Twelve

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  She had a Southern accent—less twang and more drawl than my own. Com-pluh-mehnt or an in-suhlt?

  “That depends on your perspective more than mine.”

  She smiled slightly, like I’d said something just darling but not actually amusing. “Your name is Sawyer.” After informing me of that fact, she paused. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” Clearly, that was a rhetorical question, because she didn’t wait for a reply. “Why don’t I spare us the dramatics?”

  Her smile broadened, warm in the way that a shower is warm, right before someone flushes the toilet.

  “My name,” she continued in a tone to match the smile, “is Lillian Taft. I’m your maternal grandmother.”

  My grandmother, I thought, trying to process the situation, looks like a bichon frise.

  “Your mother and I had a bit of a falling-out before you were born.” Lillian was apparently the kind of person who would have referred to a Category 5 hurricane as a bit of a drizzle. “I think it’s high time to put that bit of history to rest, don’t you?”

  I was one rhetorical question away from going for the knife drawer again, so I attempted to cut to the chase. “You didn’t come here looking for my mother.”

  “You don’t miss much, Miss Sawyer.” Lillian’s voice was soft and feminine. I got the feeling she didn’t miss much either. “I’d like to make you an offer.”

  An offer? I was suddenly reminded of who I was dealing with here. Lillian Taft wasn’t a powder puff. She was the merciless, dictatorial matriarch who’d kicked my pregnant mother out of her house at the ripe old age of seventeen.

  I stalked to the front door and retrieved the Post-it I’d placed next to the doorbell when our house had been hit with door-to-door evangelists two weeks in a row. I turned and offered the handwritten notice to the woman who’d raised my mother. Her perfectly manicured fingertips plucked the Post-it from my grasp.

  “‘No soliciting,’” my grandmother read.

  “Except for Girl Scout cookies,” I added helpfully. I’d gotten kicked out of the local Scout troop during my morbid true crime and facts-about-autopsies phase, but I still had a weakness for Thin Mints.

  Lillian pursed her lips and amended her previous statement. “‘No soliciting except for Girl Scout cookies.’”

  I saw the precise moment that she registered what I was saying: I wasn’t interested in her offer. Whatever she was selling, I wasn’t buying.

  An instant later, it was like I’d said nothing at all. “I’ll be frank, Sawyer,” she said, showing a kind of candy-coated steel I’d never seen in my mom. “Your mother chose this path. You didn’t.” She pressed her lips together, just for a moment. “I happen to think you deserve more.”

  “More than off-brand knives and drinking straight from the carton?” I shot back. Two could play the rhetorical question game.

  Unfortunately, the great Lillian Taft had apparently never met a rhetorical question she was not fully capable of answering. “More than a G.E.D., a career path with no hope of advancement, and a mother who’s less responsible now than she was at sixteen.”

  Were she not an aging Southern belle with a reputation to uphold, my grandmother might have followed that statement by throwing her hands into touchdown position and declaring, “Burn!”

  Instead, she laid a hand over her heart. “You deserve opportunities you’ll never have here.”

  The people in this town were good people. This was a good place. But it wasn’t my place. Even in the best of times, part of me had always felt like I was just passing through.

  A muscle in my throat tightened. “You don’t know me.”

  That got a pause out of her—and not a calculated one. “I could,” she replied finally. “I could know you. And you could find yourself in the position to attend any college of your choosing and graduate debt free.”

  There was a contract. An honest-to-God, written-in-legalese, sign-on-the-dotted-line contract.

  “Seriously?”

  Lillian waved away the question. “Let’s not get bogged down in the details.”

  “Of course not,” I said, thumbing through the nine-page appendix. “Why would I go to the trouble of reading the terms before I sell you my soul?”

  “The contract is for your protection,” my grandmother insisted. “Otherwise, what’s to keep me from reneging on my end of the deal once yours is complete?”

  “A sense of honor and any desire whatsoever for an ongoing relationship?” I suggested.

