Sweetwater Creek (23 page)

She smiled at them. In the candlelight she was suddenly as beautiful as a madonna. Emily remembered that Buddy had said she had a natural elegance.

“I’ve been offered a job at Saint Francis Hospital in Charleston,” she said. “And I’ve accepted it. It’s in the public relations office and the pay is really good. I’d have enough to travel like I’ve wanted to, and to maybe one day buy a little house. A friend from college has asked me to share her house in West Ashley, and since we’ve always gotten along wonderfully, I think that’s what I’ll do.”

She fell silent. The table was silent, too. Emily stared at her. For just a moment, the bridge crumbled and the moat ran dry. She heard in her head the companionable talk between Jenny and Cleta in the kitchen, Jenny and Walter’s laughter floating up the stairs into her bedroom at night. She looked at Jenny Raiford’s silver candlesticks gleaming on the table, and felt again her aunt’s arms firmly around her on the day she had gotten her first period and had thought she was dying. For a moment the world went black and howled. Jenny Raiford had always been a buffer between her and her father.

Jenny looked around the table, still smiling. “You really don’t need me now,” she said. “You girls are both grown-up and doing a fine job of looking after things, and Cleta will come in the mornings just like she always has to straighten up and get lunch, and her niece will come in after dinner and wash up. It’s all I could have wanted, a really good job and finally getting to travel, and seeing Emily so happy and busy. Everybody’s happy, now, it seems to me. We owe Lulu a lot.”

Lulu bent her head, accepting the words, but she was not smiling. Emily looked at her, seated as always on her father’s left. She was frowning, a small, puzzled frown.

“I’ll miss you,” Emily said, throat and nose beginning to burn. “I really will.”

Behind Jenny’s chair, Walter squeezed her slim shoulders.

“Well, for a long time we surely couldn’t have done without her,” he said. “She deserves her own life now. We’ll be just fine.”

For a moment Jenny Raiford’s eyes closed, and then they opened and she was smiling around the table once more. In a burst of clarity, Emily read behind her aunt’s closed eyes. She looked up at her father. His face in the candlelight was suddenly younger, warm and softened with a tenderness Emily had never seen, really quite beautiful. She saw, in a sort of swift epiphany, how he must have looked when he met her mother, saw with astonishment that he was a man a woman could love.

“We’re going to be just fine,” he repeated. His eyes were on Lulu, who looked down at her plate. The burning in Emily’s throat grew into a lump she could scarcely swallow around.

Oddly, she and Lulu did not discuss her aunt’s leaving when they got back to the apartment.

“Back to school for you and back to work for me,” Lulu said, and they both simply got into bed and Lulu turned off the light. But it was a long time before Emily slept.

When she got home from school the next afternoon, Jenny Raiford was gone. There was no one in the big, dim house, and the silence echoed louder than shouting would have done. Emily went up to her hot, closed room to get another armful of clothes to move out to Lulu’s. Beside her, Elvis whined.

They stopped by her aunt’s bedroom before going down the stairs. Buddy’s room. It was locked, as it had been for so long before Jenny Raiford had come to Sweetwater. Elvis paced nervously in the silent hall, ears back, toenails clicking.

Turning away, Emily noticed for the first time the yellow Post-it on her own closed bedroom door. It was from her aunt.

“Here’s my address and phone number, both at work and at home. If you don’t get me, there’s an answering machine. I’ll call back as soon as possible. You call me
any time
, if you need anything at all, or if you just want to talk. I’ll be pretty busy at first, but I’ll check in with you at least once a week. Be happy, Emmybug. And be careful. I love you. Always have. Always will. Aunt Jenny.”

Emily sat down slowly on the top step of the dusty staircase in the empty house and buried her face in Elvis’s curly neck and cried.

FOR WHAT SEEMED
to Emily a long time, they did not speak of Jenny Raiford. Occasionally, at dinner, Walter would say, “Have you heard from Jenny? I haven’t heard a word. Give her a call, why don’t you?”

But somehow they did not. Obscurely, Emily felt that to do so would open the door into that great, echoing interior cavern she kept tightly shut since Jenny had left. Lulu had been silent and abstracted. But even unevoked, Jenny Raiford’s presence hung in the air like a toothache.

