by Maria Padian
“It is so good to see you, Aunt Carrie,” I say.
“Same here, sweetheart. Goodness.” Her eyes begin to fill but then change, as if she’s just remembered something. “Your mother called. She’s worried sick about you. I telephoned her while you were sleeping this morning to let her know you arrived safe and sound.”
A cold tsunami of dread rolls through my stomach at the mention of Mami. The Habitat dinner is over.
And pretty much everyone I care about is pissed at me.
Around the same time my bus pulled out of Clayton yesterday and began its nine-hour winding trip to Queen’s Mountain, my phone blew up. Sam had come home from school expecting to hang out that night, and he instead got a text from me saying I couldn’t make it. Roz was minding her own business when Mami banged on her door. That’s because she’d come home from work expecting me to be dressing for the dinner and instead found a note on the kitchen counter:
Hi Mami.
To begin with, I am sorry. I am not going to the dinner tonight. And I took the emergency money. All of it. I will pay you back, I promise. I know you are probably very angry and I don’t blame you, but for a lot of reasons I can’t explain right now I just can’t do this dinner. I’m sorry. Besides being supermad, I’m guessing you are also freaking out and wondering where I am, but I promise: I am safe. Please don’t worry. I’m not doing anything bad. I might even be doing something good.
I will be back in time for school.
P.S. I am NOT with Roz. She doesn’t know anything.
For some reason, that postscript prompted Mami to march immediately over to Roz’s. (That was after Mami tried calling me maybe twenty times. I didn’t answer even once.) I know this because the first texts last night were from Roz.
Roz: WTF Izzy? Where are you? Your mom just here
Me: Sorry I told her you don’t know
Roz: ???
To which I did not reply. Then:
Mami: Where are you?
Didn’t reply to that one, either. Then:
Sam: Hey. Just saw your text. You ok?
Me: I’m fine. Sorry to cancel. Rain check?
Sam: Sure
Roz: ?!?!
Mami: I am calling the police.
Mami doesn’t make empty threats. So:
Me to Mami: Please do not do that. I am safe
Me to Roz: Long story cant talk now
Sam: Should I be worried?
Me to Sam: ??
Sam: You realized I AM an asshole?
I stared at the screen. Did he honestly think I’d changed my mind about him?
Me to Sam: LOL. No worries
Mami: If you do not tell me where you are I am calling the police.
I started to type “Fine.” Then thought better of it. If Mami put out some dragnet for me, who knew how far she’d go? Definitely the VC girls. Aubrey. Which would lead to Sam. So:
Me to Mami: I’m on a bus headed to Queen’s Mountain and staying with Aunt Carrie and Uncle Dewitt. I’m going to the Crawford reunion. Don’t call police
There was a very long pause after that. I could practically feel her thinking. Then:
Mami: Tell Carrie hello from me. Let me know when you arrive.
I stared at the screen. Was this a trick? Were the state troopers already on their way? Because Mami doesn’t give up this easily.
Me to Mami: Ok
Mami: You should have told me. I am very disappointed in you.
Which is when I turned my phone off.
“How old is he now?” I hear Aunt Carrie say.
I shake my head, trying to reengage with the conversation. “Who?”
“Your little brother.”
“Jack is six. He’s great. Hyper, but great.”
“Hey: no talking about me behind my back!” we hear. Aunt Carrie and I both look to the doorway.
Devil Spawn has arisen.
“Oh, are you hyper?” I ask him, laying on sarcasm thick so there’s no mistaking it.
Aunt Carrie’s guffaw is like a bark. “You two!” she exclaims. “Caught right up, I see.”
Mark crosses the kitchen and peers into the pan. “I see Cousin Izzy’s getting the full Carolina breakfast!”
I look at my brimming plate. “Wait. There’s more?” I can’t help asking.
Mark lowers himself into the opposite chair. “The pâté de foie gras of the South,” he informs me, intentionally mangling the French pronunciation. “Livermush.”
I’m really hoping I just misheard him.
“It’s a specialty around here. Made from hog liver and head parts. All ground up with spices, then baked, sliced, and fried.”
I feel my stomach buck. Maybe from the “parts” part? Still, I want to be polite. “Sounds delicious,” I manage.
A pleased smile unfolds across Mark’s face. “Tell you what,” he says as Aunt Carrie slides a sizzling rectangle of livermush onto my already-full plate. “This might be my favorite cousin. Right here.”
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around this version of Mark. When I stepped, stiff and sleepy, from the bus late last night, his voice cut right through the cotton that had replaced my brain.
“Cousin Izzy, I’da known you anywhere!” he boomed. Heads turned. It was too late to be that energetic. I faced the direction of the voice. A tall, slim young man with straight brown hair and a ski jump nose was standing on the sidewalk.
“Mark?” I asked. He’d texted that he’d be the one to “collect” me. For some reason, I’d been expecting an enlarged version of the ten-year-old I last saw demolishing Grandma Crawford’s birthday cake. Not this guy with the smart jeans and untucked shirt.
He also had “trouble” practically stamped on his forehead. So that hadn’t changed.
