Georgia Rules

by Nanci Turner Steveson

  “This is my mom, Mrs. Baird,” I said.

  She untied the scarf and pulled it off her head. Masses of wavy hair fell past her shoulders.

  “This is James,” I said.

  He reached out and shook her hand. “James Parker, nice to meet you. These are my sisters.”

  The girls said their names one at a time. Mama looked from one to the other, her mouth slightly open and her eyes wide. “Y’all are all from the same family? Well, it’s so nice to meet you. Isn’t it nice to have new friends, sweetheart?”

  “We came to see if Maggie wanted to swim,” James said.

  “And an invitation to swim, too!” she exclaimed.

  That was not what I expected. First of all, I didn’t know these people were already my friends. Except for Biz, I couldn’t remember which sister was which. And second, shouldn’t I be able to use the Georgia rules to my advantage on an as-needed basis? Like now? In Georgia, Mama would have to meet their parents before I’d be allowed to go off with them. She didn’t even know about the two-moms part yet.

  Mama plastered a smile on her face. “I didn’t know there was a pool nearby. Is there a country club I haven’t sniffed out yet?”

  “Around here, families swim in the river,” James said. Emphasis was on families.

  Silence.

  Mama looked from girl to girl, then right to James’s leg without even stopping at his face.

  “I see. Well,” she said slowly, “my only problem would be there’s no lifeguard at a river, and we’re used to swimming under the supervision of a trained professional.”

  Maybe this was going to go my way. Maybe Mama would save me from an outing to a river with all these people I didn’t know, who talked about things that were never even whispered at the country club. At least not in front of me.

  “James is our lifeguard,” Biz said.

  “Yeah, James is our lifeguard,” Lucy echoed. The other two girls nodded.

  Mama’s eyes focused on his leg again. “I don’t—”

  “I understand,” James interrupted. “But I’m still a better athlete than most of the kids in my school. And I’m CPR certified.”

  Maybe Mama felt a little ganged up on. Or maybe she thought I wanted to go with them, because she let it go, right then and there.

  “I suppose if you’re certified and all, you ought to be able to watch over my precious for a swim in the river.”

  “Yay!” Biz high-fived me.

  Lucy raised her china-blue eyes, which made Mama’s whole face soften. “Is it okay if afterward we go to the store for ice cream?”

  Mama bent down and got close to her face. “Well, aren’t you just the most adorable thing ever? And what store do you mean, sweetheart?”

  “We own the country store near town,” James said. “Little over a mile up the road from here. Sue and Kori will be there. I can drive Maggie back if it’s too late.”

  “Who are Sue and Kori?”

  Here it comes.

  “My moms,” James said without hesitating. “We have two of them.”

  On behalf of this family who would now be judged mercilessly at our dinner table, I flinched. Visibly.

  Mama’s shoulders rose so slightly no one else probably saw it. But I did. I knew her body language as well as I knew the name of the hair color she used every month to keep her roots from showing.

  “Two moms. I see. Is there a father involved?”

  OMG. “Mama, that’s none of—”

  “It’s okay, Maggie,” James said. “We all have different fathers. Sonnet, Biz, and Lucy are adopted. Haily and I are from when our moms were married to husbands. Kendra is a foster.”

  When James singled her out, Kendra scowled and turned sharply away.

  “And how many does that make altogether?”

  “Six. Five girls and me. Haily’s working at the store today.”

  “Is that so,” Mama said slowly. She cocked one hip and pulled the scarf through her fingers, looking suspiciously at each of them, one at a time. Then she caught my eye. I don’t know what she misunderstood about my expression, but she uncocked the hip, tied the scarf around her neck like a cowgirl, and said, “Well, James, all I have to say is that Vermont is a very interesting state.”

  Then she waltzed back across the yard, stopping at the new Mustang to gather her purse and shopping bags.

  “I’ll take you for a ride in the new car later, sugar,” she called. “In fact, I’ll take all of y’all! Isn’t it exciting? I’ve waited my whole life for a red Mustang convertible.”

