Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  We got there early, but on Friday nights, the bar fills up quickly. Men and women spilled through the door in groups, businesspeople fresh out of school with jobs in insurance or banking or one of the few other white-collar options in this area, wearing button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled clumsily to their elbows. Or else they were students from the Baptist college down the road, working themselves up for a good sin. The rest were locals, old widowers or middle-aged divorcées.

  Happy hour always started the same way. A group of men—younger ones, or else Jules and I would ignore them entirely—would call us to their table or join us at ours. What’s your drink, baby? one of them would ask, and Jules would wink. Just Cokes, for both of us, she’d say in this voice that sounded like it should be saying all manner of illicit things, and the man would be too intrigued by the sound of her voice to question it. But the bartender, our Bryant, would keep his eyes on us. He would wait until we got up together, pretending to go to the restroom, our red-tinted plastic glasses in hand.

  The bar is a raised platform in the middle of the restaurant (no secret what’s most important at Southern Saddle, and it isn’t the food), with a set of small steps in the back for the servers to get in and out. On the top step, Bryant would “leave” a bottle of whatever cheap liquor was handy. Vodka, rum, or tequila, whatever wasn’t being used at the moment. I would keep watch while Jules spiked our drinks.

  She never knows exactly how much to mix. (Bryant won’t do it for us, is too afraid of getting caught and ending up in jail or something.) So, sometimes the drinks taste strong and hot and bitter, and we gag on every sip until we finally get used to the taste, or until the backs of our throats are too numb for us to notice the taste at all. Those are the times when Bryant has the patrons around the bar distracted with noisy conversation.

  But sometimes there are only seconds before I’m hissing that Someone’s coming! and Jules can somehow always hear me, even over all of the voices and clinks and clanks of pint glasses and loud music blaring through the speakers. Those times, Jules replaces the bottle quickly and we duck into the bathroom. Bryant never bothers asking our true ages; he’s a friend of Toby’s, so of course he knows. But he’s never told anyone else. Some nights I catch him watching Jules with a sweet hunger in his eyes, but he rarely speaks to us at all.

  That night, Jules chose a table for us in the center of the room, in front of the bar. I would be more comfortable in a cozy corner, but she knows that.

  Jules took long sips of her already-spiked drink, but I hardly looked at mine. It’s lame, I know, but I’m always afraid of getting into trouble. I looked at the door and imagined my daddy bursting in, his face ugly-crimson red and his booming voice drawing the attention of everyone in the bar. Jules worries about that too, but she’d never admit it. We should be safe, though. No one who knows my parents or Aunt Molly is likely to show up at a place like Southern Saddle. Well, no one besides Toby.

  We watched the band set up, rough-looking men lugging speakers and guitars. Before the music started, two boys had already joined us at our table. Jules playfully called them boys, even though the very youngest was three years older than us and using a fake ID.

  Jules says boys are drawn to me, but I don’t know if that’s really true. She says I’m delicate as a flower, or something. But I don’t know what to do with boys like that, boys who aren’t boys but are actually grown men already.

  So I was quiet, while Jules said something witty and provocative so the boys didn’t leave. The brown-eyed one, probably twenty-two or twenty-three, asked Jules to dance when the music started, and even though we spend nights in her room listening to Pearl Jam and Better Than Ezra, she looked excited as she took his hand. I even saw her singing along to the same country cover songs we heard there every weekend.

  How old are you? the boy probably asked her, and she probably lied, and then she probably let him cover her lie with his drunken mouth. His body pressed against hers, and she likely felt the usual thrill, and then she probably hinted about seeing him later, after I made curfew.

  The boy beside me kept asking me to dance, but I shook my head and smiled a smile that I hoped he realized was polite, not flirty. He must have gotten the hint, because he finally got up to move on, maybe to some other underage conquest.

  And then I put the smile away, crossed my arms and watched the reflection of the dancers in the front window.

