by SM Reine
“In order to cook breakfast,” Sophie said.
“With our food,” Skylar said.
“I bought what I needed and only borrowed a little,” she said. “I assumed that it was fine for me to feed Mr. Marshall in such a manner. I apologize if I overstepped. I can replace everything I used.”
“That’s not even the entirety of the issue! She’s argumentative—we’re scared of her.” Aunt Bee was getting herself all worked up. “We only treat people like guests when they are polite. I have never seen anyone so rude as that girl, and I can’t believe you think I should put up with it. She might stab us in our sleep.”
“It’s not like she was invited anyway,” Ashley said. “And she’s friends with witch hunters.”
“At risk of bursting this illusory bubble you have built for yourselves, wherein I am completely deaf and mute and thereby incapable of defending myself, I will say that I have done nothing wrong,” Sophie said. “Mr. Marshall invited me, and this is his family home as much as yours. I have already offered to replace any resources I used. You had no right to put your hands on my bags.”
“See?” Aunt Bee drained her lemonade in one long gulp, setting it down with a shaking hand. “Rude.” She stormed into the house, the screen door bouncing shut behind her.
“I told you that Aunt Bee wouldn’t be happy about this,” Ashley said. “You could’ve listened. Good job ruining everything, Linc.”
“You cretins wouldn’t know hospitality if it emptied its bowels on your shoes.” Sophie stormed up the stairs, and Skylar physically recoiled at her approach.
“Don’t hurt me!” Skylar shouted.
Lincoln hurried up the steps. “Jesus Christ, sis—”
“Don’t bother with them, Mr. Marshall,” Sophie said primly. “Anything you do now is too little too late. Carry my bags to the pickup. I will need a ride to stay somewhere else, which I will happily pay for. You are relieved of being responsible for me after that.”
“You kidding? I’m coming with you,” Lincoln said.
Ashley’s eyes widened. “You aren’t getting kicked out.”
“I go where Sophie goes.” He raked a hand through his hair, battling words that made his throat feel raw. “All I wanted to do was see my family, help my dad, help you. But you’ve reminded me why I went to college in another state.” He tossed Sophie’s bag over his shoulder, then tried to take the tote she was holding.
She clutched the straps to her chest, glaring at him with nostrils flared. “These are mine,” Sophie said.
“Get your butt in the truck. And listen to me this time. I need to have words with my cousin, and you’re too much a lady to hear the color of the thoughts I’m having.”
Some of the alarm within Sophie’s eyes faded to wariness. She nodded, and for once, she listened to Lincoln.
“It was Aunt Bee who went through your room,” Ashley said, suddenly defensive.
“I’d have done it if I’d been given a chance,” Skylar said. “The black girl was so rude.”
“The hell she was,” Lincoln said.
“I said that it wasn’t right for them to go into your room while you are occupying it, but they wouldn’t hear any of it,” Ashley went on. She talked right over them. “Frankly, there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room to defend her when she was going through all of our stuff and drawing pictures of where to find it, and—”
“Sophie’s right—you guys are cretins,” Lincoln said.
“You’re not seriously leaving with her?” Ashley asked. “What about Uncle John?”
“I can see Dad and still sleep in a motel,” Lincoln asks. “I don’t wanna be anywhere Sophie’s not welcome.”
Ashley looked triumphant, as though Lincoln had confirmed her conspiracy theories about their relationship. “I knew it. I knew it. This is another phase, and—”
“Shut up. Just shut up for once, Ash,” Lincoln snapped. “After everything I gave up for you, the least you can do for me stop talking!”
Her mouth closed. The muscles in her neck were like cables screwing her shoulders up to her ears. “Are you still gonna help me?”
What she meant was, Help find your half-brother. But the phrasing of it rankled. This was about Ashley, not about their missing family.
He headed down the steps, which creaked like they were gonna fall apart when he put his weight on the third stair. The dust that swirled around his feet was the same glittering gold hue as when he been a child. The orchids surrounded him in a warm perfume.
