Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  It was late August then, and Jules was spending every afternoon rehearsing. She’d stopped working at Nell’s as soon as school started back, and it had been ages since she’d been over to my house for dinner. Not that I blame her, with everything so volatile. God, could my daddy be any more embarrassing? I don’t know if Nell was taking pity on me, but she asked me to stay on part time at the shop, working after school and on weekends. Nell said things were busier than normal, but I can’t tell if that is actually true. It doesn’t matter, either way. I was only too happy to have an excuse to stay away from home.

  It was late afternoon, and I was pushing a broom around the shop, getting ready to close up. Toby had taken a sick day already, so Nell had been forced to load up the white van and make the day’s deliveries herself.

  I’d cut the lights, save for one lone glowing bulb near the counter, enough to illuminate my path. I watched the floor intently, sweeping up the dying petals with the concentration Jules uses when memorizing lines.

  I heard a door open, and I looked immediately to the front door, which I thought I’d locked ten minutes before. But there was no happy jangling of the attached bell, so I spun, expecting to see Nell coming through the back. I remember thinking that she must have forgotten something.

  It wasn’t Nell, though.

  “Hey,” August said softly, probably because he expected me to be frightened. And I was, a little. Mostly I was intrigued.

  “You,” I said.

  “Yes.” Even though the entire store was between us, I took a step back. I couldn’t help it. What do girls do in situations like these, anyway?

  “You know me, remember?” He smiled, hesitant. I did know him, sort of, but things were different here, more intimate somehow.

  “August,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted you to see something. Is this okay?” He stepped toward me, a daring move. Closer. A pile of forgotten petals lay at my feet.

  “I…” I didn’t know if I liked being interrupted in my solitude before I was prepared to see him again. I felt as though someone had pulled open the shower curtain in my bathroom to find me naked, exposed.

  He came closer, slowly, as if he thought I might actually try to run away. “It’s the pictures, from that day. I thought you might want to take a look. I thought…” I watched the dimple in his cheek deepen.

  We both looked down to see petals scattering around his feet. He’d walked right through them.

  “Sorry,” he said, still smiling. His face resembled a child’s, one who has made an accidental mess and hopes to somehow escape punishment. “I’ll sweep it all up for you again. Here, let me borrow the broom.”

  “No, that’s okay.” I tightened my grip on the broom handle.

  “Come on, let me help you,” he insisted.

  “No.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Come on…” That disarming smile.

  “No,” I said again. “Thank you, but, well, I don’t mind it. I actually kind of like it.”

  “Like it? Sweeping?”

  I know he was thinking about how weird I am. Of course he was. “This,” I say. I don’t even want to think about how red and spotted my cheeks must have been at that moment. “I like doing this, gathering the pieces.”

  He looked surprised and completely skeptical. He laughed, quietly, but I heard him just the same.

  “You’re laughing at me?”

  “You’re a strange girl, Reba.”

  “You don’t understand.” I turned away from him.

  “Okay…so, tell me. Make me understand.”

  I was quiet for a moment before I resigned myself to this, to sharing my own peculiar ideas with him. “Okay, look,” I said finally. I moved to the glass door of the refrigerator and pressed my finger against it. “See those flowers, the lilies?”

  He followed my pointed finger with his eyes. “Lilies,” he said aloud, as though he had never put a word to them before. Maybe he had seen them, but before that moment, they were only flowers, like all the rest. And then they were lilies. Some had bloomed already, coral petals springing outward toward life, but most were still pulled in tightly, the only visible part the delicate white underside of the yet-to-bloom petals.

  I couldn’t believe I was still talking, but I also couldn’t seem to stop. “Before they bloom, see these?” I asked. “They’re white. Pure and innocent, but only white. Common. And then they bloom, and there’s this unfolding—they become loud and bright.” He laughed at my description, and I pretended not to hear him that time, though I could feel the heat still blossoming on my cheeks.

  “But look down here,” I said, and kneeled down in the floor by the ruined altar of petals. “See this?” I pointed to the scattered mess, pressed my fingers to the floor, and began gathering the pieces, dark purple with brown creeping into the edges. They were curled up like a rich velvet robe, discarded. Luxurious in their own right. Light, loose bits of orange dust clung to my fingers.

  “What are those?” August asked.

  “Lilies too. Aren’t they lovely?” He seemed to know that I meant the flowers on the floor, and not the ones in the fridge. And he seemed surprised, I guess, to find himself drawn into this strange lesson.

  “They are perfect,” I said, not waiting for his response. “They are perfect and lonely and beautiful, each little petal. They are what they were meant to be. They have fulfilled their destiny.”

  “Well, they’re kind of…dead.” August looked at me, dark eyes searching mine like I was some kind of puzzle he was trying to solve. “But maybe you’re right.” His voice was deep, a man’s voice. He picked up a single petal and held it gingerly in his palm as if waiting for it to crumble. In his other hand was a large yellow envelope.

  He let the petal fall onto the pile I’d made with my fingertips. And when he moved his hand back to the floor, it was so close to mine that our fingers collided.

  “Are lilies your favorite flower?”