  She kissed the tip of her fingers and pressed them onto the hood of the car before disappearing inside the house. This time it was Biz’s turn to drop her mouth open.

  TEN

  This recurring abandonment thing with Mama had turned annoying. I didn’t mind when it meant I got to stay home alone for a few hours—which I never got to do in Atlanta because either Peter or Clarissa were always around—but this time I felt like she’d thrown me right into that river and walked away before waiting to see if I sank or swam. So, I did what Mama did in times like this. I lied, cool as a glass of iced tea on a scorching afternoon.

  “My bathing suit hasn’t come yet,” I said.

  Lucy tugged my hand. “You can swim in your underwear.”

  “Or not,” James said quickly. His ears turned near as red as his hair. “She doesn’t have to swim.”

  Kendra yawned, big, like the whole idea of my coming with them bored her. “Maybe she just doesn’t want to go.”

  “She’s coming,” Lucy announced. She slipped tiny, pale fingers into my hand and tugged. “The river is this way.”

  And just like that, off we went.

  By the time we reached the road, the others had caught up and were happily gossiping about Haily’s new bf. The mule’s giant hooves made nice clopping sounds on the road, one-two, three-four, one-two, three-four. Lucy had a ginormous smile on her face, like she’d won me as a prize. And I was going to the river.

  We crossed a field with pale grass so high Lucy could have gotten lost if she hadn’t been holding my hand so tight. I think she was afraid if she let go, I would run back to the house to hide. She just might have been right.

  Halfway across we stopped for the sisters to change places riding the mule versus walking. Lucy gave up her turn to hold me captive.

  “Do you have a sister or brother?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whaddya mean you don’t know? You have to know.”

  “I guess because my daddy was away most of the time he and Mama were married.”

  “You don’t have to have a father present to have a baby—don’t you know that?”

  OMG.

  James stared straight ahead and pretended not to hear. I stammered and stuttered, trying to think of what to say. Finally, I leaned down and whispered, “I still don’t know why.”

  “Well, that’s dumb.”

  Once the girls had switched places, James picked up the mule’s reins and started walking again. “Look out, Maggie,” he called over his shoulder. “She’s a pistol.”

  “The mule’s name is Molly,” Lucy said. “Because a girl mule is called a molly and it’s easy to remember. Did you know that?”

  “No, but it makes sense.”

  “Did you even know this is hay growing in this field?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know much about anything, do you?”

  Kendra swung around and sat backward on Molly to face us. “It’s already been cut and baled this summer, Lucy. This is the leftover. And stop being rude. She’s new. You have to be polite to new people, remember?”

  “She’s not new,” Lucy insisted. “She lived here before when she was little and now she came back. She was here before you, or me, or maybe even Sonnet, so there! Right, Maggie?”

  Her expression was so hopeful, I couldn’t tell her I barely remembered anything, so
it really didn’t count. I nodded just a tiny bit, hoping it was so tiny neither one of them would think I was siding with the other. No such luck. Kendra narrowed her eyes and swung around, turning her back to me.

  The rest of the field crossing was uneventful, except when Molly raised her tail and deposited a big load of manure in my path. I squealed and sprang to the side, barely escaping my foot being planted in the middle of the hot, steaming pile. Biz laughed so hard she had to run ahead and find a tree so she wouldn’t wet her pants. If it hadn’t stunk so bad, it might have been funny in a welcome-to-Vermont kind of way, something I could laugh about with Irene later. But that mule’s manure was so rank, I gagged.

  After the long walk, the sight of cool water spelled serious relief, a reminder that I had ignored any form of cross-country training and was more out of shape than I ever remembered. The river looked fresh and clean. There was a sandy place on the bank, and an old rope with a knot at the end hanging from a tree leaning over the water. If I’d had my bathing suit, I just might have gone in. Next time. If there was a next time. I sat down against the tree and fanned myself with a small branch of leaves.

