Page 69 of The Night the Lights Went Out
Willa Faye released her hold on my hand. “What did Tom say about the baby?”
“He says he’ll love it as if it were his own, even though I’m not sure that I can. But Tom’s so sure that his love will be enough. And that I’ll grow to love the baby in time.”
“And you will, Sugar. You will. You’ll see.”
I chose to believe her, and once I’d made that choice the rest seemed easy.
I watched the house being built and the birds in their migration patterns decorating the sky, seeing them both as symbols of hope. Before he left to join the colored troops to fight in the war, Lamar built me bird feeders to place in the trees around the new house, and I kept them filled with corn and seeds, remembering what Bobby had told me about karma. I figured if I fed the traveling birds I was doing my part of being good to the universe, and that in repayment it would be good to me.
As it turned out, Tom had less time than we thought. He got two days’ leave, which meant that Mrs. Mackenzie had to make do with magnolia leaves from her backyard instead of the flowers she’d planned to get in Atlanta to decorate the church. At least I’d had time to shop for a suit to wear. Mrs. Mackenzie had said every bride should have a gown, but I was hardheaded and practical like my father. And I remembered the hard times and could not bear to waste money on something I’d wear just once. I suppose I could have worn my mama’s dress, but nobody mentioned it. Maybe because they wanted to think I should start my own marriage with better karma. Not that anybody would have called it that—I’m sure there’s some Christian word for it—but we were all thinking the same thing.
Tom and I got married at the church where I’d been baptized and where we’d had Jimmy’s funeral less than two months before. My daddy was there to give me away, and Mama came, too, her hair washed and combed by Mrs. Mackenzie, her dress hanging on her because she’d gotten so small. My brothers couldn’t get leave, and that was just as well. Mama had Dr. Mackenzie’s arm to lean on and that was all she needed.
Tom was so handsome standing at the front of the church in his uniform, but I think it was his smile I noticed the most, reminding me of the first time we’d met on Stone Mountain and I knew then there was something special about him.
There was a small reception afterward in the church hall, and I knew it would take a long time for me to come up with the right words and the right way to thank Mrs. Mackenzie for everything. But right then I was in too much of a hurry to get Tom alone. It might not have been more than an hour after the ceremony, but it seemed like a century had passed before Tom helped me into his Jeep, then slid in next to me.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Bates,” he said, kissing me gently on the lips.
It was the first time I realized I wasn’t going to be a Prescott any longer, and I pulled back as if he’d made a mistake. But then I smiled and put my arms around him and pressed my lips against his, and that made the wedding guests on the church steps—mostly Willa Faye and her sister and also, I suspected, Mrs. Mackenzie—start shouting and hollering.
We waved good-bye as Tom put the Jeep in gear and we headed toward our new home, ecstatically uncaring of the ruts and dust of the unpaved road. But the road Tom chose took us by the old Brown homestead. Daddy was working the farmland now, the cotton fields replaced by rows of corn to grow what the government needed him to, to supply the war effort, but the house had fallen into disrepair, the front porch all but gone to wind and rot, and most of the windows broken or missing altogether. I suppose if I’d been paying attention, I would have told Tom to go another way like I always did. It was longer, but then I didn’t have to pass the house and remember who’d once lived there. But Tom would have wondered why.
“That doesn’t look right,” Tom said, slowing down the Jeep.
I’d been looking in the other direction like I usually did when I accidentally went this way and had to pass the house, but Tom’s words made me turn around.
“See?” he said, pointing toward the lone chimney and the unmistakable column of smoke rising into the early-evening air. “Isn’t this your daddy’s property?”
I nodded, struggling to find my normal voice. “Nobody’s lived there in a long time. But sometimes Daddy will turn the other way if one of the migrant families needs temporary shelter. That’s why he keeps it stocked with wood. If they decide to stay and work his land, he’ll find a better place for them to live.”
This was the truth, although nobody had been inside the house for more than a year. And I wondered if Tom noticed that there were no lights on in any of the rooms that might indicate more than one person living there.
“Let’s go,” I said, as eager to get home as I was to leave this place behind me.
Tom smiled and took my hand to kiss it, then put his foot down on the gas pedal.
There’d been no time to finish our house. Only the walls in the bedroom and kitchen had been Sheetrocked—something new Daddy said would be quicker than plastering and just as good—and the outside hadn’t yet been painted. But when we pulled up to the front, Tom laughed.
“I told Lamar that I wanted a front porch swing. I didn’t think they’d have time to build one and hang it, but I guess I was wrong.”
He opened my door and swung me up in his arms like a baby. He kissed me properly this time, the kind of kiss that made me forget things like the woods after nightfall. “I’m going to carry you over the threshold for good luck, and then we’re going to rock a bit in the swing. Because that’s how I want to think of you when I’m over there, fighting. I want to picture my beautiful wife sitting here on this swing, saving a seat for me beside her.”
We sat in the porch swing and huddled under a blanket and talked until the stars disappeared from the sky and the light turned pink. Then we went to bed and Tom made me forget, for a little while, about the war being waged on the other side of the ocean, and the smoke rising from a house that should have been empty.
Twenty-four
MERILEE
As the rear door to the Odyssey lifted, Merilee stifled a groan. Colin’s game tablet—given to him by Michael as a consolation prize for the divorce and disguised as last year’s Christmas present—sat in the middle of the trunk. She slid in her suitcase and picked it up, thinking she could just put it into Michael’s mailbox on the way out of town as she headed to Tybee.
Or not. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Colin playing with it. Since Sugar had given him the field glasses, they were rarely parted. A few times he’d gone to sleep with them around his neck, and it reminded her of Jimmy. As Merilee had carefully removed them to his nightstand, she’d understood what a gift they had been from Sugar.
She tossed the tablet back into the car, then closed the door. It would be there if Colin wanted it when she got back. Returning to the house, she made sure the coffeemaker was turned off and unplugged, the thermostat set to sixty-six degrees—five degrees warmer than Sugar had suggested she set it to if she ever had to leave the house for a long period of time—then checked all the windows to make sure they were shut and locked.
As she locked the front door behind her, she saw again the porch swing hooks and recalled what Sugar had told her about Tom. When she’d reached the part in the story where Tom left to go overseas, Merilee had been pulling up to Sugar’s house and she’d stopped talking. Merilee had turned off the ignition and moved to the other side of the car to help Sugar out—but only because it was too high up; otherwise, Sugar insisted, she could do it herself. Merilee had expected Sugar to invite her inside for some sweet tea so she could finish the story.
Instead, Sugar had thanked Merilee for the ride and had gone inside by herself, closing the door firmly behind her. For a brief moment, while sitting on that bench in the cemetery, Merilee had imagined they’d made a connection. Maybe even had the foundation for a friendship. Or at least found a substitute for an absent mother and a lost daughter. Instead, it appeared that Sugar might not be the only one attempting to fool herself.
