Page 5 of Broken Bayou
And I ran away.
The clip ends. The gaggle of strangers in front of me, now silent, look up. My face flushes with heat. I choke down my bitter pill. “Can I check out now?”
Chapter Two
It takes every ounce of self-control I possess not to unscrew the chardonnay I just purchased and drink it straight from the bottle. Mama would have. But I’m not my mother, I remind myself. If I wasn’t so tired, I might laugh at that thought, as the image of me clawing my shirt off on live television flashes in my head.
A familiar heaviness settles on my chest. A heaviness I welcome. All the good I’ve experienced lately, my podcast, the book, it all makes me nervous. It always has. Accepting good fortune was the hardest thing for me to learn, and I still slip. Still look over my shoulder, looking for the bad, waiting for it, and in a completely unhealthy way, hoping for it. When the bad shows up, I can exhale. Then I know what I’m up against.
Guess I can exhale.
I cruise south on Main Street, passing the ditch where Mama wrecked the old station wagon, then bragged to the tow truck driver she hadn’t even spilled her beer when we crashed.
Memories, like poisonous vines, curl around my throat. Memories of Mama and me and my little sister, Mabry, and our trips to this town every summer to visit my great-aunts on Mama’s side. Down here, it never failed that some kid would ask where I was from because of my accent. As if I was from some faraway land, which in a way, I guess I was. In Greenhill, our northwest corner of the state, we had clipped words and no Mardi Gras until the riverboat casinos showed up. The local news included Texas and Arkansas.Dressedreferred toclothing, not what you wanted on your po’boy. But this place, this town, was what Mama referred to as our escape. And what we were escaping from fluctuated every summer. Her job slinging soggy Tater Tots and Salisbury steak onto plastic trays for the ungrateful students at Greenhill High. Her latest boyfriend. Her bench warrants. So when summer came, we’d load up the station wagon and head south. My great-aunts’ home, our refuge.
The adrenaline from the moment at the Sack and Save has receded and left in its place an edgy jitteriness I can’t seem to shake. The guy tailgating me on this tiny two-lane road isn’t helping. I lower my window and motion for him to go around but he doesn’t.
Something on the far side of the street catches my eye. A white news van like the one at the Sack and Save. I slow down, study it.
My phone rings next to me and I jump. Then I see who it is.
“Hello, Mama.” Of course it’s Mama, tethered to me despite the miles between us, calling at the exact moment I think of her.
“You sound so far away,” she says.
Her voice sounds small and fragile and lonely. I fight off the guilt it triggers and remind myself for the hundredth time she’s where she needs to be.
“I am far away, Mama. I’m in Broken Bayou.”
I refocus on Main Street. There’s no traffic. It feels like a ghost town. And in a way, it is. Full of my ghosts. Everything looks how I remember. Narrow and potholed and quiet. The street names come back to me: Vine, Hill, Church.
“What! Why the hell are you down there?”
I glance at the letter again. A letter that states my great-aunts passed away. Within minutes of each other. Just like how they were born. My throat constricts at the thought. I hadn’t been in touch with them in years. Neither had Mabry or Mama. The Aunts, as everyone called them, hugged Mabry and me, fed us pancakes and coffee, and showed us how to gather eggs from the henhouse without even ruffling a feather. We helped fertilize plants in their greenhouse while Dolly Parton crooned“Here You Come Again” from a small cassette radio. And sometimes, we slept on the floor outside their bedroom door, our little-girl bodies curled like cats around each other. But after our last summer here, and with each passing year, those memories had grown smaller and smaller until they finally dissolved into nothing but dust. I wonder if a VHS tape left in an old attic could turn to dust as well.
“I’m getting your things, remember? The boxes left in the attic?”
There’s a long pause. “Mama?”
“I remember now. That’s right. You said you were gonna go down there.”
She’s lying, but I’m not sure I’m up for exploring her memory loss at the moment. That can wait. Besides, maybe I’m just tired and only hearing lies from the past, not the present.
“The letter,” she says as if she knows she needs to prove something.
“Right.”
Mama says, “You’re getting my things.”
I pull at the collar on my blouse, adjust the air so it blows directly on my face. Mama doesn’t know all the things I’m here to get. I protected her from that.
“Have you seen the news?” Mama’s voice cracks, and she starts to cough.
“Take a breath. Are you wearing your oxygen?”
Her voice rakes over her smoke-ravaged vocal cords. “Listen to me, sweet girl. That bayou is all over the news.”
I straighten, thinking of the news van I just passed, the one I saw earlier. “What do you mean?”
