“They’ll appeal the will, you know,” Mike said. It seemed impossible, on this jeweled morning, that they could be having this conversation.
“Let ‘em. It’s as airtight as the law can make it. I worked on it for a long time. I knew I couldn’t help him much against the DOT, but I can draw a right nice will. I even took the little precaution of hunting up two good shrinks and getting him to go see them so they could testify to his mental state, if they want to claim unsound mind. Getting him there was worth a year’s fee, believe me.
“Sam. You know I can’t pay you for what you’ve done for him. I don’t know when I can. I can’t even think of a way to thank you.”
“It was, as they say, my pleasure.” He was silent for a moment, and then said, softly, “Do you mind so much, Mike? About Sewell?”
“No,” she said unhesitatingly. She held his eyes with hers. “It happened to somebody else. And that’s not shock talking, or bravado. There’s not even going to be any delayed reaction. I’m sure of that. That simply happened to somebody who does not exist anymore.”
“Thank God for small favors,” he said. “That was a good-looking broad, but she was a real pain in the ass.”
Mike laughed. “Was she not,” she said.
“So then, what now?” Sam Canaday said. “You said the other night you were going to go back and get on with it; did you mean that?”
“I … don’t know,” Mike said. “I need some money. I’m almost out. I could go on back and round up some assignments …”
“But?”
“But … I think I really might have a book, Sam. Or rather, the beginning of one. It’s … I don’t know; it’s not like any kind of writing I’ve ever done, and it’s terribly hard to do, and coming slow, and it would need an iron lung … but I think I really like it. I think I’d like to finish it. Whether anybody would want to print it, I have no idea. I could take it to the editor who was interested in the other book, and see if they’d give me another advance. At least, that way, I could pay back the first one.”
“Where would you write it?”
“I don’t know that either. I can’t raise the cost of a co-op in New York, but I might swing a little place, a sublet of some kind.”
“You might try writing it here,” he said, elaborately casual. “If it’s about Lytton, you might as well write it in Lytton.”
“Where on earth would I live? DeeDee’s going to want this house as soon as she can pack,” Mike said.
“She can’t legally take possession of it until the will is probated, and if they’re going to contest it, that’ll tie it up until kingdom come. And I can probably string it out even longer. You’d have plenty of time, time enough to write two books,” he said.
“No. I don’t want to stay in this house.” Mike surprised herself, but knew it was true. “This house never did feel like home to me, really, and with him gone, it’s going to feel even less so. Let Dee have it.”
He looked at her sharply. “You’re not having second thoughts about your inheritance, are you? No bright ideas about nobly turning it over to her after all?”
“Oh, no. Not that, not ever. Maybe I’m being hard and selfish, but I don’t think Dee … deserves that land. Not after what they did. Not that I’ve got an idea in the world what to do with it; what am I going to do with eighty acres of Georgia farmland? But I just couldn’t … but, Sam, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve better than she’s got. She never meant to hurt Daddy. I’m sure of that. She might be greedy, but she adored him. She’s going to be just—stricken about this, for the rest of her life.”
“She’ll be okay, if she’s careful,” Sam said. “She has this house, and the money the Colonel left her. She has a teaching certificate. I could help her.”
Mike laughed. “I doubt if she’d welcome your help,” she said. “But I can help her a little now by letting her move on in here. And maybe later I could help her some more. I think she just might turn herself into something, if she could dump Duck …”
“Well, now’s her chance. But don’t count on DeeDee changing much,” he said. “She’s been poor and unhappy a long time. It does permanent damage. It might be she’s just been too poor too long.”
“I don’t count on anything,” Mike said.
Sam Canaday said, “You know you can always stay with Priss for as long as you want. I’d offer you haven myself, but as you know, I live over the store. Or you could sell off your land, or some of it, and buy yourself a house. He really wouldn’t care.” He looked, not at her, but out the kitchen window, where J.W. was trailing the lawn mower back and forth, back and forth. They could not hear him over the mower’s noise, but they could see his mouth moving hugely, and knew that he was singing.
“No,” Mike said, with a swift, unbidden certainty that had the weight of a long-held belief. “I’m not going to sell the land. I don’t know where I’ll live, or even if I’ll come back here, but I’ll never sell that land. I need a place to be from, Sam. A homeplace of my own. And Rachel needs one, even if she never sees it. You can’t be from some sublet in the East Eighties, which is what I’ll have to settle for if I go back. I guess what I mean is—you’re free to wander only as long as you have a taproot. Without one, you can just—fly off the face of the earth, if you’re not careful. That’s what I’ve been trying to control all my life, I think … that awful feeling of free flight. It can turn right into free fall. I know. I was in it. It was … terrible.”
