* * *
Louisa made it to Atlanta the next noon to shepherd me through the funeral. It was like a replay of how I’d done that for her when her husband Harold died, only I’d had Charlie to help me manage things. Louisa said Gus had offered to come, but that I was, after all, Harold’s sister-in-law, not Gus’s, and she wasn’t about to start letting Gus be Harold’s stand-in. I imagine it was Louisa’s son, Gary, always overly fond of the internet, who made the quick plane reservation for her.
She warned me that he had the automatic thought that he’d be doing the funeral, being a Reverend and all. Bless his heart, but no way I was going to risk Charlie’s soul with Gary’s fly-by-night internet ordination. I had no lack of love for my only nephew, him being the closest I came to having a child myself, but I knew I’d have to lie and tell Gary that Charlie had left instructions for his funeral with his will, and unfortunately, it involved his one-time Baptist minister to whom he’d been close. It wouldn’t be the first lie I’d ever told and funerals count as a good cause, don’t they?
The good-hearted Baptist minister, who’d never previously heard of Charlie, but was kind to help me out, asked Gary to do him the “professional courtesy” of reading the twenty-third Psalm. That line was enough that I do believe Gary thought he’d died and gone to heaven himself, having finally proved himself a good and worthy man in spite of the sins that had cost his family so much.
Louisa and I wore the same black dresses we’d worn to her grandson Cody’s funeral—I’d made an emergency run to buy hers—and then, six months later, to Harold’s. Then, it had been I who’d dressed her, and she’d been the rag doll.
I would have liked to listen to the service, out of respect if nothing else, but my mind just wouldn’t stay in the chapel of the funeral home, though the décor was lovely, a soft peach, like an early sunset—doubtless, I was supposed to think of a new dawn—and the pew cushions heavily padded. That last was a mercy.
I fingered the pearls Charlie had given me for our wedding—they looked nice against my black dress, Louisa said—while my mind zagged from what was I going to do now to how I’d ended up here, where I sounded like a foreigner and people still teased me about my “accent.” To me, they all sounded like their words were stuck together with syrup. Well, landing here hadn’t been an accident, I reminded myself. Charlie had been as rooted in the South as I’d been in the farmland of southeastern Indiana, and he was still working when we met. I’d never had a real career like Louisa, the educated one. How could I have asked Charlie to relocate? A husband is a husband, even if it is your second one, right? It had to be I who moved. Atlanta was my home now, too, wasn’t it? I supposed it was. Fifteen years is a long time. That’s what my mind was on instead of whatever the minister was saying. I imagine it was nice. People said it was. Louisa told me that she hadn’t heard a word of Harold’s service, that she gave herself a grade of A just for sitting through it with none of her special tea, which, she reminded me, I wouldn’t let her have in advance.
Well, now I understood Louisa’s tea-need at Harold’s funeral. I understood a lot. When the funeral meal was eaten, all the crying and hugging and so sorry, so sorry, so-sorrying was finally over, Gary was dispatched to his hotel and Louisa and I could finally stop, just stop, I was plain grateful when my sister fixed us both extra-large mugs of it. A body could get drunk on the smell alone. Perfect.
I’d thought I was cried out, but as soon as there was this additional liquid in my body it worked its way out as tears. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said. We were on the couch in the family room together. It’s Louisa’s favorite room, I know, because there’s some furniture that was Mom’s in it, and it’s not so formal. “These retirement community—what do you call them? patio homes?—are nice,” Louisa said one of the few times she came here instead of my going there. She acted like she was in a museum in which everything has a DON’T TOUCH sign and is surrounded by an electric wire just to be sure. Well, Charlie did pay a fancy decorator, which wasn’t my idea, but he thought it would please me.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re coming home. We’re putting this place up for sale and you’re coming home. With me.”
Home. In my mind’s eye, I could picture the corn, how it was silvering in the sun then, shimmering like an inland sea in late afternoon light, rippling when a breeze crossed its surface. Then, when fall came, the combines would crawl across the acres like slow ships heading home.
I hesitated. “I’d need to rent a place there . . . or buy one,” I said. “Do you know of something on the market?”
That didn’t slow my sister down a nanosecond. “Don’t be ridiculous. Your home is with me. We take care of each other, don’t we? Good grief, did you think I want Gary wiping my butt when I’m old? And, please don’t picture that.”
“I’m older than you are. We’re already old, anyway, and quite capable of wiping our own butts.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Or . . . uh-oh, aren’t you?”
“Pffft.” Louisa dismissed that with the wrist flip she’d perfected with years of practice listening to fifth graders. “You’re missing the point as usual. I have the farm. How long has our family had the farm?”
“You and Harold bought the farm, not Mom and Dad, they—”
“Good Lord, CarolSue! The point is where were we raised? What land is in our blood? You’re my family. And you are coming home.”
I was going home.
Chapter 2
CarolSue
I don’t mind telling you that my sister is a bit of a nutcase about making a Plan. And yes, it’s capital-P Plan. She got the trait from our grandmother who started each day by asking the nearest victim, “What’s the Plan?” meaning a list of tasks the victim was going to accomplish for her with a precise time schedule by which they’d be accomplished. Louisa’s version is somewhat different. When she sees something she thinks needs to be fixed, she comes up with a Plan to fix it, and if God has something else in mind, well, I’ve got to say, it might be too bad for God because once Louisa’s head is down and she’s got her mind set, you might as well fasten your seat belt because you’re going on her ride.
So that night after Charlie’s funeral, I knew: Patching up my broken life was Louisa’s new Plan and she’d be loaded for bear to take out anything that got in her way. The thing was that I might have put up a token objection, at least for show, if I’d really had one. But I admit, much as I loved Charlie, I’d missed the rhythm of the seasons, although I’d routinely denied it when he asked me. There was that, but more to the point, I didn’t have another Plan for myself.
Years ago, I’d fit myself into Charlie’s world when I moved that thousand miles from home to Atlanta. Charlie’d been thrilled at how his friends took me right in to their circle. It didn’t come naturally; I’d had to play a role at first, though I did it gladly for his sake, and it had become my world, too. Part of me wondered if now I could go back to who I once was, a woman who’d never worn designer slacks with coordinated tops, gotten her hair done, had manicures, even pedicures; a woman who hadn’t learned to play bridge two afternoons a week after a ladies’ luncheon. Not that I minded the clothes; I’ve always been the one with a fashion sense. Good Lord, Louisa’s idea of a new outfit is whatever she finds in the back of her closet that she hasn’t worn in fifteen years. “Nobody remembers it anyway, CarolSue. It’s new to them,” she actually announced to me when I asked her what she was wearing out to some sheriff’s department Christmas gathering last year.
It was while we were packing that I started thinking about how abruptly my life would change. When Louisa asked me where my jeans were, I had to say, “I don’t have any.”
“No jeans? What the hell do you wear?”
“I’m