by Kristin Gore
“Miz Hunt, Miz Butrell, hello,” he said as he rose quickly to his feet.
He could feel the benched men staring as he crossed the grass to the waiting car. His MCAT book was heavy and unwieldy, and it made him self-conscious. He turned the cover around so it was facing his leg, away from the gaze of the women before him.
“I thought that was you,” Willa said triumphantly. “I didn’t know you were back. Why haven’t you been to see us?”
Bo smiled politely. He liked Willa Hunt, but knew better than to indulge in any true familiarity. That same old hesitation always hooked him, even with the nicest people.
“I’ve just been home a couple weeks,” he replied good-naturedly.
“Well I’m gonna have to take a switch to your great-aunt Lyn for not telling me so!”
Bo forced himself to smile at this. He thought he saw something flicker in Willa’s eyes, perhaps remorse for her choice of phrase? It was too late regardless; her only option was to steamroll ahead. Jean Butrell seemed oblivious, content to let the two of them find their own way out of the quagmire of this already awkward conversation.
“I haven’t been able to see nearly any of the people I’d like to yet,” Bo said. “I gotta catch up on my catching up, I guess.”
Willa smiled, a little gratefully, Bo thought. Though it could have been his imagination.
“Well, the yard’s all grown up as usual, so if you wanna make a little money while you’re here, just stop on by,” she said graciously.
Bo did want to make a little money, but he’d budgeted his time with only the MCATs in mind.
“If I can get a break from studying, I’ll be sure to head on over.”
“You taking summer classes?” Willa asked. “I thought Lyn said you’d graduated.”
She said this kindly, like she’d be nothing but supportive if Bo had failed to stick to the normal schooling schedule. College was a lot to take on, after all.
“I’m all done with regular classes, but I’m taking the MCAT at the end of next month in order to apply to medical school, so I’ve gotta buckle down for that.”
“Oh!” Willa exclaimed, her mouth a perfect O of surprise.
Bo couldn’t tell if she was happy to hear this or not.
“Well my, my, that is something’,” she clucked. “Good for you.”
Bo nodded, but said nothing more.
His decision to stay silent led to an uncomfortable pause, something unfamiliar on these Southern streets when ladies of a certain age and breeding were involved. Willa smiled even more widely to cover it up.
“Well, stop by and see us, ya hear?” she said.
Bo promised he would and raised his hand in goodbye. As the car pulled away, Bo could see Willa and Lyn glance at him in the rearview mirror and burst into chatter, and though an acute muscle spasm coursed through his tensed shoulder, he didn’t lower his arm until they had disappeared down the road.
Jiminy scratched her shoulder absentmindedly as she skimmed another almanac. She’d discovered a pile of them in a dresser drawer in a little room at the back of the farmhouse, and had spent a delightful hour thumbing through the decades-old books, marveling at how sure they purported to be about things nobody could possibly know, such as the weather on a particular day, eleven months away. How accurate had these predictions ended up being? she wondered. Were the people who planned their lives by them idiots, or optimists, or both? And what use were the almanacs once their year had past? They became irrelevant, already proven prophetic or off-base, already gone to seed.
Jiminy liked that her grandmother kept the old almanacs around. She felt comforted to know that useless things were welcome here.
Not that Jiminy was comfortable in her uselessness. To the contrary, she longed for a purpose. She always had. Inspired at a young age by Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher, and later—nonfictionally—by Erin Brockovich, Jiminy had held vague ambitions of becoming a private eye or a feisty attorney. But these aspirations had taken a backseat to the day-to-day responsibilities of just getting by. Life with an unreliable mother had robbed her of the sense of security necessary for upward mobility. It had rendered her anxious and shortsighted.
When Jiminy was in college, her mother had married a wealthy retiree who delighted in her capriciousness and indulged her every whim. The two of them had taken off to travel the world, ostensibly liberating Jiminy to finally focus entirely on her own life. But the years of worry and insecurity had taken their toll, and instilled in her a reflexive skittishness that she seemed unable to shake.
