A silver flash in the field caught my attention, and I turned my head to find the source of the sudden light. It is a testament to all the fairy tales I’ve read in my life that my first thought was of magical things, especially when the light quickly vanished. But then it returned, shimmering like a diamond in the field before disappearing again.
It looked like there was an animal crouching out there, but then I realized it was a person, squatting low in the weeds and holding a camera in front of his face. A camera pointed at me. I used one hand to shade my eyes as I jumped from the chair, the cotton of my skirt swaying around my calves with the motion. I took a step.
“It was Mr. Breyer,” Jules said, rattling the screen door as she reappeared. She said something about it being Mrs. Breyer’s birthday, and Mr. Breyer waiting until the last minute. Men, she said with a laugh, like they’re all exactly that way. And I guess she’s been around enough of them by now to know.
“I saw someone,” I said.
“Where?”
“Out there. A man. With a camera.” I scanned the length of the field and found it empty. He’d been there one second and gone the next, evaporating like water turned to steam in the heat.
“Weird.” Jules shrugged. If she thought I was hallucinating, she at least had the good grace not to say so.
Funny how a beginning can sneak up on you.
19
The hotel curtains hang so thick against the windows that Julie can’t see any light at all, and for a moment, she doesn’t know where she is. She rubs her eyes, pressing harder than she means to against the tender skin of her eyelids so that fuzzy, dark stars dance in front of her eyes before slowly fading away. She crawls from the stiff hotel sheets and pushes one floor-length curtain back to reveal sunlight so bright that she promptly drops the curtain again and stumbles backward. The air conditioner was humming all night, and now it’s freezing in her room.
Next is just a transition from one point to another, Lila said in last week’s class. Of course, she was talking to the writers about changing the scene, manipulating the action. Julie thinks about what she is going to do next, about what Nell will say when Julie walks through the door of her shop after all of these years.
Her overnight bag sits on the threadbare carpet at the foot of the bed, its dark contents—skirts, shirts, pants—reaching outward like arms in all directions. She trips over it on the way to the bathroom.
She dresses in jeans and a light sweater. The absence of a menu confirms that The Inn still doesn’t offer room service, so she locks up the room and heads to the elevator in search of food. In the lobby, she nibbles a bagel and drinks a cup of black coffee from the continental breakfast. The coffee sizzles against her tongue, singeing her taste buds so that she can barely taste the bagel when she bites into it. She eats quickly, willing Maggie Harris not to materialize. August rounds the corner as Julie is tossing half of her bagel into the trash.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.”
Coffee cups in hand, they leave the hotel and climb into the rental car. The sun is so warm that it is hard to believe that only last night she’d huddled inside her coat, shielding herself from the rain. Still, the steering wheel is cool against her palm. She turns the key and sits, thinking of where to go.
“I don’t mind driving,” August says.
“It’s okay. I know the way.” She slips the car into Reverse and accidentally peels out of the hotel parking lot. “I don’t actually drive a lot in New York,” she says apologetically.
The Opal Mall was right across the street from The Inn, back when Julie lived in Lawrence Mill, but now there is an elaborate strip mall with a Barnes & Noble, a T. J. Maxx, and a Target where the mall used to be. The whole thing feels strange, familiar and foreign at the same time.
She heads away from Opal, driving on the two-lane highway that will take them into Lawrence Mill. Julie leans forward to twist the plastic radio dials, but Opal only has two local stations, country and soft rock.
“Do you mind Elton John?” she asks, and August shakes his head.
Along the highway, small trees are blooming with pink-and-white dogwood blossoms, planted and tended by the Opal Women Gardeners Association. Julie remembers riding into Opal in the backseat of Aunt Molly’s car, watching dogwood petals drift onto the windshield like delicate pink snow. But Molly doesn’t live here anymore. (Thank goodness, or Julie would have had to make time for a visit or be guilt-ridden for avoiding it.) She retired and moved to a condo community on the Gulf Coast last year.
