“Hey, Miss Leia,” Jeffrey said, which made me feel about a thousand years old.
“Hey, Lavender,” Hugh said, overly casual, cocking his hip like Elvis. He looked the way Frank had looked at fifteen, tall and lanky with a mop of sandy curls and a confident smile.
I became suddenly conscious that my niece was wearing tiny cotton shorts and a camisole top. Thirteen woke up dewy and kitten-eyed and thoroughly adorable, and sashaying up the stairs had set her hips asway. I started back down, turning Lavender and herding her before me.
“Go get dressed,” I whispered to her as we reached the hall. It was a palpable relief to step out into the air conditioning.
“I’m wearing shor—”
“More clothes,” I hissed, and gave her a little push toward her room.
She rolled her eyes, calling “Be right back” to one boy or another. Maybe both of them. They were following their dad down the stairs, but they both paused to watch her twinkle along the hallway.
I shook my head and backed up, giving the Darians plenty of room at the bottom of the stairs. Thirty-eight and pregnant did not wake up so fresh and fair. I had bed head and no bra. My mouth was coated with morning goo and probably smelled like Swamp Thing.
“What were you guys doing?” I asked.
Hugh, down last, mercifully closed the door on the heat.
“We dug your trunk out and took it down, and then we were repacking that back room,” Frank said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for me to wake up to an attic full of Darians landsliding books around at the ass crack of dawn on a Friday morning.
“My trunk?” I asked. “What?”
“You wanted a sea trunk, out of the back room?” I shook my head no, and Frank said, “Well, Birchie called last night and said you did. Do you think she was . . .” He paused, searching for words. “Maybe she was confused. We all know that Birchie is . . .” He paused again, looking down at his feet. “Not herself.” It was a kind finish, considering. I couldn’t think of a worse way to learn of your wife’s infidelity than having it publicly announced to your family, friends, and clients in the middle of a church social. I had a sudden urge to go find Jeannie Anne and smack her one. She’d been one of my summer friends, though by high school I was tired of her endless drama. She’d acted like she was on a mission to enact every plot from All My Children before graduation.
“I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what my heart told me,” she’d say, trading one boyfriend for another with a lot of overlap and sneaking. Twenty years of marriage and two kids later, it turned out she was still that girl. This time her heart had told her to get with Pastor Campbell in the choir room. By now she should’ve figured out that her heart was shitty, maybe told it to shut up.
Frank looked like hell. His eyes were puffed small with purple shadows underneath. The lines around his mouth and on his forehead looked like they had been scored double deep.
I felt swamped with empathy, though Frank might find that word presumptuous. Jeannie Anne had torched close to twenty years of shared life; on the scale of douchery, she deserved a higher score than JJ. But even so, Frank and I were two people standing in a hallway who knew what betrayal felt like.
“No, Birchie’s not herself, Frank,” I said, an indirect apology.
“She sounded good on the phone, though,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
“What time did she call?” I asked, changing the subtext if not the subject, to give him some relief.
“Maybe eight?”
I frowned. Had Birchie snuck back out of bed to call him? “Was Wattie with her?”
“Yeah, on speakerphone. You know how they do. Maybe they mean whatever’s in that trunk for a surprise?”
I didn’t think so. Not a nice one anyway, considering our constant clash of wills the last few days. I had a vague but very bad suspicious feeling growing.
“’Scuse me, Miss Leia,” Jeffrey said, and squirted past me, Hugh in his wake. “Dad, can we go down? Smells like the rolls are ready.”
Once he said it, I noticed it, too, the yeasty, sugared smell of Wattie’s cinnamon rolls drifting up from the kitchen. She must have been up way before dawn; they had to rise twice and bake for forty minutes.
“Sure,” Frank said. “But afterward you’re going to help me restack those boxes.”
They clattered down the hall, and Hugh paused at Lav’s door. He gave it a casual knuckle rap. “Yo, Lefty, come have breakfast.”
Lefty?
Lavender, now in a cotton T-shirt dress and tennis shoes, came out, and they galloped downstairs to eat a thousand calories in butter and sugary carbs that would slide right off their adolescent bodies.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Frank once we were alone.
He shook his head as if I’d asked a yes-or-no question, then gave me such a sad, cynical smile that my heart broke for him again. He was such a decent person, so good to my grandmother. In summer he sent his boys down to mow her lawn, and he acted as her man-in-the-house when the porch light went out or the doorbell stopped working. Now he was up in the thousand-degree attic heat before his workday started, moving boxes for two little old ladies who had blown up his marriage in front of his whole church.
“How are the boys doing?” I asked.
Frank didn’t answer for a sec, his tired eyes searching my face, looking for some shade of schadenfreude or gossipy interest. I hoped he wouldn’t imagine it there. I asked because he was our family friend, and because he was fresh broken in a way that I’d felt cracked my whole adult life.
Frank must have read me right, because his guard dropped. His shoulders slumped, and the dark pits of his eyes told me how hard he was working to keep himself together.
He said, “Hugh’s shut down. I have no idea. Jeffrey, he’s young. He can’t hide how hard he’s taking it. Watching him try, it breaks my heart.”
“God, Frank. I’m so sorry,” I said. I knew from Lavender that the boys were staying with him at the house. They’d been to see their mom a couple of times, walking over to their grandma’s house where she was staying, a half mile off the square. “Have you talked to Jeannie Anne at all?”
“Yeah. I’m trying to be civil, even though she’s seeing Campbell. They’re in love, apparently. Martina Mack, God bless her black-hole heart, came by with a burned chicken casserole and that cheery news.”