It had taken all of her nerve just to move to Chicago to pursue law school, and she’d hoped this accomplishment signaled a new proactive boldness. But once there, Jiminy had continued to feel stunted and hesitant, which frustrated her. Her growing certainty that she was withholding some essential part of herself had filled her with quiet desperation. All of this had come into stark relief in the moments after she’d been taken out by the bike courier. As she’d lain there feeling for broken bones, Jiminy had been filled with revulsion for herself and her inability to fulfill the potential she surely possessed. Concerned that this disgust could harden into something crushing, she’d picked herself up, canceled her life as she knew it, and fled to the first place that popped into her mind. Had the bike courier been wearing a “Keep on Trucking” shirt, she might have ended up in San Francisco. As it was, she found herself in rural Mississippi. Exactly what she was to do now remained a mystery.
Through with the almanacs, Jiminy glanced toward the windowsill and remembered in a flash something she’d discovered about this room nineteen years before and hadn’t thought of since. She ran her hands along the wood paneling beneath the window and, sure enough, felt a square portion give a little beneath her fingers. She pressed harder and experienced the same thrill she had as a six-year-old as it sprang open to reveal a secret compartment.
Peering into it, Jiminy found a translucent snail shell perched atop a book. She picked up the book and carefully dusted it off. The black leather cover was painfully cracked. It claimed to be The Holy Bible, but the inside pages were homemade and filled with firm, slanted handwriting that Jiminy assumed did not belong to God. The inscription on the first page confirmed this.
Henry Esau Hunt—Recollections and Resolutions
Her grandfather’s name, her grandfather’s writing. Her grandfather’s diary? Jiminy thumbed through the roughly bound pages. The handwriting was very precise, but faded and difficult to read. The first entry was dated January 1, 1954, and titled “Our Wedding Day.”
It contained a brief description of the event, really just a record of the fact that Henry Esau Hunt had married Willa Calamity Peal in the presence of their parents and a minister at noon on that New Year’s Day. The entry seemed dispassionate enough, though Jiminy supposed it had meant enough to Henry to warrant beginning this book.
From that day forward, it appeared that Henry had made an entry every six months or so, only to record a happening deemed significant. As the years wore on, he began adding slightly to the entries—just bare-boned commentary that hinted at what he might have been feeling at the time. On January 6, 1959, Henry noted that Margaret Peal Hunt was born at eight thirty-five in the morning. Henry had written: “A long, hard night. A joyous day.” Jiminy smiled ruefully, reflecting that her mother continued to be known for such extremes.
She flipped to the last entry, which occurred about two-thirds of the way through the book, with plenty of blank pages left to be filled. It was dated January 1, 1967, and it read: “Hard year, hopeless. Poor Lyn, poor us.” And then, nothing more.
Jiminy knew that her grandfather had died suddenly and unexpectedly when her mother was eight years old. She was less certain that he’d been killed by a lost tribe of Indians hiding in the surrounding hills, or a roving band of land pirates, or a swarm of killer vampire bats up from the Louisiana swamps. All of these explanations had been offered to Jiminy by her mother, with considerable flourishes, but Jim
iny had instead accepted a cousin’s report that her mother’s father had succumbed to a massive, sudden pulmonary embolism, and died very prematurely at the age of thirty-two, leaving his wife and daughter to fend for themselves as best they could.
Since Jiminy’s mother had been born in 1959, she would have turned eight years old in 1967, the year of Henry’s final entry. It seemed he’d died before he could make another one. Had the hardness and hopelessness he’d written about brought on the embolism? Was that just a medical term for an unfixable broken heart?
Poor Lyn, poor us. Jiminy assumed the Lyn he referred to was the Lyn she knew. The Lyn who had worked for her grandmother for over fifty years, and in whose indifferent disregard Jiminy had always found a special solace. The most anyone could hope for from Lyn was a gruff affection that could be easily mistaken for dislike. Still, Jiminy had always gravitated toward her, because as shy as Jiminy was, there was something about Lyn that drew her out. Now that she thought about it, Jiminy felt an intense gratitude for Lyn that she’d never adequately expressed. Why hadn’t she? She decided she would. That was something she could do.
