Chapter Thirty
Thirty
GRACETOWN, FLORIDA
MAZELLE THOUGHT SHE WANTED TO get away from Gracetown at first light after her father’s funeral, but now that her car had left Lower Spruce and was heading toward McCormack Road, she ached with too much grief to leave.
Mother, Doris, and Dottie were staying behind with Brother and his wife for at least a month, and Brother had offered her and her children a cramped room to share in the cradle of family so they could soak in their misery together.
Mazelle couldn’t do that. She and Doris got along better than they ever had, but Mazelle’s sister still belittled her from habit, disguised as concern.
(“Why don’t you do another Lazy Mazy picture?
Shoot, you can’t be scared off by picket lines.
You don’t want the public to forget you.
”) Dottie was much more patient with the children than Mazelle was, but it was all too much. Too much activity. Too many voices.
And Mazelle could only stomach the Deep South in small doses anymore.
The baby was too young, but Ricky was five and already had noticed the WHITE ONLY signs posted everywhere downtown like religious idols.
If Daddy hadn’t insisted in his will that he wanted to be laid to rest on his family plot in Gracetown, they would have buried him in California.
If Mazelle had her way, she would never have returned.
She didn’t tolerate segregated travel, and the drive to California from Florida was endless.
She couldn’t stay here. But she couldn’t leave. Not yet.
“Stop, please,” she said to Grady in her husk of a voice. She’d had laryngitis since Mother’s frantic phone call the night Daddy fell. Would she ever have her true voice again?
“Yes, ma’am.” Grady was older than fifty now, and the long drives wore on him more.
He sounded weary in a way that reminded her of Daddy’s exhaustion in the days before he fell.
The shock of Daddy’s death would never wear off, but they should have known how weak he was feeling despite the way he’d tried to hide it.
Mazelle noticed that Grady’s eyes were locked on the rearview mirror, so she followed his sober gaze.
A Gracetown sheriff’s car was approaching behind them at a good pace, with too much purpose for a sleepy morning.
Grady was from Watts, and his fear of “cracker” cops had made him initially refuse this thirty-hour drive across the country.
They both loosened with relief when the sheriff’s car drove past them and turned onto McCormack Road, its tires stirring up orange-clay dust as it followed the long line of cattle fencing.
The deputy looked barely old enough to drive.
The sheriff’s car was a glimpse of someone else’s bad luck. But not theirs.
Ricky and the baby were both asleep, curled in the back seat. Ricky was a protective brother, with one arm nestled around baby Sadie. Neither of them stirred after the car stopped. With any luck, maybe they would sleep until the Georgia line. Mazelle savored the rare peace.
“I want you to turn down this road,” Mazelle said. “I grew up near here.”
“This road?” Grady said. “We’re gonna get road dust all over this car.”
“That’s what happens when you go home,” Mazelle said, half to herself. With her voice gone, everything she said was half to herself anyway. More rows of orange trees were planted than she remembered at this intersection, but she knew McCormack Road well. It’s all dust in the end, she thought.
“I’m not tryna get pulled over by some deputy mad because we got a better car than him,” Grady argued. He was Yes, ma’am and No, ma’am at home, but they were negotiating every boardinghouse and gas stop on this trip. Sometimes Grady won out, but not this time.
“Go on, Grady,” she said. “Do as I say. For once.”
Grady sighed. Slowly, he pulled forward and turned on McCormack Road, driving slowly to avoid the deputy still in sight thirty yards ahead of them.
“We goin’ to your old house?” he asked. “That one where you slept in the attic?”
A lightning bolt of memory: hiding behind the sheet on the backyard clothesline while she nervously anticipated performing for her family.
Remembering the surprise and delight in Daddy’s face nearly doubled Mazelle over with a stomach cramp.
Grief pummeled her body so hard that she couldn’t imagine a boxing match with Joe Louis would hurt any worse.
That might have been the first time he was truly proud of her. Maybe the last time too.
She tried to tell him that this was the road where she had found Scout.
But those words wouldn’t come.