This used to be home. It was still home.
But right now, he didn’t want a damn thing to do with it.
The screen door crashed open behind him.
“Lincoln!”
He turned to see his mother, Susannah, bustling down the stairs. She reached the pickup at the same time he did, and she was out of breath from trying to move so quickly.
This was a woman who had decided early in life that her currency would be usefulness, not beauty, so she had sacrificed her joints and back laboring over the family home and the people inside of it. The Breaking had done few favors for the woman’s looks. The lines on her face were deeper than they’d ever been, and the remnants of her thinning hair were turning gray. Her eyes were bruised. Her cheeks hung in jowls.
Still, calluses and all, Susannah’s touch on Lincoln’s wrist was soft. “I told them not to mess with your girlfriend,” Susannah said. “They don’t listen to me. I would never have allowed it if… Well, I wouldn’t have it that way. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Lincoln said.
Both of them knew well that Susannah had no control over anything at the Marshall home. She was a guest as unwelcome as Sophie.
“I wish you hadn’t come,” Susannah said softly.
“I know.” Lincoln started to climb into the pickup, but she held the door.
“It’s just a hard time for the family right now, and there’s no reason you should be in the middle of it. You should be living your life and forgetting about everything here. Grove County, your family’s cruelties, John Marshall…”
Lincoln’s throat clenched shut. “You did a fine job living life on your own and forgetting about this, didn’t you?”
Susannah clutched the rubber lining the pickup’s door. “Come have breakfast with me tomorrow morning. At Poppy’s.”
“I’m not going anywhere without Miss Keyes,” Lincoln said.
“Of course you’re both invited,” Susannah said, bending to offer Sophie a cautious smile through the window. Sophie smiled back. “Anyone who is important to my boy is important to me.”
“I would be delighted to share breakfast with you,” Sophie said.
Susannah finally stepped back to them leave, appeased. The kindness on her face didn’t match her final words. “Grove County is Hell on Earth and we’re all burning in our own sins. Y’all should think about getting out of the fire while you still can.” And then she waved goodbye, and Lincoln left his childhood home in the dust.
Chapter 22
The only motel with open rooms was in Woodbridge. Sophie was silent on the drive to the town on the westernmost side of the county. The evening darkened until the trees were a black wall flanking the road, and he chased twilight away from Mount Bain.
“If I tell you to stay here, will you listen to me this time?” Lincoln asked once they parked in front of the motel. It had six rooms and a dirty little hole of a pool shaped like a kidney bean. The deteriorating wooden sign claimed that the rooms were blessed with air conditioning and HBO, but Lincoln doubted either was still true after Genesis.
“Don’t tell me,” Sophie said dully. “We’ll be turned away if I go inside because people here won’t want to give a room to a mixed-race couple?”
“This isn’t nineteen-fifties Alabama,” Lincoln said. “I’m more worried about the assassin. The less folks know who and where you are, the safer you’ll be.”
Sophie nodded silently.
Lincoln checked in at the fro
nt window, standing on a cracked sidewalk as mosquitoes swarmed. The hostess smiled apologetically as she gave Lincoln an old-fashioned key with the room number stamped on it. “We couldn’t rely on the card system anymore,” she said by way of explanation. “We can’t guarantee power outside the city’s regular hours of service, but we try to keep the generator going until at least nine so you can watch TV before bed.”
“Much appreciated,” he said, checking the key. Room six. That was the furthest from the office possible, and nearest the kidney-shaped pool nobody could use.
Lincoln parked the truck in front of their room. He double checked for cameras—there weren’t any—before ushering Sophie inside, piling her belongings beside a couch patterned with brown roses. He locked the door and closed the curtains before turning on the light.
“Oh dear,” Sophie said.
There was only one bed in the room. The clerk had been optimistic describing it as a king; Lincoln’s double bed in his childhood bedroom was wider than this. “I didn’t plan on sleeping anyway.”
