“He still claimed Olivia wasn’t his daughter, but he went with me to see her. When we got there, though, the child was gone. Carol had taken her again.” Her eyes had glistened with tears then. “I’ll never stop blaming myself that I didn’t do something quicker. If she ever comes back, you make sure she’s part of this family if she wants to be, you hear?”
“I hear.”
“Promise?”
I promised.
“Should I call you Olivia or Tally?” I asked her now.
“Tallahassee’s my legal name, okay? They called me Tally when I joined my first carnival in Tallahassee and I made it official when I married Arnold Ames the day I turned twenty-one.”
“And Carol—?”
“Dead.”
She took a long swallow of her tea. “And my father’s married for a third time with some hell-raisers of his own.
I wasn’t as surprised as she seemed to think I’d be. “You’ve kept tabs on the family?”
She nodded. “Every time we come through Colleton County, I stop at the library and the courthouse. I’m real good at searching legal documents.”
For the last few minutes, she’d been fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. “Will it bother you if I smoke?”
I shook my head as she lit up, hungrily drawing the smoke into her lungs. “You should have contacted us.”
“Why? Y’all never contacted me, did you?”
“But we tried,” I said. “Least Daddy did. But it was as if you and Carol had vanished off the face of the earth. Then after your grandparents died and the farm changed hands, I guess you just slipped out of our memory.”
Saying those words jarred a more recent memory. “In court you said you owned property here in the county. The farm?”
“Yeah. Ironic, isn’t it?” She flicked ashes into the tray beside her. “My Grandpa Hatcher wanted to make sure we’d never get a penny out of him and he willed the place to his only sister, who willed it to her son Mack. Mack got killed in a car wreck about a week after she died and guess who was his last living relative? So, yeah, I’ve been paying taxes on it for three years now.”
It occurred to me that Daddy must be starting to lose it a little. In years past, he’d have known about this the minute Tally took title to the farm. Anything that touched his family touched him, and since Mother had been so sure that Carol’s baby was his granddaughter, he’d have tried to keep his feelers out. Somehow, this had slipped past him.
“We’ve been fixing the place up a little every time we pass through,” said Tally. “The house isn’t much, but at least Aunt Nancy put in plumbing. And the outbuildings are solid, okay? We’re using some of the barns for storage.”
“Storage?”
“Yeah. Arn and Braz? They buy up stuff when we’re on the road and we cart it back to Gibtown when the season’s over. We sell it on eBay or flea markets in the wintertime.” She sighed. “Every time Braz went off and bid on a storage locker or bought something at a salvage auction, he thought he was going to hit the jackpot. Score big. Poor kid. He wanted to be rich so bad.”
As she spoke, I remembered that she’d said she never knew the biological father’s name. “Major Bryant told me your son’s name was Hartley?”
“My first husband,” she said. “He sort of took me under his wing the week I joined the carnival. He owned a couple of grab wagons, okay? Let me wash dishes for my keep and made me go to school in the winter. When I got pregnant, he already had the colon cancer. Told me it I’d stay and nurse him, he’d marry me and say the baby was his so we could have his name and Social Security. I was eighteen when Hartley died. His Social Security and his grab joints kept us going till I met Arnold and I earned every penny of it, okay? But he was good to me. Gave me books. Made me get my GED.”
“I’m really sorry I never got to meet your son,” I said. “I wish you’d called us, let us know when you were here.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t see the point.”
“But you’re family.”
“Yeah?”
The skeptical look she gave me was so like Andrew or A.K. that even if Mother hadn’t made me promise, I’d have had to say it. “Can I tell the rest of the family who you are? Andrew? My daddy?”
She was clearly torn. “I thought I would one of these years, but now... What with Braz and all...”
Tally stubbed out her cigarette and lifted her anguished blue eyes to me. “I don’t want him left by the side of the road somewhere. That’s why I asked your deputy friend to ask you to come. Do you think I could bury him in your family graveyard?”
I leaned over and gave her a hug. “Of course, you can. It’s your family, too. Honest.”
As if things to do with family are ever that easy.
“
“
