Chapter 2
The decision made, I get down to business.
I rent my folks’ house out to Leah and Tommy Billings so they can have their baby somewhere besides Tommy’s mom’s moldy basement.
I convince Mr. Buckley to let me legally adopt Doris, as she hates him with a fiery passion and once bit a chunk out of his job-stealing niece’s arm at Easter brunch.
He seems relieved and immediately draws up a contract, promising to continue to reimburse me for her care using the trust his mother left in her name.
I pack up my things and Doris’s cage, tie everything down in my old Ford Explorer, and hit the road, praying that I won’t run into a certain towheaded tow-truck driver or his conniving cop brother on my way out of town.
The road trip is easy and fast, thanks to an engrossing audiobook.
Doris loves the car—Mr. Buckley’s mother was very eccentric and took her everywhere—so she’s happy enough on her perch in the back seat.
On the other side of Atlanta traffic, we stop so I can gas up cheap, get my five hundred dollars, and send my sisters a selfie with a giant water tower that says Cumming, and then we’re driving up into the mountains.
The moment I see the Welcome to Arcadia Falls sign, it’s like something lights up inside me.
I’ve spent all my life in that cramped little house in the boonies outside Birmingham, but apparently my body recognizes the fresh mountain air that once lived in Mama’s blood.
Maybe it’s the elevation, maybe it’s the collected oxygen of all these trees, maybe it’s two Diet Cokes and a large bag of Skittles, but it feels like I’m breathing more deeply than I have in my entire life.
Colonel Gooch’s law office sits on the outskirts of downtown proper, a quaint white house with green shutters surrounded by blue hydrangea bushes in full bloom and a massive fig tree that smells like boozy rot and sounds like happy bees.
As I stand outside and stretch, the front door opens and a round little man with an eye patch, a shock of white hair, a mustache, and a dapper three-piece plaid suit steps onto the porch looking like the dandy piratical twin brother of the KFC mascot.
“Mr. Gooch?” I ask, hurrying to catch him before he can leave.
He looks up, startled, but his blue eye is dancing.
“Why, you must be Miss Kirkwood,” he says. “I’m sorry. I mean—Wolfe. The spitting image of your grandmother in her day. Well, our day. She was just two years ahead of me in school. Pretty as a picture. And please, call me Colonel.”
“Okay, Colonel.” I reach out to shake his hand, one sturdy pump, like we’re making a deal. “Were you in the armed forces?”
His visible eyebrow draws down like this is a sore and constant subject.
“No. My mother, God rest her soul, had delusions of grandeur. I got off light. My brothers are named King and Duke.” He shakes his head and takes a cleansing breath.
“I was just headed into town for lunch, if you’d care to join me? ”
“Don’t we need to…sign the papers?” I’m not hungry, but I am financially desperate. I still don’t know if I’ve—we’ve—inherited an outhouse or a mansion, and the suspense is killing me. Every time I asked on the phone, he’d said, “You just have to see it.”
He flutters a hand in the air. “A formality. We’ll eat, and I’ll show you the property, and then we can get down to brass tacks. I don’t operate well on an empty stomach, do you?”
Without waiting for an answer, he takes off up the sidewalk at a sprightly pace, his leather shoes squeaking.
I’ve already got Doris zipped into her hot-pink bird backpack, so I grab the handle and jog to keep up.
She flaps her wings and mutters, “Lordy. Oh, lordy,” which is really the only part of her vocabulary she’s gotten from her time with me.
“You haven’t been to town before, I presume?” Colonel asks when I catch up.
“Never.”
“Well, welcome to Arcadia Falls. Your family used to all but run this town, and then, with the storm…” He sighs.
“Doesn’t really matter, does it? You’ve got a place here.
Not much blood these days, but plenty of bones left in these cemeteries.
” He gestures to a small, fenced-in graveyard by an old gray church, all the tombstones leaning drunkenly and carved away by the elements.
“See it there? Always plenty of Kirkwoods. Used to be, at least.”
He’s right. I count three Kirkwood stones nestled in the verdant clover. I’m surprised to see a stone-built church with spires and stained glass—most Southern churches are plain brick things like squatting toads, but this building looks like it was transplanted straight out of Ireland.
The sidewalk cants up toward a cluster of buildings, and Colonel isn’t even huffing and puffing, although I am. Everything was a lot flatter back home.
“So this is downtown,” he says as the sidewalk spits us out on the square I saw online.
It’s even prettier in person. Birds sing in the trees and peck on the sidewalks, butterflies and bees buzz amid blooming bushes, and the canopy overhead glows a uniform shade of brilliant green.
All four sides of the square are lined with colorful buildings, some regular brick, some whitewashed, some wood, some mostly windows.
There are flower baskets planted with late-summer marigolds and those tufty magenta plants that look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.
Some buildings have balconies, and people laugh as they sit at bistro tables or sip wine at open bars.