He shouldered my pack, pointed me toward his pickup, and talked nonstop until we pulled up to the house. He was friendly in a four-pack-of-Red-Bull way. Like he was jet fueled.
“Izzy Crawford!” he crowed as we sped along the dark country roads of Queen’s Mountain. “It is good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” I said, surprising myself. Because I meant it. Go figure.
“Why’d you come alone?” He cut straight to the chase.
“Long story,” I replied honestly. “And frankly, I only decided at the last minute.” I could see him eyeing me in the dark truck cab.
“Fair enough,” he finally said. Like someone who smelled a secret and knew better than to lift the lid off the box.
Now, tucking into heaping plates of Aunt Carrie’s good food—the livermush is delicious—he reveals his plans for my day.
“So’m thinking we’ll swing by the pens first,” he tells his mother. “Daddy and Jim’ll want to say hey.” He glances at me, mischief in his grin. “Plus you don’t want to miss the hogs.”
“Absolutely not,” I assure him.
“Maybe pack a lunch and take Izzy up to the quarry for a swim?” Aunt Carrie suggests. “It’s a nice little hike up there. Get some views. And tonight it’ll just be the five of us for dinner. Something quiet before we set the whole clan loose on you Sunday.”
“The whole clan,” I repeat. “Ready or not.”
“Here you come,” Mark says. He peers at me across the food-filled table in a curious, expectant way. Smiley, but with a side order of grim. As if I’m a small child standing at the edge of a high diving board, and he’s waiting to see whether I’ll jump or retreat.
Like he knows something I don’t.
Betts is right about one thing: hog stench’ll damn near kill you. As happy as I was to see Uncle DeWitt (he looks so much like my daddy I could scarcely keep from crying) and cousin Jim (Mark’s one older brother who still lives at home), I struggled to breathe through my mouth and not gag the whole time they were talking. We s
tood alongside a writhing, stinking passel of piglets, chatting, and they just smiled away, oblivious to the odor.
A dip in the glass-clear quarry is a must post-hogs: fortunately, I had packed a bathing suit. After the initial shock of the cold water it feels amazing, all the sweat from the hike up and clinging bits of dust and airborne dry pig poo whooshing off. Afterward, Mark and I stretch out on the sunbaked boulders, our wet hair streaming.
“You’re definitely not a wuss anymore,” he says.
“When was I ever a wuss?” I demand.
“Those dresses,” he begins. “Talk about lace explosion.”
“I hated those dresses. My parents only made me wear them because all the other girl cousins did.”
“You were always a little scaredy-cat,” he continues. “Practically had to crowbar you off your mother.”
“You were a scary bunch. Well, you were, anyway,” I tell him. “And be fair. You all knew each other. I was the outsider. It’s intimidating.”
He rolls to his side to get a better look at me. “I wasn’t scary. I was . . . rambunctious.” I can tell he’s trying not to laugh.
“You know what my nickname for you is?” I say.
“Can’t imagine.”
“Devil Spawn.”
Now he laughs. “Oh, I like that! Ha!”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” I tell him.
“I know! That’s why it’s funny,” he replies.
I growl at him under my breath. He’s a very frustrating person.
“I like you, Cuz. More’n the rest of the crew.” He props his head up on his wrist and looks at me. “So tell me. Why are you here alone?”
His sudden flip from lighthearted to direct is disarming.
“I guess because I am a scaredy-cat. You’re right,” I tell him, a little surprised at my honesty.
Mark’s expression doesn’t change. He waits. Like someone who’s good at listening.
“I’ve been keeping secrets from a whole lot of people. And it’s about to bite me on the butt in a big way,” I say. “Things came to a head and rather than deal with it I . . . ran. Your Facebook message and the reunion happened at just the right time, so I bought a bus ticket and here I am. My mom and this guy I like and my former best friend and the Habitat people are all mad at me, and I don’t blame them.” I’m running on, like a sentence without punctuation, but Mark holds steady. Until I say “Habitat.”
“The what people?” he asks.
“Habitat for Humanity. We’re building a house with them.”
Mark sits up. “Really?”
I nod.
“Wow. That’s cool. I’m impressed.”
“You know about Habitat?”
“You could say that. I had to do some court-ordered community service, and I did it volunteering on a build. Best hundred hours of my brief high school career.”
I sit up as well. “That’s a lot of hours.”
“And I deserved every one of them,” he says.
I fake-sigh. “Like I said. Devil Spawn.”
He laughs, this short punch of sound. Reminds me of Roz. Especially in the way it doesn’t sound happy. “Nah. Addiction isn’t evil. It’s a disease,” he says.
A silence falls between us. Finally broken by me.
“You were an addict?”
He doesn’t answer right away. When he does, he measures his words. It’s a switch from his usual barrel-assing, runaway-truck conversational style.
“I was headed down that road,” he says. “Way down that road. Before I turned it around. But I definitely have the tendency. So when you ask was I an addict? I’d say no. I am an addict. And every day I get up and choose not to drink or use. That’s recovery, Cuz. The desire to drink and use never goes away. You just beat it back. One day at a time.”
