One More Knight

Well, good Lord, they’re all grown up by now, though-Bobby Jr.’s graduatin’ next week, and Sara Louise is a year behind him.”

“No way!”

“I know, doesn’t seem possible, does it? Seems like it was just yesterday you and me were in high school, and it was me and Bobby and you and…oh, Lord, there I go again. Charlene, I’m just so sorry, I should keep my big mouth-”

“Hey, I told you, it’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

“Yeah…” Kelly Grace’s eyes rested on her, a slight frown making wrinkles appear in all the places Charly had recently begun to study minutely in her own mirror. This is too weird, she thought. How can my best friend have wrinkles? The last time I saw her we were sixteen. Sixteen.

“How ‘bout you?” Kelly Grace asked hesitantly, obviously still feeling uneasy about it. “What all have you been doin’ with yourself? Did you ever…you know?”

“Get married? Have kids?” That, of course, was the biggy. The ol’ sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “Nope,” said Charly cheerfully, “not yet. Guess I just haven’t had time.”

With that out of the way, Kelly Grace relaxed and settled herself like a nesting hen into the opposite side of the booth, from whence she resumed her artillery barrage of less important questions. “So, what have you been up to? Where’ve you been? Hey, did you ever get to California? I remember you were always talkin’ about goin’ out there.”

“I did.” Charly nodded, her head going up and down like one of those tacky little doggies people used to put in their car windows. “That’s where I live now. I’m an attorney, actually.”

“No way! Get out! You are not!”

“It’s true. I’m a lawyer,” Charly said, her own laughter feeling like rocks rattling inside her chest. “Swear to God: Who’d a’ thought, huh?”

“A lawyer! Oh, my God, the judge musta had a cow when he heard that!”

The laughter died. Charly rested her elbows on the tabletop and pressed interwoven fingers to her lips. After a moment she cleared her throat and said, “He doesn’t know.”

There was absolute silence. Then Kelly Grace leaned forward and said in a hushed voice, “You mean you haven’t…”

“Nope.” Charly shook her head. “Haven’t seen him, haven’t spoken to him. Not in twenty years.”

Kelly Grace’s eyes went wide. “Then you don’t-” She cut herself off and clamped her lips together, while her gaze slipped away and down.

Charly tried laughing it off. “Hey, give me a break, I just got into town. You’re the first person I’ve seen, much less talked to.”

“But you’re going to, right? I mean, well, for heaven’s sake, you are goin’ to go see him, aren’t you?”

“I guess I’m gonna have to,” Charly said dryly. “I’m sure the news will get to him that I’m here.” And probably already had, she thought as the door gave its warning ding, and she glanced around nervously to see who had just come in. A couple of teenagers, nobody she’d know. She shook back her hair, making a conscious effort to unclasp her hands and relax her shoulders. “Actually I was driving around the square trying to get my courage up, and I saw the sign. I wondered if that was you, and I just thought I’d stop in for a minute, say ‘Hey,’ you know, maybe give my nerves a chance to settle a little… Damn, Kelly Grace,” she burst out, “this isn’t gonna be easy!”

Kelly Grace shifted in uneasy sympathy. “I guess not.”

“Hey,” said Charly brightly, “I don’t suppose you’d happen to have a bottle of Black Jack tucked away someplace?”

Kelly Grace put a hand over her eyes and groaned. “Oh, Lord, does that bring back memories! Remember that Fourth of July… Lord, I thought I was gon’ die.”

So many memories, Charly thought. So many years. And maybe…not nearly enough. Because if it still seems like yesterday to me, and to her, then it probably does to everyone else, too.

“I should be going,” she said, covering an involuntary shiver as she slid out of the booth.

Kelly Grace followed, but when Charly glanced over at her, she saw that her friend had her hand clamped over her mouth and that above the hand her eyes were way too bright Somehow Charly knew that the brightness wasn’t laughter.

A new thought and a terrible fear clutched at her heart. She halted, touched Kelly Grace’s arm and said airlessly, “He’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, he didn’t…die or anything?” And tried to laugh, as if it were of no consequence to her one way or the other.

Kelly Grace blinked, then gave a sharp bark of laughter. “The judge? God, no. I guess there was some talk he was goin’ to retire a year or so ago, and I b’lieve he has cut back some. But…no, the judge is still-” she shrugged “- the judge.”

“And Aunt Dobie, is she…?”

“Aunt…you mean miz-” Once again she stopped herself. She swallowed, nodded, and her eyes slid away. “Oh, yeah, she’s still goin’ strong.”

“The Stewarts?” The word caught, and emerged in a croak.

Kelly Grace’s lips twisted in a little half smile of sympathy. “No, hon, they’re gone. Mr. Stewart, he passed on a few years back, and Miz Stewart, she sold the old place and moved down to Mobile to be closer to her grandkids. Becky and Royal-the girls, remember them?-they’re both married and livin’ down there somewheres.”

They were at the door. Charly paused, looked over at the woman, now inexplicably middle-aged, who at the age of sixteen had been her best friend in all the world. Save one. She searched for something to say. But so many emotions were backed up inside her that she couldn’t say anything at all. Kelly Grace seemed to be having the same problem. She wiped away a tear, and they both laughed.

“It was so great seein’ you again.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Sniffling, Kelly Grace said, “Charlene, you come on back here later on, now, y‘hear? After you’ve been to see him. We have catchin’ up to do. You just have to meet my kids… come up and see Mama…”

Charly tried clearing her throat, but the ache there obviously meant to stay awhile. “Oh, Kelly, I wish I could, but I can’t. I have to get back to Atlanta. I just came to…” She made the mistake of looking at Kelly Grace’s face again. She turned away, saying tightly, “You know people in this town aren’t going to be exactly thrilled to see me back. I doubt that’s changed, even after all this time.”

“My Lord, it’s been twenty years!”

Charly drew a breath and let it out in a snort of ironic laughter. “Kelly Grace, fifty years wouldn’t be enough. You haven’t forgotten anything that happened, have you? Don’t kid yourself-neither has anybody else.”

It had been a good many years since Charly Phelps had made a fool of herself in a public place, and here she was, not thirty minutes back in Mourning Spring and trembling on the brink of doing just that. I’ve got to get out of this town, she thought. Do it, get it over with and get out of here. God, I hate this place.

“I’ll stop and see you before I go,” she finally promised, desperate to escape. She gave Kelly Grace a quick hug and pushed her way through the door.

Looking neither right nor left, she hurried across the street. She unlocked the Taurus, got in, started it up, backed out of the parking space and drove off, all without allowing herself to think even once about what she was about to do. She’d conquered skydiving pretty much the same way, come to think of it. And if I did that, she told herself, teeth clenched with determination, I can do anything. I can do this. I can.

Her courage thus bolstered, her resolve fortified, she turned off the courthouse square and onto Hill Street, so named for the residential neighborhood in which it dead-ended. The Hill wasn’t much of a hill, as hills go, but it did lend a kind of exclusivity to the cluster of mansions dating back at least to Reconstruction. A few were even said to have actually survived the Yankee invasion. All the homes on the Hill had the same quiet, if rather stuffy elegance, surrounded by brick and wrought iron and shaded by oaks so huge and old they arched over the street and met in the middle, turning it into a sun-dappled tunnel.

Her destination was the second house from the end, a redbrick Victorian monster with a white-columned portico and black shutters. She turned into the semicircular driveway, shut off the engine and sat for a moment,