Counting on Cayne (Hallow River Book 1) (2 page)

While I was very curious
to get a glimpse of the transformed Cayne Talbot, I had another more important
errand to accomplish first. I suppose it was less of an errand than a
reckoning.

I bid farewell to Cami,
but not before she excitedly took down my cell number and promised to text me
for a girls’ night out before I left town. I declined to inform her that my
stay in Hallow River would likely be a lot longer than temporary, so there was
no rush on scheduling our evening of candy-flavored drinks and gossipy
chit-chat.

I pulled out of the
diner parking lot and wound through a maze of curving streets so familiar that
muscle memory alone could have guided me to my destination.

“5972 Poplar Road,” the
old-fashioned metal mailbox declared in red paint-chipped script. Anxiety rose
in a bubble up the back of my throat as I eased up to the curb in front of a
spike-tipped iron gate.

This was the house where
I had spent the first eighteen years of my life, but it would always be the
exclusive domain of my Aunt Luella. Others came and went, leaving height marks
and fingerprints on the doorjambs. Aunt Luella, or “Lu” for those of us who
knew her well, was the tough spirit that kept the weathered shingles from
flying out into the atmosphere, the rain-split porch boards from collapsing,
and the soot-blackened chimney standing straight and firm. Without her, the
house would probably fold into a heap of dust and rusty nails.

Among all the worries
that had occupied my mind since my tires hit the highway just before sunrise,
this encounter loomed large. I hadn’t spoken to Aunt Lu in almost two years. At
that point, the reality of my life was locked behind a mask of lies and evasions.
I didn’t hide the truth out of any desire to be cunning, but simply out of
shame.

I looked up at the
gabled roof and the banks of shuttered windows and took one tentative step toward
the chest-high gate that separated the sidewalk from a garden of weeds and tangled
vines. A cobblestone path, visible here and there amid the jumble of
vegetation, ran all the way to the porch. I hesitated and felt my phone buzz within
my purse – more messages that would have to wait.

As I reached forward and
lifted the gate latch with a metallic scrape, the front door swung open. Aunt Lu
emerged from the house. She stood with hands on her hips, elbows locked outward
at her sides. I froze with my fingers gripping the gate spokes. We stared at each
other in silence for what felt like ten minutes but was probably less than one.

“Welcome home,” she
pronounced in a flat matter-of-fact monotone.

I heaved the gate toward
me, stepped inside, and let it clang shut with a resounding thwack. I gazed up
at Aunt Lu, my heels lifting slightly from the ground. This was my natural
posture during times of stress, poised on my toes and ready to bolt at the
first sign of danger.

“Hi, Aunt Lu.” My voice
sounded unnaturally chipper.

She remained as still as
a stone pillar. With her commanding stance, she resembled a resolute Southern
matron boldly facing down a horde of rampaging Yankee soldiers. She wore a
cotton dress with a light blue background and a smattering of bright purple
lilies. Her hair, midway in transition from ash blonde to gray, was pulled into
a bun that sat severely on the crown of her head. On her feet, she wore what
appeared to be an oversized pair of men’s brown moccasin slippers.

“Battleax” was a word townspeople
often used to describe Aunt Lu while I was growing up. Most did not realize
that she hid a warm maternal nature beneath her stern exterior. I could never
picture her without multiple children happily scurrying around her ankles. Even
now, a tow-headed toddler in denim overalls darted from between her tree trunk
legs and thumped down onto the top porch step, rolling a fire engine back and
forth and making spit-sprinkled “zoom” noises.

Her house was, in fact,
a dumping ground for other people’s children. This one probably belonged to my
cousin Garnet. Last I heard, Aunt Lu’s eldest daughter was living in Nashville
with a scraggly drifter who claimed to be a musician but was really just a drug
addict of very limited guitar-playing abilities.

Once upon a time, I too
was a discarded child who landed unexpectedly in Aunt Lu’s lap when I had
nowhere else to go.

