Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Annie
Idrive into Bear Claw Junction with one hand tight on the wheel, the other pressed flat against the spot where my wedding ring ought to weigh more than it does.
The road unspools before me. Blacktop. Cold gas station coffee in the cup holder. Dawn, pale enough to look washed out. My phone sits face-down on the seat, quiet except for the one time Reed's name lights up and I flinch hard enough to feel it in my teeth. I let it ring.
I tell myself I'm heading east for space. I'm not running home like a kid with skinned knees. Then I turn down Lanie's gravel drive and suddenly I’m eleven years old again, coming home after the worst year of my life.
Her porch light is still on, yellow against the gray morning.
The house sits low and familiar under the trees, white paint weathered at the edges, porch steps dipping in the middle from decades of boots, groceries, and people coming in without knocking.
She’s apparently having work done on the roof, and I hate that I don’t know what’s going on with that.
I park crooked beside her old hydrangeas and sit there with both hands in my lap.
The front door opens before I can move. Lanie steps onto the porch in a faded robe, her gray hair braided over one shoulder, one hand braced on the doorframe. She takes one look at me through the windshield.
I get out, and the cold hits my bare ankles.
"Hey," I say. My voice sounds like gravel.
Lanie comes down two steps. "Bring your bag in, baby."
That's all. No what happened. No why are you here. No where is Reed.
I open the back door and reach for the suitcase, but my fingers slip off the handle. Lanie waits. When I let go, she picks it up herself.
Inside, heat rolls off the wood stove she only fires up when the mornings turn cold enough to make the windows frost. The kitchen light hums above the table.
A towel hangs over the sink faucet. A stack of mail sits under a ceramic rooster, and a chipped mug rests where Lanie must've left it when she heard the car pull up.
"Sit," she says.
"I don't think I can eat."
"I didn't ask if you thought you could."
She sets a plate in front of me anyway. Scrambled eggs. A biscuit split open, butter melting into the middle. Apple butter in a glass dish. Lanie never let grief, fever, or heartbreak be an excuse for dry bread.
I stare at the plate until it goes fuzzy.
Lanie touches my shoulder once, light and brief. "Clean towels are in the hall closet. Bed's made. You can sleep as long as you need."
"I should call," I say, though I don't pick up the phone.
Lanie's mouth tightens by half an inch. “You should eat first.”
I try. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
She pulls out the chair across from me and drinks her coffee, soaking a biscuit in the mug, while I manage two bites of egg and half the corner of the biscuit.
She talks about nothing that matters. Some tourist went to Melson’s Steakhouse and put the leftovers in their car, then got mad when they realized a bear took that as an invitation.
The church roof is leaking again over the choir loft.
Somebody hit a deer out past Shady Ridge and left half the front end of their truck in the ditch.
Ordinary things. Things that would be laughed at in the rooms where I’d been attempting to fit in back at Stanhope.
After a while, I stand up. If I sit any longer, I'll seize up for good. "I think I need to sleep."
"Then sleep."
I get to the spare room, the one with the iron bed and the old blue curtains, and lie down on top of the covers, clothes and all. I pull a quilt from the top of the cedar chest and drape it over me. Downstairs, Lanie runs water in the sink. I close my eyes. For most of the day, nothing touches me.
When I wake, I don't know where I am.
The ceiling slants on one side. The curtains are blue with little white flowers. A branch taps the window in the wind. The room is dim, the kind of dim that could be late afternoon or early evening. The radiator knocks twice, clearing its throat. For a second, I'm sixteen and late for school.
Then the night comes back.
Lexi in my dress. Reed's hand on her jaw.
Catherine's voice behind that mask, sweet and rotten under the perfume. The treatments would wear out anybody. Reed in our bedroom admitting he’d told someone and not warned me.
The suitcase zipper snagging my sweater.
My ring flashing on my hand as I packed, still loving him but no longer sure if that was enough.
I sit up too fast and everything spins.
The shower is across the hall. I make it there, shut the door, and turn the water hot enough to sting. Then I brace both hands against the tile and come apart.
There's nothing graceful about it. No quiet tears, no movie scene.
I make a sound that startles me. My knees buckle, and I lock them before I slide down the wall.
Water hits the back of my neck and runs into my mouth when I open it, so I cough and cry harder.
My chest jerks. My throat burns. I press my forehead to the tile and try to breathe, but it doesn't help.