One evening in late September as they were riffling idly through Lulu’s battered old English textbook,
Contemporary Poetry
, Lulu laid the book aside and looked at Emily.

“Is there something between your aunt and your father?” she said.

Emily was caught off guard, and for a moment could not think of a reply. It was a far more complicated question than it seemed on the surface.

“Well, there was once, I think,” she said carefully. “He was dating Aunt Jenny before he ever met my mother. He came out here to visit her sometimes; there’s a photo of them together in the library. But I don’t think they saw each other anymore after Mother came along.”

“But I think she’s still in love with him,” Emily thought but did not say. To speak the words would be to edge far too close to the mouth of the cavern.

Lulu turned her head away, but not before Emily had seen a sheen of tears in her eyes.

“You better go on down to bed,” she said. “I want to read a while more, and you’ve got school tomorrow.”

Emily was unaccustomed to being downright dismissed from Lulu’s presence, and shifted awkwardly on the sofa, looking at her. Then she got up and went silently down the barn stairs to her bedroom. Elvis followed, clicking behind her and bumping her legs with his cold nose. Emily did not think she would sleep for a long time that night.

In the second week of their shared occupancy, it had become clear that the apartment was too small in some ways for both of them. When they fiddled about getting dressed or read and listened to music after dinner everything was fine; they laughed a lot, and Emily was beginning to love the sound of Lulu’s rich, light voice speaking words that had come to resonate in the deepest parts of her. But when it was time for bed, or occasionally even at the beginning of the evening, old routines collided and neither seemed to be able to accommodate them. Emily was accustomed to watching television in bed, often late into the night, and Lulu loathed the TV. She kept hers in a closet, and Emily had to ask if she especially wanted to see something. Lulu said nothing, but tapped her foot restlessly while the screen flickered, and pointedly tried to read, without success. Often Emily was tired and wanted just to sink into the lavender-scented sheets with Elvis and sleep, but was kept awake by Lulu’s CDs and her reading light. For a few days neither said anything, but the evenings were soon strained, and finally Lulu said, “This isn’t working. I love being with you most of the time, and I need to know you’re near, but we’re going to end up having a fight one of these nights, and I couldn’t stand that. I have an idea.”

The next evening she asked Walter if she and Emily might fix up the little feed room to the left of the staircase up to the apartment in the barn.

“I know there’s a water line, because it leads into that big trough, and there’s electricity. I thought we could sort of spruce it up and make a little bedroom of it. I’m keeping Emily awake on school nights, and I don’t want her to have to come back to the house just to get some sleep. I’ve got almost enough things stored in the stable to furnish it.”

Within the week, Walter and the twins and Cleta’s son GW had paneled the dreary little room in cypress and laid down a hardwood floor over the cold concrete, and installed a tiny bathroom with a fiberglass shower in one corner, shielded by a red Chinese screen that Lulu had banished from the apartment, and a wall of shelves. The gas line that fed the winter puppy kennels next door was run into it, and a hot water tank and small furnace installed just outside. Emily found an old maple twin bed in the barn attic that she thought she remembered from early childhood, along with a birds’-eye maple rocking chair and a spavined sofa from who knew where. Dusted and polished and dragged downstairs, they shone sweetly in the light from the lamps Lulu’s mother had brought early in the summer. An exotic, faintly Persian bedspread with matching poufy drapes and bright throw pillows and Mexican scatter rugs, all rejected by Lulu, lit the low-ceilinged dusk of the room into enfolding warmth.

Emily’s bureau and mirror and desk from her old room were the only things she brought to her new bedroom—those and armloads of books from Buddy’s shelves. She had not delved into them yet. It was enough for the moment to have so much of Buddy close by.

She had thought she might find some prints or paintings for the walls, but she did not want to take Buddy’s from his room, and the rest of the house yielded little but hunting prints and photographs of long-deceased champion Boykins. She would have loved the painting of the plantation over the dining room mantelpiece, but it seemed irrevocably wedded to its spot, and so she settled for photographs of Elvis taken at different stages of his life, from earliest puppyhood to beautiful maturity. In some he held a perfect point, in others he leaped forever out into the river in his glorious copper arc, and in still others he lay on Emily’s bed looking up at the camera and grinning.

