Sweeter Than Tea

by Deborah Grace Staley

  The car accident was one of the first references. The load on a logging truck driving ahead of her down the highway had come loose, and Lula had broken her back, both arms, and her right leg. She had kept quietly to herself since then, if the lack of mentions in my Google search were any indication. She was credited on the boards of various charities and as a sponsor of the opera and the ballet, but there were no pictures of her, and nothing at all about children or a husband. There was also no address, only contact information for an attorney on Fremont Street.

  I couldn’t bring myself to do anything with that. Nothing I had found, after all, told me anything personal about Aunt Lula, about who she had become.

  I drove home on auto-pilot and discovered that Joe’s Mercedes was still parked out front at Watson’s Landing. I left my worn-out Volvo in the sagging converted carriage house and followed the sound of a chain saw until I found him in worn jeans and a plain white cotton T-shirt, slicing through a fallen cypress tree out near the edge of the creek.

  “I didn’t mean for you to come out here and work yourself to death,” I said, my nose wrinkling at the tang of fresh cut wood.

  His face was flushed, or maybe that was the result of being out in the sun and the wind all day. It made the blue of his eyes stand out like indigo. I wondered, since evidently I’d started down the dark road of introspection, how much my obsession with the color had to do with Joe and how much was due to my own history. One of my distant ancestors had planted the first of the seeds that transformed the indigo industry in the Colonies. Eliza Lucas Pinckney saved three Lucas family plantations and countless others with the crop, and she was only seventeen. She’d been younger than me when she helped lay the foundation of what I was now selling off. No wonder I felt blue so often.

  “You would die sooner than ask someone for help,” Joe said, pulling off his gloves. “Even if they’re willing to give it.” He wiped his face with a red bandana. “Now your Mama on the other hand—”

  My hands clenched. “Oh, lord. Has she been out here talking your ear off?”

  Grinning, he tucked the bandana back into his pocket. “Caught me as I was going back to the car. Took me inside for a glass of tea, talked my ear off about you, and gave me my marching orders.”

  “Marching orders?” I fell back a step.

  “Nothing dire.” His eyes locked on my feet. “Just about what all needs doing around here.”

  My heart squeezed at the look on his face. Sometimes, the thought of leaning in and kissing him was almost beyond resisting. Kissing him the way I used to be able to kiss him, back when things hadn’t been so complicated. Back when he and I would go down to the creek with our friends and dance to music from someone’s CD-player, swing out on a rope from the bank, and drop down into the middle of the current. Joe would stay under long enough to make my heart stop. Then he’d surge up from the churning depths, shaking the water and hair out of his eyes, skin gleaming in the Carolina sun and dappled blue cypress shadows.

  I shook my head. “Mama had no right to tell you to do anything—”

  “She knows I want to help,” Joe said. “And you know I’d rather stay on her good side than catch the wrong end of that tongue. Not to mention she’d be on the phone with my daddy before my car hit the highway.”

  “You’re a grown man—”

  “Yes, I am,” he said, taking a step closer. “Sometimes, it wouldn’t hurt you to remember that.”

  Sudden streams of warmth spread through my veins, and my lungs squeezed down to nothing. Maybe the lack of air was what made the blood all head south out of my brain. I mumbled something incoherent and ran back the way I’d come, Joe’s bark of laughter ringing in my ears.

  It was still ringing when I let myself into the house and heard Mama calling. “Is that you, Ginnie Mae?”

  “Yes, Mama.” I followed her voice into the drawing room and found her on the couch glaring at her daily Sudoku. She was firmly convinced doing them would keep her brain sharp. Trouble was, she’d been at it so long, she’d worked past the hard levels and was now deep into Monster territory. According to Joe, Monster should have been familiar ground for her, except it suited only when she could be the one to dish it out. Ever since she had graduated up from Extremely Difficult, the Sudoku puzzles had become a love/hate relationship.

