gardener. He knew landscaping was still in that family. He’d get this place fixed up. He turned to look at the house. It looked nothing like when Lily was alive. He’d hire a roofer. A housepainter.
Yes.
And he’d give Emily an allowance. He’d have a talk with her about college. Maybe she would go to State, where Lily had gone, which was only a short drive away. Maybe she would want to come home on breaks. Maybe she would want to live here after she graduated.
Yes.
He would build her a house on the lake, as a wedding gift, maybe.
What if she married Win Coffey?
It wouldn’t be a nighttime wedding, that was for sure.
Or, knowing Win, maybe it would be.
He smiled when he thought about how Emily would look on her wedding day. Lily’s wedding dress was in the attic. Maybe she’d want to wear it.
Julia, of course, would make the cake.
He gave a short laugh at how far ahead of himself he was getting.
He might be tall enough to see into tomorrow, but he hadn’t looked there in a long, long time.
He’d forgotten how bright it was.
So bright he could hardly stand it.
SEVEN DAYS later, Emily felt like she was living in a bubble, waiting for Win’s punishment to end. She began to wonder if his father had grounded him for life.
Not that there wasn’t plenty to distract her. Vance was suddenly on a home improvement kick, which was a good thing, except every morning Emily woke up to hammering on the roof, or the roar of a lawn mower in the backyard, or the sharp, pungent scent of house paint. When Emily asked Vance what was the hurry, he told her rain was coming and he wanted all the work done before then.
A heat wave had hit Mullaby that week, so Emily couldn’t believe rain was coming any time soon. But every time she would come downstairs, irritable from the heat, Grandpa Vance would tell her not to worry, rain was coming to cool things off. When she finally asked him how he knew, he told her his elbow joints told him so. She didn’t argue, because she really didn’t want to get into why he was talking to his elbow joints.
Every day, when Vance took his afternoon nap, she would go next door just as an excuse to spend some time in an air-conditioned house. It didn’t exactly work to her favor, though. Despite the heat, every day Julia made a cake with her kitchen window wide open. When Emily asked her why, she said she was calling to someone. Emily didn’t question this. That Julia believed it was good enough for Emily. While Julia baked, Emily told her about Win, and Julia seemed glad that Emily now knew. Emily knew that Julia had forgiven her mother for what she’d done. Julia seemed to be doing a lot of forgiving lately. She’d lost a lot of her restlessness.
At five o’clock every day, Julia would leave with the cake she’d made, just as Stella came home from work. On the seventh day of this happening, Emily finally asked Stella where Julia was taking the cakes. At first she’d assumed she was taking the cakes to her restaurant, but she became curious when she realized Julia never returned in the evenings.
“She takes them to Sawyer,” Stella said.
“Does he eat all that cake?” Emily asked.
“Don’t worry. He burns it all off.” Stella looked shocked at herself. “Erase that. You didn’t hear that. Crap. I need a glass of wine. Remember, do as I say, not as I do.”
Emily liked sitting on the back porch with Stella after Julia left, the slow pace of the day as it turned into evening, waiting to go eat dinner with her grandfather. Stella would sometimes talk about Emily’s mother. She was a champion storyteller and had a wild past, which was a great combination. Emily never sensed that Stella was anything but happy with her life as it was now. She got the feeling the stories were worth more than Stella’s desire to go back and do anything differently.
As she headed back home that evening, she realized that, if possible, the heat made things in Mullaby move even slower. There were still plenty of tourists, but the neighborhoods were quiet, with only the occasional hum of a window fan or air conditioner gliding from houses as she passed them. It was as if everyone was in stasis, waiting for something to happen.
Finally, that night, it did.
A terrific thunderstorm erupted just as darkness fell. It came on so strong that Emily and Vance had to race around the house closing the windows. They laughed as they did so, making a game of it, then they stood on the front porch and watched the sheets of rain. The ending of that day felt like she was coming to the end of a story, and suddenly Emily felt sad. She made excuses to stay up with Grandpa Vance. They played cards and looked through photo albums Vance magically produced, full of photos of her mother.
Finally, Grandpa Vance said he was tired and she reluctantly said good night to him. She went upstairs and walked into her room, and realized that she’d forgotten to close her balcony doors. Rain was flying in and the floor was soaked. She spent nearly an hour wiping down the floor, the doors, the walls, and all the nearby furniture. She dropped all the wet towels in the bathtub, then stripped out of her wet clothes.
She put on a cotton nightgown and fell into bed. The temperature had dropped sharply, and it felt almost decadent to cover herself with a sheet. The clatter of drops against the windows on the balcony doors sounded like raining coins.
A few hours later, she woke up as she was unconsciously kicking the sheet off. Everything was quiet, a strange sort of quiet that felt like an unfinished sentence. The storm had passed and it was uncomfortably hot in her room now.
She opened her eyes and saw that moonlight was now filtering in through the gaps in the curtains on the closed balcony doors. She slowly got out of bed and went to the doors to open them. The limbs of the trees were so heavy with rainwater that some of them almost touched the balcony floor. The heat of a typical Southern summer night was back, the humidity oppressive, but the moonlight reflecting on the wet surfaces made the neighborhood look like it was coated in ice.
All this had been so foreign at first. She hadn’t known, when she’d first arrived, that she would grow to love this place like she did.
There were a lot of things she hadn’t known when she’d first arrived.
Strange and wondrous things.
The light from the moon shone along the door casing and spread across the walls a few inches inside, far enough for her to suddenly notice that the phases-of-the-moon wallpaper she’d been living with all week was gone. It was a now curious dark color she couldn’t quite make out, punctuated by long strips of yellow. It looked almost like dark doors and windows opening, letting in light. The wallpaper was usually some reflection of her mood or situation, but what did this mean? Some new door was opening? Something was being set free?
When she finally realized what it meant, she spun around, her eyes darting around the room until she found him.
Win was sitting on the couch opposite her bed. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped.
“My punishment ended as of midnight,” he said.
Her heart began to race. It was so good to see him. And yet, she felt unexpectedly awkward. “So… so you were just going to sit there until I woke up?”
“Yes.” He stood. It made a swishing sound in the silence. He walked to the balcony doors. She was standing in a square of moonlight, and he stopped just short of it, like it was a line he couldn’t cross.
“I’d almost forgotten what you looked like,” she said, joking. A bad joke. Why was she so nervous?
“I spent all my time remembering what you looked like,” he said seriously.
“I had people hammering and sawing and mowing all around me. It was hard to concentrate.”
He gave her a funny look. “That’s your excuse?”
“And there’s no air-conditioning in this house. Do you know how hard it is to concentrate when you don’t have air-conditioning?” She needed to stop, but couldn’t seem to.
“Your grandfather had the largest limb of the oak that stretched to your balcony cut down. I had a hell of a time getting up here this time.”
