Page 7 of The Night the Lights Went Out
“Now I’ve got a headache. Thank you, Merilee, for starting my day off by bringing up Tybee and those horrible memories.”
“They weren’t all horrible, Mama. There were so many good ones, and I wish you’d reconsider—”
She heard a fumbling sound and then her father’s voice. “Merilee? Why are you giving your mother a headache? I hope you’re not talking about your divorce—you know how upsetting it is for your mother. I think it’s best if we hang up now until you’ve calmed down and can talk about more civil subjects. Good-bye, Merilee. We’ll talk to you soon.”
Merilee hit “end” before she could hear the click from her father hanging up the phone. She pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, not trusting her shaking hands to hold the steering wheel straight. She practiced her deep breathing for a moment, until she was distracted by the bag on the seat beside her and picked it up. Being careful not to disturb the tissue paper too much—Lily would be able to tell—she parted it carefully and looked inside.
She’d expected a small bottle of blowing bubbles and maybe a bag of chips or a cookie. Instead, she pulled out a black-and-white gift card from Sephora worth twenty dollars. Merilee’s first thought was to call a friend to discuss how odd this gift was for a ten-year-old, and if she should get a gift for Colin just in case his room mother hadn’t seen the need for a little first-day-of-school lagniappe. And then she realized that she’d jettisoned all her old friends along with her marriage and house.
Not that she’d had any close friends—at least not since high school and college. She’d left her old friends behind along with her hometown and the memories it contained. Besides, she’d always worked full-time, which didn’t allow time to build close friendships with the other mothers at school. She’d worked not because they needed her income, but because Merilee never wanted to be as dependent on her husband as her mother was on her father. But, as her mother had pointed out more than once, look where her independence had gotten her.
She took a deep, shuddering breath, feeling the trembling in her fingers begin to subside, then let her gaze fall to the floor on the passenger side, where a small box of her antique maps sat, apparently forgotten during the unloading. Reaching over, she picked it up and set it on her lap, resisting the urge to reach inside and follow a random map to an unknown destination. She couldn’t, of course. There were Lily and Colin—the best things that had ever happened to her—and she had a strong suspicion that she needed them as much as they needed her right now.
As she put the car in drive and pulled out into traffic, she kept the box of maps on her lap, if only to remind herself that nothing ever stayed the same, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Three
SUGAR
Sugar squinted at her reflection in the mirror over the hall table as she carefully applied her lipstick. Until the day her mother decided to stop getting out of bed, Sugar had seen her mama do this at the exact same mirror every time Astrid left the house or someone came to the door. Always humming or singing, even when putting on lipstick. It was Sugar’s earliest recollection of her mama, hearing her beautiful voice singing her to sleep. Her daddy called it singing sad, on account of the sorrowful tunes that she favored. He always said it like an accusation, looking at Mama as if he were expecting an apology.
The memory stung Sugar like a slap, causing her hand to shake and forcing her to lean against the table. She’d always thought that memories were supposed to fade as she got older. Only the good ones, apparently. The bad ones seemed to grow sharper, a knife blade pressed against her skin, threatening to cut her if she turned to look too closely.
She closed her eyes for a long moment, thinking she could hear the braying of the mules in the fields and smell the dust from the road churned up by the metal-rimmed wheels of a hay cart. Thought, too, she heard the shattering of breaking glass in a sleeping house and the sound of her mother’s bare feet on the floor. The sharp shout of a name. Echoes of a past that was like a shadow that stayed long after the sun disappeared.
Sugar’s eyes snapped open, trying to focus on the reflection in front of her. The cotton fields had long since been plowed under, the mules gone long before that. And Astrid had been laid to rest more than sixty years before. Sugar leaned forward, blinking rapidly behind her glasses, peering into the old mirror. The woman who stared back wasn’t her. She never would have allowed her hair to get so white, or her skin so wrinkled. Astrid used to say that Sugar was so strong willed a tornado wouldn’t be able to shift her position on anything. Maybe time was more covert, slowly spooling the years until there was no thread left behind you and all that remained was a stranger’s face in the mirror.
She glanced down at the plate of brownies she’d placed on the hall table, unsure why she’d made them or for whom. True to her nickname, she’d been born with a sweet tooth the size of Stone Mountain. But besides robbing her of night vision and her once-beautiful gold hair, old age had muted her taste buds, too. It put her out of sorts. It didn’t seem fair how finally when she’d reached the age where she didn’t have to worry about her figure anymore, she’d stopped craving sweets. If she somehow managed to make it to heaven, she’d demand an explanation.