  Lillian arched an eyebrow. “Are you willing to bet your college education on my honor?”

  I knew plenty of people who’d gone to college. I also knew a lot of people who hadn’t.

  I read the contract. I wasn’t even sure why. I was not going to move in with her for an entire year. I was not going to walk away from my home, my life, my mother for—

  “Five hundred thousand dollars?” I may have punctuated that amount with an expletive or two.

  “Have you been listening to rap music?” my grandmother demanded.

  “You said you’d pay for college.” I tore my gaze from the contract. Even just reading it made me feel like I’d let the guy with the Dodge Ram tuck a couple of ones into my bikini. “You didn’t say anything about handing me a check for half a million dollars.”

  “It won’t be a check,” my grandmother said, as if that was the real issue here. “It will be a trust. College, graduate school, living expenses, study abroad, transportation, tutors—these things add up.”

  These things.

  “Say it,” I told her, unable to believe that anyone could shrug off that amount of money. “Say that you’re offering me five hundred thousand dollars to live with you for a year.”

  “Money isn’t something we talk about, Sawyer. It’s something we have.”

  I stared at her, waiting for the punch line.

  There was no punch line.

  “You came here expecting me to say yes.” I didn’t phrase that sentence as a question, because it wasn’t one.

  “I suppose that I did,” Lillian allowed.

  “Why?”

  I wanted her to actually say that she’d assumed that I could be bought. I wanted to hear her admit that she thought so little of me—and so little of my mom—that there had been no doubt in her mind that I’d jump at the chance to take her devil of a deal.

  “I suppose,” Lillian said finally, “that you remind me a bit of myself. And were I in your position, sweet girl…” She laid a hand on my cheek. “I would surely jump at the chance to identify and locate my biological father.”

  My mom—in between alternating bouts of pretending that I’d been immaculately conceived, cursing the male of the species, and getting tipsy and nostalgic about her first time—had told me exactly three things about my mystery father.

  She’d only slept with him once.

  He hated fish.

  He wasn’t looking for a scandal.

  And that was it. When I was eleven, I’d found a picture she’d hidden away, a portrait of twenty-four teenage boys in long-tailed tuxedos, standing beneath a marble arch.

  Symphony Squires.

  The caption had been embossed onto the picture in silver script. The year—and several of the faces—had been scratched out.

  Money isn’t something we talk about, I thought hours after Lillian had left. I mentally mimicked her tone as I continued. And the fact that the man who knocked your mother up is almost certainly a scion of high society isn’t something I’ll come right out and say, but…

  I picked the contract up again. This time, I read it from start to finish. Lillian had conveniently forgotten to mention some of the terms.

  Like the fact that she would choose my wardrobe.

  Like the mandatory manicure I’d have once a week.

  Like the way she expected me to attend private school alongside my cousins.

  I hadn’t even realized I had cousins. Trick’s grandkids had cousins. Half of the members of my elementary
school Girl Scout troop had cousins in that troop. But me?

  I had an encyclopedia of medieval torture techniques.

  Pushing myself to finish the contract, I arrived at the icing on the cake. I agree to participate in the annual Symphony Ball and all Symphony Deb events leading up to my presentation to society next spring.

  Deb. As in debutante.

  Half a million dollars wasn’t enough.

  And yet, the thought of those hypothetical cousins lingered in my mind. One of my less random childhood obsessions had been genetics. Cousins shared roughly one-eighth of their DNA.

  Half siblings share a fourth. I found myself going to my mother’s bedroom, opening the bottom drawer of her dresser, and feeling for the photograph she’d taped to the back.

  Twenty-four teenage boys.

  Twenty-four possible producers of the sperm that had impregnated my mother.

  Twenty-four Symphony Squires.

  When my phone buzzed, I forced myself to shut the drawer and look down at the text my mom had just sent me.

  A photo of an airplane.

  It may be more than a few days. I read the message that had accompanied the photograph silently and then a second time out loud. My mother loved me. I knew that. I’d always known that.

