Page 2 of The Night the Lights Went Out
Having gone back inside, she listened to her footsteps echo against the bare walls as she moved from room to room. The house had never really felt like home to her, just as none of their previous four houses had. Michael thought they needed to upgrade every couple of years to keep up with his job success. They had moved into a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood each time, staying within the same school district to make it easier on the kids. And easier for Michael’s affair, Merilee had realized much later.
Merilee thought she should be thankful for the frequent moves, knowing that leaving a beloved home would be almost as painful as leaving an eleven-year marriage. Or burying a favorite dog. Instead, this parting was as easy as pulling off a Band-Aid—it would sting a little but be forgotten as soon as they’d unpacked the first box in the new house.
The kids strapped themselves into the backseat of the minivan as Merilee headed down the driveway one last time and drove down the street without looking back. No neighbors came out to wave good-bye. She didn’t know them well, having always worked and not had the time to build relationships in each of the neighborhoods they’d lived in, and hadn’t expected any more fanfare when they left than when they’d arrived.
She waved good-bye to the guard at the front gate just as the first drops of rain began to pelt the dry asphalt and her dirty windshield, already splattered with the remains of dozens of insects. The rain and bugs were, Merilee thought, a fitting tribute to her old life, the one she couldn’t quite let go of yet had no interest in holding on to, either. She thought of the boxes of old maps shifting around in the back of the minivan, reminding her again of the impermanence of things and how nothing stayed the same no matter how much you wanted it to.
• • •
SUGAR
Sugar Prescott sat at her dining room table in the front room of the old farmhouse, tapping out a letter to her best friend, Willa Faye Mackenzie Cox, on her 1949 Smith-Corona typewriter, her bottle of Wite-Out sitting nearby. She rarely had to use it but always wanted to make sure it was close by just in case. At ninety-three, she didn’t have a lot of time to waste. And Willa Faye had all the time in the world to sit and wait for a letter. Her daughter had recently moved her to a senior living facility with the improbable name of the Manors. If there was one good thing about not having children, Sugar decided, it was being spared the indignity of being moved into such a place, like a box of old toys that a child has outgrown but doesn’t want to get rid of completely.
She glanced outside, not wanting to miss the approach of her new renters. She hadn’t met Merilee Dunlap or her children before, but the Realtor, Robin Henderson, who’d been handling the rental of the Craftsman cottage behind Sugar’s farmhouse, had only good things to say about all three of them. Robin’s children had attended Prescott Elementary with the Dunlap children, making Robin privy to the unsavory gossip surrounding the Dunlap divorce. Not one to gossip, but a good listener, Sugar had suggested the cottage as a good spot for the family to land while they decided what to do next. It wasn’t as if she had any desire to befriend anyone, but Sugar had the feeling that Merilee Dunlap, whoever she was, was suddenly and unexpectedly on her own and in need of help. And Sugar was in a position to understand that need more than most. She suspected, but would deny if anyone asked, that she was getting soft in her old age.
She typed one last word, then drew the carriage back before standing and approaching the front window. The rain had tapered off, leaving a smoking, dripping landscape, her climbing roses on the front porch supports waterlogged, with petals opened as if gasping for breath. The small lake that sat in the front of the property, separated from the road by the white ranch rail fence, was thick like syrup, as brown as molasses because of the rain. She had a sudden image of her brother Jimmy sitting on the muddy bank, fishing for turtles, his feet bare and his freckled nose red and blistered. Although all four brothers were long gone, Sugar now found herself seeing them more and more, as if old age were nothing more than the past and present squeezing together like an accordion until no air was left.
She watched as a white minivan turned off the paved road onto the long drive leading around the lake to the farmhouse, winding between the stately oak trees that had been planted by her great-grandfather before the Civil War, their roots as wide as the trees were tall. The road was a ribbon of red Georgia clay, soft and muddy with rain, the minivan hugging the side, where grass gave the wheels some traction. Sugar smiled to herself, thinking that Merilee Dunlap knew something about driving in wet Georgia clay.