Poor Lyn, poor us. What had happened to Lyn? What had happened to all of them?
Jiminy moved backwards through the pages, looking for answers. Her hand paused on an entry that read: “Edward and Jiminy found, buried. Awful.”
For a moment, she felt like she couldn’t breathe, like she’d stumbled across a hidden portal into the future and was illicitly reading about her own demise. She’d been found and buried, but how had she died? She shivered. The date of the entry was June 24, 1966. There had obviously been another Jiminy. She’d never in her entire life heard of her, not even in her mother’s crazier stories. Who was she?
“Scarin’ up the devil in here?”
Jiminy leapt up, slamming the book shut as she whirled around in surprise. Lyn was standing in the doorway, her shoulders stooped with age. She was taken aback by Jiminy’s sudden fright. It made her clutch her own heart in solidarity.
“Lord child, what’s wrong with you?”
“Sorry,” Jiminy replied, somewhat breathlessly.
She wondered if Lyn recognized the book clasped in her hands. Lyn was looking at her strangely.
“Your grandma just wanted to make sure you were still alive since we hadn’t heard a peep outta you all mornin’,” Lyn said flatly, before turning to leave.
Jiminy stared after her, stricken. She wanted to stop her. She had things to say. She had things to ask.
“Wait,” she said, but it came out a whisper that Lyn didn’t appear to hear.
“Wait,” Jiminy repeated. “Thank you.”
She’d meant to say this loudly, and meaningfully, but again the words barely escaped her throat, and they drifted ineffectually toward Lyn’s hunched, retreating back, too weak to possibly be heard.
Chapter 3
Bo Waters’s back hurt from pushing a lawnmower over Willa Hunt’s endless yard. When he had done this chore for her years ago, there’d been a tractor-mower he could sit and ride on, turning the task into a relatively painless journey in the hot sun. But now he was stuck with some contraption from the last century, without an engine in sight. It was a hand-powered rotary mower meant for a much smaller lawn than Willa’s. Bo was sweating and grunting, and not even done with a sixth of his task. He’d better get paid considerably more for this. He tried to succumb to the rough pleasure of physical exertion—he’d been a decent athlete in high school but hadn’t done much since. It occurred to him that perhaps this was his first step back into shape; that maybe he should be grateful for the immense inconvenience of this stupid machine.
As he was distracting himself from his throbbing muscles by cursing the lawn mower, Bo was suddenly stopped by a timid sneeze. He looked toward the sound and saw a movement by the woodpile. Expecting a cat or a groundhog, Bo was startled to see a human form rise slowly from the other side. A female human form.
“Hi,” Jiminy said, sneezing again.
“Hi,” Bo replied, aware of the pollens floating in the air between them. He wondered how many of his curses had been overheard.
“I’m allergic to grass,” Jiminy said, by way of explanation.
“That’s a tough one to avoid,” Bo replied.
Didn’t Jiminy know it. She was allergic to dust also, and wheat, and easy human interaction, or at least it frequently seemed so to her.
“Do I know you? You look familiar,” she said, with her head cocked to the side in an inquisitive way that didn’t feel totally natural to her, but that she hoped was fitting for the moment. Her neck hurt from how she’d been sitting against the woodpile.
“You do, too,” Bo replied. “I’m kin to Lyn. I’m Bo.”
“I’m Jiminy. Willa’s my grandmother.”
They’d made their introductions, declared their affiliations. Jiminy stood waiting for some inspiration about how to continue this conversation. She wanted it to go forward, she liked the look of this guy. It wasn’t just that he was the first person younger than seventy that she’d encountered in the past week, though that probably was part of the attraction. But there was more. He had a smooth assurance to his features that made Jiminy feel calm.
“How old are you?” she blurted.
Bo stared back at her.
“Twenty-one,” he replied. “Is that old enough?”
Jiminy blushed.