Julie veers off the highway, leaving the dogwoods behind and pressing her foot against the brake pedal as she approaches an aging stop sign. The red of the sign is faded, the white a dirty brown, soiled. Something now indecipherable has been spray-painted across the sign, and curly smears of blue paint cover the word STOP. If she turned right here, she would see the rows and rows of narrow, dusty brick apartment buildings with rusted screen doors and dirty sidewalks. Government housing. She doesn’t have to actually make the turn to see that those buildings are still standing.
Past that old housing project are huge, once-lovely houses that were falling apart even when Julie still lived there. She can’t imagine the shape they’re in now. Decaying bones of homes that were once considered stately, they had the misfortune of being located in what eventually became the worst part of town. The last time Julie saw them, the houses were painted too-bright pinks and yellows and teals, the paint peeling away in wide jagged strips, the original white paint or raw wood exposed in places, somehow jubilant. Aunt Molly made Julie and Toby roll up the car windows and lock the doors when they drove past.
“I think you’re supposed to actually turn here, Jules,” August says, when a car horn blares behind them. She makes a quick left onto Magnolia Street, the narrow road that snakes all the way in and then quickly out of Lawrence Mill, as though even the road is in a hurry to get the hell out. The kids who lived in the city and went to Opal High School used to refer to Lawrence Mill as Opal’s Outhouse.
Tiny homes line this part of the street, dressed in old, white wood siding with dark-gray roofs like jaunty, ragged hats. Narrow concrete pathways lead from front porches to tin mailboxes. Julie remembers these as cute, happy little homes, but now these too have paint peeling and shutters dangling helplessly against glass panes. The lawns are overgrown, with old signs pressed into the ground, peeking over the tall grass like faded flowers and advertising various political candidates and religious activities: Sonny for Mayor and Lawrence Mill First Baptist Homecoming, September 22nd.
She passes a speed limit sign for thirty miles an hour and presses the brakes again. One night when she and Reba were sixteen, they’d asked Toby for a ride home from Southern Saddle and then spent an hour in the car with him, trying to evade the police. Toby was driving seventy down Magnolia when the police car made a U-turn in the road and the blue and red lights started to flash, illuminating the dark road. Toby maneuvered the car into a neighborhood, where he took a left and then a right, trying to find a hiding place on the dark streets.
He finally stopped in a cul-de-sac, where he snapped off the headlights and threw a tiny plastic bag at Julie, barking at her to hide it under the seat. The white substance inside was like soft powder beneath her fingers as she tucked it away. They waited, all three of them, while Toby cursed and mumbled things they couldn’t hear, and Julie and Reba watched, expecting the cops to find them at any moment. But incredibly, it never happened. Julie shouldn’t have been so surprised—Toby managed to escape punishment for every bad thing he ever did.
August and Julie pass the mill houses next, the two-story structures fragile and wilting. When Julie was in high school, it became trendy to buy and renovate the mill houses, but that trend seems to have come and gone. Erected by necessity, just before the Lawrence Mill opened in 1901, the thirty or forty homes are laid out in a neat grid, as
though the construction had been planned for months in advance, as though housing the millworkers wasn’t an afterthought.
“We were in that one,” August says, pointing. “You know, when my family lived here.”
The now-unused train tracks are still so rough that the Honda bounces up off the road as they cross over. And beyond the tracks, there it is: the Lawrence Mill.
“I thought they tore this down,” Julie says. And they have, some of it. She remembers the facade as being dark brick and sprawling, grand. But now most of those bricks lie in heaps, those once-imposing walls half demolished. Windows, long boarded like closed eyelids, line what remains of the exterior. Through the holes and missing walls, Julie can see the exposed brick interior and overturned tables—all that is left of what was once an empire, a castle. They’re breathtaking, these ruins, and Julie and August are quiet in the car as they pass. She’d expected bulldozers or cranes, or else a completely flattened landscape, not this abandoned in-between. Aunt Molly sent her the newspaper article about the mill closing and about the petition to preserve the building as some sort of historic landmark, but that was years ago. Julie thought that a decision would have been reached by this point.
