’t wanted to stay still for him, so he’d moved his canvas and paints and brushes outside next to the barn where I could run around and play in the grass while he tried to capture my image. He’d made me laugh so hard I ended up with a tummy ache. Later, he’d rocked me to sleep, my cheek pressed firmly against his sweat-stained T-shirt, the sound of his heart beating in my ear.
With shaky hands, I carefully placed each canvas back into its slot, covered the crate with the tarp, and slipped out the door. Sprinting across the yard, I grabbed my backpack from the porch, bolted upstairs, and locked myself in my bedroom. The photo of me and my daddy on the carousel was still tucked inside my copy of Charlotte’s Web, where it had lived for over six years. I held it by one corner and lay flat on my back, studying the image. The need to confront Mama was gone. Everything I wanted to know at that moment, I’d seen in the magnolia paintings. And for the first time I could ever remember, I missed him.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The most amazing thing happened over the next three weeks. With the Parker family still in Boston, people from all over came to help at the store. Deacon said he could identify folks from at least five different counties spread from one side of the state to the other. I said there were a whole lot of people who loved the Parkers, but no one missed them more than me.
I learned what 4-H was when the kids showed up every afternoon to take care of the animals, and I got to know the track team really well when Bob had me teach them how to stock shelves. Angela gave her students extra credit for doing chores like hauling trash to the dump, and one of them wrote an article about community spirit for the newspaper.
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