  It’s funny how you can be in a room full of people and still feel alone.

  16

  Food seems repulsive. Too many memories in this place. Julie pretends to read the menu, the laminated paper with the lasso border advertising cheap bar food: grilled cheese sandwiches and burgers and wings. She finishes the last of her drink, the liquid filling her body with warmth so soothing that she leans her head back against the cracked vinyl of the booth. She doesn’t make a face—she knows how to drink whiskey like a man, learned right here in this bar. When the waitress returns, she orders another. Julie hadn’t really planned on drinking tonight, but how else would she have stopped her hands from shaking, stopped the chills dancing along her skin?

  She waits for August, desperate for the distraction. She breathes a sigh of relief when the door opens and he steps into the bar. It feels like she’s been waiting forever, but he’s right on time. The tension in his shoulders is evident, as though he hates being back in Mississippi as much as she does. He must. All of the noises in the sparse room seem to blend into one quiet, dull murmur. It’s the first time she’s been able to see him like this, to really look at him. At Sax, she’d been so close to panic, and every time she’s been around him since then has been filled with plans, with negotiations.

  He stops briefly to look for her, eyes going immediately to the back, as if he knew she would hide. He’s changed clothes as well, into a striped shirt tucked neatly into khaki slacks, all perfectly tailored to his tall, muscular frame. Did he dress for her? His shoes make a click-clacking sound on the old hardwood floors when he walks.

  The few patrons in the wooden booths look up as he passes, curiosity in their eyes, easy to read as words in a book. The eyes of the waitstaff are on him as well, even after all of these years. Apparently, things haven’t changed too much around here. August is the only black man in the bar.

  Julie can feel her pulse twitching against the naked flesh of her wrists as he comes nearer, and she doesn’t know why her response to him, here, is so visceral, as though this is their first meeting. She licks her chapped lips.

  “Hey, Jules,” he says in his deep voice, taking a seat across from her in the booth, and she can tell that she’s not the only one on edge.

  She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again and watches him instead. Has she noticed, before, the small outline of a dimple on the left side of his mouth? It seems ready to form a happy indention in his cheek if he should grin, laugh. But his dark eyes are haunted, and she wonders if hers are the same. Reba saw something in this man, something beautiful, and, looking at him now, Julie sees it too.

  17

  This place is a dive. If he’d known it was like this, August would have suggested they go somewhere else. He never came here as a teenager, though he remembers hearing occasional talk of kids who did. He cracks his knuckles and tries not to fidget under Jules’s obvious scrutiny. Fails. “You’re kind of staring,” he says finally.

  “Sorry.” And then nothing. The burden of conversation seems to fall to him; wasn’t this whole thing his idea, after all? But he has no idea what to say. He studies Jules like she’s been studying him. She’s pretty in a provocative way, runway-model pretty, and if he were a normal, well-adjusted man, he’d feel lucky just to be sitting across from her. Men glance in her direction every few minutes, admiring her like an expensive antique. They appreciate her beauty, but they know she’s not for them. She’s outgrown this town.

  August can’t ignore the glances he’s getting, e
ither. It hasn’t escaped his notice that this place isn’t exactly packed with diverse patrons. The waitress shows up, and August looks at Jules’s empty whiskey glass and the half-drained one beside it before ordering one for himself.

  “You know, you’ve changed some,” he says, grasping for a conversation starter when the waitress is gone. “Since then.”

  “You never knew me.” Julie pulls her silverware from its paper napkin and begins toying with the spoon, tapping it against her palm. “We weren’t friends.”

  It’s a cold thing to say to him after all of these plans they’ve made together, and he looks at her cautiously. “No,” he agrees. “I guess we weren’t.”

  Silence again. The bad lighting in this dump makes her look closed off and far away, and he has an urge to reach out and touch her to make sure that she’s really here. But her hands are occupied, and after the whole stalking debacle, he knows he needs to tread lightly.

  “Ever been married, August?” she asks.