“I guess so,” she replied. “Except for renting cars.”
“Who needs a rental car when I’ve got these hot wheels?” Bo replied, lifting up the lawn mower he longed to fling into the nearby river.
Jiminy laughed.
“Are you doing the whole lawn?” she asked.
Bo nodded wearily.
“I should be finished in a couple months. Do you know what happened to your grandmother’s tractor-mower? I’ll pay you a thousand dollars if you tell me where it is.”
Jiminy laughed again.
“Sorry, I don’t know where much of anything is. I haven’t been here in years.”
“What brings you back?”
Jiminy looked down, unsure of how to answer. Could she say she was running away? Should she tell Bo about her restlessness, and desperation, and how her unsatisfactory world had abruptly folded in on her? Should she mention her mother, and her nervous breakdown destiny? Or admit how random it was that she’d chosen this spot for refuge? She opened her mouth to let all of this out, then closed it again.
“Just getting a break from city life,” she managed to say at last.
Bo nodded, unperturbed by Jiminy’s awkwardness. He could tell she had plenty more to say, but he felt no urge to pry. Like anyone who wasn’t actually from here, Jiminy assumed Fayeville represented a relaxing respite from busier places, but Bo knew there was as much turmoil here as anywhere. If she stuck around, she’d find that out for herself.
“How long you staying?” he asked.
“Just taking it day by day,” she answered with a shrug. “How are you related to Lyn?”
“She’s my great-aunt. I lived with her some growing up.”
Jiminy glanced down at the book in her hand, then snapped her gaze back up to meet Bo’s.
“Do you happen to know . . . I mean, I guess you probably would . . . but maybe not, who knows how much families communicate . . . Um, was Lyn ever married, by any chance?”
Bo felt sorry for Jiminy that she had to expend so much effort to ask a simple question. What a difficult way to go through life. He had his challenges, but most of them felt imposed from the outside, not created within. And now Jiminy was looking at him fearfully, like she was worried she’d overstepped her bounds somehow.
“Aunt Lyn was married to my grandma’s brother, Edward Waters. And they had a daughter, but she died. He died, too—both a long time ago. Aunt Lyn never hooked up with anyone else, as far as I know.”
Jiminy nodded.
“She doesn’t talk about it,” Bo continued. “No one else does either, to keep fro
m upsetting her. What I know, I heard from a drunk old uncle talking outta school.”
Jiminy nodded again. She considered showing Bo her grandfather’s diary, but decided to keep it to herself for the time being.
“Is that a Polaroid camera?” Bo asked.
He was pointing to the camera dangling from her neck. Jiminy had brought it with her from Chicago, to document her decline. She touched it now, and nodded.
“I didn’t even know they made them anymore,” Bo remarked. “I used to love those things. Such instant gratification.”
Jiminy nodded again, in complete agreement. She resisted the urge to snap a photo of Bo right that second.
“So what do people do for fun around here?” she asked instead.
“Oh, we go cow-tipping, throw crab apples at the Hardee’s billboard, make crank calls,” Bo answered.
Jiminy tried to imagine herself doing these things with any amount of enthusiasm. Maybe the crab apple thing, if she actually managed to hit the billboard.
“I’m kidding,” Bo continued. “We’re not that bad off. Though I have been known to spend rainy days in the sports aisle of HushMart. You can get a pretty good basketball game going before they ask you to move on.”
“I’m the queen of HORSE,” Jiminy replied.
It was true. She wasn’t athletic in general, but she had a preternatural talent for making basketball shots. Not while on the move, and she couldn’t dribble or pass or be sure of many rules of the game, but she could get that ball through the hoop from practically any standing position, no matter the distance.
“The queen, huh?” Bo replied.
His tone wasn’t skeptical; it was more amused. Still, Jiminy found herself resenting it. She wasn’t good at many things. She felt she proved this nearly every day.
“I’m not kidding,” she insisted, with uncharacteristic fire. “I’ve never lost a game. I’ve never been anything more than a HOR.”
Bo raised his eyebrows.