Chapter Two
It takes every ounce of self-control I possess not to unscrew the chardonnay I just purchased and drink it straight from the bottle.
Mama would have. But I’m not my mother, I remind myself.
If I wasn’t so tired, I might laugh at that thought, as the image of me clawing my shirt off on live television flashes in my head.
A familiar heaviness settles on my chest. A heaviness I welcome.
All the good I’ve experienced lately, my podcast, the book, it all makes me nervous.
It always has. Accepting good fortune was the hardest thing for me to learn, and I still slip.
Still look over my shoulder, looking for the bad, waiting for it, and in a completely unhealthy way, hoping for it.
When the bad shows up, I can exhale. Then I know what I’m up against.
Guess I can exhale.
I cruise south on Main Street, passing the ditch where Mama wrecked the old station wagon, then bragged to the tow truck driver she hadn’t even spilled her beer when we crashed.
Memories, like poisonous vines, curl around my throat.
Memories of Mama and me and my little sister, Mabry, and our trips to this town every summer to visit my great-aunts on Mama’s side.
Down here, it never failed that some kid would ask where I was from because of my accent.
As if I was from some faraway land, which in a way, I guess I was.
In Greenhill, our northwest corner of the state, we had clipped words and no Mardi Gras until the riverboat casinos showed up.
The local news included Texas and Arkansas.
Dressed referred to clothing, not what you wanted on your po’boy.
But this place, this town, was what Mama referred to as our escape.
And what we were escaping from fluctuated every summer.
Her job slinging soggy Tater Tots and Salisbury steak onto plastic trays for the ungrateful students at Greenhill High.
Her latest boyfriend. Her bench warrants.
So when summer came, we’d load up the station wagon and head south. My great-aunts’ home, our refuge.
The adrenaline from the moment at the Sack and Save has receded and left in its place an edgy jitteriness I can’t seem to shake. The guy tailgating me on this tiny two-lane road isn’t helping. I lower my window and motion for him to go around but he doesn’t.
Something on the far side of the street catches my eye. A white news van like the one at the Sack and Save. I slow down, study it.
My phone rings next to me and I jump. Then I see who it is.
“Hello, Mama.” Of course it’s Mama, tethered to me despite the miles between us, calling at the exact moment I think of her.
“You sound so far away,” she says.
Her voice sounds small and fragile and lonely. I fight off the guilt it triggers and remind myself for the hundredth time she’s where she needs to be.
“I am far away, Mama. I’m in Broken Bayou.”
I refocus on Main Street. There’s no traffic. It feels like a ghost town. And in a way, it is. Full of my ghosts. Everything looks how I remember. Narrow and potholed and quiet. The street names come back to me: Vine, Hill, Church.
“What! Why the hell are you down there?”
I glance at the letter again. A letter that states my great-aunts passed away.
Within minutes of each other. Just like how they were born.
My throat constricts at the thought. I hadn’t been in touch with them in years.
Neither had Mabry or Mama. The Aunts, as everyone called them, hugged Mabry and me, fed us pancakes and coffee, and showed us how to gather eggs from the henhouse without even ruffling a feather.
We helped fertilize plants in their greenhouse while Dolly Parton crooned “Here You Come Again” from a small cassette radio.
And sometimes, we slept on the floor outside their bedroom door, our little-girl bodies curled like cats around each other.
But after our last summer here, and with each passing year, those memories had grown smaller and smaller until they finally dissolved into nothing but dust. I wonder if a VHS tape left in an old attic could turn to dust as well.
“I’m getting your things, remember? The boxes left in the attic?”
There’s a long pause. “Mama?”
“I remember now. That’s right. You said you were gonna go down there.”
She’s lying, but I’m not sure I’m up for exploring her memory loss at the moment. That can wait. Besides, maybe I’m just tired and only hearing lies from the past, not the present.
“The letter,” she says as if she knows she needs to prove something.
“Right.”
Mama says, “You’re getting my things.”
I pull at the collar on my blouse, adjust the air so it blows directly on my face. Mama doesn’t know all the things I’m here to get. I protected her from that.
“Have you seen the news?” Mama’s voice cracks, and she starts to cough.
