The Girl Who Chased the Moon

He’d changed clothes since she’d last seen him that morning, when she’d followed him to breakfast, like he had designated morning clothes and evening clothes. She’d hardly slept at all last night after chasing the light through the woods, and she’d been awake when she’d heard him leave. She’d intended to wait for him outside the restaurant and walk home with him again. But then Win had distracted her. She’d followed Win to a diner, where she’d watched him go in and vanish in the crowd. She’d gone home after that and waited for Grandpa Vance there, but when he’d gotten home, he’d disappeared into his room after leaving an egg sandwhich for her on the kitchen counter.

“Julia,” he said. “I thought I heard your voice.”

“I brought you a gift.” Julia handed the bags she was holding up to Vance, who looked like he’d been given the Holy Grail of foodstuffs. “With this heat, I thought cooking dinner would be the last thing either of you wanted to do today. Maybe the two of you could eat together,” she said with a significance that wasn’t lost on Emily. She was trying to get them to spend some time together. Emily appreciated the effort, but didn’t think it would do much good.

But Grandpa Vance nosed around in the bags and surprised her with his zeal. “You’re in for a treat, Emily! Julia’s barbecue is the best in town. It’s all because of her smokehouse. Electric smokers just aren’t the same. My mouth is watering already. Will you join us, Julia?”

“No, thanks. I have to be going.”

“You’re right neighborly. Thank you.” Vance disappeared inside, leaving Emily on the porch with Julia.

“That’s the first time he’s been out of his room since this morning,” Emily said, amazed.

“Barbecue gets him every time.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Listen,” Julia said, “how would you like to go to Piney Woods Lake with me on Saturday? It’s the place for kids your age to go in the summer. Maybe you can meet some people you’ll be going to school with.”

It felt nice to be included. Those elderly ladies this morning had to be wrong. She could fit in here. “Okay. Sure.”

“Great. See you tomorrow. Now go talk with your grandfather.” Without another word about the lights, Julia gave her a backward wave and jogged down the front porch steps.

Emily turned and went back into the house. She thought about just going to her room and letting Grandpa Vance eat in peace, but then she decided to give it one more try. When she reached the kitchen, she heard the dryer door close and Vance came out of the attached laundry room. He’d been looking in the clothes dryer again. He was inordinately preoccupied with it, which was strange because just that afternoon, someone from the dry cleaner’s had come by to take a bag of laundry he’d left on the porch.

Vance stopped when he saw her. “Emily.” He cleared his throat. “So, um, has the wallpaper in your bedroom changed yet?”

“Changed?” she asked.

“It does that sometimes. Changes on its own.”

It sounded like something you would say to a child. The moon is made of cheese. Wish on a star. There’s magic wallpaper in your room. He probably thought of her as a little girl, she realized, and he was trying to make her smile. “No, it’s still lilacs. But I’ll be on the lookout,” she said to humor him.

He nodded seriously. “All right, then.”

In the silence that followed, Emily looked around and found where he had set the bags on the table in the breakfast nook. “Are you going to eat now?” she finally asked.

“I thought I might,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all. Have a seat.” He took plates and utensils out of the cabinets and put them on the table. They sat opposite each other, and together they unloaded the contents of the bags, mostly Styrofoam containers of various sizes, plus a few hamburger buns and two slices of cake.

Vance took the lids off all the containers. His incredibly long fingers were clumsy and his hands shook a little.

“What is this?” Emily asked, looking in the largest Styrofoam container. There was a bunch of dry-looking chopped meat inside.

“Barbecue.”

“This isn’t barbecue,” Emily said. “Barbecue is hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill.”

Vance laughed, which automatically made Emily smile. “Ha! Blasphemy! In North Carolina, barbecue means pork, child. Hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill-that’s called ‘cooking out’ around here,” he explained with sudden enthusiasm. “And there are two types of North Carolina barbecue sauce-Lexington and Eastern North Carolina. Here, look.” He excitedly found a container of sauce and showed her, accidentally spilling some on the table. “Lexington-style is the sweet sugar-and-tomato-based sauce, some people call it the red sauce, that you put on chopped or pulled pork shoulder. Julia’s restaurant is Lexington-style. But there are plenty of Eastern North Carolina-style restaurants here. They use a thin, tart, vinegar-and-pepper-based sauce. And, generally, they use the whole hog. But no matter the style, there’s always hush puppies and coleslaw. And, if I’m not mistaken, those are slices of Milky Way cake. Julia makes the best Milky Way cakes.”

“Like the candy bar?”

“Yep. The candy bars are melted and poured into the batter. It means ‘Welcome.’”

Emily looked over to the cake Julia had brought yesterday morning, still on the counter. “I thought an apple stack cake meant ‘Welcome.’”

“Any kind of cake means ‘Welcome,’” he said. “Well, except for coconut cake. You give coconut cake and fried chicken when there’s a death.”

Emily looked at him strangely.

“And occasionally a broccoli casserole,” he added.

Emily watched as Vance picked up the container of barbecue and forked some chopped pork onto the bottom hamburger bun. He poured some sauce on it, then topped it with coleslaw. He capped it all with the top bun and handed it on a plate to Emily. “A barbecue sandwich, North Carolina-style.”

“Thank you,” Emily said, smiling as she took the strange sandwich. He really was a nice man. She liked being around him. And he made her feel so small, like there was so much more to the world than just her problems, her grief. “This was nice of Julia to do.”

“Julia is a wonderful person. Her father would have been very proud of her.”

“I was just talking to her about the Mullaby lights,” Emily said, hoping he’d be more interested in what she’d discovered than Julia had been. “I’ve been seeing them at night.”

Vance paused in the middle of handing her the container of hush puppies. “You have? Where?”

“In the woods behind the house,” she said as she reached over and took the container from him.

“I’ll only ask you to do one thing while you’re here, Emily,” he said seriously. “Just one. Stay away from them.”

“But I don’t think it’s a ghost,” she said. “I think someone is doing it on purpose.”

“No one is doing it on purpose. Trust me.”

She wasn’t usually an argumentative person, despite her mother’s love of passionate debates. But Emily had to bite her tongue to keep from pointing out that leaving her a box of Band-Aids last night seemed pretty intentional.

“Your mother would get that same look on her face when she was a little girl,” he said. “She was stubborn, my Dulcie.” He hastily looked away, as if he’d said too much. Suddenly that old awkward tension was back, joining them at the table with apologies for being so late.

Emily toyed with the hush puppies on her plate. “Why don’t you want to talk about her?”

Still not looking at her, he said, “I get all confused about it. I don’t know what to say.”

Emily nodded, though she didn’t really understand. Maybe, like everything else about him, his grief was larger than anyone’s, so big that no one could see around it. Vance’s relationship with his daughter must have been a complicated one. But then, her mother’s relationship with everyone had been complicated. She’d been a hard woman to know. High-spirited and mercurial, she’d been like the mist from perfume. You had to be content to let a little of it sprinkle over you. And then, eventually, it went away.