She sighs and forces her eyes back to the road. The Lawrence Memory Gardens are a mile from the mill, past the old Thomas Pharmacy and Car Care, and that’s where she leaves August. It’s better for her to visit Nell on her own, and the memory gardens are where August tells her he wants to go. Still, she doesn’t feel good about leaving him alone in a cemetery.
“It’s okay, Jules,” he says. “I’ve never been here. I need to do this. You know where to find me when you finish up. Good luck.” He shuts the car door and starts to walk up the shaded hillside, and Julie backs out and heads toward Nell’s Flower Shop.
20
The little shop hasn’t changed at all. Julie used to love this place: the white, wooden sign announcing Nell’s! in pretty cursive, the small gravel parking lot leading up to the homey front-porch entrance, the weeds and wildflowers filling in the places where the gravel had worn to dirt. It’s all straight out of a memory.
But when Julie looks beyond the shop, she sees that some things are different. Drastically so. She bites her lip, hard, and sits for a moment, staring. Then she takes a deep breath and slowly opens the car door.
The gravel makes a jarring crunch, crunch beneath her feet as she walks, and she thinks of Beck chewing cold cereal on a quiet morning. The shop bell tinkles when Julie pushes the door open.
“One minute!” She hears the voice from the back, too distinctive to belong to anyone but Nell. Julie looks around, wondering what she’s going to say. What will Nell think, when all these years have passed and Julie has never even called to say hello? In the cooler to her left, she can see fresh lilies in the first stages of soft bloom. All of the scents must be mingling together and confusing her, because she can see that the lilies are sealed away, but she can smell them, she swears, the heavy perfumy scent of lilies and something like honeysuckle forcing its way into her nose, her lungs. It’s not air, she thinks. It’s too sweet. She opens her mouth to breathe but the scent gets in, and now she can taste it too. She touches her fingers to her throat and gasps, but that doesn’t help, and for a moment, she knows she will surely suffocate.
“What can I do for you?” Nell asks, stepping out from the back room and breaking whatever hold these memories have on Julie. For a second, Nell looks at her like she is a stranger, and Julie stands still and speechless. She has come unannounced, and she wonders again if maybe that was a mistake.
She can feel it when Nell recognizes her. “Well, well!” she says. “Good Lord, Jules, get over here and give me a hug!” Her friendly, frosty-pink-lipsticked smile is so familiar, so comforting, that Julie feels like crying. Finally, she can breathe again. She crosses the room and throws her arms, childlike, around Nell’s neck.
“Jules,” Nell says, her arms patting Julie’s back as they hug. “Girl, it’s been a long, long time.”
“Nell, the field is gone,” Julie whispers.
“My God, so you can talk. Sit down, sit!” Nell points to a stool behind the counter and perches herself on the one beside it. Nell’s hair is the same orangey shade Julie loved so much—no gray, even though it’s been ten years.
“Honey, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not thrilled to see you, because I am. But things are okay with Molly, right?”
“What?”
“Sweetie, is everyone okay? Molly’s all right? I haven’t seen her lately, but if anything was wrong, surely I’d have heard.”
Julie blinks. “No. No, not Molly at all. It’s nothing like that.”
“Then what brings you back? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you around these parts in years. But I’m glad you’re here,” Nell reiterates, patting the top of Julie’s hand.
Julie must look overwhelmed. She certainly feels overwhelmed. “Well, I actually came here with someone. To Lawrence Mill.”
“Oh.” Nell raises an eyebrow. “Boyfriend? I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to bring a special someone around here.”
“Not my…special someone.” She takes a deep breath. “I…um… Actually, I came here with August. August Elliott.”
“Come again?” Nell shakes her head quickly in disbelief, as though her ears have betrayed her and she hopes to jostle them back into working order.
