Prologue
1994
SHE WAS THE BEST last thing to see. Every year when he got ready to leave again, he watched her from this same grassy hillside. He always told her he was going off by himself for a few minutes and he knew she thought, or at least hoped, that he was going off to pray.
Sometimes he did, but mostly he just watched her while she wasn’t watching him. He soaked in the sight of her as she drank her coffee on the front porch or, like today, worked in her front garden.
Jack Canfield had been coming to and leaving Locust Grove, Alabama for almost twenty years. He’d grown up here, but he’d left the first chance he’d gotten, off to Ole Miss and then the Marine Corps.
He came home every year on leave and every now and then he made it back for Christmas, but there was nothing here for him but these nine acres here on this dirt road and the woman that lived there.
He was thirty-seven years old and still hadn’t found some place he could be that wasn’t here. But he couldn’t be here, either.
Every year, he got off the bus out on Hwy 9 and walked the two miles to her place here just outside of town. He never told her when he was coming, in case his leave was cancelled or his orders changed.
But come he did, for a few days every year, and then he would leave, taking the memories of her with him so he could ration them out to himself when he was gone.
From his spot on the knoll, he had a perfect view down into the only place he’d ever thought was home. A gravel drive led from the dirt road and circled around to the back of the house, beyond his vision. Next to the drive and set back a ways was the old white farmhouse.
It wasn’t the farmhouse that rich people bought when they decided to take a place in the country, though they wouldn’t have come here, anyway. It was the farmhouse of people who built something small but sturdy and then added to it through the years, when more babies made it necessary and a piece of money made it possible.
There was a front porch that ran the width of the house and one just like it on the back. At one end of the porch, a white wooden swing and her pots of flowers. At the other, a few scattered chairs and a white wooden table that had his initials carved into the top. For most of his life, that porch was where a lot of his best living got done.
Sweet tea in the afternoons, when the sun was hot but the two big magnolias gave shade. Cribbage at night, or maybe some storytelling, laughing so hard the cicadas stopped their racket to see what was so funny.
Now his battered sea bag sat by the front door, waiting for him to take it up and be gone again.
When he was gone, when he was back to whichever far away the Corps had sent him, he would sometimes sit and imagine he was on that porch with her, listening to a late afternoon rainstorm pounding on the faded green tin roof. Next to her laughter, it was the finest sound he knew. He watched her now, digging in the flowerbed that ran along the front porch. Hollyhocks so blue the sky got embarrassed about it. Larkspur as purple as her homemade jam. The pink and red kalancho that she was digging now, dividing and replanting them along the rock edging he’d put down for her last year.
She could grow anything, from tomatoes to pumpkins to her giant gardenias by the picket fence; gardenias you could smell before you even turned onto the road. Everything she touched grew well, even the things that were half-dead when she found them.
He watched her digging and even though her back was to him, he knew she wore her faded flowered gloves, the ones that had the holes in both thumbs. He knew a glisten of sweat was on her brow and that it irritated her. Knew she had a handkerchief tucked down in between her breasts and that she’d pull it out to wipe the sweat away before it salted her eyes.
He also knew that she knew he was almost gone, and that she was busy making something the way she wanted it to be, because other things just weren’t.
He watched her looking like she wasn’t waiting, as he sat there looking like he wasn’t leaving. He watched her until the familiar resignation pressed into his chest and he knew it was time. He stood and pinched his cigarette out, tucked it into his pocket. Then he blew out a breath he hadn’t noticed he was holding and went to say goodbye to the only woman he had ever loved.
* * *
She looked over her shoulder when she heard the picket gate scraping across the fieldstone walkway. Her silver hair, shiny as a wedding ring, was damp along her forehead and her face was flushed from the heat. She got to her feet before he could get there to help her and she pulled off her blackened gloves as she met him halfway down the walk.
She was four feet, eleven inches if there wasn’t any wind and she had to look straight up just to meet his eye. She was seventy-five years old and generously proportioned beneath her variety of flowered muumuus, but he thought she was beautiful.
Her skin was permanently tan from working out of doors but every line on her face seemed like a laugh line and she had the warmest brown eyes he’d ever seen.
“Morning, Miss Margret,” he said. “Morning, Jack,” she answered. She looked at him only half hopefully. “You have time for one more coffee?”
“No, ma’am. I’m running late.” And he was, but he’d stolen his own time with her to spend it watching her, instead of feeling the awkwardness of goodbye between them.
She swallowed and her eyes got wet before she could catch it. He was sorry.
“Well,” she said, collecting herself. “I appreciate everything you’ve done the last couple of days. You know that.”
He did. He couldn’t say “I love you” without promising to stay, so he came and he fixed things around the farmhouse, spent his few days mending fences and porch steps, painting rails and planting trees. She knew what he meant.
She couldn’t say “I love you” without asking him to stay, so she fed him instead. She brought zucchini bread out to the barn, warm and spicy and moist. Sat him down on the porch with plates of tuna sandwiches and her potato salad with the bits of sweet pickle in it. She fed him every time he stopped moving and he knew what she meant by that, too.
