Chapter 19 #2
Lila Mae put her bite of fettuccine in her mouth, realizing that she often reached out a hand and ran her fingertips along a wall or a fence the way her mother did.
“We’d always end up on the back veranda.
And Edgar, our longtime butler, would go get chilled pink champagne, my mother’s favorite.
Daddy had brandy at dinner, which was served immediately afterward, and we ate off a set of china and used silver that only came out on August twenty-third. ”
“Wow,” Trap said. He’d opened a pizza box and held a piece in his hand, but he’d only taken a couple of bites.
“Daddy sat at the head of the table and Momma at the foot. My oldest brother, Donovan, commanded one side by himself, and Spence and I sat on the other—me closest to Momma. We always had to wear something in a deep green or cream, and Momma had a new gold dress commissioned every year. She was the only one who could wear gold, though she had a tie and vest made out of the same fabric for Daddy.”
“Why those colors?” Trap asked.
Lila Mae twirled up another fork full of noodles. “Because those are our family colors,” she said simply, wondering if the Walkers had family colors, or a family crest. For some reason, she didn’t think so.
“They’re used in our china borders. My daddy sealed everything with dark green wax. We have interior paint tones in those colors, and every piece of flooring in our house has some hint of gold in it, especially the library.”
She put the noodles in her mouth and watched Trap’s reaction. He didn’t give much away, but she could tell he had no understanding of this type of tradition.
“Burgundy came out for holidays,” Lila Mae said. “One year, Momma had all of us kids dressed in that color for The Anniversary Walk. Our Christmas celebrations are not red and green; they’re burgundy and forest.”
“I see,” Trap said, though Lila Mae was quite sure he did not.
“And every five years, on their anniversary, we have to sit for a formal family portrait.”
“Wow,” he said. “Is that like a photograph or a painting?”
“It depends on my mother’s mood,” Lila Mae said.
“Sometimes it’s both. We always do it in the formal living room, in the same place, with the five of us facing the front window for natural light.
Momma and I sit on a couch that she keeps in storage and only gets out for the portrait.
Daddy stands behind her with my brothers behind me.
Momma hangs each one in an identical gold frame in the hallway upstairs that leads toward my father’s private study. ”
“That’s incredible,” Trap said.
“My momma had a picture done every year while she was having kids. It is quite incredible to see myself going from in my momma’s belly, to a baby on her lap, and then a prim two-year-old, then three, and then four. After that, Momma decided every five years was enough.”
She gave Trap a smile. “So I’m immortalized as a nine-year-old, fourteen, nineteen, twenty-four, and twenty-nine. We did the last one last year.”
Thankfully, she added silently to herself.
“Do they expect you to come home in four years and sit for the next portrait?”
“Absolutely, they do,” Lila Mae said. She took another bite of noodles and looked out into the twilight. “My family is steeped in tradition, and one does not break easily from it.”
Trap sat with her in the silence while they both ate, and then he moved his chair even closer and wrapped his arm around her again. “Not all traditions are bad.”
“No,” she said. “I actually like them. They give me a firm foundation upon which to build.”
“I like that,” Trap said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
She curled into his chest, feeling small and insignificant under the vast sky spreading out before her.
She’d often felt like this in Atlanta and then Baltimore, and she waited for the paralyzing fear and sheer overwhelm to sweep through her, reminding her of how very tiny she was, and how very little she mattered.
But tonight, safe in Trap’s embrace, those feelings did not come.
“I miss them,” she whispered. “At least in quiet moments like this, all I seem to be able to remember are the good things.”
“That’s a blessing then,” Trap said.
While Lila Mae had never thought about good memories as blessings, now she always would.
She’d noticed Trap doing that a lot in the past couple of weeks—making her think about something in a different way, and actually changing her view on things.
She felt like she was changing for the better, and that was exactly what she wanted for this reinvention stage of her life.
She turned toward Trap and looked up at him. “Thank you for being here with me tonight,” she said. “I’m glad we didn’t go to town.”
He leaned down and pressed his lips to hers, his touch searing and hot, his movement urgent, and then fading into something sweeter, more gentle, and yet just as meaningful.
As Lila Mae kissed him back, she was so glad she didn’t have to go through all of these changes alone, and learn hard life lessons about Texas wildlife by herself, or navigate any part of Feline Friends solo.
She wasn’t sure what that said about her and Trap, if anything, but she let the stillness and tenderness of the moment flow through her and anchor her to Trap in a way she’d never been tied to someone before.