“I understand,” I said.
He tilted his head, looking at me from behind his thick glasses. “Why do you feel so strongly about this?” he asked.
“I know it’s unjust that so many people—have a hard time registering,” I said. “I can sit home and gripe about it or I can … act on my convictions.” I imagined Aunt Carol sitting beside me on the pew. “I … I see the dirt road we drove in on.” I gestured toward the road. “The awful condition of some of the houses and buildings. The fact that your pharmacy can’t get everything it needs. And I know voting makes a difference in getting those things taken care of.”
He looked at me wordlessly for a moment. “Yes, it does,” he said finally, getting to his feet. “Leave me your address. I’ll make a call.”
* * *
Back in my car, Brenda turned to look at me. “You’re not seriously thinking of doing this, are you?” she asked.
“I am,” I said, turning the key in the ignition.
“It’s crazy, Ellie! You’d have to sleep in colored homes! Do you really want to do that?”
I hesitated. “It’s hard to picture sleeping in any stranger’s home,” I admitted. I turned onto the dirt road, my car bouncing in and out of a deep rut. “But sounds like it comes with the job. I’d want to be treated like the other students.”
“If God had meant us all to live together, he wouldn’t have made us different colors,” Brenda said.
I looked at her in exasperation. “That’s the most ignorant comment I’ve ever heard you make,” I said. But I suddenly remembered back to the year before, when two Negro girls moved into our dorm. We all had to share one large bathroom, and Brenda suggested we put a COLORED sign on one of the stalls so Dora and Midge would only use that one. I thought she’d been making a bad joke. Right now I wondered. We rarely talked about race. We were white girls who’d grown up in a mostly white town. Race didn’t come up much in our conversations.
Even if it came up often in my thoughts.
Chapter 5
KAYLA
2010
The drive from Bader and Duke Design to my father’s home in Round Hill takes thirty-five minutes and I usually listen to pop music to lift my mood as I drive, but I’m so anxious right now that I forget to turn on the radio. I can’t get “Ann Smith” out of my head. I keep glancing in my rearview mirror to see if I’m being followed. Maybe I returned to work too soon. Took on too much. Maybe the woman is no threat at all and it’s simply that I’ve come to see life itself as a threat. I never feel safe anymore. Worse, I never feel as though the people I love are safe. My dreams, when I can sleep, are filled with blood and death. I know tonight’s dream will be even worse. How am I going to get that bizarre woman out of my head? I shudder when I think of her mentioning Rainie. I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to my daughter.
The police hadn’t seemed all that concerned about “Ann Smith,” but they hadn’t been in the room with the woman. They hadn’t felt her malignant presence, how she seemed to study me from behind her mirrored glasses as though she wanted to memorize every detail of my face. How she knew about Jackson’s death. It would be one thing if she were just some nut threatening to kill someone. Somehow, though, she knew about my life. Did she mention Rainie by name? I don’t think so. I’d remember if she had. But she knows that my daughter and I live in Round Hill and that we’ll soon be moving into the new house at the end of Shadow Ridge Lane. And as if she’d crawled inside my head, she even knew how I feel about the new neighborhood these days: All those trees suck the breath out of you, she said. Yes, that’s exactly right.
I make the left turn onto Round Hill Road, then another left on Painter Lane, and the house I grew up in is ahead on my right. Rainie and I moved in with my father the week after Jackson died as we waited for the Shadow Ridge house to be completed. Most of my high school friends have left Round Hill and the few who remain are busy with their own families. I need Daddy now, the comfort of him, in a way I haven’t since I was a child. The move’s turned out to be a good one for all three of us. Daddy’s been lonely since Mom died, shortly before Rainie was born, and Rainie’s given him a new reason for getting up in the morning. But change is coming. Daddy’s downsizing. He’s selling our old family home and will soon move into a two-bedroom condo on the other side of town. My old house has sold, my furniture moved to storage. And now the new house is ready for Rainie and me. There’s no going back to the way things used to be.
I pull into the driveway of my childhood home and park next to my father’s black pickup. I still miss seeing my mother’s silver Toyota next to his truck. My heart still hurts when I think that she never got to meet her granddaughter. I hate that I can’t call her for advice when Rainie runs a fever or skins a knee. I’m only now getting used to being in our old house without her.
The house is big, baby blue with white trim and a wraparound porch. The perimeter of the yard is dotted with mature dogwoods and redbuds, and in the spring, the beauty is breathtaking. I put aside memories of my mother for now, and my heart rate slows as I lift my briefcase and purse from the passenger seat. Rainie and I are safe here. The red-haired woman said nothing about this house, about knowing that Rainie and I live here right now, so I feel a cocoon of safety surround me as I get out of the car.
I can tell that Daddy mowed the lawn this morning, the wide stripes of green a giveaway. At sixty-seven, he still mows it himself even though he could afford to have someone else do it. He still slithers through the crawl space to check the foundation and gets up on the roof to repair the shingles. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I know now how quickly an accident can happen. He still walks five miles every morning before breakfast, as he did during the thirty years he was Round Hill’s mayor. Even the day after Mom died, he was out there, nodding hello to everyone, stopping only long enough to accept condolences as he made his usual trek through our small town and into the countryside and back again. People like Reed Miller, and he likes them back. He’ll easily make new friends in the condo complex.
I hear yelps of joy coming from the backyard as I quietly close my car door, and I smile to myself as I walk around the side of the house, my mood lifting. Standing silently at the rear corner of the house, I watch Daddy and Rainie in the yard, where he’s spotting her as she climbs the jungle gym. He’s created a veritable playground for her back here, and fortunately the family buying his house was happy to find the jungle gym and swings and sliding board already in place for their own kids.
“Mama!” Rainie suddenly spots me, and Daddy helps her off the jungle gym so she can run to me. She always hugs me as if she hasn’t seen me in days instead of hours and I bend low to wrap my arms around her and breathe in the scent of sun in her hair.
“How was your day, love?” I ask her.
She looks over her shoulder at her grandfather. “Gramps made me Mickey Mouse grilled cheese.”
“Oh, I bet that was delicious!” I rest my hand on her head, on her sun-warmed hair, nearly as dark as mine.
“Can he make it for dinner, too?” she asks, looking up at me with Jackson’s warm brown eyes.