  Biz’s face looked like one of those cherries you get in a Shirley Temple, red and puffy. She blew the bangs off her forehead and stripped out of her clothes right in front of me, all the way to pink-flowered cotton underwear and undershirt. Her tummy stuck out, and her feet curved in awkwardly, the left foot more than the right.

  “My feet were bunched up when I was in utero,” she announced, pulling a bathing suit on over her underclothes.

  In utero?

  She’d really just said that out loud? In Georgia, you never, ever discussed reproductive body parts outside of health education class. When I’d started my period, Mama’d handed me a book and a box of pads and asked if the teacher had already told me what to do. Even Irene and I never talked about the particulars, and we never, ever said anything about a woman’s uterus. Mama said that was between a lady and her doctor.

  Everyone stopped getting ready to swim and waited for me to respond. Finally, Lucy spoke up. “She doesn’t know what that means. You have to explain things to her. She’s like from another planet.”

  “I know what it means,” I said. “I just—”

  “Okay, okay, that’s enough!” James clapped his hands. “Everyone in the water. Git!” He shooed them away and shrugged an apology.

  “I do know what it means,” I said.

  “I know. This is what it’s like to have a bunch of sisters, if you were ever wondering.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  He tossed his T-shirt into the grass, then sat at the edge of the river, still in his shorts, and removed the silver leg. “Neither. Just is.”

  Scooting down the bank, he pushed off into the water, the half leg kicking out just like the whole thing was still there. Biz and Lucy splashed and crawled all over him, laughing and carrying on. Kendra was the first to swing from the rope. She kicked her legs in the air and squealed, landing close to the bank on the other side. Sonnet didn’t swim, but kept a good distance between us. I leaned against the tree and let a long, slow breath out, listening to the sounds of them playing in the river.

  Biz and Lucy tried to climb on James’s shoulders. He flung them off and flipped water in their faces. “Get you gone, you dwarfs, you beads, you acorns!” The girls laughed and doggie-paddled after him as he swam away.

  “That’s from Shakespeare,” Sonnet said, her eyes trained on whatever she was doodling. “The dwarfs, beads, and acorn part. Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s their favorite.”

  Sunlight flickered and danced and wove its way through the canopy of leaves. A tiny beam of yellow bounced off James’s leg where he’d left it near me in the dirt. I leaned close to get a better look just as Biz scrambled up the bank. She wiped water out of her eyes.

  “He wasn’t born like that,” she said. “It was amputated.”

  I sat up quickly. “Oh, I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to be nosy.”

  “It’s okay, everyone wants to know. Well, everyone who isn’t from here, because everyone here already knows. It was an accident.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Biz shrugged. “He likes it because he got the prosthesis.”

  She said it slow, like I was too dumb to understand: p-r-o-s-t-h-e-s-i-s.

  “I see.”

  “Johnny Austin bought it for him.”

  My heart fluttered two extra beats. “My Johnny Austin?”

  She tipped her head to the side and looked at me with curiosity. “Sue and Kori couldn’t afford one. Those are my moms. Sue and Kori, with an i. So Johnny Austin bought it for James.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m happy he did that.”

  “We are, too. But now he’s dead. I guess you know that at least.”

  She spun around and plunged back into the water. I was left alone except for Sonnet, whose pencil kept working the page.

  Biz was right. At least I knew that much. But the question growing bigger in my mind was, just how much did I not know?

  ELEVEN

  The narrow aisles of the country store were as packed as a Georgia highway.

  “Tourists,” James said. “You can tell by what they buy.” He nodded to a heavyset couple with a basket full of miniature, leaf-shaped bottles. “Vermont maple syrup is one of the biggest products for the tourist trade, but I guess you already know that.”

  Mama’d always made me practice my very best manners when we traveled, but these people seemed to have left theirs somewhere else. One lady pushed in front of another to riffle through bins of fresh vegetables, then she walked away complaining about the “lack of variety of summer squashes in Vermont.” Three different people spun a rack of postcards at the same time, grumbling when one of them stopped the twirling to take out their selection. A bald man gathered a bunch of tiny blue and green flags in his hand and didn’t leave even one behind for the little kid reaching for the same thing. The kid looked like he might perish if he went home empty-handed.