“You heard me,” Julie says. “August.”
“Reba’s August?”
Julie nods.
“Thought my ears had stopped working on me,” Nell says. “Well, spill, then. You’d better tell me everything.”
21
REBA’S DIARY, 1997
The day I first saw that strange, shimmery light in the field, Jules and I took our usual shortcut home. We go to my house most of the time, even though Molly’s house is right next door and we could just as easily go there. Except that Molly’s house never feels like home to Jules, and she doesn’t like to be there any more than she has to. I would tell Jules it’s all in her imagination, if that was really the case. But I’m not comfortable there either. People say that there is a difference between a house and a home, and Molly’s house is…well, a house. Even Toby, who is Molly’s child outright and not there because of circumstances, is always locked away in his room, if he’s around at all.
When we were kids, Jules and I spent almost all of our time on the banks of the river or playing on the thin, rickety bridge that connects the banks, even after Mama chased us down the time we left the front yard without permission. Oops. That didn’t keep us from the river for long—our river, we decided. Even now that we’re older, we like to think that it belongs to us.
So we walked along the river on the way home, and dipped our toes into the shallow water and shivered. How can the water be so cold when the air is so hot? I followed Jules over the wooden bridge, jumping over the sagging seventh plank (four, five, six, jump!). I was bare-armed in a tank top, and Jules was bare-legged in jean shorts. We let the tall, crisp grasses whip against our skin as we ran through the field—until my skirt got caught on a stray twig, and then we walked the rest of the way, with me holding up the ends of my long skirt until we reached the clearing that led to David Nickel’s property.
David, a friend of my daddy’s, used to live with his family, but then his wife left him and took their little boy. It was the talk of the town for a while. Just across the street is my house.
It’s bright white and perfectly symmetrical, except for the garage on the left. Jules says it’s nauseatingly pretty, and I think she would have hated this house on principle, if not for the fact that I live in it. The only thing missing is the picket fence. Molly’s house next door is larger, but it’s painted a sickly green, with black shutters (Ted painted them before he left—Jules and I watched him up there on the ladder with the paintbrush) and closed blinds covering every
window.
Jules tells me that Molly could afford to live in something even larger, not that she needs it, but something more inviting, maybe. Jules knows more than Molly thinks. She knows, for instance, about the insurance money from Jules’s parents, and she’s seen the checks of varying amounts that Ted sends in envelopes with different return addresses each month (as though he is afraid Molly might track him down and drag him back here against his will).
Jules followed me up the wooden steps, onto the porch that stretches across the front of my house, and to the blue-painted front door. I could hear the clatter of pots and pans as we walked inside. We followed the sound and saw Mama at the kitchen counter, measuring out flour into a coffee mug. A plate of cookies, oatmeal raisin, sat on the countertop.
Mama greeted us with a shy, nervous smile. Always as if she is surprised to see us. I can never tell if the surprise is a pleasant one.
“I made cookies for you girls,” she said, as though this was a new phenomenon. “Dinner will be ready in an hour. I’ll set a place for you too, Jules.” She smiled. “Harold had a big meeting at work today. I have a feeling we’ll be celebrating soon.” My daddy was up for a promotion at the mill, and everyone expected him to get it. I just couldn’t wait until we didn’t have to hear about it all the time.
Mama pushed her hair behind her ears, then immediately spun to the sink to wash her hands. She has a habit of doing this—touching her hair or face while she is cooking and then washing up quickly, like her germs might ruin the meal.
My mama isn’t pretty, not the way she used to be. Her hair, the color of straws on a broom, is shapeless against her chin. She’s short like me, but her body is thin and straight, no curves to speak of. The only remarkable thing about her is her eyes. They’re huge, like mine, the color of pool water. Jules says my eyes are my best feature, but on Mama, those eyes are strange, hovering over her tiny nose and thin-lipped mouth. Her eyes make her look innocent in a way that she shouldn’t, at her age. I hope that’s not what I have to look forward to.
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