I watch his face, his careful expression. This must be what he meant by dropping out of the “real” world.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Who knows? Starts out innocent enough. Stupid teenage stuff, trying things. Thinking it’s cool to be bad. But I never half-do anything, you know? So while my friends might get a little drunk, I’d get a lot drunk. My friends might pop a pill, but I’d lift someone’s whole prescription. Luckily, I never got into needles, or any of that. But I was on the verge.”
“Wow.” Wholly inadequate, but I don’t know what else to say. “So what happened?”
“Got caught,” he says. “Best thing that ever happened to me was getting caught. Because I was good at hiding. I snuck bottles, only got drunk enough or high enough to feel good but still be able to get through the day. Until I couldn’t. Until someone found me in their house, rummaging through the medicine cabinet in the middle of the night. Called the cops. Luckily, I wasn’t carrying, because they might have shot my ass. Instead, I got mandatory treatment and community service.”
“That sounds light, given you broke and entered.”
“Well, when it’s your grandmother’s medicine cabinet and she’s the one who calls the cops, things go a little easier.”
“Whoa! Grandma Crawford called the cops on you?” This is a stunner. I knew she wasn’t the warm-and-fuzzy type, but to turn in her own flesh and blood?
Mark makes this I-know-right? face. “She dialed nine-one-one before she knew it was me,” he says. “But when they arrived? She let ’em haul me off.”
“Wow,” I repeat. I’m actually surprised. For all my jokes about expecting Mark to wind up behind bars, they were just . . . jokes. “Maybe she wanted to even the score.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You know, finally get back at you for what you did to her birthday cake?”
I expect Mark to laugh. But he looks serious. “Nah. They still blame you.”
I’m not sure I’ve heard him correctly. “Hold on. You apologized. You acknowledged you did it. And they still think it was me?”
He puts his hands up in this what-can-I-say? gesture.
“That’s insane.”
“Welcome to the Crawford family,” he says without a trace of humor. “They’re not right.” Which he still says like “rat.”
I sit up a little straighter. I need to make sense of this. “But you confessed,” I repeat.
“But you were wearing the cake,” he explains. “And people believe what they want to believe.”
I don’t ask him the obvious—why would they want to believe I had done it?—but instead stare stupidly at him. “Was this a mistake?” I finally say. “Coming here?”
He doesn’t answer right away, which makes me feel worse. “I don’t know what y’all’s secrets are, Cuz,” he finally says. “But running away from them? That won’t help. In fact, it’ll make things worse.
“But as far as coming here? Not a mistake. We are all really glad to see you.” He places a hand over mine. It’s an unexpected gesture of kindness, and I feel my eyes fill.
“That’s because now there’s a cousin lower on the ladder than you,” I say tearfully.
We both laugh.
“Well, you might be right about that,” he says.
27
In addition to being the least fashion-forward members of the Christian family, Catholics are musically challenged. Well, maybe not all Catholics. I’ve been to a few churches where it didn’t sound like they were tuning cats. Once, when we went to church with friends in Atlanta? The choir there sang from the Lead Me, Guide Me hymnal, and their Sunday renditions of “I’ll Fly Away” or “Precious Lord” could’ve won Grammys.
The Queen’s Mountain Methodists aren’t quite that good, but they’re close. When we file in Sunday morning, they’re belting out a rousing “How Great Thou Art.” It’s one of my favorites, which I take as a good omen.
Which I could really use. Word of my arrival spread like spilled mercury through the
Crawford clan, and no fewer than two aunts, three cousins, and an uncle had dropped by while Mark and I were at the quarry. Aunt Carrie held them off so we could have a quiet dinner, but now, at the worship service, I’m on full display. Especially since we’re tardy and there are only front-pew seats left. We make the Late Walk of Shame in front of everyone.
“Stare much?” I hear Mark mutter right before the congregation launches into verse two.
I glance back quickly as I lower myself into the pew: every pair of eyes is trained on me.
Holy crap.
“When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees . . .”
I recognize a few of the gawkers. Cryin’ Jonnie is now a pimply preteen. Ginny looks taller, blonder, and lacier than ever. Mary looks . . . pregnant? An unmistakable bulge pulls the fabric of her cotton dress tight across the front. She stands alongside a guy who looks to be her age. Maybe nineteen?
“When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.”
Everyone is super dressed up, and I feel every wrinkle in the yanked-from-the-backpack sundress I’m wearing. Along with last summer’s worn sandals. My long hair is shower wet and pulled into a damp knot at the back of my neck.
Aunt Carrie and Uncle DeWitt pull out their hymnals, but I know this one by heart. I lean into the chorus:
“Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!”
Now Mark is staring at me. You’d think I’d just sprouted a unicorn horn.
“You have a beautiful voice, Cuz,” he says.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“I never knew you could sing! See, now that’s a secret worth sharing. You should—”
“Shh!” Behind us, a middle-aged woman with a line of grumpy-looking children pokes Mark.
“Sorry,” he mutters as the next verse begins.
“You are still bad in church,” I murmur.
“You too, missy,” the woman hisses.
Mark rolls his eyes and I try not to giggle.