“No,” she whispered. “We’re going to the woods.”
Mazelle knew the spot as soon as she saw it.
Little had changed on McCormack Road in the nearly twenty-five years since she had liberated her family from Gracetown.
The weather-faded sign still stood at the wooded path like a sentry: FRESH PECANS!
This was the storied landmark, wooden sides frayed from long-ago storms. But it was still here.
You followed the PECANS sign to the creek.
And you followed the creek to the Wishing Pool.
Mazelle could almost hear Priscilla Stephens’s rote instructions, as if the details bored her.
You throw in your penny and wish real hard, but wishes always try to trick you.
If you touch the water, the wish won’t come true—and there might be hell to pay.
The Wishing Pool is mostly dried up, except during the summer. That’s the best time to get your wish.
Gracetown had beckoned her back in the summer.
Mazelle’s heart fluttered to her throat with an anxious beating so fast that she felt lightheaded. Was this what she’d been up to all along? Had this plan somehow floated up through her rivers of grief?
Silver needed polishing to wipe away the tarnish. Maybe wishes needed tending too.
No matter how much she’d tried to convince herself that Scout was a stray she’d found in the road, today the truth was in plain sight.
The trees were a lighter shade of green on the path behind the faded sign, with sparks popping like fireflies in the shadows, except in flashes of lilac and red and blue.
None of the leaves swayed in the breeze.
These trees were sentries. The path to the Wishing Pool was waiting.
Maybe it was waiting especially for her.
With Grady parked nervously on the roadside and her children still sleeping, Mazelle rummaged through her small bag on the passenger seat for her loafers and a light sweater to protect her arms and dress from brambles, although the morning was scorching from the sun.
The mugginess in Florida hugged you in a wet, hot embrace.
She checked her sweater pocket for loose change and found a shiny penny.
She closed the penny tightly in her palm as if it were the last money she owned.
(And after spending so much building Mazywood and paying for the lawyers to divorce Richard, that wasn’t too far from the truth.
She had five or six club bookings coming up in the fall, so she would be back on the road where she started.)
“I won’t be long,” Mazelle told Grady. “I just want to see where I carved my name in an old oak tree. Stay with the kids.” Lying came so much easier to Mazelle now. As a child, she’d thought lies would send her to Hell. Now she knew the truth could do far worse.
“You better be quick about it and get back to this damn car.” His voice was softer than his words so he wouldn’t wake Ricky and Sadie. “You’ve got ten minutes, then I’m gone.”
“I can’t wait to get back home to ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am,’ ” Mazelle said.
“You and me both.” He sighed. “Mazelle.” He called her given name so urgently that she whirled back around when she was halfway out of the car.
His eyes were the color of a horse’s saddle in the sun, gleaming beneath his bald brown scalp.
“I’m serious. We need to hit the road. My mother had stories about Florida. She left for a reason.”
Grady was fifteen years older than her, but he felt closer to a husband than Richard had ever been, since he had been driving her for six years. And babysitting. And helping to oversee her construction site for Mazywood. Grady felt like a father—especially now that Daddy was gone.
Mazelle gave Grady a ghost of a smile. “Yes, sir,” she teased.
“And you be careful. You don’t know what the hell’s in those woods.”
As if he knew what she was up to.
“I already spend half my time in the woods,” Mazelle said. Her new Mount Shasta lodge had been open for a year, and she already wished she didn’t have to live anywhere else.
“California woods ain’t Florida woods,” Grady said.
Mazelle was still holding the shiny car door handle. With the heat bearing down and Grady prodding at her better sense, she almost climbed back into the car and said never mind.
She came just that close.
woods Mazelle had loved in childhood did not seem alluring with its tangles of aerial roots from the banyan trees and shadows between the stands of Florida pines.
Some trunks were scorched black, their branches lifeless, scarred from a long-ago fire.
The twinkling was gone, so Mazelle wrote that off as her excited imagination.
The path beyond the sign was so overgrown that it was mostly a deer trail, meandering alongside the creek that looked much shallower, barely ankle-deep, too weak to gurgle.