Reed told. Not Catherine found out. Not somehow people knew. Reed told.
And he didn’t warn me. That’s the part that I keep sticking on. If I’d been prepared…
When the water cools, I wash my hair just to keep my hands busy. I scrub mascara from under my eyes with Lanie's soap, wrap up in a towel, and stare at the mirror until my face looks mostly human again.
Downstairs, Lanie has soup warming on the stove and cornbread wrapped in a towel beside it. She glances at my wet hair, then at my swollen eyes.
"There's coffee if you want it. Sweet tea if you don't."
I swallow around the raw place in my throat. "Coffee."
“Coffee it is.”
She puts a mug in front of me. No comment about my face. No gentle questions. She ladles soup, sets it down with a spoon, and pushes the cornbread closer. I eat because saying no would take more energy than just chewing.
"He kissed her," I say after a while.
Lanie's hand pauses on the handle of the coffee pot.
"He thought she was me." My spoon scrapes the bowl. "She dressed like me. Same dress. Same mask. Same hair. She planned it."
Lanie sits down.
“Then Catherine told me I should step aside and let her make babies with him.”
Lanie's face goes still in a way I know. The madder she gets, the quieter she looks. She’d describe herself as a God fearing woman, and she wouldn’t say anything that would put her in danger of hell fire, but there’s a limit on her boundaries.
“That woman," she says, "best hope I never catch her on my porch."
A laugh slips out, thinking of what Catherine would look like standing on Aunt Lanie’s porch. It would have to be a hostage situation. The laugh almost turns into crying, so I bite it back.
Lanie doesn't reach for me. I love her for that so much I can barely look at her.
"You can sleep here as long as you want," she says. "Nobody comes through that door unless you say so."
I nod. I look away. Too much kindness and I'll embarrass us both.
That's when I notice the refrigerator.
It's the same fridge Lanie's had since I was in college. White enamel, yellowed near the handles, dented from when she tried to move it herself and cussed the delivery men for days. Every inch is covered. No arrangement. No spacing. Just layers.
A faded school picture of me with blunt-cut bangs and a gap-toothed smile.
A magnet from Pigeon Forge holding up a grocery list. A photo of Lanie and me on her porch the summer I finally came to live with her, my shoulders too sharp in a hand-me-down T-shirt, her arm around me like she was daring the county to come take me twice.
Me at thirteen, muddy to the knees, grinning beside a creek I wasn't supposed to climb down into.
Me by the old cemetery fence off Route 19, a disposable camera hanging from my wrist, my hair in a crooked ponytail.
Me standing in front of a half-collapsed store everyone else called an eyesore, looking as proud as if I'd discovered buried treasure. A Halloween photo from the town’s fall festival, my face painted ghost-white, Lanie beside me with a plastic cup of cider.
My mother.
I forget to breathe.
She's younger in the picture than I am now.
Dark hair, one hand lifted to block the sun, laughing at whoever held the camera.
Maybe Lanie. Maybe my dad, but I doubt it since as far as I know, he hightailed it not long after I was conceived.
The photo curls at one corner, but Lanie's pinned it down with a magnet shaped like a tomato.
I stand up before I know I’m doing it. The kitchen floor is cold under my feet. Lanie follows my eyes, and we both stay quiet.
Then she takes a sip of coffee and says, "You used to make me pull over for every cemetery between here and Knoxville."
I reach up and straighten a magnet that doesn’t need straightening.
"You'd read every stone if I let you."
"Somebody ought to," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I meant. More mine than Mrs. Dillon's.
Lanie nods once, like that settles something private.
By late afternoon, the walls start pressing in. Not Lanie's, mine. My thoughts wear a path in my head until I grab my keys and say, "I'm going out for a bit."
Lanie doesn't ask. She hands me a dented thermos. "Road past the ridge washed out last rain. Watch for deer. And don't leave anything sweet in the car unless you want a bear to move in."
“No bear passengers. Got it.”
The thermos is warm against my palm.
Outside, wood smoke hangs low and sharp in the damp.
I drive with no plan, just away from sitting still.
The road narrows past town, winding between ridges and hollows where houses crowd the shoulder and every mailbox has been hit at least once.
Church signs lean near gravel lots. A cemetery climbs a hill behind rusted fence.
Kudzu drapes an old gas station, making it look like the station itself has sprung from the earth.