The one small, high window looked out into the little stand of trees whose branches kissed Lulu’s upstairs windows, and under it stood an ornate carved Mexican chest, destined for Lulu’s apartment and banished early on. Elvis often slept there, curled into a Greek throw in the daytimes, but he slept at night tucked as closely into Emily’s side as he could manage. It was comforting to wake in the cooling nights not quite knowing where she was, and feel his warm weight, and know that wherever she slept, with him beside her, it was home.

Emily loved the cavelike little room, and though she still spent the bulk of her waking time upstairs with Lulu, it was often with real gratitude that she slipped downstairs to her lair at evening’s end with Elvis and reruns of
Stargate SG
and
The X Files
. Lulu laughed at her choices and lobbied for
Masterpiece Theatre
and old movies. But Emily was not yet ready to give up the swaddling world of science fiction that had been such a safe haven for her in the cold, flat time after Buddy died and before Lulu came.

The next morning Lulu’s shine had been restored, and she sang as she drove Emily to school in the red convertible. At the top of her lungs she sang, “I didn’t know God made honky-tonk angels. I might have known you’d never make a wife. You gave up the only one that ever loved you, and went back to the wild side of life.”

Her rich molasses voice slid up into a perfect hillbilly twang, and Emily laughed helplessly as they roared into the school parking lot. Heads snapped around and slouching cool was abandoned at the sight of the little red lance of a car and Lulu, gilt hair streaming, eyes shielded by enormous black sunglasses, singing Hank Williams so loudly that it carried over the silken noise of the engine.

“Everybody’s going to be talking about me,” Emily said, getting out of the car. People were still staring. Her cheeks and neck reddened.

“High time,” Lulu said, and squealed out of the parking lot.

No one mentioned the car directly to Emily, but a couple of the older boys sidled up to her at lunchtime and said, “Who’s the babe?” and one of the varsity cheerleaders asked her to sit with her crowd at lunch. But Emily was suddenly stricken mute by the unearned attention, and muttered a refusal and had her sandwich sitting on the steps with a copy of Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
, which Lulu thought a good vessel for launching her into poetry.

Lulu took Emily to school most mornings, and soon the BMW became a part of the landscape and the conspicuous admiration abated. But Emily knew that she had advanced several giant steps in the game of Middle School, even if it was in a red BMW convertible.

Lulu’s high spirits lasted the whole week; at the dinners she and Emily cooked she was once again the magical, gesturing spinner of tales and fables, and the general laughter largely banished the thin ghost of Jenny Raiford that hovered at ceiling level in the dining room.

Emily’s school had altered their training routine, so now they trained the older puppies and dogs ready for finishing in the afternoons. In the mornings while Emily was away, Lulu took over the schooling of the youngest puppies, and often Walter worked with her. He did not have to; Lulu was almost as good as Emily now with the babies, but it pleased her father to see the new crops coming along so smoothly, and Emily suspected that he hugely enjoyed the time spent with Lulu. His awe at her social cachet had largely been replaced with something easier, almost lighthearted. But the Foxworth name still lit his eyes. The twins still lingered around Lulu as long as they decently could, but they had long ago relinquished any hopes of impressing her, and had to be content with warming themselves at a distance at her fire. GW came in the mornings to help with the kennel work, and the boys and Walter took the late-afternoon advanced training. Cleta still came in the early mornings to make breakfast and clean, but she did not stay long into the afternoons now. Her niece Tijuan, the feckless mother of small Robert, now in one of her domestic phases, came to do the dishes and tidy up after dinner while Cleta sat with Robert. All in all, it was a comfortable arrangement, and life at Sweetwater continued on largely as it always had.