Luella LeClare was the
older sister of my mother, Charity LeClare. The sisters must have made for an
odd pairing around the streets of Hallow River. Lu, solid and unyielding,
provided a stark contrast to the delicate and wayward Charity. Memories of my
mother were cloudy and tinged with the ethereal quality of dreams, but I knew
from photographs that she was a wispy pale blonde with a perpetually faraway
gaze. She never looked straight into the camera, but off to the side or into
the middle distance as she leaned provocatively on a Mustang passenger door in
a crop top and acid wash cutoffs or balanced on her thin hip a baby that looked
too substantial to have been birthed by her willowy body. I recalled that she
sang lullabies in a pleasing soprano.

The sisters were left to
fend for themselves in the ramshackle house on Poplar Road after their parents
died. Lu was five years older and already working as an aid at a local nursing
home when eighteen-year-old Charity became pregnant as a result of a brief
romance with a meathead jock from the neighboring town of Pine Hill. He picked
her up where she worked at the drive-in burger stand, took her on a few dates,
planted a seed in her unresisting womb, and then hightailed it out of the
picture. Legend has it that Lu drove to Pine Hill in the dead of night with a
shotgun when Charity’s swelling belly could no longer hide her growing secret,
and that she threatened to shoot my father’s balls off if he didn’t give her
$5,000 by the following noon. He somehow scrounged together the money. That was
the last the sisters ever saw of him.

Once I was born, Lu
supported the three of us on her meager salary from the nursing home,
occasionally supplemented by my mother’s short-lived stints as a receptionist or
clothing store clerk. I sometimes heard their whispered arguments about money as
I tiptoed down the creaking wooden stairs at night. My clothes were always
castoffs from the church donation bin. The snootier families in town cut me a
wide berth, refusing to invite me to their children’s preschool birthday
parties.

Eventually, Aunt Lu
married a good and kind-hearted man named George, and they started their own
family in the rambling old house. My mother and I remained as guests in the
upstairs bedroom. In the evenings, I would stare up at the slanted ceiling, the
soft light peeking through the sheer lilac curtains, while she combed her
shining golden hair, humming a tune to herself as she planted a peck of a kiss
on my forehead and headed out of the house. She wore orange blossom perfume
that surrounded her like an aura. The scent of orange blossoms would forever
remind me of those hazy childhood moments.

Then one day, with the
abruptness of a thunderclap, she was gone. I was six years old. When I opened
the door after trudging home from the bus stop, I found Aunt Lu seated at the
kitchen table gripping a folded paper in her hand, her knuckles clenched white.
My entrance startled her. In the instant that she raised her head, I saw a
burning fury in her eyes. She stood and slammed the paper into an open trash
can. Then she knelt in front of me, a look of the deepest compassion overtaking
her face, placed her hands on my shoulders, and wrapped me in the safety of a
protective bear hug.

Later that night, when I
was sure Aunt Lu was sound asleep, I fished the paper out of the trash and recognized
my mother’s handwriting. I saved the note in a drawer until my developing reading
abilities enabled me to decipher her slanting script. She wrote that she was
leaving Hallow River with a man named Trance who was “a creative genius” and
“the love of her life.” She committed my care to Lu’s capable hands and
declared that she would retrieve me when the time was right. That time never came.
Her last communication was a birthday card that she mailed from a postmark in
Arizona when I turned eight. She enclosed a losing lottery scratch ticket and a
picture of herself, baked tan and posing outside of a dust-swept truck stop in
a breezy white cotton dress and a string of turquoise beads. A part of me never
stopped looking for her in the back of every theater and auditorium when I
danced. She was never there.

From the day my mother left,
Aunt Lu and Uncle George raised me as one of their own. They clothed me, fed
me, supported me, and treated me as a natural addition to their own pair of
high-spirited daughters. I poorly repaid their generosity by leaving for New
York only one month after my high school graduation and never returning. I
could still picture myself running headlong down this same path ten years
earlier, shouting goodbye and ducking into the car, conscious only of my own
hopes and dreams shining in the distance. It seemed like yesterday and it
seemed like a million years ago. The world had moved full circle since then.