“Well, you have a taproot now,” he said. “Okay, so you’re going to go back and see if you can get a book advance. And then?”
“I’m going out to the coast and get Rachel.” It was all falling into place now. Mike felt very clear in herself. “She’s got no business in that damned sex boutique out there. He’s no more a fit father than Roman Polanski. I’m going to go get her by her smartass little pierced ear and yank her home where she belongs.”
“And where’s that?” His voice was slow and soft.
“Someplace where she can go to public school and wear flipflops and cutoffs without somebody’s name on her ass,” Mike said. “Someplace with privacy and space and real trees and real people who aren’t in any danger of being chic. Someplace where I can write that isn’t my bedroom and where I can go to the grocery store without locking twelve locks. Someplace I can have a big dog and a big car. Do you know that I’ve never had a car of my own? I want a big Chevrolet station wagon.”
“I know a place like that,” Sam Canaday said. “About two miles down the road. Pretty land. No neighbors breathing down your neck. Trees. Creek. Woods. School bus goes right by there. Brand-new road, too. It wouldn’t take a lot to put up a nice house on it. It wouldn’t take more than—oh, what you’d make on a middling good book. How long do you figure it takes to write a book?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I never wrote one. Maybe a year.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “A year. Long time, a year.” And then, “Oh, wait, I almost forgot. I’ve got something for you.”
“Something for me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just a minute.” And he was gone out of the kitchen. She heard his footsteps receding down the hall toward her father’s bedroom, heard the door open and shut, heard the steps coming back down the hall, and then he was back in the kitchen once more, carrying a large cardboard box that said J&B SCOTCH on the side. He brought the box over to the kitchen table and set it down in front of Mike. She peered into it. Inside, a tiny, quivering, silky brown rabbit crouched, its miniature nose trembling tinily, in the palm of a new tan catcher’s mitt. The mitt was large and smelled wonderfully of leather and was stenciled with the name Rawlings.
Mike reached in very slowly and picked up the tiny creature and held it close under her chin, feeling the minuscule vibration of its terror and the incredible, small softness of it. It nestled close to her throat. A great, silly, trembling smile bloomed inside her; the corners of her mouth twitched with it. Sam reached into the box and plucked
out the catcher’s mitt and put his hand into it.
“Good fit,” he said. “Nice leather.”
Still cradling the rabbit, she walked slowly around behind him, lifted her free hand, and put one finger lightly on the cowlick that whorled on the top of his blond head. Outside the September day seemed to shimmer.
“Will you be here a year from now?” Mike asked.
Sam Canaday tossed a cold doughnut into the air and caught it neatly behind him in the catcher’s mitt. He grinned his white wolfs grin.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I expect I will.”
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS AND HOMEPLACE
“Siddons knows how to exploit the old South’s sense of Gothic and its mordant wit. At the same time, we believe in her portrait of the new South—still a place as difficult to take as it is to leave.”
New York Times Book Review
“A novel to savor.”
Newsday
“Can you ever go home again? Siddons weaves a tender story around that theme, using a winsome narrative with just the right words, which she plucks as lovingly as from a field of flowers. She’s always written that way. When you finish the book, you’ll want to ask her to hurry on to the next one.”
Southern Living
“Siddons writes with compassion and insights only few can match. At her best she slips under the skin and raises goosebumps…. She can strike a chord so resoundingly, it takes your breath away.”
Newport News Daily (VA)
“Thickly plotted, warm, and memorable… Easy, lyrical prose… A good read.”
Milwaukee Journal
“A deeply moving story of a fierce and necessary forgiveness.”
Publishers Weekly
“The prose flows easily and creates an evocative atmosphere of summer in the Deep South.”
Library Journal
“Siddons’s way of delving into a character’s psyche is deeply satisfying.”
Denver Post
“She is a fine writer.”
Macon Telegraph & News
“Anne Siddons’s novels are women’s stories in the best sense, pulling you into the internal landscape of her characters’ lives and holding you there.”
People magazine
“A gentle, warmhearted, graceful writer.”
Dallas Morning News
Books by Anne Rivers Siddons
Homeplace
Peachtree Road
King's Oak
Outer Banks
Colony
Hill Towns
Downtown
Fault Lines
Up Island
Low Country
"Nora, Nora"
Islands
Sweetwater Creek
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HARPERTORCH
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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New York, New York 10022-5299
Copyright © 1987 by Anne Rivers Siddons
ISBN: 0-06-101141-X
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2010 ISBN: 9780061854491
Version 08302013
First HarperTorch paperback printing: July 2003
First HarperCollins paperback printing: July 1996
First HarperTorch hardcover printing: June 1987
Visit HarperTorch on the World Wide Web at www.harpercollins.com
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