After dinner with the Williamses, Loralee and I had driven to a grocery store with the improbable name of Piggly Wiggly to pick up supplies, and I remembered her putting a gallon of milk for Owen—or Rocky, as he seemed to want to be called—in the cart. I’d never tried it before, but I’d heard that warmed milk helped a person sleep. I’d have to find a pot to heat it on the ancient stove, because I didn’t recall seeing a microwave.
The grocery-shopping trip had been an oddly silent one. Owen had slept in the car to and from the store, then walked like a zombie along the fluorescent-lit aisles. Loralee had been unusually silent, and I wondered if it was because she was tired, too, or because she’d realized that her heavy Alabama accent and nonstop chattering were giving me a headache. There could have been another reason, but I’d been too tired and my mind too full with the day’s events to care enough to ask.
I threw off the covers—all freshly laundered and put on the beds by Kathy Williams’s cleaning lady—and slid from the tall four-poster bed. This had been Edith’s room, and her bed, and the only reason I’d been persuaded to use this bedroom was because Mr. Williams had told me that she had died in the downstairs parlor.
But her presence was everywhere. Her clothes remained in the tall antique armoire against the wall and in the closet; her silver-backed hairbrush, with long gray hair still wound around the bristles, rested on the dresser. I hadn’t unpacked yet, because I was unsure I would remain in this room, with its view of the river from the front windows, and that of the garden from the side. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wake up each morning and see the water. Even at this distance it made me uneasy. But I imagined that during cooler weather in the spring, when everything was blooming, the scents from the garden would rise up to this corner bedroom. For now, this was Edith’s room and her house, and before I could start claiming space in it, I needed to convince myself that it was actually mine—something I hadn’t really considered until I’d met Dr. Gibbes Heyward.
I heard a sound from inside the house and I stilled, straining my ears. I heard it again, like metal against glass, and I froze, thinking only of Edith and how she’d lived alone in this house for so long, and died within its old plastered walls. I relaxed only a little when I remembered that there were two other living, breathing people in the house with me who were capable of making noise.
It was a tall bed, and I had to slide off the side a bit until my feet touched the floor, my oversize New York Giants jersey reaching to my knees. I’d bought it for Cal our first Christmas together, but he’d told me to keep it, saying he preferred the Atlanta Falcons. His rejection had hurt my feelings, but I’d felt better after realizing that it made the perfect nightgown for me. All these years later, I couldn’t bear to part with it, clinging to it like a child might cling to a security blanket. If only it had made me feel secure.
Barefoot, I crossed the wood floor and pulled open my door, sticking my head out into the corridor. A plastic Darth Vader night-light had been stuck in a baseboard outlet, looking ridiculously out of place in the elegant yet shabby decor of the hallway. But Loralee had insisted, saying that all three of us might need it if we woke up disoriented. She’d said “we,” but she’d shifted her eyes to Owen. Apparently my half brother and I shared more than a love for eating Oreos cream-first.
I’d learned to compensate for my fear of the dark since my marriage to Cal. He didn’t like any show of weakness and had banned night-lights not just from our bedroom and bathroom, but from our house. He’d been right, of course. No adult should harbor childish fears, no matter how justified their source.
The noise came again, and I was pretty sure it was from the kitchen. I peered down the hallway, seeing that Owen’s bedroom door, to what had been Cal’s room, was closed, but that the door to the room next to his was open.
I made my way down to the first level, then toward the back of the house to the kitchen. The swinging door had been left propped open, and I stopped right before the light of the kitchen hit me to observe.
Loralee, wearing a ridiculous long silk leopard-print peignoir set with matching kitten-heel slippers, stood at the peeling Formica counter stirring a light brown liquid in a large Tupperware pitcher with a wooden spoon. A bag of sugar—from our trip to the store—sat open in front of her, and as I watched she picked it up and poured the remainder of the bag into the pitcher, and then the entire thing into a large pot on the stove. I hoped that meant the stove was working.
“What are you doing?” I asked, forgetting my plan to back away and head back upstairs before she spotted me.
She jerked a little in surprise, then widened her perfect mouth into a genuine smile. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to make sweet tea so that we have some tomorrow. I hope I didn’t wake you. I was trying to be real quiet.”