  “And where have you been all afternoon?” she asked as soon as I stepped over the threshold. “Without so much as a single word to let me know where to find you.”

  “I knew Joe was here.”

  “Good thing, too.” Her expression changed, went as sly as a cat ready to pounce. “He’s turned into a good man, that Joe Beaufort. Wish you’d develop some common sense before he changes his mind about you.”

  I fought a sigh. “Can’t you ever leave it alone?”

  She dropped the Sudoku book and pencil into her lap and wagged her finger. “Don’t you think you can talk to me like that, just because I’m In Bad Shape and Stuck Here in the house most of the day on account of my Heart and Nerves—”

  “Can I get you some tea, Mama?” I asked. “I see the electricity is still out, so I’ll need to be creative for dinner.”

  “Mind you ask Joe to stay,” she called after me as I turned into the hallway. “After all he’s done, it’s the very least you can do.”

  I stood in the kitchen a long moment with my arms wrapped around my waist trying to ignore the sound of the chain saw outside and Mama’s bulldozer voice still running through my head. Then I made her tea and escaped again to take a pitcher down to Joe. Feeling guilty, I invited him to dinner after all. I made a summer tomato salad, and a plate of cheeses and cold cuts, and set them out on the porch to take advantage of the fact that the hurricane had swept most of the mosquitos away. They would be back with a vengeance in a matter of days as the floodwaters hatched the dormant eggs.

  Sitting in the white wicker porch set that needed another coat of paint, we ate and talked a while about not much of anything. I tried to ignore Mama’s blatant early good night, which left me alone with Joe by candlelight under the big, gold moon.

  “There’s a bat,” Joe said, pointing toward a fast-flying shape winging past one of the live oak trees. “See it? First one I’ve seen since the storm, and here you are wearing white.”

  “Yes.” I nodded distractedly.

  “Good thing you’re already halfway to insane then,” Joe said. “At least it won’t matter as much if the bat tangles in your hair.”

  “What?” I jerked my attention back.

  His rough chuckle shivered down my spine. His hand brushed mine as he reached to take my empty glass and set it down. “A dollar for your thoughts,” he said.

  “Is that inflation? Or do you really want to know?” I twisted my ring, resisting the urge to start clearing plates away.

  “A lot of both.”

  I watched the bat fly, let my head fall back against the chair, and thought about Lula and Mama. Thought whether I should say anything. Do anything.

  “What would you say if I found a letter Aunt Lula sent to Mama that she has never seen?” I said eventually.

  Joe leaned forward slowly and picked up the sweaty tea pitcher. It looked small in his hand. I noticed all the cuts he’d gotten out there chopping my wood today, despite the gloves he’d worn. One of the cuts was still lightly weeping.

  “You ought to take care of your hands,” I said.

  “Have you told your Mama about the letter?” My glass clinked as Joe carefully set the lip of the pitcher against it, refilled it before he refilled his own.

  “Not yet. I’m not even sure I’m going to. I don’t know what she would say.”

  “That’s probably wise.” Joe nodded.

  “I know where she is though.” I looked up and met his eyes, and suddenly felt a little breathless, and more than a little guilty.
“I’m thinking of tracking her down.”

  “Why?”

  I watched the Adam’s apple fall and rise out of the open collar of the shirt he had carelessly thrown back on after he finished cutting the wood. “Because in the letter, she sounded lonely and sad,” I said. “And she missed Mama. They were twins. You don’t get over losing a twin.”

  “She was the one who walked away,” Joe said in his careful lawyer voice. He leaned back into the deep, white wicker chair.

  “It wasn’t Mama she meant to leave. Only Watson’s Creek.”

  “Sometimes it’s one and the same thing, isn’t it?”

  Later, I lay in bed with the warm breeze blowing through the window and the yellow gauze curtains swaying, and I thought about his words. Thought about him.

  The next morning, I told Mama I was going back to Charleston to check on the electricity and on one of my paintings I had left with someone. My cell phone was working again, but the land lines were still out. What I wanted to do was best done in person anyway.