“How long are you
staying?” Aunt Lu now asked.

“A while,” I said with a
glance back at the car. Inside the trunk was a suitcase with the few belongings
I had been able to pack in a hurry the night before.

She tilted her head to
the right and narrowed her eyes in appraisal. Then she straightened up and
relaxed her arms.

“Well, come on in then.”
She made a scooping gesture for me to follow and turned toward the door.
“C’mon, Georgie,” she said to the little boy on the stairs. He grasped the fire
engine in his chubby hands and tottered after her. I exhaled in relief and
followed them inside, the porch steps making sharp cracking noises under my
feet.

The house looked almost
exactly the same as I remembered it. In the front hall hung a picture of Aunt
Lu and Uncle George on their wedding day. I was a blur in the back of the
photo, darting through the frame in a yellow taffeta dress and a white flower
garland. Next to it was another picture of the two of them, this one taken shortly
before his death, when cancer had already thinned him to a specter of the hale
and hearty figure I once knew.

I felt a stab of guilt.
Upon learning of Uncle George’s passing three years earlier, I’d called Aunt Lu
to offer my condolences and apologize for not being able to come down for the
funeral. The reason I gave was a big rehearsal that I simply could not miss. It
sounded so callous in retrospect. It was also a lie. The real reasons were a bruised
eye socket and swollen jaw courtesy of the man who was now buzzing my phone
with another insistent burst of messages.

Aunt Lu leaned a bit
crookedly and favored her right leg as she walked in front of me. Little
Georgie’s sneakers pattered across the floorboards and made a soft thump-thump
when he ducked into the living room.

“You hungry?” she turned
and asked.

“No, Ma’am.” I marveled
at how rapidly I had regressed to the accent of my youth. “I ate lunch over at
the diner. I ran into Cami Talbot. She’s a waitress there, but I guess you know
that. Anyway, it was a shock to see her all grown up. Her brother Cayne is a
mechanic now? She told me to go see him about my car.”

Aunt Lu raised her
eyebrows and shook her head. “Cayne Talbot, huh? Be careful with that one.”

Once again, I was having
trouble squaring my memory of the geeky kid I knew ten years ago with the image
of a dangerous ladies’ man. I waited for Aunt Lu to elaborate, but instead she
just pointed up the stairs.

“You can have your old
room. Might as well bring your things inside.”

I appreciated that she
wasn’t asking questions yet. My appearance on her doorstep must have come as a
complete surprise, but Aunt Lu was used to dealing with surprises in stride.

My phone buzzed in an
emphatic rhythm within my purse. He was calling again. Aunt Lu glanced at my
purse and then up at me. I swallowed hard and felt my cheeks get hot. I leaned
on one foot, trying to appear nonchalant, and ignored the buzzing. Her eyes
narrowed again. The years had carved two deep furrows from her nose to her
mouth and a crease of worry into her forehead.

“You in some kind of
trouble, Brinley?”

Words threatened to flow
out in a torrent, the truth nearly rising over the walls I had built to contain
it. But I pursed my lips and stayed silent. Keeping secrets was a habit I found
difficult to break.

Aunt Lu stepped forward
and put a hand on my shoulder. I was reminded of that long ago day in the
kitchen, the day that my mother left and Lu’s hand on my shoulder told me that
everything was going to be alright before I even knew that anything was wrong.
I took that same comfort now.

“Go on, then. Get your
things and get settled. Dinner is at six.”

She turned into the
living room, where Georgie was once again making bubbly “vroom-vroom” noises
and rolling his fire engine across the carpet. I went outside to retrieve my
suitcase from the car.

***

After a dinner punctuated
at times by awkward silence and at other times by the slapping of Georgie’s
hands on his highchair table, I climbed the familiar steps to my old bedroom.