by Grace Greene
But maybe a cleanup? That old shed must hold a rake and shovel. The sun was shining. The light dappled the new leaves of the oak and created shadow patterns on the green grass that danced with the breeze. It was an inviting scene. Trent hadn’t liked her to do yard work. He wanted to keep it simple; nothing that a lawn mower couldn’t take care of.
She stretched her arms out to her sides and felt the muscles ease in her back. She needed exercise. Fresh air.
In the garden, the air wasn’t fresh. In fact, it smelled like old, damp manure, so the kitchen door and French doors had to stay closed. Her aunt hadn’t bothered with a pooper-scooper or otherwise picking up after Honey. But that could be fixed. Sandra could clean up the area. It would be nice to be able to open the dining room doors and combat the dusty, musty air inside the house.
If the shed was locked, she was out of luck.
It wasn’t. The door opened awkwardly, and she hoped it wouldn’t fall off the hinges before she could get it closed again. It was jammed with implements and old crates and all manner of “where else are we going to put it?” stuff.
The dirty, rusty jumble was intimidating. Tomorrow, she told herself. After she visited the shelters in the morning and had hung the posters, she’d tackle this. She’d find the tools she needed and get to work on the erstwhile garden and make it more bearable for people and friendlier for Honey.
The to-do list for tomorrow was building in her head, and it felt good. All except for the most glaring, most important task: finding Honey.
She walked into the woods, following the left-hand path and calling Honey’s name. No response. Birds flitted around and above her, and a few surprised squirrels scampered away.
Sandra stood and listened. Any number and variety of animals roamed these woods. Her mother had taught her to stay out of these woods, to stay on the porch and be quiet. This felt like it should be dangerous somehow, but it wasn’t. It was peaceful.
She had been young when her grandmother died, and they hadn’t come out here often after that. When her mom had come out here, she didn’t bring Sandra. To be fair, Sandra hadn’t wanted to come, and Mom hadn’t insisted.
She stood there feeling the peace and thinking about how people are influenced by those they love and trust. Mom never liked the woods. As her daughter, Sandra hadn’t questioned her mom’s opinion on it.
The path before her was a faint two-wheel track that vanished over a low hill ahead. Wooden wagon wheels had probably passed this way long ago. Sandra walked a little farther, and beyond a downed tree blocking the path, she saw the creek. It had to be Cub Creek. She was surprised to recall an image from many years ago—a small plaque attached to the house, near the porch. It was probably hidden under the ivy now. The Shoemakers had named the house and the farm “Cub Creek” after this very watercourse, this dark water.
How many miles did the creek run? How many properties did it border or cross as it flowed through Louisa County? The Shoemaker homeplace was only one of many. How many lives had been touched by its waters through the years?
The path was damp, and where it was bare, it was muddy from the recent rain. Sandra turned back to retrace her steps.
When she returned to the house, she pushed aside the ivy and located the bronze plaque. CUB CREEK was engraved on it, and the date below the name was 1867.
How had the family let the nameplate get lost like that? Her mother, Barbara, Cliff . . .
So many forgotten things. No one could keep track of everything, let alone an aging woman managing by herself in a very old house. No one could do it all on her own.
Sandra went into the kitchen. She found rags and sponges and cleaning products under the sink. She cleared the counters, tossing questionable items into the trash and putting appliances and keepsakes and utensils on the kitchen table. Barbara’s table was an amazing wood plank affair that looked like reclaimed barn wood, but reconditioned and finished. It weighed a ton, as she discovered when she tried to shift it.
She washed the stained, ancient Formica countertop and the pine cabinet doors from top to bottom. She scoured the stove top and inside the microwave oven. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the faded linoleum floor. It had looked clean but was really only broom clean, and the water was dark gray. Now it shone. Sandra was exhausted, but at least she had something to show for it, and that made all the difference.
A small bonus was that she’d found an orphaned light switch hidden behind the blender. She flipped it, hoping nothing would blow up, and through the kitchen window she saw the pole light was lit. Bingo.
That afternoon, she brewed iced tea on the stove top. She found lemons in the fridge. After washing and cutting them up, she put them into a glass pitcher full of ice and water to steep. She was craving brownies. How long had it been since she’d craved any kind of food? It felt like progress. Unfortunately, she didn’t have brownie mix or the fixings to make them from scratch, but that went on the grocery list for her next trip to civilization.
She poured the cooling tea over a glass of ice cubes. Old-style ice cubes, twisted out of a tray, and she remembered to refill the trays and return them to the freezer. Then she went out to the porch with her book and iced tea. She pulled the bench closer to the railing so she could prop up her feet.
The porch chimes made their music, and they were nice enough, but they belonged to Aunt Barbara, and it was like listening to someone else’s noise, not her own. A small annoyance, but one she could change. She reached up and took the chimes from the hook and carefully laid them on the porch floor next to the house.
Sweet peace and quiet. She took her seat again and settled in.