“Emma!” she called back toward the house. “Emma Lee!”
The screen door squeaked open and thirteen year-old Emma stepped through it, wearing faded cut-offs and a big white tee shirt. She was still a tiny little thing, but when he’d first seen her the other day it had rocked him.
In his mind, she was always nine or ten. Seeing her growing up reminded him that time passed here while he was gone. Emma Lee was growing up and Margret Maxwell got older, too. She would continue to do so until one day she stopped, and the idea of it was intolerable.
He squinted across the porch at Emma Maxwell, the only child of Margret’s only child. His best friend Daniel, now dead. Both of them dead, Daniel and Michelle, leaving four-year old Emma and her Grandma to go on together.
He’d joined the Corps two years before the accident that took them both, right out there on the dirt road. Had thought about staying home for good when his six years were up, but while he knew Margret waited for his visits home, he also knew she couldn’t look at him without seeing her only boy. So he left, always.
“Emma, bring me that banana bread, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Emma went back into the house and Margret looked back up at Jack.
“Where are you off to now?” she asked. “Back to Kuwait,” he told her.
“Well, I don’t like it,” she said and set her lips that way she did when she disapproved.
“Yes, ma’am. I reckon they don’t care for it overmuch, either.” Trying to get her to smile. She almost did.
He walked up onto the porch and grabbed his sea bag. When he headed back down the steps, Miss Margret was busy not looking.
Emma came back out the screen door and down the steps, a loaf of Miss Margret’s banana bread wrapped in foil. Emma’s brown hair had all kinds of gold in it, like her Grandma’s used to have. He wondered if she’d go silver, too, one day. Emma handed the bread to Margret and stepped back.
“See you, Little Bit,” he told Emma.
“See you, Jack.” She gave him a shy-girl wave and they watched her go back into the house.
Margret pressed the banana bread into his hands. It was still warm and he could smell the allspice and the nutmeg.
“Thank you,” he told her.
“Well.” She fussed with the embroidered handkerchief tucked between her breasts but didn’t pull it out. He knew he’d better go. She hated it if he saw her cry.
“Bye, Miss Margret.”
She slapped him on the cheek, almost softly.
“What did you just say to me?” she asked, only half joking.
“Sorry, ma’am. See you, Miss Margret.” He smiled, kissed the top of her head. Her hair smelled of hot sun and lavender shampoo and he memorized it.
“See you, Jack.” Her voice broke and again he was sorry.
She squeezed his hand and he started walking away before it just got too damn hard.
* * *
Margret watched him walk out through the picket gate, and she pulled the handkerchief from inside her bra. She loved him so much that sometimes she forgot she hadn’t given birth to him. He and Daniel had been best friends since first grade, inseparable and yet so different.
Daniel mischievous and fair-haired, always laughing. Jack tall and broad-shouldered, the football star, with his lush black hair and those sharp blue eyes that always seemed to look right into a person’s bones.
The two boys had done everything together, most of it right here. When Jack was twelve, his people had moved off to Natchitoches, seeking someplace new to be of no account, and Jack had stayed here with her and Daniel.
She desperately wanted him to stay right here with her and Emma Lee. Every time they did this, she wanted to grab onto him and beg him not to go. She didn’t, because she knew that he would stay for her. But she also knew he couldn’t look at her without seeing Daniel and that caused him pain.
So she never asked, she just watched him go. It wasn’t her job to make it harder for him to leave; it was her job to make it possible.
Margret watched him round the bend where the pecan trees stood and then he was gone. She kept watching anyway. She’d let herself cry for just a minute and then get back to her flowers.
* * *
Emma ran through the backside of Grandma’s land, past the little orchard and down the hill that led to the old pasture. She was a tiny thing, five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet, but she could run. Years of being the smallest kid in class had taught her to run fast.
Until last year, she’d been nothing but knees and elbows, but then Grandma’s big boobs had come flying out of nowhere and landed directly on her chest. They made running a little uncomfortable, but she was still fast and she was awfully motivated.
She’d always done this; run from Grandma’s through the Peterson’s land and cut across to the river that ran parallel to Hwy 9. Every time Jack Canfield said goodbye and walked out that gate, she’d run this path to the river. She’d been doing it since she was about six years old and if Grandma ever noticed, she hadn’t said.
Once she reached the river, Emma ran across the footbridge, her sneakers thumping along the aged wooden planks, and hit the other side without breaking stride. She could see Hwy 9 from here, a good couple of hundred yards away, but Jack wasn’t on it yet.
She got to her special tree, a huge old oak forty feet high and with at least a dozen fine places to sit. She climbed up it without even thinking about it, muscle memory and hurry were all she needed.
She had just settled into her favorite crook, a comfortable “V” about halfway up the tree, when Jack appeared on the road. She made herself quite still and watched him come. The sun was hitting his black hair just right, making it glint like onyx.
