“My mother never kept a diary,” I said.
It had been a family joke that Chantal Montgomery was single-handedly responsible for Atoka having its own post office rather than us being lumped in with Middleburg. I never saw her desk when it wasn’t heaped with stacks of writing paper, boxes of note cards, pens with different colored ink, sealing wax, and embossed address labels. During her life she had written thousands of letters, postcards, and notes. But as many times as I’d watched her writing, her head bent over some piece of correspondence or her gardening journals as Edith Piaf warbled “La Vie en Rose” on one of her old records, I didn’t ever recall seeing a diary.
Fitz clasped his hands to his chest and for a second, I thought he might be having a heart attack. “I am not asking you if she kept a diary. I am telling you she did. And when you clean out that compost heap of a house that used to be your mother’s pride and joy—and I know you will—you are going to find them. And then…” He shook a finger in my face, revving up with the fury of a Bible-belt preacher taking a sinning congregation to task. “And then you are going to turn them over to me.”
Them. More than one. “Why?”
“So I can burn them. It’s what she would have wanted.”
My mother baked cookies for every school bake sale, library fund-raiser, and church social I could remember. She sewed our Halloween costumes by hand and never missed a sports event, dance recital, or school concert. She read the same bedtime stories over and over and decorated elaborate birthday cakes in cute shapes and knitted mittens with animal faces on them.
She was not someone who wrote a diary that needed to be burned. Her life—to continue the metaphor—was an open book.
At least I’d always thought it was.
“What makes you so sure?” I asked. “I mean, I think I would have known…”
“Honey.” Fitz pulled me to him and stroked my hair. His voice was soft in my ear, a gentle wheeze. “You’re gonna give them to me when you find them, you hear me? Let your poor momma rest in peace. I’m asking you.”
“Yes,” I said, and my voice quavered. “I suppose I am.”
“Good.” He crushed me in another bear hug. “Now go along inside, like Eli said. They’re waiting on you.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Lord, no. I came to see you, that’s all. I already made my peace with Lee.” He stepped back, stumbling unexpectedly.
“Careful!” I grabbed his arm to steady him and he clung to it, pulling like it was a lifeline. I let go of my cane and wrapped the other arm around a porch balustrade to keep us both from falling. We swayed together until he found his footing.
“Whoops.” His chuckled giddily. “Almost lost my step there, didn’t I?”
“Why don’t you come inside, Fitz? Rest a bit.”
“Naw, I’m fine. Besides I need to get over to the winery. We’ve got a wedding tomorrow afternoon at the inn and the bride and groom ordered some bottles with custom labels. Quinn said he’d leave the cases out for me.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be driving…”
“Don’t you start, Lucie. How do you think I got here?”
“Please, Fitz?” I smiled. “Let me take you to the winery after the wake is over. We can talk some more. Come on.”
His genial bonhomie evaporated. “Now you pay attention, you hear? You’ve been listenin’ too much to that brother of yours. He ought to mind his own business for once. I am fine and I know what I’m doing. So stop patronizing me!”
“I’m not…”
“Oh yes, you are. And you of all people ought to know better.” He stabbed a finger at my chest. “Robs a body of his own dignity when people act like you can’t take care of yourself, doesn’t it, my chair? It’s humiliating.”
I was silent, wondering how I’d betrayed myself and let him find the soft place in my shell of invulnerability.
He nodded. “I thought you’d understand. Go inside now.” He still sounded cross, but he leaned over and his lips brushed my forehead. “Good night, sugar.”
A moment later the darkness swallowed him except for the tapping sound of his receding footfalls and then the noise of a car door slamming.
I went slowly back to the Green Room. Fitz had turned the tables neatly so that now it was Eli’s motives I was wondering about. Everything he’d said had made sense. If only he hadn’t begun slurring his words right before he left.
Upstairs, I could hear them singing. “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” One of Thelma’s favorites.
Eli met me at the door, scowling. “Just in time to close the barn door after the horse bolted. Thanks a bunch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What happened to Fitz?”
“He went over to the winery to pick up some cases of a special label wine for a wedding. Who’s Quinn?”
“Quinn Santori. The new Jacques.”
Jacques had been both our winemaker and viticulturist since my parents first opened the vineyard. The rootstock for the original vines came with him from France, so in the beginning we produced only vitis vinifera, the so-called noble wines made from Old World or European grapes. He had lived in one of the tenant houses on our property, but most of the time he was either in the fields or at the winery.
“Where’s Jacques?”
“He had a stroke a few months ago. His daughter came over from Giverny and took him back to France.” He took my elbow. “Come on. Maybe we can head her off before she starts ‘Climb Every Mountain.’”
“A stroke? When did that happen? Somebody could have told me.” At least now I knew why Jacques hadn’t answered my last letter.
“I guess we forgot. Sorry, babe.” He smiled pleasantly, but his eyes were mocking. One more life event I’d missed during my long absence. He jostled my arm. “Let’s go.”
I still had Fitz’s little key in my hand and it fell, bouncing on the wooden floor. Eli reached down automatically and picked it up. “What’s this?”
“My suitcase key.”
I didn’t intend to lie. But as he handed it over our eyes met. He knew Fitz had just put me wise to what was really going on.
I closed my hand around the key and smiled back. “Thanks.”
“Sure. Come on.” He turned away and I followed him into the Green Room. I realized then that I didn’t trust him.
Though judging by the expression on my brother’s face, it was pretty clear that he didn’t trust me, either.
Chapter 5
The punishing heat didn’t let up for Leland’s funeral. The Blue Ridge had vanished, bleached by the haze until it disappeared, blending into the colorless sky. The horizon looked disturbingly flat and closed-in. Eli reported before we left for the funeral home that when Hector’s men dug the grave for the coffin, they broke a shovel trying to penetrate the concrete-like clay soil. The drought was reported as the lead news story on the local radio station, instead of being lumped with the rest of the weather forecast.
Once again, everyone in town showed up for the short ceremony, crowding in to our brick-walled cemetery, standing shoulder to shoulder, drenched to the skin in heat-seeking dark clothing. It seemed surreal as all funerals do, the bizarre intersection of time when Leland was and wasn’t among us—a lifeless body inside a glossy wooden casket soon to be lowered into the ground. I stared at my mother’s headstone, unable to clearly conjure the sound of her voice in my head anymore, however much I might want to hear it again.
The bagpiper played “Amazing Grace,” and it was achingly lovely. Next to me Mia sobbed quietly into a handkerchief. I put my arm around her thin shoulders, half-expecting her to pull away and gratified when she leaned against me protectively. I stroked her hair. Eli reached over and took her hand.
Then Reverend Martin said, “Please bow your heads.”
After a few minutes I noticed Eli glancing at his watch. His lips were moving.
“Stop it, will you?” I whispered behind Mia’s back. “It will be over when it’s over. Leland won’t come back and haunt you if it doesn’t end precisely at sunset. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”