  “No.” I jerked my hand back, the way I do when I am down by the river with Jules and can’t resist dipping my fingers into the icy water. I didn’t tell him (because I’m sure he thought I was strange enough already) that my favorite flowers aren’t in a flower shop, that my favorites grow wild on the edge of the forest. Others might pluck them to keep things neat, to cultivate tulips or pansies or something similarly domesticated. Others would call them weeds. But I don’t care. Wildflowers have always been my favorites.

  “The pictures,” he said, jolted by my movement. “Do you want to see them? You don’t have to. I can show you some other time, if, you know, you’re in a hurry.”

  “No,” I said. “Show me.”

  He pulled the prints from the envelope and handed them to me, one by one. The photographs were black and white, and larger than I expected. Did I say expected? I don’t mean it. I didn’t expect anything at all, expectation implying too much room for error, too many opportunities to be let down. But if I had been expecting something, these were more. These were breathtaking.

  The first ones were of the shop, seen from the back, its ramshackle exterior pretty and nostalgic through the camera lens. The small wooden building stood determined against the field, the two plastic chairs empty on the short, rickety porch. It was just a shop, and it was more than that too, some sort of sweet magic covering the entire scene.

  “Wow,” I said. And I wasn’t simply being polite. His photos were lovely. Even those simple scenes held a kind of presence. Those photos said something, even if I didn’t know exactly what. They seemed perfectly uncluttered, stripped free of the complexities of humans, and so much better for it.

  Then, I found myself looking into familiar light liquid eyes. I didn’t realize, right away, that they were my eyes, that it was my hand held up against my forehead (a feeble attempt to block out the sun), my own small mouth slightly parted. I
wiped my dusty fingers against my shirt and then gently touched the surface of the glossy paper. “Oh,” I whispered.

  “Careful,” he said. “I like that one.”

  I liked it too, even though I feel vain admitting it. “It’s me,” I said, and then felt silly for stating the obvious.

  “Yeah.”

  “But, it’s beautiful.”

  “You are,” he said, and before I could respond, “I’m going to visit you here again. Is that okay?”

  I nodded. He’d called me beautiful. How could I say no?

  34

  Julie pulls on a gray tunic sweater and dark leggings. She’s nervous about seeing August again, about what he’s going to think of the plan she’s come up with. Her high black boots don’t seem right for the unseasonable warmth, so she tries ballet flats instead. She frowns in the hotel mirror. Her hair hangs in short, loose waves, and she looks young suddenly, so she works with bobby pins and clips and pulls her hair into a sort of messy updo.

  But with her hair up, her neck is bare—a surprise of pale skin surrounded by dark fabric. It seems grotesque, this odd elongation of her neck, giraffe-like. This transparency of skin. The bobby pins come out of her hair one by one until her hair is loose again, and when she still feels wrong, she tries on every top in her overnight bag before settling back into the original one with her hair down and the boots zipped up around her calves.

  She leaves the hotel room early because she can’t stand to be alone in there any longer. The elevator seems too small, even though she is the only one in it. It moves slowly downward, giving her plenty of time to worry about whether Maggie Harris will be at the reception desk again, her eyes so observant, so intent. But when Julie leaves the elevator, a different girl is behind the desk.

  Southern Saddle is crowded tonight—it’s the weekend, after all. Families pack into cozy booths and around tables, and single men and women are settled at the bar in comfortable positions, as though they are planning to stay all night. Julie looks for August immediately, and finds him already seated in the same booth from the night before. He looks tense, but the tight line of his mouth relaxes when he sees her.

  “We really need to get out of here,” she says as she slides into the booth.

  “Hello to you too,” he says, taking a long, slow drink of his beer. She watches his Adam’s apple rise and fall, the movement somehow elegant and unexpectedly erotic. She wonders how much he’s had to drink already.

  “I have an idea,” she says. “I mean, it’s kind of obvious…what we have to do.”

  “What?”

  “That diary is in Nell’s shop,” Julie says. “I know exactly where it would be. How do you feel about breaking in and taking it?”

  • • •

  “I can’t believe this is your solution,” August says. But he’s in the passenger seat of the Honda anyway, headed to Lawrence Mill. “Can’t you just call Nell and have a heart-to-heart with her? Tell her how much the diary means? I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  “You don’t understand,” Julie says. “She told me a lie, August. Nell, the woman who never lies. That means she’s serious about not giving it up. This is the only way.”

  “So, we’re going to break into the woman’s business? Going to jail isn’t going to give us any answers. In fact, I don’t know about you, but going to jail would cause a whole lot of problems for me.”

  “She’s not going to know, August. Not until we have the diary, and then we’ll apologize. We’ll have what we came for, and she’ll have to be okay with it.”

  “Or, she isn’t okay with it, and she presses charges, and we’re in serious shit. Jules, this is stupid.”

  “It’s not that stupid.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he says, gesturing to his khaki slacks and his teal golf shirt. “You could have at least let me change into something more suited to breaking and entering.”

  “You don’t need it. This is not a big deal. I’ve been in Nell’s shop after hours before.”