“You mean to stay awake for the entire visit? That hardly seems reasonable.” Sophie lifted the corner of the bedspread to look underneath it, nose wrinkled. “You’ll just have to ask the clerk if it’s possible to get a roll-away bed. I do not wish to sleep on this mattress, and it’s unrealistic for you to stay awake all night.” She grinned smugly. “I’ve been reading about your culture in my free time. I know about roll-aways.”
“I’m not asking the front desk for nothing. There’s no better way to advertise two people in a room with reservations for one.” He tossed his backpack and jacket on the floor. “There. A second bed. You can have floor or mattress.”
“I think they have bed bugs,” Sophie said.
“Floor it is,” he said, sitting on the bed.
As it turned out, neither of them had to worry much about sleeping that night; the power went out ten minutes after they arrived and drenched the motel in shadow. Lincoln was brushing his teeth in the lightless bathroom when he heard shouting in the room next to theirs. The walls were thin enough for him to hear every last word. Bitch this, slut that. Something about drugs. A baby. Another woman. Lincoln had left his family home and found the exact same bullshit elsewhere.
Sophie took the floor but rested with her eyes open all night. Lincoln knew—he stayed in the chair blocking the door, looking out the window, and listening to the drama next door.
The fight silenced before dawn. He napped maybe an hour in the chair but woke when Woodbridge city power came back on.
And then it was time to move again.
Poppy’s Diner was a restaurant in Northgate, an antique silver beacon amid the newer constructions. Its windows were polished clean so that they caught sunlight, and its parking lot was as full as it had ever been. Trust Poppy to get back to feeding the community at prices everyone could afford. She was probably hemorrhaging money by serving twenty-dollar omelets, as advertised on the chalkboard outside, but Poppy wouldn’t care. She’d feed everyone until she’d sacrificed her last penny.
“Come on in,” Lincoln said, grinning as he held the door open for Sophie.
She looked at him in alarm. “Are you all right?”
“Never been better,” he said. “Why?”
“This is new, this smiling thing,” Sophie said. She poked his cheek. “You have dimples.”
He swatted her hand away. “The hell I do.”
“It’s very cute. Perhaps I should call you shortcake as well.”
“You try it and I’ll abandon you, Historian or not,” Lincoln said. He couldn’t stop smiling anyway. He was about to have Poppy’s cherry pie—the best pie this side of the Mississippi—and he might never stop smiling again.
They stepped inside together. There were so many tables that they had to squeeze sideways to weave toward the back. Lincoln had no complicated feelings about Poppy’s like he did with his family; the old-style booths, jukebox, and mismatched art cluttering its walls filled Lincoln with a glow of joy he’d never felt anywhere else.
For once, Sophie’s joy was only an additive to his, rather than a nuisance. “This is excellent!” She plucked at the boa wrapped around the shoulders of a carved wooden bear. “It’s incredible how thematically coherent these decorations are, despite seeming to come from myriad sources!”
“You’re such a nerd,” he said.
She beamed. “I am, aren’t I?” Sophie nudged him. “I know your secrets now. I know you’re capable of smiling with dimples. If you tell anyone that I am a nerd, I shall release this information as revenge.”
“Like anyone doesn’t know you’re a nerd just by looking at you.”
“Excuse me. At first glance, I look like an elegant lady.” Sophie tried to navigate through two particularly close tables and tripped over someone’s foot. She had to catch herself on the wooden bear to keep from falling.
Lincoln scooped her away from it, laughing. “If you’re excited about all the memorabilia, just wait until you try the food.”
Susannah had already gotten a table. She waved at them from the corner with the jukebox. Sophie slid into the crimson upholstered seat in front of Susannah, and Lincoln slid in beside her, putting himself between Sophie and the world.
“Did you two find somewhere to stay last night?” Susannah asked, clutching at her half-empty coffee mug with both hands. It was so loud from the crowd packing Poppy’s that she practically shouted at them.
