That’s how I felt now. Trapped on the wrong side of the sky.
Alone on the top of the Summerville water tower, looking out over the world I had known my entire life, a world of dirt roads and paved routes, of gas stations and grocery stores and strip malls. And everything was the same, and nothing was the same.
I wasn’t the same.
I guess that’s the thing about a hero’s journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to. I had changed.
I had come back from the dead, and Amma was gone, even if she was one of the Greats now.
You couldn’t get more changed than that.
I heard a clanging on the ladder beneath me, and I knew who it was before I felt her curling around my heart. The warmth exploded across me, across the water tower, across Summerville. The sky was striped with gold and red, as if the sunrise was reversing itself, lighting up the sky all over again.
There was only one person who could do that to a sky or my heart.
Ethan, is that you?
I smiled even as my eyes turned wet and blurry.
It’s me, ll. I’m right here. Everything’s going to be okay now.
I reached my hand down and wrapped it around hers, pulling her up onto the platform at the top of the water tower.
She slid into my arms, falling into sobs that beat against my chest. I don’t know which one of us was crying harder.
I’m not even sure we remembered to kiss. What we had went so much deeper than a kiss.
When we were together, she turned me completely inside out.
It didn’t matter if we were dead or alive. We could never be kept apart. There were some things more powerful than worlds or universes. She was my world, as much as I was hers. What we had, we knew.
The poems are all wrong. It’s a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper.
And sometimes gold can stay.
Anybody who’s ever been in love can tell you that.
CHAPTER 37
What the Words Never Say
Amma Treadeau has been declared legally dead, following her disappearance from Wate’s Landing, the home of Mitchell and Ethan Wate, on Cotton Bend, in Central Gatlin’—” I stopped reading out loud.
I was sitting at her kitchen table, where her One-Eyed Menace waited sadly in the mason jar on her counter, and it didn’t seem possible that I was reading Amma’s obituary. Not when I could still smell the Red Hots and the pencil lead.
“Keep readin’.” Aunt Grace was leaning over my shoulder, trying to read the print that her bifocals were ten strengths too weak to read.
Aunt Mercy was sitting in her wheelchair, on the other side of the table, next to my dad. “They best say somethin’
about Amma’s pie. Or the Good Lord as my witness, I’ll go down there ta The Stars ’n’ Bars and give them a piece a my mind.” Aunt Mercy still thought our town newspaper was named after the Confederate flag.
“It’s The Stars and Stripes ,” my father corrected gently. “And I’m sure they worked hard to assure Amma is remembered for all her talents.”
“Hmm.” Aunt Grace sniffed. “Folks ’round here don’t know a lick about talent. Prudence Jane’s singin’ was looked over by the choir for years.”
Aunt Mercy crossed her arms. “She had the voice of an angel if I ever heard one.” I was surprised Aunt Mercy could hear anything without her hearing aid. She was still carrying on when Lena began to Kelt with me.
Ethan? Are you okay?
I’m okay, ll.
You don’t sound okay.
I’m dealing.
Hold on. I’m coming.
Amma’s face stared out at me from the newspaper, printed in black and white. Wearing her best Sunday dress, the one with the white collar. I wondered if someone had taken that photo at my mom’s funeral or Aunt Prue’s. It could’ve been Macon’s.
There had been so many.
I laid the paper down on the scarred wood. I hated that obituary. Someone from the paper must have written it, not someone who knew Amma. They’d gotten everything wrong. I guess I had a new reason to hate The Stars and Stripes as much as Aunt Grace did.
I closed my eyes, listening to the Sisters fuss about everything from Amma’s obituary to the fact that Thelma couldn’t make grits the right way. I knew it was their way of paying their respects to the woman who had raised my dad and me. The woman who had made them pitcher after pitcher of sweet tea and made sure they didn’t leave the house with their skirts hitched up in their pantyhose when they left for church.
After a while, I couldn’t hear them at all. Just the quiet sound of Wate’s Landing mourning, too. The floorboards creaked, but this time I knew it wasn’t Amma in the next room. None of her pots were banging. No cleavers were attacking the cutting board. No warm food would be coming my way.
Not unless my dad and I taught ourselves how to cook.
There were no casseroles piled up on our porch either. Not this time. There wasn’t a soul in Gatlin who would have dared bring their sorry excuse for a pot roast to mark Miss Amma Treadeau’s passing. And if they did, we wouldn’t have eaten it.
Not that anyone around here really believed she was gone. At least that’s what they said. “She’ll come back, Ethan.
’Member the way she just showed up without sayin’ a word, the day you were born?” It was true. Amma had raised my father and moved out to Wader’s Creek with her family. But as the story goes, the day my parents brought me home from the hospital, she showed up with her quilting bag and moved back in.
Now Amma was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. More than anyone, I knew how that worked. I looked at the worn spot on the floorboards over by the stove, in front of the oven door.
I miss her, ll.
I miss her, too.
I miss both of them.
I know.
I heard Thelma walk into the room, a hunk of tobacco tucked under her lip. “All right, girls. I think y’all have had enough excitement for one mornin’. Let’s go on in the other room and see what we can win on The Price Is Right.” Thelma winked at me and wheeled Aunt Mercy out of the room. Aunt Grace was right behind them, with Harlon James at her feet. “I hope they’re givin’ away one a those iceboxes that makes water all on its own.” My dad reached for the newspaper and started reading where I left off. “ ‘Memorial services will be held at the Chapel at Wader’s Creek.’ ” My mind flashed on Amma and Macon, standing face to face in the middle of the foggy swamp on the wrong side of midnight.
“Aw, hell, I tried to tell anyone who would listen. Amma doesn’t want a service.” He sighed.
“Nope.”
“She’s fussing around somewhere right now, saying, ‘I don’t see why you’re wastin’ good time mournin’ me. Sure as my Sweet Redeemer, I’m not wastin’ my time mournin’ you.’ ”
I smiled. He cocked his head to the left, just like Amma did when she was on the rampage. “T. O. M. F. O. O. ll. E.
R. Y. Ten down. As in, this whole thing’s nothin’ but hodgepodge and nonsense, Mitchell Wate.” This time I laughed, because my dad was right. I could hear her saying it. She hated being the center of attention, especially when it involved the infamous Gatlin Funerary Pity Parade.
My dad read the next paragraph. “ ‘Miss Amma Treadeau was born in Unincorporated Gatlin County, South Carolina, the sixth of seven children born to the late Treadeau family.’ ” The sixth of seven children? Had Amma ever mentioned her sisters and brothers? I only remembered her talking about the Greats.