  James reached on a high shelf for a new jar and let him pick one out. “Thanks,” the kid said. “I really wanted one.”

  Even with all that rudeness, being crowded made me feel at home. I could hide in a mass of people like this. For a few minutes I relished the sense of being one of many, and not the center of attention, which, I was realizing, could be exhausting.

  James maneuvered me toward the front of the store, where two women managed the customers together. One lady was stout with dark hair and muscled arms. She bagged items up and made suggestions on other purchases. Next to her, a tall, thin lady with a light ponytail punched the keys of an old-timey cash register. Every time she smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkled.

  “That’s Sue,” James said, pointing to the short one. Sue looked over and blew him a kiss. “And that’s Kori.”

  Biz climbed on a stool in between them. Kori automatically reached over to spin the seat so Biz swirled and giggled, her knees tucked up in front of her, her fingers curled around the edge.

  “This is our second busiest time of year,” James said. “Peak foliage season in the fall is first.”

  “What about in the winter—don’t a lot of people ski here?”

  “They do, but skiers only stop on their way to or from the resorts. Most of their time is spent on the slopes. They don’t like to miss one minute of powder. Come on, I’ll introduce you to the moms later when they aren’t so busy.”

  We picked our ice cream from a long freezer. There were more flavors than I remembered seeing in any specialty store back in Atlanta, where ice cream is as important a part of summer as air-conditioning and swimming pools. James went behind the counter and wrote down what we took in a spiral notebook, then led us out the back door to a yard.

  A barefoot girl twirled slowly in circles on a wooden swing hanging from a tree, flicking her toes at fallen acorns. Leaning against the side of an old barn, a boy about the same age sipped soda from a bott
le and watched her spin. Every few seconds the girl looked up from under long bangs and blushed, pretending she hadn’t noticed him studying her before.

  “That’s Haily and her new bf!” Lucy whispered. She had a dab of chocolate ice cream on the end of her nose. “It’s her first one and the moms said we have to be re-special.”

  James wiped the ice cream off with his thumb. “Respectful, not re-special.” He herded us to a picnic table on the side of the house. Lucy and Biz snuggled up on either side of me. Sonnet and Kendra sat next to James and watched me eat my Mexican chocolate ice cream cup as if I were the most curious thing to ever come to Vermont. No one had to tell me they weren’t as keen about my being there as the two little girls.

  Lucy nudged me. “Did you know it takes twelve pounds of milk to make one gallon of ice cream?”

  “No, I did not know that. You’re so smart.”

  “Lots of cows in Vermont,” Biz said between licks of a cherry-chocolate-chip bar. “Ben and Jerry’s gives their leftover ice cream to pig farmers, but the pigs don’t like the Mint Chocolate Cookie flavor. Isn’t that weird?”

  “You girls are full of fun facts,” James said.

  A couple of fat, black-and-white speckled hens wandered near the table, pecking at the dirt.

  “That’s Harriet,” Lucy said, pointing at the one closest to us. “And that’s Georgia. Johnny Austin named her ’cuz that’s where you lived.”

  “They’re rescue chickens,” Biz said. “Haily has to collect the eggs every day, but she doesn’t like to. It’s dirty. She wears dresses now. That’s what happens when you get a bf.”

  “Sonnet can’t eat eggs, she’s allergic,” Kendra said.

  “Sometimes Harriet makes double-yolkers. You know what that means?” Biz asked.

  “I can guess,” I said, but my mind was swirling with thoughts of my daddy naming a chicken after the state where I lived.

  I took a bite of ice cream and let my eyes wander around the backyard. Haily and the bf had moved out of sight. I wondered if they were hiding somewhere, kissing. One of the chickens strutted over to a grassy area where flowers grew around a circle of pretty white stones. In the center, a wooden cross was stuck into the ground. It tilted slightly to the left and leaned against a homemade sign that read “Here lies James’s leg, kicking some butt in Amputee Heaven!”