“The motel in Woodbridge,” Lincoln said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
This was what she chose to apologize over? There were so many worse sins that Susannah needed to come to terms with. “I take it you wanted to meet us here for a reason,” Lincoln said.
“Isn’t it enough to want to catch up with my boy?”
“No,” he said.
She fumbled in her purse and came up with a faded photograph. It showed a younger, healthier John Marshall holding an infant. He was stony-faced. Unsmiling. The curtains behind him made it look like a hospital. “I know Ashley told you about him.”
“My brother?” Lincoln took the picture. The baby wasn’t real interesting; he looked like a baby, indistinguishable from any of his sister’s boys when they’d come fresh out of the womb. His dad’s mustache had more of his attention. John Marshall had only had that mustache for a few years of Lincoln’s childhood, meaning that this had to have been thirty years past.
“I hoped to answer any questions you might have about him,” Susannah said. “Bear in mind that I don’t know much, but what I do know is yours.”
There was a lump in Lincoln’s throat he couldn’t seem to swallow down. “What’s his name?”
“When he was born, they called him John Junior. I don’t know if they gave him another name when he was adopted.”
“Who adopted him?” Lincoln asked.
“First he was with a foster home that knew how to handle babies,” Susannah said. “He stayed with Mrs. Poynter, if you remember her. After that…I don’t know.”
“Who’s the mother?”
“John never told me. When he showed me pictures, they weren’t…” She bit the inside of her mouth. “I never saw her face in them. He only showed me enough so I’d know exactly what they’d done, and so I’d feel like a piece of garbage.”
“Sure he did.” This was the same martyr bullshit she’d been saying for years. That John had cheated first. That John had taunted her.
Susannah was a chronic liar, and that would never change.
“I don’t think that Junior’s still living in town,” she went on. “I know for a fact that he’s not with any of the families in Grove County because Ashley couldn’t find him. If you want to look for him, there’s no point being here to do it.”
“There’s still a chance Dad will tell me when he wakes up,” Lincoln said.
“You shouldn’t wait for him,” Susannah said. “He might not ever wake up, and this place isn’t safe for you.
Either of you.”
“This is the nearest to safe I’ve felt in a long time,” Lincoln said, and it was true. Poppy’s was safety. It was his real home.
Even this home was different than he remembered, though. More people were staring at their table than usual. Northgate had always been bigger than Mortise; strangers were slightly likelier to go unnoticed. But even the occasional stranger had never been as diverse as those having breakfast that morning. There were even golden eyes among the diners—pack members who’d come to town for whatever reason. To shop, to eat, to get a break from living in Tent City. No wonder Lincoln’s family was getting up in arms over the preternatural threat. Northgate’s mundane population was being replaced, leaving the locals a minority.
The people who stared at them weren’t newcomers. They were old-town people. A couple of Salter cousins, one of the McBrides.
The table adjacent to theirs was the most obvious threat. Behind Susannah, a cluster of men were muttering among themselves and shooting glances their way.
“I see that I am as popular here as I am with the Marshall family,” Sophie said, shrinking into the bench.
Susannah glanced over her shoulder. Anyone who’d been staring at them looked away quickly. “Oh, that? Believe it or not, that’s about me. Lincoln only surprised people by bringing you around because you’re—well, you’re different. But these people think that they know me, and that is much worse.”
“I beg to differ,” Sophie said. “Little has been proven to be more damaging, historically speaking, than xenophobia. Small town gossip in regard to your personal life is uncomfortable, yet incomparable.”
Susannah’s features became pinched. “I see an old friend over there. I’m going to go talk to her for a minute.” She slid out of the booth. “Lincoln, will you order for me?”
“Sure thing,” he said.
She squeezed her way through the crowd to speak to female friend at the bar. Lincoln caught sight of the two women embracing before the people in the diner shifted, cutting them out of his view.
“Will you now lecture me for failing to ‘let things slide’ with your family?” Sophie asked. “Are you angry that I have, again, taken an opportunity to speak up in defense of my experiences?”