Mr. Woodward’s history book was amusing, but the air was too perfect, and she was soaking up the outdoors more than what was written on the page. Trees waved in the breeze on either side of the house, and their leaves rustled like voices speaking, perhaps a story being told, but in a secret language that human ears couldn’t decipher. She put back her head and closed her eyes, not understanding the story but soothed by the cadence. If she looked to her right, and if time travel were possible, she might see herself as a child, her toys surrounding her, with the adults inside, the rise and fall of their conversation creating a cadence of their own. Across the yard and the dirt road was the fallow field. Beyond that, the woods began again. On the far side of that field was the family cemetery. She’d never walked out there. Never been allowed. It was the forbidden land of snakes and ticks and other creepy-crawlies, per her mother.
She heard a vehicle in the distance. The state road was a ways away, but on such a quiet day, if the vehicle was loud enough and the breeze had the right heading, she supposed the sound could travel this far.
Her uncle was on her mind. Maybe because he seemed so absent from this place after spending his entire life here. Their last real conversation had happened the day her grandmother died, and it had made an indelible impression on her. Sandra was very young at the time. Seven, maybe? Mom had had red, wet eyes that morning, and they’d piled into the car to drive out to the homeplace, so Sandra knew on a day of such seriousness that she’d be on the porch. She took her favorite dolls and her coloring books with her. She didn’t mind. She understood important, and she understood obedience.
Uncle Cliff had come out of the house, and the porch door slammed shut. He jumped as if he was surprised by the sound. She looked up at him from where she and her doll were coloring at the end of the porch. He held out his hand and said, “Let’s take a walk, Cassandra.”
She nodded, situated her doll on the bench, and then accepted his hand. His hand was big and warm. They walked along the dirt road as if they’d taken this stroll every day of their lives.
The wind rippled through the goldenrod growing by the roadside. It made swoosh-swoosh sounds that she could hear because she was walking with Uncle Cliff and not Mom. He stopped, and she followed his gaze to where a hawk sat on a branch above their heads. Not more than twenty feet away. After a quic
k look from one eyeball, the hawk ignored them and resumed its own watch of its kingdom. They moved on.
Uncle Cliff stopped at the old, ramshackle one-room schoolhouse.
“Did you go to school here?” she asked.
He hummed. “Me? Started there, but after the first year, we got assigned to the new school. Our parents went here for sure. Last generation to sit in those desks all the way through. Building stood up pretty good for a long time, but once it was out of use, it couldn’t last.” He looked down at her. “Weather and all, you know? Stuff can’t hold from the center for long. You can fight it, but ultimately it’s a waste of effort.”
She had no idea what he was talking about, but she liked the sound of his voice, soft and gravelly and with mystery in it. There was beauty even in the derelict building. Its door broken, the roof sagged into the one room, the porch planks sprung. She heard a watery noise, too. The creek ran back there behind the building and clumps of trees.
“You don’t go in there, you understand? It could fall on your head, and no one would find you.”
Sandra nodded. She wondered whether the children who’d studied in this building were sad or happy that it was so badly broken. Likely, since they were grown-ups now, they never thought of it one way or the other except as something to remember—like memories of friends and teachers. She didn’t have many friends, but she liked her teachers a lot.
A noise grew. Uncle Cliff and Sandra turned to see a vehicle driving up the road toward the house, leaving dust clouds behind it. It was a van, long, lean, and dark. Not a regular van. More like a station wagon.
“Hearse,” Uncle Cliff said. “Don’t look, Cassie.”
She tightened her hand around his. “Why not?”
“They said to get you away from the house so you wouldn’t see.”
“See what?”
He sounded almost surprised. “Miz Shoemaker died. They didn’t tell you, I guess. You’re too young to be exposed to all that. Death.”
Sandra must’ve looked confused because he added, “Your grandma.”
Her grandmother was the reason she always had to stay downstairs or out on the porch, and be quiet.
“I know,” he muttered to himself. “She’s been sick a long time. You hardly knew her.”
“Why us?”
“Us?”
“Why’d we have to leave? Where’s Momma and Daddy and Aunt Barbara?”
Uncle Cliff took a seat on the corner of the porch. Enough of the boards supporting the walls and roof remained so that, hopefully, he was safe as long as the roof didn’t decide on a whim to avalanche the rest of the way down.
“Come here,” he said, and patted the porch.
She sat next to him, a little excited, as if she were daring that roof to move. Momma wouldn’t be happy about this.
“See here.” He took a stick and drew a shape in the dirt. He raised the stick and waited.
“It’s a square,” she said, proud to give the right answer.
“Yep. Now this.” He drew a circle within the square.
The circle was perfect in its roundness and was situated with a couple of inches to spare inside the borders of the square.
He stabbed the stick several times in the center of the circle. “What’s that, Miss Cassie? Can you guess?”
He called her Cassandra or sometimes Cassie. They all did back then.
“A circle.”
“Inside the circle, I mean. That’s your auntie, your momma, and your daddy.”
“What about us?”
He poked the stick inside the right angles of the corners of the square. “Us.” Then he tossed the stick into the nearby brush. He rocked back and forth in a couple of quick movements with his hands braced on his thighs. “That’s us in the corners. The center is where the strength is. But what’s outside of the center don’t fit in the circle.”