  “Don’t know why you think anyone would be interested in that so-called art of yours,” Mama said from the wingback chair in the morning room, sniffing as she peered up at me over her needlepoint. “It’s almost as embarrassing as those erotic romances Arnell Mitchel’s oldest girl is writing.”

  “I wouldn’t worry. I promise I’m not painting anybody naked.”

  I drove back to the Antique shop and asked Charles if I could borrow his email account. Then I wrote a long note to the address of Lula’s San Francisco lawyer.

  “Would you call me if you get anything back from them?” I asked Charles after hitting send.

  He’d been shamelessly reading over my shoulder the whole time, and now he straightened. “You know I will,” he said.

  “And one more thing?”

  He gave me a long, searching look. “What now?”

  “You honestly thought the painting was good? You weren’t just saying so?”

  He smiled and turned me by the shoulders to look up above the cash register where he’d hung the painting in pride of place.

  Relief bloomed in my chest. Combined with the sending of the email, I felt about twenty pounds lighter than when I first walked into the shop that morning.

  “I honestly know the painting is good,” Charles said.

  The next question was even harder. “Do you have any connections to galleries here?” I rushed on. “You know how I’ve talked about going to New York, well all this time, I guess I’ve been thinking it was an all or nothing situation. That I’d have to go up there, and study, and make connections before I could even think about selling my work or showing it to anyone. But if I could sell a painting or two now . . . It would make things easier.”

  “You’d feel safer,” Charles said slowly. “Nothing comes with guarantees. But if I know anything about what people prize, you could sell a busload of your work to the tourists alone. That indigo effect, there’s something hypnotic to it, and it speaks of the South.”

  “Would you mind asking around?”

  “How many more paintings do you have?”

  “A sanity-preserving shed full,” I said. Not one of them meant a thing to me compared to the idea of having the chance to get out of Watson’s Creek. Or at least of having the freedom to choose to stay.

  I drove home overflowing with a burst of energy. It made me wish for a convertible so I could throw back the roof and appreciate the sun and the wind on my face.

  The feeling drained away as the days went by. It was replaced by a heaviness inside me that mirrored the thick, indigo air and the swell of humidity as the floodwaters burned off and soaked into the moss and the trees and vegetation, until everything was heavy and oppressive once again. The phone and the electricity came back on. Charles called to say he had set up three meetings for me to show my work the following week. But that only added to my sense of wondering and smothering and waiting.

  I convinced myself the appointments weren’t going to translate to sales. I convinced myself Charles was being kind. And I finally admitted Aunt Lula clearly didn’t want to have anything to do with us since she hadn’t written back in response to the email I had sent.

  My temper was short. With Mama, whose own temper already frayed too easily, and with Joe. He stopped by three times, and finally left with a determination in his step that made me miss him even before the soles of his departing wingtips crunched on the gravel of the drive. When the doorbell rang an hour later, I assumed it was him coming back.

  I opened the door with my heart beating fast and an apology on my lips, and discovered it wasn’t Joe at all. A long, black car with a driver stood waiting in the drive at the bottom of the steps. My eyes had to drop to waist level to find the woman in the wheelchair who had rung the bell. She had my Mama’s eyes.

  My fingers tingled, and my breath caught. My voice coming out in a cracked whisper of surprise, “Aunt Lula?”

  The woman smiled broadly. Her lips twisted around an old scar that bisected her face from mid-cheek to chin. “You’re the spitting image of your mother, child. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  I stepped back, not knowing what else to do. At a nod from Lula, the driver rushed up the stairs to lift the wheelchair over the threshold into the foyer. Dimly, I realized that had to have been the way she had gotten up there in the first place. The fact that she’d asked him to leave her to wait at the door alone told me worlds about her, and made me feel even smaller.

  “Who’s there?” Mama called from the parlor. “Is that Joe Beaufort coming back?”