  “No,” he says quietly. “I’ve never been serious about anyone…since her.” He sounds pathetic, and he knows it, still carrying a torch for his high school girlfriend after more than a decade. It’s the truth, though.

  “Oh.”

  “What about you?”

  “Once. Beck’s dad.”

  “Beck,” he says. “It’s Rebecca, isn’t it?” The spoon she’d been tapping against her palm falls hard to the table with a loud clatter. “You did that, named her after Reba?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “You hungry?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  August sighs. “What is it about this place that makes everything feel so heavy?”

  “Memories,” Jules says.

  “God, I feel like a teenager again, and not in a good way.”

  She nods.

  “Well, we’re here. Let’s talk, get to know each other or something.” He rubs his chin with his thumb and forefinger in an effort to appear more relaxed. “You’re an actress.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Interesting job, pretending to be other people.”

  “I guess.” She doesn’t elaborate. He hopes it’s being in this bar that has her treating him like they’re on two completely different planets. Hell, maybe it is the memories. He knows they’re getting to him already.

  To fill the silence, he talks a bit about himself. The details are one-dimensional; his life feels flat as cardboard, and he can’t work up the enthusiasm to fake it. He owns a real estate photography business in Virginia. It’s a one-man operation, making yuppy homeowners’ houses look good enough to drive up the selling price or catching the best angles of high-rise apartments for website photos. He could do more, maybe; he’d gotten his MBA after undergrad at his dad’s insistence. But it’s nice, mostly solitary work, and he always did love photography. So, there’s that.

  “You know,” he says after a while, “I haven’t been here since my family left, after everything…” He trails off. “I thought I would be able to feel her here, in Opal, in Lawrence Mill. Almost like I thought she’d still be here somewhere, living and breathing. Almost like she didn’t die. Like she didn’t jump off that bridge, even though I know she did.”

  Something breaks through that closed-off expression Jules has been wearing, and her lips part. He thinks she’s going to say something important and he leans forward in anticipation of her words, but then she closes her mouth again.

  “What?” he asks.

  She shakes her head and looks down. “Nothing.” But she bites her lip, and it’s clear she’s hiding something. He wants to pry, but he has his own secrets too, and God knows he isn’t ready to share them. Still, he wonders what she’s keeping from him.

  “She’s not here, you know,” Jules says.

  “She is,” he says quickly, determined.

  “No, I mean here, in this place. She hated it here. I used to make her come, on weekends, when we were young.” The phrase hangs in the air, unwelcome, because when wasn’t Reba young?

  “Then let’s get out of here, call it a night,” he says, waving a hand to get the waitress’s attention. It’s going to take time with Jules, to get her to warm up. He can see that now. “Do you have a plan for tomorrow? To find the diary?’

  “I think so,” she says. Nell is their only lead in finding it. Nell has to have that book.

  18

  REBA’S DIARY, 1997

  Summer break was halfway over when life, sleepy up until that point, became something else. Something wide awake. I didn’t ask for it, but maybe I needed it anyway.

  In July, the air in Nell’s Flower Shop smells like wilting roses. Jules and I sat on wooden stools behind the small counter and listened, half attentive, as the woman buying an arrangement of daisies gave us the details of her niece’s recent tonsil operation.

  “Oh, she’s all right now,” the woman said, her eyes large and open wide, acting for all the world as if a tonsillectomy is the most dangerous thing a person can encounter. “Lucky’s what she is, though. Never know what can happen with those kinds of things. Never had surgery myself. Nope, healthy as a horse all my life.” She smiled slightly, smug despite her best intentions.

  I smiled back. “I’m glad she’s okay.”

