Chapter 8 - The Clearing of the Hall
Three weeks later, the live oaks along Abercorn Street were dropping their acorns, the small, hard nuts clicking against the roof of my twelve-year-old Subaru like birdshot every time the coastal wind picked up from the sound.
The front yard of my small wood-frame bungalow in Thunderbolt was overgrown with crabgrass and wild mint, but the ramp we had built two years ago—pressure-treated pine with a non-skid rubber runner—was clear.
Luke was standing at the top of the landing, wearing his work boots and a clean denim jacket, holding an electric drill in his right hand.
He was replacing the bottom stringer where the wet salt air had rotted the wood near the garden hose. Beside him on the porch, sitting in an antique wicker rocker that had belonged to my aunt, sat a plastic car seat holding four-month-old Leo, who was currently occupied with chewing on a silicone teether shaped like a lighthouse.
The gate clicked.
A black town car—an old Lincoln from the Skidaway Island livery service—had stopped at the curb, its engine idling with a low, wet purr.
My mother got out of the back seat.
She did not wear her beige wool coat. She wore a simple gray cardigan, flat shoes, and no jewelry save for her wedding band. She walked up the concrete path between the overgrown mint with small, hesitant steps, her handbag clutched against her stomach with both hands.
Luke stopped the drill. The motor whined down to a stop, the sudden silence filled only by the wind through the cedar trees.
Mom stopped at the base of the ramp. She looked at Luke, then at the baby in the wicker rocker, and finally up at me where I was standing in the screen door with a basket of folded pediatric laundry against my hip.
“Claire,” she said. Her voice was thin, stripped of the velvet, stripped of the committee authority. “Arthur told me you were home.”
“Lily is inside,” I said through the wire mesh. “She’s doing her speech exercises with the county therapist.”
Mom took two steps up the wooden incline, her shoes making a hollow, wooden sound on the rubber runner. “Can I see her? Just for five minutes, Claire. I brought her the porcelain music box—the one with the silver carousel that your father bought in Munich.”
I didn't open the screen door.
I rested my shoulder against the jamb, looking down at the woman who had spent fifty years teaching me that peace was something you purchased by letting other people cut off your fingers.
“The music box has lead paint on the horses, Mom,” I said. “And Lily doesn't play with porcelain anymore. She plays with plastic. Plastic doesn't break when people knock it over.”
Mom’s lower lip gave that small, familiar twitch, but this time the tears that followed were real. They didn't stop at the powder line; they ran down into the deep crevices around her mouth, making her look seventy-five instead of sixty-five.
“Vanessa’s hearing is on Thursday, Claire,” she whispered, her hands tightening around her leather bag until the seams groaned. “Cole says the state isn't offering diversion. They’re asking for five years at Pulaski State Prison. Five years in a dormitory with... with women from Atlanta.”
“The sentencing guidelines for a Class A aggravated battery on a minor are three to twenty, Mom,” Luke said from the top of the ramp, his drill resting on his knee. He didn't raise his voice. He spoke like a man reading an invoice for a load of gravel. “She’s lucky they aren't charging her with attempted manslaughter. If the photographer hadn't shot at twelve frames, she’d be facing twelve.”
Mom looked at Luke, her eyes wide and wild. “She’s your wife, Luke! You took vows at St. John’s!”
“I took vows to protect my family, Eleanor,” Luke said, looking over at his son in the rocker. “I just didn't realize until the water hit the floor that Vanessa wasn't my family. She was just the tenant who had the biggest room in the house.”
He picked up his drill, turned back to the pine stringer, and hit the trigger.
The high, screaming whine of the carbon-steel bit driving into the green wood drowned out whatever Mom said next. Her mouth moved, her shoulders shook, but the noise of the work was too loud, too clean, and too heavy for her words to reach the porch.
I watched her turn around.
She walked down the ramp, her gray cardigan catching for a second on an unplaned splinter near the handrail, before she pulled it free and climbed back into the dark interior of the livery car.
May you like
The door shut with a heavy, expensive thud.
The car pulled away from the curb, its tires leaving two dark, wet tracks in the fallen oak leaves that led all the way down the lane toward the Savannah turnpike.
