Page 6

Chapter 5

T hat night in our newly set up bed, I nestled close to Peter. I breathed in the unfamiliar scents of our new house: old man, uncleared AC flues, stacks of old newspapers. And underneath all that, the faint whiff of some chemical I couldn’t identify. I didn’t mind the hint of mustiness: in fact, it was comforting. The smell of stability.

“Round of applause for not ripping into that poor guy about the well.” Peter rested his hand on my right shoulder, finding that spot just beside my shoulder blade. That knot that was perpetually lodged in the middle of my trapezius, which had come from years of hunching over a stove. His thumb moved in small circles and I melted.

I sighed. “I mean, how can I be mad about a one-hundred-dollar estate?”

“In all fairness, they should’ve told us.”

“Would that have changed anything, though? I mean, honestly, we were still going to get this place for nothing. We’ve just got to remember the bees with honey thing. Not that you have a problem with that. I’m more of a bees-with-a-bulldozer person.”

He laughed and pulled me closer. “I’ve always liked that about you.”

I smiled, relaxing into his rhythmic touch. I remembered the crime tape at the old mill. The police cruiser. Now was definitely not the time to bring that up. Another time. Or maybe not at all. It was so peaceful, lying here with him, blissing out under the pressure of his fingers.

I was asleep in minutes, my dreams full of splashing fountains, rushing brown rivers, and the plaintive sounds of fiddle music. I saw children, huddled together, crying. In the middle of it all, an old woman emerged in the darkness. She had a crown of gray braids and a silver cross around her neck. Her withered mouth opened, and I smelled something fetid.

Whaaat . . . have they taaakennn . . . from you? she drawled in her crone’s creaking, rasping voice. What have they stooolennn, Billieeeee . . . ?

I woke with a strangled cry. It was morning and Peter’s side of the bed was empty. I got up, showered, and gave Mere her breakfast. Peter didn’t reappear until I’d already made my way through half the coffeepot. He looked exhausted and sweaty, covered in grass and streaks of mud. He’d woken at four, he told me, heart racing about the uncapped well, and set out to find the thing. He hadn’t had any luck. I gave him coffee and watched him head for the stairs and a shower. I certainly wasn’t going to mention the bizarre old lady from my dreams, but her strange voice still echoed in my ears.

* * *

The following week, this became our default routine. Peter would toss and turn each night, then every early morning, usually before I woke, he’d head out to hike over our twelve acres. The twelve acres, which, incidentally, had started to feel vaguely threatening.

It was a strange thing. Major’s revelation about the well had shifted something inside me. I felt ill at ease, definitely annoyed that no one had bothered to mention the well until we’d already moved in. Peter was downright obsessed with it. Now, as I stood at the kitchen sink, watching Peter tromp back home across the green field for the seventh morning in a row, I felt like I was looking out over someone else’s property.

Until he found the well, Peter insisted Mere stay in the front yard, only going as far as the towering magnolia that lay a hundred yards down the drive while either he or I sat on one of the porch rockers and kept an eye on her. Since he had appointments, that person usually ended up being me. This bugged me. Besides keeping me from my search for a space for the restaurant, I just thought it was overkill. Mere was six, a smart and generally reasonable kid, not one who pushed back on boundaries just for the hell of it. But Peter was adamant—the well was out there, uncovered and unsafe. We’d never forgive ourselves if she fell in.

The few times we had gone outside, as soon as Mere opened the front door, Ramsay would shoot off across the yard, disappearing within seconds across the fields to parts unknown. Her playmate’s absence didn’t seem to bother her, though. Mere was content to entertain herself, exploring every nook and cranny of the yard surrounding the house, searching for pretty rocks, peering down holes dug by some animal, or attempting to climb the towering magnolia. It was only after several days of this that she grew bored. She would return to the porch, glum and listless. I couldn’t blame her. There was a whole world to explore, but she was chained to the house.

I suggested we organize the house together. Mere agreed, a bit unenthusiastically. So after Peter returned from his daily well hunt, showered, and shut himself in the front bedroom he’d made into his office, we began. We chose a playlist and turned the volume as high as we dared. We began downstairs, trying to keep quiet so we wouldn’t disturb Peter, but constantly failing. We dropped boxes, thumped our old vacuum cleaner into furniture, inadvertently slammed pocket doors, smothering our giggles every time we kept accidentally bursting into song with “Hey Jude” or “Carolina in My Mind” or “You Are the Best Thing.”

The downstairs of our new house consisted of a wide center hall flanked by two parlors on either side, a dining room, conservatory, and kitchen, along with a hodgepodge of closets and hallways and small storage rooms that seemed like strange architectural afterthoughts. The parlors were mirrors of one another, the one on the left done in pale greens and yellows with an intricate marble mantel over the fireplace and a piano, the one on the right, in shades of cobalt blue with a leather chesterfield sofa and walls of books.

Fine Regency and Victorian furniture filled each room, and silk and tasseled draperies hung on the floor-to-ceiling windows. The wide plank floors, though scarred from a century and a half of use, still glowed. This house, full of all these antiques, would have gone for well over five million in upstate New York. I couldn’t believe our luck. Portraits—Dalzell and Minette ancestors, I guessed—framed in heavy gold, lined the walls. I thought of poor widowed George Davenport, alone in the house, his mind slowly deteriorating. How lonely and scared he must’ve been.

Mere spoke behind me. “It looks like there’s a girl’s room and a boy’s.”

“Yeah, they tended to do a lot of that in the old days,” I said. “Separate everyone into groups.”