In the center of the cobblestone square stands the Platonic ideal of a town hall, crisp white with tall columns.
There’s a matching gazebo beside a sculpture of an old miner with a pickax and a pot of gold.
I feel like I’ve just walked into the welcome brochure.
“Which do you prefer, country cookin’ or rabbit food?”
“Rabbit food?” I ask, confused.
“Country cookin’ sticks to your ribs. Fried trout, chicken ’n’ dumplings, macaroni and cheese with that nice crumbly stuff on top.
” He puts a hand to his stomach and points to a brick storefront painted dark burgundy with gingham curtains in the window.
“That’s Marla’s Home Cookin’. Whereas if you prefer rabbit food, Lindy’s has little fiddly sandwiches and soups and salads, although you can’t always trust the salads, just between us.
” He looks vaguely disgusted as he points across the square to a light blue building with a striped awning. “What’s your poison?”
Realizing that there is no way to get out of lunch, I say, “Sandwiches sound good.”
He deflates. “Yes, my wife and my cardiologist would both agree with you. Sandwiches it is.”
When we reach the door, he holds it open for me, and I pause. “This is a weird question, but do you think anybody would mind if I brought in a cockatoo?”
He looks at me like I just barked at him, so I turn my backpack around to show the rose-breasted cockatoo sitting inside. She’s about the size of a football, with a Pepto-Bismol-pink head and chest, and soft gray wings and tail.
“This is Doris.”
“Oh, lordy,” Doris says, raising her feathered crest curiously. “Shipoopi!”
Colonel’s jaw drops.
“It’s from a musical—The Music Man,” I say, blushing just as pink as her crest. “The old lady who owned her kept musicals on all day long. She doesn’t actually curse, I promise.”
“Well, I’ll be. I guess we’ll see what we can get away with. If Chuck Hickman can bring in that rashy old dog of his, I don’t see how anyone could complain about a well-cultured cockatoo. Just don’t let her escape. Lindy’ll have a fit. She’s more of a cat person.”
I step into the restaurant, and it’s hopping.
There’s a bakery counter and at least a dozen wobbling wooden tables filled with all sorts of folks, from moms with little kids fresh out of school to a man who’s got to be older than God sitting alone with a half-bald mini poodle that’s got to be older than God’s oldest dog.
Colonel leads me to the counter, and I’m reading the chalkboard menu when a loud voice drawls, “Oh my golden gravy, Miranda Kirkwood, is that you?”
I turn around to see who asked the question, and the woman’s face falls, and I instantly know why. She’s about Mama’s age, and she’s just realized that I’m not her.
“Close,” I say, because I feel bad for her. She looks shaken, like she’s seen a ghost. “I’m her daughter.”
“Where’s your mama at?”
The look on my face tells her everything she needs to know. She puts a hand to her prow of a chest and shakes her permed hair, blond running to gray. “She said she’d never come back come hell or high water, so I should’ve known. I’m so sorry for that. Can I ask—”
“Cancer.”
She blinks rapidly as her eyes go wet. “She didn’t deserve that.
She was a good friend. Still, it’s nice to see a Kirkwood around these parts, now that your grandma is—” She stops, eyes flying wide.
“Oh, Lord. I did it again. Always putting my foot in my big ol’ mouth.
No wonder my pedicures don’t last long.”
Colonel steps in gallantly so she’ll stop panicking. “Tina McGowan, this is Rhea Wolfe. She’s come to take care of her grandmother’s estate.”
I can’t quite decode the face Tina makes. There’s some pity and disappointment there, but also…amusement?
“Well, good luck with that, honey. Does that mean you’ll be sticking around?”
“Maybe,” I begin.
“Has he shown you the—”
“The girl just got here, Tina. Don’t scare her off with your stories,” Colonel chides, a little sharp.
Tina pulls me into a big, warm hug, like she really means it, and rubs my back. “You’re gonna do fine,” she says softly. “You just remember you’re a Kirkwood and don’t take shoo-shoo off nobody, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say reflexively, because what else is there to say?
She releases me and bustles out the door, and now it’s my turn to order, even though I haven’t really had time to peruse the menu.
I almost get a salad, but then I remember what Colonel said about the salads and think about what the plumbing must be like in the back of this ancient building.
I order a grilled cheese and a side of fruit because it’s almost impossible to make a bad grilled cheese, and Colonel insists on paying for us both.
He guides me to a table for two up front by the window that looks out on the square.
My chair is spindly wood with a rounded back, and there’s no room for Doris’s backpack.
As I turn in place in the cramped space, trying to find somewhere to put her, a toddler charges past, screaming about cookies.
I back up, and my butt hits a chair, which knocks into the next table.
I whirl around to apologize, forgetting I’m holding a neon-pink bag full of cockatoo.
Doris is already screaming as her backpack knocks over someone’s sweet tea—
Spilling it all over the table and a tablet, and into the lap of the best-looking man I’ve ever seen.