“Take a breath. Are you wearing your oxygen?”
Her voice rakes over her smoke-ravaged vocal cords. “Listen to me, sweet girl. That bayou is all over the news.”
I straighten, thinking of the news van I just passed, the one I saw earlier. “What do you mean?”
“There’s a drought.”
I shake my head. “Well, that’s . . . terrible.”
“And there’s a schoolteacher missing. Her parents think she drove her car into that bayou.”
“What? That’s horrible.”
I approach the corner of Main and Bridge Streets. A flashing stoplight sits at the corner. That’s new. I roll to a stop even though it only flashes yellow. The guy behind me revs his engine. Late-model truck, no muffler. Then he lays on the horn.
“What in the world is that?” Mama says.
“Some asshole behind me.” I yell out the open window, “Go around!” There are still no cars in sight. He’d have no problem passing. I motion again.
The old truck revs a second time, then starts to ease past my window.
His windows are down, and his eyes stay on me as he rolls by.
He looks rough. Thin, unshaven face marked with scars.
I make sure my doors are locked, but he doesn’t stop.
He turns left on Bridge Street and disappears.
Once he’s gone, I release my breath. I’m not in danger, I tell myself.
The fear I’m feeling is from an internal source, not external.
I don’t need to shift blame to a random guy driving an old pickup.
“That place is gonna come back to haunt us,” Mama says.
I scan the intersection. Ned’s Pharmacy sits on the corner to my right, next to Ace’s Hardware and Farm Supplies.
Not Ace Hardware. Ace’s. You’d be hard pressed to find a business in this town without the owner’s name in front of it.
The two stores are part of the same white clapboard structure with a deep overhanging eave and small wooden steps leading up to the doors.
Steps, no ramps, which is surprising, considering the median age in this town has to be north of seventy.
Young people don’t stay in small towns anymore.
Then I notice another storefront next to Ace’s.
An antique store. I squint through the setting sun at it.
It seems familiar, even though I don’t remember an antique store ever being there.
“Nothing’s coming back to haunt us,” I say. I ease north of Bridge Street, past an overgrown parking lot with an abandoned, rotten shell I remember as a Dairy King. “Screw Dairy Queen. We got the Dairy King here,” Mama always said.
“I’m tired, Mama. I gotta go.”
She coughs and clears her throat again. “Love you, sweet girl.”
That’s when I hit the brakes. Krystal Lynn is not a love you kind of lady. “Mama, what’s wrong?”
There’s no answer. I check my phone. She’s hung up, but my screen is full of missed emails, messages, and voicemails.
A text from Amy asking if I’m okay; a voicemail from a reporter wanting a comment.
The buzzards are circling indeed. Even Harper Beaumont has chimed in.
She messaged me that she hopes I get the mental care I so obviously need.
As if. That’s my lane, dammit. My fingers itch to reply to Harper.
Something smart and snarky. But I understand once you are in the hole, quit digging.
I’m just the new bull’s-eye for them to shoot at.
To be fair, though, I did hand them the gun.
I start moving again, and the last building on the corner catches my eye.
A small redbrick box with a sign reading NAN’S CAFé over the door.
But it’s not the sign or the building that has my full attention.
It’s the parking lot. Specifically, the two news vans sitting off by themselves in it.
I may not be from this town, but I know enough to understand four news vans is not the norm here.
Would four news vans be here for one missing person?
The sun is lower through the front windshield but still as hot.
Just because it sets doesn’t mean relief is coming.
I remember that. Just like I remember the building I glimpse as I start driving again.
Taylor’s Marketplace and Bait Shop. There was a little silver bell above the door.
The smell of stale tobacco and burgers frying coated the interior.
I had a part-time job there every summer thanks to a sweet woman named Ermine Taylor.
She taught me about making money and saving money.
And she paid me in cash, always slipping a few extra bills in for “fun money,” she’d say with a wink.
The white paint around the large transom windows and on the clapboard exterior looks fresh.
The covered porch looks new, too, and the double-hung doors are painted pale pink, not green like when I was here last. Its two-story facade looks like a square wedding cake with the adornments on the front instead of the top.