And I would, too. I’d come down and watch them do it and ask Birchie and Wattie to come as well. The town needed to see us making the kids do what was right. I needed every human from my South to stand behind us. Maybe they would. After all, Wattie was beloved at Redemption, and at First Baptist only twenty or so people had moved to sit behind Martina Mack.
On the other hand, the seats behind my family had not exactly filled to bursting. I’d been heartened to see that some of the younger members of the church, led by Jim and Polly Fincher, had moved into the Partridges’ regular pew, right behind ours. The dear old Partridges themselves had simply moved back a row and stayed. We had at least five more families than Martina Mack. Still, most of the congregation had packed itself uncomfortably into the center seats, uncertain. Undecided.
I felt my shoulders squaring. I wasn’t twelve years old anymore. I was a Birch in Birchville. My brown-skinned son would be a Birch in Birchville, too, yet he would be nothing but that ugly word to trash like Cody Mack. He could not live in the town as I knew it. He would not live in the South or even America as I knew it. I hadn’t truly understood how deep and old and dangerous this was, until tonight.
We couldn’t hide up in our house and wait for them to choose. This was a war. An old, old war that had started before I was born and would likely not be finished in my lifetime, but I had to fight it. I was going to have to learn to fight it.
16
I stomped toward home so deep in thought that I almost jumped out of my skin when Lavender materialized out of Martina’s darkened side yard.
“You took her down hard! You are such a badass,” she told me, grabbing my hand. She’d circled back and heard the fight then. Good.
“Don’t say ‘ass,’” I chided, which wasn’t very Cool Aunt of me, but I was firmly on the mother side of the pond right now. I was mothered up, mothered out, enmothered in such fierce, protective rage on Digby’s behalf. My son was growing bigger and thumpier every day. He would be born, and I was seeing with fresh eyes the world he would be born into. “And also, do not ever, you hear me, sneak out in the middle of the night to meet a boy. You should be home already, not hanging out in the wee hours of the night listening to me shriek like a harpy at a little old lady. You are going to be so grounded.”
She shrugged, unconcerned, swinging our hands between us. “Totes worth it.”
I shook my head. Well, maybe to thirteen it was. Hugh was very, very cute. I took a cleansing breath, feeling a bit better with my niece’s hand in mine. I secretly loved that she had called me a badass, loved that she was on my side. More than that, she was on Digby’s side. I hoped hard that her whole generation would be like her.
“Do people still say totes?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. But just, like, ironically,” she told me. “Do me and Hugh really have to go back and fix her yard up?”
“Absolutely,” I said, and speaking of ironic, I was engaging in some next-level irony right now, wasn’t I?
I’d decided to protect Birchie, even though she’d done the worst thing that a human being could do. She’d taken a life. I was firmly on Wattie’s side, too, and Wattie had helped her hide the body. But would I let my equally beloved niece get away with some petty vandalism against roaring jackasses? Apparently not.
Lavender blew a raspberry. “She deserved it, though.”
“Oh, totes,” I said, very California, and she laughed. “I’ll help you clean up.”
We were at the end of Pine Street now, where it bumped into the square. We turned and headed down the pavement on the side with the old houses. The streetlights were on the other side, by the square itself, but I thought for this conversation we could use a little shadow.
As we passed the Darian house, I paused to check the side yard, to be sure the other budding felon had made it home safely. The ladder was gone, and Hugh’s window was closed. I took these as good signs.
Lavender, looking up at the dark window, said, “He wanted to wait with me. I told him I’d be safe with you, and you might kill him.”
“I might still, but not for rolling Martina’s house. That boy is too old for you,” I said. I was calmer, and I thought Digby had calmed, too. He spun in a slow pinwheel at my center.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “We’re just friends.”
“It’s actually a lot like that, or you would have invited Jeffrey along on your midnight ramble,” I said. I shot her some side-eye, but she said nothing. It was a very telling silence. “Be his friend in the living room with your mom right upstairs and me in the kitchen. Be friends at Cupcake Heaven with Jeffrey there, too. Don’t be friends alone at two a.m. You aren’t ready for that kind of nighttime friend.”
“Okay,” she said, too flip and immediate for me to believe for one red second that she meant it. But when she spoke again, she was serious. “It’s just that Hugh gets it, you know? I swear we aren’t all flirty or talking gushy crap. We talk about, like, our lives. Real stuff. My dad and his mom. Jeffrey gets too upset. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but me and Hugh, we do want to.”
This was supposed to reassure me, but it didn’t. She was too young to know yet that their conversations about the things that mattered most were far more dangerous. They were the conversational equivalent of tequila, a faster path to intimacy than flirting ever could be. She pulled on my hand, tugging us toward Birchie’s darkened house. The porch light was off, and only the living-room window had a faint glow to it. Wattie always left one of the side-table lamps burning, to deter all the burglars Birchville didn’t have. I pulled Lav to the side, thinking we should go around to the back door. It was unlocked, and I thought we had a better chance of sneaking in that way. I didn’t want to risk waking up our exhausted old ladies. Much less Rachel. I’d had enough ballistics for one night.
We turned, but something caught the corner of my eye. Something in the deep shadows of Birchie’s porch. I stopped dead, staring up the hill. I could barely make out the figure of a man. He was sitting in the porch swing. The light was off, and the moon was setting, but he was silhouetted against that faint golden glow from Wattie’s lamp.
I recognized him as the shadow I’d seen earlier, flashing past the gate when I was in the graveyard. It hadn’t been my imagination or a dog after all. It had been this guy. I could see those points on the top of his head that looked a bit like tiny ears.
There was a crazy moment, hardly longer than a heartbeat, when I knew, I simply knew that it was Batman. Somehow he’d learned that there was a Digby and the news had mattered to him in every way that was right. He’d come racing across the state line, Georgia to Alabama, hurrying to see about his son.
Lavender had stopped with me. She said, “What?” too loud, in a nervous voice. “Why did we stop? You look spooked.”
The figure on the porch started and stood up when she spoke. The guy was tall like Batman, but maybe too tall, and definitely too broad across the shoulders. Too bulky. I felt an odd sink of mingled relief and disappointment as he came to the stairs and started down them, toward us. Lavender heard him, and when she saw him, she went dead still, too.