  “Yeah, when you were a teenaged employee. You were allowed to be there.”

  “Look,” Jules says, exasperated. “You’re the one who talked me into coming back here, who clued me in to this whole diary mess to begin with. You’re the one who wanted my help.”

  August sighs. “This is insane.” She steers the car off the highway and onto Magnolia. A stillness settles over them.

  “Do you have family left around here?” he asks finally.

  “No. Yes. Sort of, depending on what you consider family. My aunt, Molly, moved away. But Toby, my cousin, is still around.”

  “Is he the one that worked at the flower shop?”

  “Yeah,” Julie says, surprised, because Toby and August never came into contact with each other—that she knew of. “For a little while, at least. Did you ever meet him?”

  “No. I just…saw him around sometimes, when he didn’t know I was there. I was waiting for Reba, you know. No offense, but I always had a bad feeling about him.”

  “No kidding,” Julie says. “I think everyone had a bad feeling about him.”

  “It’s hard to explain, but…well, I didn’t like the way he looked at her.”

  “Hmm…” And suddenly Julie is thinking of Toby, his wolfish, cocky grin and evil eyes. Thinking of how much she hates him.

  • • •

  When they were teenagers, Toby sold drugs, without stealth or pretense, from his bedroom in Molly’s house. It wasn’t his real job; he worked part time and halfheartedly for Nell, making deliveries, and he was a full-time art student at the Baptist college. But still. God knows why Molly would ever have been concerned with what Julie did, when her own son was dealing out of her house.

  With Molly gone most nights, friends (and non-friends with habits) showed up at the house at all hours. That, or Toby would go out without a word to some secret meeting for some illicit transaction. Julie didn’t know much about his so-called business. She actively tried not to know. She got used to the faces of the regulars, those who came to Molly’s house without shame or fear and left with their drug of choice. Toby hinted that she’d be surprised at the sheer number of upstanding drug users in Lawrence Mill.

  She didn’t want to understand the things he did. Better if she didn’t, in the event that one day cops showed up and raided the place. It never happened, but the possibility kept her away. She never entered his room when he was out, rarely entered even when he was home. She didn’t search for his stash, didn’t inquire about where and how he got his merchandise. She had no idea then (still doesn’t, truth be told) of how these things work.

  Back then, she’d never taken a drug in her life, had only seen the tiny packages, plastic bags wrapped around white powder or little white pills or greenish tufts like dead flowers. Toby made no effort to hide his hobby from her. He took it for granted that she would never tell, knowing, as he did, about her own hobbies. Still, with so much activity in the house, she knew enough to keep her bedroom door locked at night.

  Toby had been a lanky kid, with long arms and legs jerking awkwardly when he walked, as though he were a puppet whose strings were held by some invisible master. He grew out of it, though, and by college, he was slim but sculpted. Julie never saw him work out, but he must have gone to a gym somewhere. His hair was brown and long and messy, nearly to his shoulders, though he kept it pulled back in an elastic band most of the time. For all of his faults—and there were plenty of them—he wasn’t unattractive. His eyes, though hard and uncaring most of the time, were dark and intelligent. His face was angular—strong jaw, strong nose, thick brows.

  Julie had once heard, God knows where, that a drug dealer can’t (or maybe shouldn’t) also be a drug user—something about not getting high on your own supply. Toby was, though. He was unquestionably a user, but he never struck her as an addict. He got high alone (mostly) and
only in the evenings or late at night, and then he painted. Murals were his thing, then, and his bedroom walls made up his canvas.

  If she had a reason to knock on his bedroom door, and if he said come in and not go the fuck away, then she might find him painting, face pressed almost to the wall itself, sitting on the floor or standing on a step stool. Paintbrushes, not unlike the ones she and Reba used for watercolors as children, would be littered around the room, with little jars of paint spread out before him. Toby had a friend who worked at Sherwin Williams and brought him free samples from the paint department.

  In the glow of the black light, his face would be illuminated, sinister, and his music would blast so loudly that it hurt her ears to stand there and watch. Toby focused on small sections at a time, creating carefully detailed and intricate scenes of surprisingly whimsical things: twisting waterfalls, bridges arching like rainbows. It was his obsession. When he’d painted his entire room, he would cover part of the wall with fresh white paint and start again. Each time he started over, the project took months to complete. But when he was finished, the scenes covered every square inch, and the whole thing felt like being immersed in a fairy tale. Its intricacy was maddening and stifling.

  Which was to say that she found it all disturbingly beautiful.

  Fuck off, Toby said whenever she told him so.

  35

  “Oh,” August says, as they turn into the gravel lot of Nell’s Flower Shop, and Julie can feel his sudden disorientation. Nell’s shop stands stark and wooden in the darkness. But behind that is the clearing—the expanse of unruly grass upon which, farther back, sits the brick recreation center. On one side of the building is a playground; on the other is a tennis court. And even though she can’t see it, Julie knows from Nell that there is a large asphalt oval behind the building, a man-made track for walking or jogging.

  “Hobart Park,” she says. “I think it’s been here for a while now.”

  “God, what a stupid name. What happened to the field?”