She moved to the front porch and waited for the minivan to pull to a stop. It wasn’t ideal, sharing a driveway, seeing the comings and goings of her renters, but if there was one thing she wouldn’t do, it was have one more strip of her property bulldozed for another driveway. Her brothers had done a good enough job of plowing under all the farmland the Prescott family had once owned, and she would not continue their legacy, no matter how inconvenient it was for her.
The woman who carefully stepped from the minivan wasn’t what Sugar had expected. She was younger—mid-thirties, Sugar thought—and much prettier. As if men didn’t divorce pretty women. She was surprised to find that she’d thought she’d be able to spot a flaw in her new tenant, something that would explain how she’d ended up in the predicament she was in. As if Sugar didn’t know better.
“Hello,” the woman said, stepping carefully onto the flagstone walkway before sliding open the side door of the minivan and waiting for two children to emerge. The children were as blond as the woman was dark. She had straight, no-nonsense brown hair, parted at the side, and hazel eyes that looked almost green. Her only makeup was a flick of mascara, a touch of nose powder, and a sheer gloss of exhaustion.
“I’m Merilee Dunlap,” she said, extending her hand.
Sugar grasped the tips of her fingers, still unused to the way women shook hands these days, but didn’t return the smile. She didn’t want Merilee to think of her as anything more than her landlady. “And these must be your children, Lily and Colin.”
“They are. Children, this is Mrs. Prescott, whose house we’ll be renting.” Both children extended hands as they were introduced, confirming to Sugar that their mother, despite other issues, had done a good job in teaching manners.
“Our old neighborhood was called Prescott Farms,” said Lily, her eyes wide and earnest, her forehead creased as if she spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the world around her.
Sugar’s mother had barely been cold in her grave before her oldest brother, Harry, sold the property for no other reason than somebody wanted to buy it. The memory still hurt. “Yes, well, that was part of my family’s farm back when I was a little girl. Most everything around the county with the Prescott name on it used to belong to my family. But that was a while ago, when there were lots of Prescotts around these parts. Now there’s only me.”
Facing Merilee, she said, “Please call me Sugar. Everybody does. My real name’s Alice Prescott Bates, but I’ve been known as Sugar Prescott my whole life and I see no need to change it now. I was married just a short time before I became a widow, so my married name really never stuck. And the children can call me Miss Sugar.”
“I smell cookies,” the boy said, looking up at her with a hopeful expression. His light blue eyes were the same shade as those of her youngest brother, Jimmy, making her forget, just for a moment, that he’d been gone more than seventy years. And in that moment of weakness, she stepped back to open the door wider. “Come on inside,” she said. “They had sugar on sale at Kroger, so I had to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies. If you don’t want them, I’ll have to give them to my friend at the nursing home, because I don’t eat them.”
“We really don’t mean to intrude,” Merilee said, a hand on each child’s shoulder.
“Yes, well, the cookies won’t eat themselves, so somebody has to.”
The little girl’s eyebrows knitted together. “Are they gluten free? I keep having tummy aches and my friend Beth says I probably have a gluten allergy.”
Merilee put her arm around Lily and sent a pained look at Sugar. “She’s never been allergic to chocolate chip cookies before. I think the upheaval of the last few months has just given us all a bit of a stomach upset.”
“My tummy’s fine,” Colin announced. “I can eat Lily’s if she doesn’t want them.”
Sugar began leading the way back to the kitchen, then stopped as Colin paused at the threshold to the dining room and pointed at the typewriter. “What’s that?”
Sugar took a deep breath, more concerned about future generations now than she’d been ten minutes before. “That’s a typewriter. It’s what people used to use before computers. I used to have a good-housekeeping column in theAtlanta Journalback in the day, and they gave me this typewriter when they retired both me and the column in 1982.”
His eyes widened as if he were being presented with the key to Disney World. “Wow. That was way before I was born.” With a quizzical expression on his face, he turned his head to look up at Sugar. “So you must be very old.”
“Colin... ,” Merilee began.
Sugar waved her hand in the air, stopping her. “You are correct, Colin. I am very old. Ninety-four in December, as a matter of fact. Thank you kindly for pointing that out.”