“Me, too?”
“You tell me, Cassandra. Where do you fit in?” He coughed, cleared his throat, and spit.
For a flash of a moment, she caught the clarity of her uncle’s whiskers, the unshaven face, the soft jaw and ragged hair. The odor of alcohol was there but faint, perhaps because it was early in the day. She didn’t know. It was part of Uncle Cliff, nothing more. Then the moment of sharpness faded, and they were only two people sitting on the edge of a broken porch of a dilapidated schoolhouse waiting for the black vehicle to drive back the other way so they could return to the house. Sandra giggled.
“What’s funny?” He perked up a bit.
“We aren’t in their circle. They are in our square.” It sounded like nonsense but right nonetheless.
He shook his head. “You’re wrong and right at the same time.”
He seemed sad. Her joke hadn’t cheered him up, so she let him be. They sat in silence. After the van had passed, heading back to the state road, they let the dust settle for a few minutes and then set out for the house to see what the rest of the family was up to.
As they walked, she took his hand and asked, “Where would you rather be, Uncle Cliff? In the square or the circle?”
“Cassandra, unfortunately, I don’t think we are born with a choice.”
Her present had been hijacked by that memory. It took her on a side trip into the past with her uncle, leaving behind the old history book on her lap. She was surprised to find the book still open on her legs, her hands resting on the pages.
She hadn’t done this much reminiscing in years. Maybe ever. She hadn’t thought of Uncle Cliff in recent times, except for when he died early in her second marriage. She and Trent were living in Arizona. Mom said not to come back for the funeral, and Sandra didn’t. It was too expensive, and her life had become too complicated.
She stood, setting the book in the chair. The white-painted handrail slipped beneath her fingers as she descended. The long dirt road called to her, and she decided to revisit history in person. Funny how, all these years later, she knew what Uncle Cliff had meant. It was true then, and, for her, nothing had changed.
They weren’t in the circle. The family circle. The family and friends circle, even. They existed in the barely tolerated fringes. They couldn’t be in the circle because they couldn’t fit. Fitting in—that was the key. She’d known that for a long time, but she’d never understood why it had to be that way. For Uncle Cliff? Maybe it was the drinking. The family hadn’t approved of his weakness, his inability to toe the line and live up to his responsibilities. But Sandra-Cassandra? Cassandra had been a cute, smart little kid who was on the fringe long before she had the chance to become a person in her own right, and when she did, she, Sandra, finally fell off the diagram map altogether.
Looking back, she didn’t think it was them—the other adults. Uncle Cliff had made it sound like it was a family decision to treat them as if they were different. She wasn’t sure about that now. Some people didn’t fit in, and some people didn’t want to. She’d been too young to make that kind of distinction at the time, and there was a part of her that had empathized with her uncle, bonded to him. She’d recognized his brokenness. It was one thing to be different and embrace it. It was something else to cast blame and drink it away as her uncle had. And years later, she’d married a man who was, to all appearances, successful and confident, and yet he, too, was very broken. He’d fooled everyone into believing he was a highly rated, well-respected engineer. They’d been together several years before she’d figured out that he wasn’t much more than a clerk who, every time he came close to actually achieving the respect he wanted, alienated his boss and coworkers and had to start looking for a new job.
Different. Broken.
She was, too. How had she ever thought she could fix anyone? Or their marriage?
The road was dirty and rutted. She’d barely started down it when a tread mark caught her eye. It wasn’t much, but it was captured in the dirt because of the rain they’d had during the night.
Only the one tread mark, so she couldn’t estimate the size of the vehicle,
but it seemed large. Maybe a truck? The road ended here, so the driver must’ve turned in the grassier area right in front of the house. Perhaps a stranger who thought he or she could cut through somehow? Or maybe someone selling something?
Standing there, thinking, she heard a distant motor. An approaching vehicle. For a crazy moment, she almost thought she’d see that old, dusty black hearse, but it wasn’t, of course. That was long ago. This was a pickup truck, one of those big ones, dark green, moving slowly along, negotiating the dips and bumps. Somehow she knew who it would be. Colton Bennett.
A skinny arm shot out through the passenger-side window and waved. Aaron. Sandra moved to the side of the road, the driver’s side, as they pulled forward.
Colton rolled down the window. “Want to take a ride?”
CHAPTER SIX
Sandra put up a hand to shade her eyes. “Ride? Where to?”
“Hang some posters.”
“You’ve already done so much.”
He frowned and pressed his lips together as if considering her words before he reshaped them into a smile. “I’d help Barbara if she was here and dealing with this. Besides, Aaron thinks you don’t know your way around here. He’s worried you might get lost. Then who’ll find Honey?”
Aaron was up on his knees so he could see past his dad through the window. He waved, and she waved back.
“I was planning to visit the shelters and local authorities tomorrow and then hang the posters.”
“Let’s do it now. There’s plenty of afternoon left.”
Sandra looked down at her clothing and spread her hands. “I’m definitely not dressed for that.”
“You look great. Change if you want. We’ll wait. But you look nice. This is the country, after all, and we’re talking about animal shelters.”