She crinkled her nose and peered into the blue parlor. “The boy’s room has all the books.”

I looked over her shoulder. It did indeed. Books somebody would have to dust—me, no doubt. Even now, they were covered in a fine, white dust. The shelves were, however, the perfect place to stash my bag of Godiva chocolate squares, where Peter and Mere would never think to look. “You pick where we start.”

After we finished the parlors, Mere and I moved on to the dining room, where we stacked Peter’s grandmother’s china in the glass-fronted cabinet. Behind the dining room, off a side hallway, there was a small glass conservatory, which had obviously been skipped by the cleaning crew. In the center, a dry concrete fountain, cracked in several places, boasted an intricate blue tile pattern. The room was full of dead potted plants, and everything was coated in white dust. We dumped the shriveled plants in the compost heap out back and dusted and mopped the whole room. I promised Mere we could start with a few hard-to-kill plants and see where that led.

Late in the afternoon, when the sun’s low rays were shooting through the windows of the house, we went back to the kitchen, which I had already fully cleaned and set to order the first day we’d arrived. The large room ran the entire length of the back of the house and included a spacious butler’s pantry lined with glass cabinets as well as a collection of hutches and wooden bread tables. I loved the whole 1930s aesthetic: the red tiled floors, red-and-white cherry-patterned wallpaper, and the centerpiece of the room, an enormous, scarred pine farm table surrounded by eight ladder-back chairs. The room made me feel like I’d stepped into a slower way of life, a place where I could leisurely bake a coconut cake and thaw a couple of steaks for dinner while the setting sun sent its golden beams to bless my work.

That first day, at the deep, cast-iron sink, I had run the faucet. At first it spurted, then had started to run a dark rusty red. After a few minutes, though, it began to clear up. I turned off the faucet, hoping we weren’t going to have to call out more people to fix the new well. It was the last thing I needed. Fortunately, we hadn’t had a problem with it since.

* * *

The next morning, as I watched Peter heading back to the house across the dew-drenched field after another obviously unfruitful hunt for the well, I decided to take Mere to town. The house was spotless, I didn’t want to hover as she played outside, and I really needed to find a space for the café. I kissed Peter when he came into the kitchen for coffee, then ran upstairs. I showered, leaving my chin-length hair to air dry. With the thick Georgia humidity, there was no point in blowing it out. After checking the weather on my phone—a balmy seventy-eight degrees with not a cloud in the forecast—I pulled on a green sundress printed with light blue flowers, and sandals.

Peter had started his first session in his office upstairs. I could hear his voice drifting through the house, not necessarily the exact words, only the deep, comforting rumble of his voice. I paused, letting the sound wash over me. I loved his voice—the way he said my name, the way he told a joke, like he fully expected everyone within earshot to be as delighted by it as he was. But I’d been married to the man for eight years, and I’d never heard that particular brand of gentleness in his tone when he talked to me.

I had no one to blame but myself. Maybe he would speak to me that way if I was truthful with him, but I hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about how much Mom’s move to Maine still hurt. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because I couldn’t stand to admit that I was so emotionally needy. I’d just worked through the pain. Acted like everything was the same.

How could I tell him that even though I seemed fine, I still felt like crawling into bed and hiding most days? He needed a wife and a partner, not another patient. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if I walked into his office right now, sat down, and told him the mortifying truth.

I opened the first Billie’s to make my mother love me, and now I’m opening another restaurant because I could use an easy win. I need it . . . and that’s the reason I wanted this move.

Moving to Juliana wasn’t for Mere or you.

It was for me.

What if I said the ugly truth straight out like that? Would he use that same gentle tone he used with his clients? Or would he finally see what a fragile, needy person I was—a person who had moved her family hundreds of miles away so she could repair her precious, shattered ego—and be disgusted? When I let myself even edge around the truth, it sickened and shamed me. How would it not have the same effect on him?

“I’m ready,” Mere said, standing before me in jeans, an orange-and-red striped shirt, and her tiny, patent leather Doc Martens. Her long blond hair hung like a wet curtain over her shoulders. She grinned at me, my little hipster kid, as Ramsay wove a figure eight around her legs. “Mama, I thought of a name for your new restaurant.”

“Oh yeah?”

“The Lottery,” she said.

I smoothed her hair back. “That’s an interesting name. Like the scratch-off tickets we used to get at the bodega back home?”

“No,” she said, “like another kind. An old kind. With old-timey people in covered wagons and everything.”

I stopped. “Where did you hear about that?”

“I read it, in a book in the empty bedroom. L-O-T-T-E-R-Y.”

“That’s right. Good sounding out the word, babe.”

“And there was a picture. It said 1832.”

“When were you in the other bedroom?” I asked.

“The other night. I had a bad dream that woke me up.”

“Why didn’t you come get me, sweetie?”

She shrugged. “I wasn’t really scared. I just wanted to go look in the room next to mine. The one with all the books.”

“Okay. So you had a bad dream, and you went into the spare bedroom?”

“Yeah. There are books in there with old-timey pictures. That’s when I saw the L-O-T-T-E-R-Y. That’s what you should name your restaurant.”

I brushed her hair back and gave her a little squeeze. “We’ll put it on the list, okay? We’ll put all our ideas on a list and then you, me, and Daddy’ll vote. Ready to go?”

She nodded, and I caught her hand.

“What was your dream about, babe?” I asked.

“Just some children.”

“Children?”

She nodded. “Children in the dark. They were scared of the dark. I’m not, but they were, so they sang a song. And there was a lady with them. An old lady with all of these”—she circled her hand around her head—“braids.”