The inability to sleep was another one of Father Time’s little jokes on the elderly. For years now she’d wake up around three in the morning and would read either her Bible or the latest Harlan Coben novel or whatever thriller she’d found on the New in Print table at the new library in Milton. But the night before, she’d chosen to bake brownies instead. Despite her intentions of having nothing to do with her new tenants, her thoughts never seemed to stray far from the young divorcée and her two children. There was something so familiar about Merilee Dunlap, something sad and haunted about her that had nothing to do with her recent divorce. Most people would miss it when looking at her, but Sugar had lots of experience recognizing the perpetually haunted.
Now she had three dozen chocolate brownies that she couldn’t taste arranged on a plate with plastic wrap, and, having survived the Great Depression, she would not throw out anything, regardless of how unwanted or useless it appeared to be. She’d seen Merilee’s minivan rumbling down the drive an hour before and figured that they’d had enough time to have already had supper and she wouldn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of being invited to join them. With a heavy sigh, Sugar picked up the plate and stepped outside.
Her hip hurt as she carefully made her way down the steps and onto the drive that connected the properties. Willa Faye called Sugar’s ailments “visits from Arthur Itis,” but giving it a funny name never seemed to ease the pain. Moving her joints and limbs regularly did seem to help, but the first step almost made Sugar think how much easier it would be to sit in a wheelchair all day, letting other people push her around. Maybe it was because Willa Faye had succumbed to such an existence or maybe it was because Sugar had been raised with four brothers, but she found that she had no desire to be pushed around all day.
Bright beams shone from the windows of the cottage as Sugar approached, the front lights forming warm puddles of illumination on the porch floorboards—a complete waste of electricity considering it wouldn’t be dark for another hour and a half. The scent of the boxwoods distracted her from thoughts of Merilee’s extravagances. They always reminded her of Tom and the short time they’d had together here, the pungent aroma of the small, shiny leaves like a switch on her memory that never turned off.
She tried not to think of Tom picking her up and carrying her over this very threshold as she climbed the front steps one at a time, taking a moment to catch her breath before knocking. The main door was open, the screen door allowing in the green scents of a warm summer evening. Not that she was surprised, but there were no smells of supper billowing out of the kitchen. As she lifted her hand to knock, she glanced down and spotted a small toy figurine partly wedged into a crack between floorboards, its sightless face turned up to hers.
There was something about it that made her pause. Maybe it was the wide unseeing eyes or the careful smile that made her feel sorry for it. It wasn’t until after she’d placed the plate of brownies on a porch chair to free her hands that she realized it reminded her of Merilee. Ignoring the common sense that told her that her knees might get her down there but might not get her back up, she squatted down to reach it.
She was still crouched on the porch when the front door opened and the little boy, Colin, stood looking at her as if it were the most natural thing in the world to see her there. “I smelled cookies.”
“They’re brownies. And you can have one if you would please help me up. My knees seem to have forgotten how to stand.”
Colin got himself on his hands and knees, forming a kind of bench. “Put your hands on my back, and I’ll stand up slowly and you can stand up with me.”
She did as she was told, not convinced it would work until her legs were straight enough for her to get her feet underneath her and they were both standing. “You’re a very smart boy, Colin. I hope you’re planning on being an engineer when you grow up.”
He smiled brightly, illuminating a missing-tooth gap in his lower front teeth. “That’s what Mom says, too. But I can’t decide. I’d like to be an ice cream truck driver and eat all the ice cream I want. Or be a funeral guy like my dad’s brother, Uncle Steven. He’s really funny.”
“Your uncle Steven?”
“Uh-huh. He’s an unner-taker. He lets Lily and me ride in the long black car sometimes when we visit him and Aunt Shawna, except she’s not supposed to know. He keeps mints and water in the backseat and he says we can have however much we want.”
Sugar grimaced from the ache in her knees and from Colin’s comment about his uncle. She’d had a lot of experience with undertakers in her ninety-three years and had yet to meet one who was particularly funny or generous. And she could only hope that the long black car Colin referred to was the limousine.
“Thanks, young man.” She rubbed her knees and forced her back to straighten. She did yoga three times a week at the Prescott Bend Country Club—her lifelong membership part of the deal her brother had made when he sold the property it was built on. She probably wasn’t the best advertisement, but she didn’t care. It was free, so she was determined to use it even if it killed her.