  Someday, I’d stop expecting her to surprise me.

  It was another hour before I went back to the contract. I picked up a red pen. I made some adjustments.

  And then I signed.

  Mackie kneaded his forehead. “Are you sure none of you wants to call your parents?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Do you know who my father is?”

  “My stepmother’s faking a pregnancy, and she needs her rest.”

  Mackie wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole. He turned to the last girl, the one who’d successfully picked the lock mere seconds after he’d arrived.

  “What about you?” he said hopefully.

  “My biological father literally threatened to kill me if I become inconvenient,” the girl said, leaning back against the wall of the jail cell like she wasn’t wearing a designer gown. “And if anyone finds out we were arrested, I’m out five hundred thousand dollars.”

  I arrived at my grandmother’s residence—a mere forty-five minutes from the town where I’d grown up and roughly three and a half worlds away—on the contractually specified date at the contractually specified time. Based on what I knew of the Taft family and the suburban wonderland they inhabited, I’d expected my grandmother’s house to be a mix of Tara and the Taj Mahal. But 2525 Camellia Court wasn’t ostentatious, and it wasn’t historic. It was a nine-thousand-square-foot house masquerading as average, the architectural equivalent of a woman who spent two hours making herself up for the purpose of looking like she wasn’t wearing makeup. This old thing? I could almost hear the two-acre lot saying. I’ve had it for years.

  Objectively, the house was enormous, but the cul de sac was lined with other houses just as big, with lawns just as sprawling. It was like someone had taken a normal neighborhood and scaled everything up an order of magnitude in size—including the driveways, the SUVs, and the dogs.

  The single largest canine I’d ever seen greeted me at the front door, butting my hand with its massive head.

  “William Faulkner,” the woman who’d answered the door chided. “Mind your manners.”

  She was the spitting image of Lillian Taft. I was still processing the fact that the dog was (a) the size of a small pony and (b) named William Faulkner, when the woman I assumed was my aunt spoke again.

  “John David Easterling,” she called, raising her voice so it carried. “Who’s the best shot in this family?”

  There was no reply. William Faulkner butted his head against my thigh and huffed. I bent slightly—very slightly—to pet him and noticed the red dot that had appeared on my tank top.

  “I will skin you alive if you pull that trigger,” my aunt called, her voice disturbingly cheerful.

  What trigger? I thought. The red dot on my torso wavered slightly.

  “Now, young man, I believe I asked you a question. Who’s the best shot in this family?”

  There was an audible sigh, and then a boy of ten or so pushed up to a sitting position on the roof. “You are, Mama.”

  “And am I using your cousin for target practice?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No, sir, I am not,” my aunt confirmed. “Sit, William Faulkner.”

  The dog obeyed, and the boy disappeared from the roof.

  “Please tell me that was a Nerf gun,” I said.

  It took my aunt a moment to process the question, and then she let out a peal of laughter—practiced and perfect. “He’s not allowed to use the real thing without supervision,” she assured me.

  I stared at her. “That’s not as comforting as you think it is.”

  The smile never left her face. “You do look like your mother, don’t you? That hair. And those cheekbones! When I was your age, I would have killed for those cheekbones.”

  Given that she was the best shot in this family, I wasn’t entirely certain she was exaggerating.

  “I’m Sawyer,” I said, trying to wrap my mind around the greeting I’d gotten from a woman my mom had always referred to as the Ice Queen.

  “Of course you are,” came the immediate reply, warm as whiskey. “I’m your Aunt Olivia, and that’s William Faulkner. She’s a purebred Bernese mountain dog.”

  I’d recognized the breed. What I hadn’t recognized, however, was that William Faulkner was female.

  “Where’s Lillian?” I asked, feeling like I’d well and truly fallen down the rabbit hole.

  Aunt Olivia hooked the fingers on her right hand through William Faulkner’s collar and reflexively straightened her pearls with the left. “Let’s get you inside, Sawyer. Are you hungry? You must be hungry.”

