As the two of them made their slow way out of the hall, the congregation came one by one into this clarity: Miss Wattie’s whispered soothings and asides had long hidden a crumbling at Birchie’s center.
It was unthinkable. Miss Birchie, as they all called her, smelled like rose petals and history. She was the last Birch living in Birchville, ninety years old but still with her perfectly erect spine, her interested eyes, her ancient collection of Very Nice Handbags. For many of them, Miss Birchie was the town. The idea of the town. She was the avatar of the town as it used to be in some Old South utopia that only existed if you were white and well-to-do and Baptist and didn’t notice how folks who weren’t all of those things had fared. Even before they made it out of the room, people were texting me. Once the door closed behind them, they started calling me as well.
I didn’t answer. By then it was already past noon, and I was on my way to Rachel’s house. My phone was turned off, and my mind was made up. I was ready to drop my Bat bomb, and I was braced for the kaboom.
3
I pulled up in front of Rachel’s pristine Colonial in East Beach, with its black shutters and butt-ugly Tara columns. I was the first one here, but I parked on the street anyway. If I pulled in to the driveway, Mom and Keith might block me in; I’d be trapped, with no way out if the interrogation became unendurable. I’d baked a pecan pound cake, so that everybody would at least come to the conversation cheerful and full of sugar, but they would still want to know when and where and how I’d let this happen. Rachel especially could be so pushy.
I’d been penciling and inking far too long, leaving the scripts to other writers. I couldn’t invent a good origin story for Digby any more than I could think of one for Violence. Digby himself, while very young, might be impressed to hear he’d sprung from a late-night encounter with a Batman. But what about Digby’s older self? I didn’t want to tell my parents or Rachel or my kid that I didn’t know his father’s name. Or job. Or medical history. Or even if he was a decent person, but that was the truth.
He had good taste in comics, I could say. He was an excellent French kisser.
As I trudged up the stairs onto Rachel’s wraparound white porch, her husband, Jake, came barreling out the front door, blind, slamming it behind him. He almost ran me down. I tried to dodge and stumbled. He dropped the bag that he was carrying to catch me before I pitched back down the stairs with the cake carrier.
“Damn it, Lay!” he said, and then I flushed and he froze, his hands still on my arms. He hadn’t called me Lay in years.
I had my balance, so I crabbed sidewise away from him, out of his grasp. I didn’t like him touching me. Most of the time, I thought of him as Rachel’s accessory, buckled on but irrelevant, like a wristwatch.
His hands hung in the air for a second, awkward and empty, before he dropped them to his sides.
“Damn it yourself, JJ,” I said at last, giving him his old name back, too, as lightly as I could.
The letters made my mouth taste sour, and I had a hard time connecting them to the man in front of me. I thought of him as either Jake or Mr. Rachel. We hadn’t been Lay and JJ to each other since we were kids. We’d spent our afternoons from third grade on in my family’s basement rec room, reading new comic books as fast as they came in. We’d eat Fiddle Faddle and parse plot twists, trying to guess if our favorites would survive the cliffhanger endings. As we put each issue away into a plastic sleeve and filed it in order in the proper box, we’d discuss what superpower we would each want, debating hyperspeed or flight, teleportation or telekinesis.
I never said it out loud, but like most girls I wanted to be Super Pretty. Rachel had dibs on that power, though. Every boy I knew turned into a stammering wreck in her presence, even JJ. Maybe especially JJ, who blushed and puffed whenever she breezed through the rec room. JJ mostly wanted to be Super Not-a-Fat-Kid, though he never said that either. We knew these things about each other without saying.
Then when we were seniors, JJ’s daddy had a massive stroke and died. In the wake of it, things went all kinds of wrong and weird between us, and he quit school to help his mom run Jacoby Motors, their used-car dealership. Our paths never crossed after that. We never spoke or even saw each other. Not once. His house was biking-distance close to mine, so it had to be on purpose.
Four years later he showed up at Mom and Keith’s annual drop-in Christmas Eve party. I was on door duty, but I didn’t recognize him. He was a tall, blond stranger, smiling and holding a bottle of Riesling.
“Merry Christmas!” he said.
He leaned in to kiss the air near my cheek, and, oddly enough, I recognized him then, by smell. He was three inches taller, with a gym body, subtle highlights, and maybe a nose job, too. For sure he’d done some kind of movie-actor nonsense to his teeth. Uniform and overwhite, they made his smile seem insincere. But under a dash of subtle aftershave, I caught the essential smell of my onetime best friend.
“JJ?” I said, boggling at him.
“I go by Jake now, Leia,” he said, and then clapped me on the shoulder. Heartily. As if I were some bro of his in a beer ad. “Good to see you! We’ll have to catch up.”
He thrust the cold wine into my hands and breezed past, heading right for Rachel. He stayed with her all night, lounging against the wall, telling her all about how he’d saved the family business and now had a three-year plan to open up a Nissan dealership as well. He was Self-Made Ken, charming the pants off Holiday-Champagne-Buzz Barbie.
He’d called me Leia because you don’t call the first girl you ever had sex with by her old pet name. Not when that name was “Lay.” Not if you’ve always been in love with her stepsister.
Now I stood in the wake of our old names, clutching my cake carrier to my chest and feeling an odd, bad tang in the air around me. He bent down to stuff spilled clothes back into the bag he’d dropped. It was one of Rachel’s reusable Whole Foods bags.
“Are you on a Goodwill run?” I asked him. Stupid, but it was the only thing that came into my head.
“No. What are you doing here?” He shoved his flop of blown-out blond hair off his forehead as he straightened up.
“It’s Sunday,” I said. “Where else would I possibly be?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Rachel canceled lunch. She sent you an e-mail.”
A khaki pants leg with a razor crease ironed into it was hanging out of the bag. I tucked it back in and saw a baby blue shirt with pinstripes and a button-down collar. This was practically Jake’s uniform. Then I realized that the gray knit wad of cloth on top was a pair of boxer briefs, and I flushed and made myself look back at his face. Really look.
He had dark circles under his eyes, and his face was puffy. For a moment it was like I could see the round, sad face of my old friend JJ. A ghost face, transparent and faint, superimposed over my brother-in-law’s chiseled features.
“What are you doing?” I asked him quietly, human to human.