Now I thought the Jekyll-and-Hyde dorks might have been right all along.
I said, mostly to myself, “I always thought of Violence as maternal or big-sistery, not romantic. But I’m thinking now, what if Violet really is Violence? I haven’t been able to write an origin story that doesn’t include Violet. I can’t imagine Violence without her. The way Violence looks at her, with the songbirds and the rabbits, sweet and innocent, maybe that’s how she sees herself, in the beginning. She’s protecting herself, and she doesn’t even know it.”
I found myself excited by the idea, but Rachel was chuckling.
“I wasn’t talking about your story thing,” she said. “I meant them. Birchie and Wattie. Do you think they’re lovers?”
I’d been onto something, but that snapped me right out of it.
“Ugh! No!” I said immediately. Birchie and Wattie walked on ahead of us, rounding the last corner, arm in arm, chatting with Lavender. They were almost exactly the same height, and their sloping shoulders met in a perfect, gentle angle. “They were both married!”
“So?” Rachel said. “It was a different time. Maybe they—”
“Absolutely not,” I interrupted. My grandfather had died before I was born, but I’d known Wattie’s husband. She’d had a good marriage. He always seemed to have a hand on her hip, her back, her shoulder, and she’d leaned into his touch. I couldn’t imagine Wattie having his babies, working beside him down at the church, calling him “Big Bear,” the whole time secret-pining for my granny. “Don’t be gross!”
“And you say I’m homophobic,” Rachel said, primly but with no rancor.
I laughed. “You are. A little bit. Look, it isn’t that. They shared a crib, Rachel. They practically had the same mom.” Birchie had told me Vina stories the way I’d one day tell Birchie stories to Digby. The piecrust she and Wattie made was Vina’s family piecrust. Birchie was at Vina’s bedside with Wattie and all of Wattie’s older brothers when she died, and she took flowers to her grave four times a year. “Vina gave Birchie every bit of mothering she got. She and Wattie were born barely a year apart. They nursed together.”
“But they aren’t actually blood-related,” Rachel said, head cocked slightly sideways as she considered them.
“You and I aren’t blood-related either,” I said. “You’re saying that if we were lesbians, you’d want to French me?”
“Ew!” Rachel said instantly.
I grinned. “You’d want to lay me down on a beach and make sweet, sweet—”
“Stop! Ew, stop!” Rachel shrieked, laughing now, too. “Oh my God, my brain. I need brain soap. Okay! Fine! Point taken.”
It was another very good moment. We both picked up the pace, gaining ground, maybe to bring this almost perfect conversation to a close before it turned on us. We were coming up on First Baptist now, almost home. Looking ahead at my little old ladies, I wished I’d thought to bring an umbrella. I didn’t like to see the sun beating down on them, turning Wattie’s short, crimped hair to molten silver and bouncing off Birchie’s fluffy bun.
As we caught up, Rachel said, “Incest aside, I think you could have made Violet look like you. You’re very pretty, Leia.” I warmed to the compliment, but then she added, “Although more people would know it if you would let me shape your brows for you. You have put on a little weight. Maybe when you’re home, you could come running with me? I’m going to have to give up my gym membership—”
I shook my head and bumped her shoulder with mine. Here was Rachel, unable to help herself, readying to step in and take charge of my weight and anything else that wasn’t perfect. Somehow today it didn’t chafe me.
Lav saw we’d caught up and dropped back a step, inserting herself between us, grabbing our hands. She set our arms to swinging.
“You ready to go home tomorrow?” Rachel asked.
“Yup,” she said, unconcerned. Poor Hugh!
She pulled us forward, almost skipping, resetting our pace with a young vengeance, bringing us abreast of Birchie and Wattie as we crossed the street to the edge of our yard. I groaned but matched my feet to hers, eager to be home. Digby and I needed to lie down.
Beside me Birchie and Wattie turned in tandem up the driveway, but then they pulled up short, staring at the porch.
“What?” I said. “Are you—”
I followed the line of their gaze, and I saw him sitting in the porch swing, reading. I froze, and my mouth stopped talking. It felt like my heart stopped, too, or maybe it was only time, taking a pause.
“Holy crap! It’s Batman!” Lav said.
It wasn’t actually Batman, though.
It was Selcouth Martin, near stranger, with a sharp in-line haircut, straight across and squared on top, instead of a cowl. No cape or even a utility belt, just dark jeans, a gray T-shirt, and red low-top Chucks. He was deep into a graphic novel, waiting in the sun where Jake had waited in the shadowy night, sitting in the same swing and with the exact same purpose. Selcouth Martin had come to see about his kid.
“Batman?” Rachel asked, confused.
“Yeah!” Lav said excitedly, squeezing my hand so hard it almost hurt. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him!”
My mouth wasn’t working yet, so it was a good thing she’d answered her own question. He was here, alive and in person, on my doorstep only a few bare and busy hours after my phone call. He’d known I was staying with my grandmother in Birchville, so he must’ve put the town name in his GPS and pointed himself in my direction. I’d talked about Birchville quite a bit. I remembered telling him that Birchie lived right across from First Baptist on the square. Had he found the house on his own? I hoped to God he hadn’t stopped at Brother’s Café or Tiger Gas and asked where I was staying. The town would be ablaze with speculation, especially if he’d then sat out waiting on our porch for longer than five minutes.
Birchie and Wattie looked to me, and Birchie’s eyes were bird bright.
“Is that him?” Birchie whispered. She clutched tighter at Wattie’s arm and released an odd, trilling giggle. It had an edge of hysteria in it that I didn’t like. Maybe we should have driven down to Martina’s house, I thought, but then Birchie added, “Wattie, I think that’s the father!”
Wattie squinted, speculative, then said, “That young man is not what I expected,” her voice very dry.
“Whose father?” asked Rachel, but I was too floored to answer. She looked at Batman, watched him turn a page. We were all still down at the end of the drive and talking quietly, so he hadn’t seen us yet. “Is that— Do you have a boyfriend, Leia?”
“You know?” I asked Birchie and Wattie when my mouth decided to let me get two words out.
“Oh, sugar. Course we know,” Wattie said, like I was being silly.
“Know what?” Rachel said. “Is he a secret boyfriend? Did you keep him secret because he’s black?” Her voice dropped even lower on the last word. She flashed an apologetic look at Wattie and told her, “Because we are not like that. No one in our family is like that.”