  “I just ate,” I replied. “Where’s Lillian?”

  My aunt ignored the question. She was already retreating back into the house. “Come on, William Faulkner. Good girl.”

  My grandmother’s kitchen was the size of our entire house. I half expected my aunt to ring for the cook, but it quickly became apparent that she considered the feeding of other people to be both a pastime and a spiritual calling. Nothing I said or did could dissuade her from making me a sandwich.

  Refusing the brownie might have been taken as a declaration of war.

  I was a big believer in personal boundaries, but I was also a believer in chocolate, so I ignored the sandwich, took a bite of the brownie, and then asked where my grandmother was.

  Again.

  “She’s out back with the party planner. Can I get you something to drink?”

  I put the brownie back down on my plate. “Party planner?”

  Before my aunt could answer, the boy who’d had me in his sights earlier appeared in the kitchen. “Lily says it’s bad manners to threaten fratricide,” he announced. “So she didn’t threaten fratricide.”

  He helped himself to the seat next to mine and eyed my sandwich. Without a word, I slid it toward him, and he began devouring it with all the verve of a little Tasmanian devil wearing a blue polo shirt.

  “Mama,” he said after swallowing. “What’s fratricide?”

  “I imagine it’s what one’s sister very pointedly does not threaten when one attempts to shoot her with a Nerf gun.” Aunt Olivia turned back to the counter. It took me about three seconds to realize that she was making another sandwich. “Introduce yourself, John David.”

  “I’m John David. It’s a pleasure to meet you, madam.” For a trigger-happy kid, he was surprisingly gallant when it came to introductions. “Are you here for the party?”

  I narrowed my eyes slightly. “What party?”

  “Incoming!” A man swept into the room. He had presidential hair and a face made for golf courses and boardrooms. I would have pegged him as Aunt Olivia’s husband even if he hadn’t bent to kiss her cheek. “Fair warning: I saw Greer R
ichards making her way down the street on my way in.”

  “Greer Waters, now,” my aunt reminded him.

  “Ten to one odds Greer Waters is here to check up on the preparations for tonight.” He helped himself to the sandwich that Aunt Olivia had been making for me.

  I knew it was futile, but I couldn’t help myself. “What’s happening tonight?”

  Aunt Olivia began making a third sandwich. “Sawyer, this rapscallion is your Uncle J.D. Honey, this is Sawyer.”

  My aunt said my name in a way that made me 100 percent certain they’d discussed me, probably on multiple occasions, possibly as a problem that required a gentle hand to solve.

  “Is this the part where you tell me I look like my mother?” I asked, my voice dry as a desert. My uncle was looking at me the same way his wife had, the way my grandmother had.

  “This,” he told me solemnly, “is where I welcome you to the family and ask you, quite seriously, if I just stole your sandwich.”

  The doorbell rang. John David was off like a rocket. All it took was a single arch of my aunt’s eyebrow before her husband was on their son’s heels.

  “Greer Waters is chairing the Symphony Ball,” Aunt Olivia murmured, clearing away John David’s plate and depositing sandwich number three in front of me. “Between you and me, I think she’s bitten off a bit more than she can chew. She just recently married the father of one of the debs. There’s trying and then there’s trying too hard.”

  This from a woman who had made me three sandwiches since I’d walked in the front door.

  “In any case,” Aunt Olivia continued, lowering her voice, “I am just certain she’ll have Capital O Opinions about the way your grandmother has arranged things.”

  Arranged things for what? This time, I didn’t bother saying a word out loud.

  “I know you must have questions,” my aunt said, brushing a strand of hair out of my face, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I had been asking them. “About your mama. About this family.”

  I hadn’t expected this kind of welcome. I hadn’t expected affection or warmth or baked goods from a woman who’d spent the past eighteen years ignoring my mother—and my existence—altogether. A woman that my mom had never even once mentioned by name.