  “No, Sister,” Aunt Lula shouted back. “It surely isn’t.”

  Mama emerged from the parlor faster than I’d seen her move in the three years since the Tragedy. “My God! Lula is that you? You’ve come back?” One hand on her heart, she clutched at the wall, but the fact her knees were buckling didn’t stop her from hardening her spine and raising her voice. “No, wait just a moment now. Don’t you think you can go playing on my Good Nature, Lula Elizabeth Watson. You turn that chair right back around and go back wherever you’ve been hiding these thirty years. This is about the last place you’d be welcome after you left with never a word to me. And taking Great-Grandma Amelia’s good silver into the bargain.”

  “I wrote and wrote and wrote,” Aunt Lula said, “and if the old devil didn’t give you my letters, that certainly wasn’t any fault of mine.” She rolled the wheelchair forward with her chin stuck in the air higher than strictly necessary to look Mama in the eye.

  I knew that expression well.

  Mama set her hands on her hips like a five-year-old child. “You did not!”

  “Did so,” Lula said.

  “Did not.”

  “Yes,” I said, finally stepping forward, “she did. I found the letters in the back of Grandpa’s bottom desk drawer.”

  Both women turned to face me, and the hot air all went out of Mama as if she’d been poked with a pin and deflated. It was only when they both stopped shouting that I could see the trembling of Lula’s hands and the tears leaking down her cheeks.

  “Is it really you?” Mama whispered, turning back to her sister.

  “Yes,” Lula said hoarsely. “It’s me.”

  “Your poor face. And your legs. What happened?” Mama collapsed to her knees in front of the wheelchair.

  Both of them wept, clinging to each other as if the rubber band that had connected them from birth had finally snapped them back together and brought them back to life like the smack of a doctor’s hand against a baby’s bottom. In the midst of it, the driver came back up the steps with a couple of suitcases in either hand.

  “Where do you want me to put these?” he asked, looking at me.

  I started to open my mouth, but they both answered before I could.

  “I’m s
taying,” Lula said defiantly

  “You’re staying,” my Mama said, in that tone of hers that said she wasn’t taking any arguments. “We’ll put you down in the drawing room, and I’ll have Ginnie call over to Chandler’s Construction to put in a ramp, and we’ll get Joe over to bring down the bed from your old room . . .”

  I smiled and started eyeing the suitcases with a proprietorial eye about halfway through that litany, right about the time Aunt Lula started chiming in with her own instructions. Fifteen minutes later, they were both in the parlor arguing about Great-Grandma Amelia’s silver over a fresh pot of tea, which was probably the closest they were ever going to get to saying how much they’d missed each other. Both of them were too stubborn to admit they were happy, but I could tell.

  The scent of tea and brandy, lavender and baby powder, had doubled in the parlor, and two women, old before their time, were happy to be arguing together again. The bird had flown and come back.

  With Lula here, Mama wasn’t going to be lonely anymore. Maybe it was time to see how far I could fly myself.

  I thought of Joe and my paintings up in Charleston, of hope and indigo blue in the air, and suddenly, I wasn’t sure I would be gone forever. Maybe it wouldn’t be for long at all. I might even hate New York. But that was the nicest thing about having wings, I decided, as I watched Lula and Mama with their heads bent close.

  Maybe it was never too late to fly south and come back home.

  Lavender In Blue

  Deedra Climer

  “Welcome to Our Neck of the Woods”

  The red letters painted on the cabin mailbox were well over three decades old and barely legible. As I turned on to the driveway, the hum of tires on asphalt changed to the crunch of rocks and red clay.

  That sound always woke the children, no matter how tired they were.

  But, there hadn’t been any sleeping children in my backseat for decades. Now, it was just me. I maneuvered my Malibu around the curves that made our cabin seem further removed from civilization than it really was. Usually, trips to the cabin meant quiet relaxation, but this trip was different. Today, “our neck of the woods” was a million miles away from anywhere I wanted to be.