She couldn’t see the details of his face, but she knew that he’d be squinting against the sun and she wished that she could see it. She liked it when he squinted. He had a craggy face, even at his fairly young age. He was striking more than handsome, but she thought him the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
Every time he left, she came here to watch him go. Not just to get one more look to last her another year, but because it allowed her to watch him unnoticed. He rarely noticed her anyway, but if she’d ever stared at him this long at home, Grandma would have caught it for sure. And she would have known that Emma had feelings for this man that she really had no business having. This man that, if someone had demanded a label, would probably be described as an uncle more than anything else. But she didn’t think of him that way at all.
When she was a little girl, she’d wanted him to stay and be her daddy. He was so manly, with that gravelly voice and his crinkly eyes. He’d always seemed so strong, the kind of strong that would protect her, though she had no idea what from.
She liked his roughness, his jagged edges and his quietness. He had an unforced strength that made him seem like he would be the perfect daddy for her.
Somewhere around eleven, though, she started looking at Jack in a whole new light. When he’d come home that time, his role in her daydreams changed. In her daydreams, she had changed, too. She was older, taller and much more sophisticated. Not much older, but grown into her boobs and of legal age for sure.
In her daydreams, this new version of Jack would come home and fall almost instantly and irretrievably in love with her and tell her how surprised he was that his soumate had been right here all along.
She wrote these daydreams down sometimes, in her notebooks full of stories. But these stories were her own; they didn’t get turned in at school or shared with Grandma in the evenings. These stories were for her and her alone.
Emma thought about the Jack of her daydreams until the Jack of the real world passed her on the road, his sea bag over his shoulder. He wasn’t going to see her, but she wondered what he’d do if he did. Probably tell her to get her bony ass outa the tree and go find something to do.
She would have to explain and she couldn’t think of a single good lie, so she made herself very still and watched him until she couldn’t see him anymore.
Then she climbed down out of the tree and went home to kill another year.
Chapter 1
Twenty years later - 2014
JACK OPENED THE door to the diner and walked straight back into 1970s Alabama. It had been eight years since he’d been home and nothing had changed. The same dozen booths with the same red vinyl seats that had maybe a little more red duct tape on them. The same yellowed clippings on the walls. The same yellowed counter with a handful of stools.
The only thing that seemed different was that he didn’t know any of the half-dozen people that were scattered around the room. He figured that figured. The people he’d known had been leaving or dying for years.
He walked over to the empty counter and took a seat at the end. He smelled coffee and bacon and small town. All he wanted was the coffee. His head was pounding and the ketchup bottle didn’t look as still as he thought it ought to. He heard pots banging beyond the swinging door, behind the counter and halfway to the big front windows. He’d appreciate it if that stopped.
Just then the door swung open and a tall, skinny black girl came out carrying a plastic dishpan full of silverware. She saw him and smiled, a pretty smile, her teeth big and bright against her black-black skin.
“Hey, sir, how you doing?” “Fine, thanks,” he lied.
“You want coffee or sweet tea?” “Coffee, please.”
She put down the tub and brought the pot and the thick white mug, poured him a cup of coffee.
“Can I get you something to eat, sir?”
“No, thank you.” He tried to smile but he was pretty sure he’d grimaced at her instead. “This’ll be just fine, thank you, sweetheart.”
“Okay, then,” she said, still smiling as she gave him a spoon. “You change your mind, just let me know.”
“I will thanks.”
He stirred real milk into his coffee while he watched her take the dishpan and a package of napkins over to a booth by the window. As he drank his coffee, he watched her roll silverware up in the napkins and he wondered who her people were.
She looked like she might be a Wayne, but she also looked like she had some Brantley in her, if they still had Brantleys. Bo Brantley had been one heck of a football player back in high school. Jack had appreciated Bo saving his butt a time or two.
Jack was on his second cup of coffee when the swinging door swung again and Emma Lee Maxwell walked through it. She’d been looking at a sheaf of papers in her hand and immediately turned to walk toward the black girl, so he’d only glimpsed a piece of her face, but he knew her and it punched him in the chest. She was supposed to be married and gone off to Birmingham.
She was still tiny, but her hips were a bit wider in her faded Levis. Her hair was pulled back in a long, messy ponytail, longer than he remembered seeing it. The glimpse at her face had let him see that she had just a few fine lines starting up around her eyes and that she looked tired. How old was she now? Thirty-something.
He calculated. She was thirty-three or thirty-four. It didn’t seem like she should be. He’d last seen her nine years ago, at Margret’s funeral. He’d come back the following year, as he always had, thinking he should keep checking on her, keep an eye on the house, but she’d been gone. Gone and married to Birmingham and then he’d seen no reason to come back until now.
He watched her walk over to the black girl at the booth by the window.
“Lucinda, honey, I got your paperwork all filled out for you,” she said to her. Her voice was deeper than he remembered it, stronger.
“Thank you Miss Emma,” Lucinda answered. Another big smile.
“Just be sure you get your daddy to sign it and that you get it sent in,” Emma said. “Otherwise they’re not gonna pay the doctor bill. Okay?”
“Okay, Miss Emma. I will.’
“You can go ahead and go home once you get that silverware rolled, okay? Mary’ll be here soon.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
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