The one exception was that Emily seldom saw Cleta anymore. She and Lulu got their own breakfast in the early morning, before they left for school, and Cleta was gone when Emily got home. Caught up in the spell of dogs and Lulu and the slow bronze Lowcountry fall, she seldom thought of Cleta’s absence from her life. But sometimes, on the back of her neck, a cool little wind blew, as if from a vast empty space somewhere behind her. And then sometimes she would see or hear something that pleased her and would think, “Oh, I have to remember to tell Cleta that,” and just as quickly she would forget it. Still, there was that sense of wind at her back often that fall. Jenny and Cleta had displaced a lot of air.

One evening in mid-October Walter said at the table, “I hear that Jenny has a new beau. Have you all heard anything about that?”

“No,” Emily said. “How do you know?”

“Cleta told me this morning. Apparently Jenny calls her occasionally just to check in. I’m surprised she hasn’t called you, Emily, but then you’re not in very much. You could catch her on weekends at home, though.”

“I will,” Emily said. “Who’s this boyfriend?”

“A hospital administrator, or something,” Walter said. “I’m glad to hear it. She’s a pretty woman, and she’s buried herself in other people’s lives too much. She needs to have some fun.”

Obscure resentment stabbed Emily. Present or not, Jenny Raiford was a part of the cloth of this family. Emily wanted no strange hospital administrators introduced into the tapestry. She looked across the table at Lulu, but the girl sat with her eyes on her plate, long gold-tipped lashes shuttering her eyes.

The next morning before school, Emily crossed the dew-frosted lawn to seek out Cleta in the warm kitchen.

“Hey,” she said, hooking a hot biscuit from the tray Cleta was carrying in to the breakfast room.

“Hey yourself,” Cleta said. “You honoring us with your presence this morning?”

“I miss your biscuits,” Emily said, taking another one. “I miss you. Why didn’t you tell me about Aunt Jenny’s new boyfriend?”

“When I ever see you?” Cleta said, smacking dishes around in the sink. “I’m always in here, and you’re livin’ out in the feed room now. I guess Lulu kicked you out of her apartment?”

“No. I’m there most of the time. We read together and listen to music. We both just needed separate sleeping places so we wouldn’t bother each other.”

“Well, you got a separate place right here, a big, pretty room upstairs. Seem to me like it be a lot more comfortable than an old dog food room.”

“You ought to come see it; it’s really pretty,” Emily said defensively.

“I bet,” Cleta said. There was a long silence. It was obvious to Emily that she was not going to chat, so she turned and went slowly out into the pale sunlight, calling behind her, “Tell Aunt Jenny I’d like to talk to her when she calls again.”

Cleta said nothing.

“Cleta’s acting really funny, all quiet and grumpy,” she told Lulu that evening. “Do you think she’s sick?”

“Not in the way you mean,” Lulu said, and was quiet again herself for the rest of the night. Vaguely uneasy and weary of nuances she could not quite grasp, Emily put it out of her mind, and the golden autumn rolled on.

On a Sunday afternoon so washed with muted gold and green and warmed with sun from a high, clarion blue sky that it seemed to have at its heart the entire essence of a Lowcountry autumn, Emily and Lulu were stretched out on a blanket in the shade at the edge of the puppy ring, playing with an armful of puppies and reading Keats.

“Listen, Emily, isn’t this perfect?” Lulu said. “‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.’ He could be talking about fall on these marshes and this river.”

“Mmmmm,” Emily murmured, drifting in half-sleep while the puppies tugged at her shoelaces with their little briar teeth and Elvis, his red coat burning and smelling of sun and dust, sighed and shifted against her outstretched leg.

Autumn insects—cicadas, crickets, and grasshoppers—droned and burred in the soft pluff-smelling air. The crunch of approaching footsteps on the gravel of the drive broke into the silence, and a slow, throaty voice said, “I might have known I’d find the two of you here, covered in puppies and sleeping in the sun.”

“Grand!” Lulu cried, sitting up straight and shielding her eyes to look at her grandmother. The old woman stood in the edge of the shade, looking to Emily frailer than ever, though wonderfully dressed in a smart tweed suit with leather shooting patches on the elbows and shoulder, and polished brown oxfords, and a tweed fedora pulled down over one blue eye. To Emily, coming up out of sleep, she looked like something come to preposterous life out of a book about English country houses such as the one Lulu had been reading to her.