  We’ve worked at Nell’s every summer since we turned fourteen. To an outsider, the shop might look like a roadside stand, a curious wooden shack where fruits and boiled peanuts are sold in plastic grocery bags to travelers seeking out the biggest tomato, the ripest cantaloupe. But the residents here know better. With cheery white walls covered with old-fashioned tin signs advertising everything from ladies’ lingerie to the Saturday Evening Post, shabby, well-worn hardwood floors, and the most unusual mix of flowers found for miles around, Nell’s place is something special. Flowers crowd the entire store: blooms blossom in coolers and on tables and wilt slowly on countertops, and flower petals lie sullen on the floor before they are swept up in the afternoon.

  My mama got us the job the summer she grew tired of watching us sit out in the garden or on Aunt Molly’s front porch, restless, feeling the day trickle away like the sweat from our foreheads in the lazy Southern heat. Mama and Nell have been friends since they were girls themselves. On Sundays after church, Mama and Nell sit at our kitchen table, drinking mimosas and knitting or sewing or discussing recipes they’ve found in their women’s magazines. They used to invite Molly too, but they gave up after a certain amount of rejection.

  Nell is round and full of smiles, and she is the most outspoken woman I’ve ever known. Go to Nell if you want an honest answer, people say. Lord knows, she’ll tell you the truth. But the thing is, people rarely want the truth, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. So these days, Nell stays in the back as often as possible, surrounded by her flowers, while we take orders and I chat politely with the customers, and Jules pretends to care.

  The woman continued to talk about her niece’s hospital stay in minute detail and was delighted when we discovered that the girl is a classmate of ours. Jules rolled her eyes.

  “Oh! I’ll tell her you said hello! What were your names again? Her mother is at the hospital with her now, but I’m headed right over. It’s such a small world, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said. “The world is so small. You’ll have to send her our very best wishes.”

  Jules covered a snort with her hand, disguising it as a cough.

  The bell on the door tinkled as the woman left, and we were alone at the counter. I rose from my stool and headed out to the back porch with Jules at my heels, the screen door slamming shut behind us.

  We settled into the green plastic lawn chairs anchored in the gravel behind the shop. The gray pebbles sparkled like glass in the sunlight.

  I don’t mind working at Nell’s, but my favorite part is w
hen the shop is empty, and Jules and I can sit out back and chat and watch the tall weeds glinting golden instead of green, on their way to a crisp death beneath the hot sun. It’s exactly the type of thing Mama was trying to keep us from, idling this way, but she was the one who wanted to keep us busy. We didn’t come up with the idea on our own.

  If you were to sprint through the weeds (which we did in the evenings, on our way home), you’d come to the edge of a forest, tall trees and dark Mississippi soil that parts only for the river that runs lazily through Lawrence Mill and Opal. We can hear it from the back of Nell’s shop.

  Jules and I kicked our feet back and forth in the plastic chairs, trying to work up some kind of breeze. “I had a date last night,” Jules said, as if I didn’t know already. I’d watched from my bedroom window as the light from an unfamiliar car swung into her driveway, two shiny spotlights illuminating Jules’s face as she hurried out the front door, laughing like it was all a riot, and threw herself into the passenger seat. It’s still sneaking out, even if Aunt Molly isn’t home to see it. With her job as the night receptionist at the hospital, Molly doesn’t see the things that go on around here after dark. But I worried for Jules anyway. Rumors spread fast in a town like ours, and God knows Molly (who isn’t exactly the most understanding woman) believes every rumor she hears.

  “I know,” I said. Sweat sneaked like teardrops down my chin and neck.

  In our summer stupor, we both jumped a little when the shop bell jingled, and the hardwood floors creaked beneath the weight of footsteps. Jules groaned but pulled herself up from her seat, and I watched the glistening sweat slide from the backs of her knees when she stood. “I’ve got this one,” she said, and disappeared inside.

  I turned Julie’s empty chair toward me and propped up my feet. I was concerned about the things Jules did after dark. Concerned, but undeniably curious. I was afraid that she would end up in some kind of trouble sooner or later. But I can’t deny that I was lonely then, and secretly envious of the mysterious (and potentially wondrous) mischief Jules got herself into.