The Reckoning

The Reckoning

It was late April when Winnie’s turquoise thunderbird sped down our dirt road in a cloud of dust. The sky was blue, bluer than a robin’s egg, and the grass was still damp from the storm the night before that had all of us huddled in the cellar. I stood on the front porch and watched her with my arms crossed over my chest, loose dress tickling my ankles.

I breathed in the white violets and bluebells that danced lazily in the breeze, suddenly wishing that things weren’t so intricate and tangled in the thorns of my last year in Bitter Wood. I was certain that if that were the case, my heart wouldn’t be sat in my throat.

When she parked her car, I thought of all the times I’d been inside it; all the mornings racing down Main Street minutes before our shifts at Howie’s Record Emporium, hot summer nights parked under our honey locust tree on the banks of Alma River with our thighs stuck to the white leather, idling down Charry Avenue while I gripped the seatbelt as Billy grew smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.

Those seats had probably soaked up enough tears to form a small ocean. The little mirror above Winnie’s seat was probably worn down by the many times she checked her own reflection. Her speakers were probably permanently damaged from us playing Good Lovin’ all summer long on repeat, volume maximized, seats reclined.

Even though I knew Winnie saw me watching her, she sat still behind her steering wheel and stared before her with hollow cheeks. Her fingers absently rose and wiped the corners of her lips; her signature Revlon Really Red was vacant and I knew she felt naked.

She was still sitting behind the wheel after I went into the empty house behind me and returned to the porch with two dainty glasses of iced tea.

For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. My heart ached for her familiarity and the feeling of her hair over my lap. I wanted to hear her laugh and watch her neck swell and grow red at any mention of her new beau. Then I thought of the hurt that still held my heart; sitting with her dying mother while she had sex with Rudy in the hospital parking lot, each time she called me Plain Jane, when she dropped me off on the side of the road and made me walk home alone in the nippy October rain.

The last time I’d seen her was in early March. She was quiet as she drove me to Charleston and I had been weeping into my palms, my grief too thick to even articulate. My chest was burning and she was going ten over the speed limit to quicken our trip. When she parked outside my aunt Josephine’s big house that neither of us had ever seen, she had turned to say something to me, but her breath caught and she just stared at me with an open mouth and wet eyes. It had only been six months since her mother died. I knew she was hurting and I knew she was trying to think of something kind to say, but she couldn’t get herself to say anything. I had grabbed my bags from the backseat and left her there in the dark driveway as the cicadas grew louder and louder, the night impossibly chilled.

Back in the yellow light of the afternoon, she finally stepped out. I half-thought that she would be wearing one of those orange and pink mini dresses that had become so popular, but she wasn’t. She was wearing a tired yellow blouse and blue slacks that were becoming too tight around her hips. Her face was free from any makeup and her long yellow hair, which looked as tired as her shirt, was tied behind her in a lazy ponytail.

I was in the wet grass and the mud was sticking to the bottom of my bare feet like wet clay. She probably thought I looked like a wild woman, the kind that were common in West Virginia; the ones that lived in the mountains and never combed their hair or wore shoes or brushed their teeth and were always pregnant.

I had retired my bell-bottoms and blouses for loose country dresses that left my shape up to one’s imagination. It was gratifying to be elusive in that small way—it was something I could control and I didn’t control much those days. My hair was still brown, but it was short, just touching my shoulders, and my nails were never painted anymore.

Quietly, I started for my spot the shore of the river that still felt new to me. Winnie knew where I was going and she fell in step behind me. I heard her nervously wringing her hands together and clearing her throat a few times in place of a greeting.

We walked down a small decline and navigated carefully through the low branches of willow trees and lilac bushes. Then we were at the patch of grass that was directly on the shore of the water that hastily floated onward.

The Kanawha River that ran through Charleston was much different than the Alma River, which ran through Bitter Wood, in terms of beauty. Alma River had a sort of delicacy in her waters and in the mud-sand on the shores. Kanawha River was bolder, faster, rockier. It was harder to swim against its current, but I had been doing so in the blue mornings and black nights.

Kanawha River felt more lonesome, too; which was partly because Aunt Josephine wouldn’t so much as step her toe in dirt, but mostly because I did not know that river like I knew the one back home. I was not baptized in the Kanawha River, I never rode my bike along the shores and collected wild foliage along the way. I had never laid on a picnic blanket with Billy, sticky with sex, on the shores of the water as the bullfrogs sang their lullaby.

If Winnie and I were the same people we were the year before, she would’ve squealed and complained about the mud on her shoes and chastised me for sitting on the ground without a blanket to protect my clothes. But she sat down before I did and drew her knees to her chest. Her ponytail had fallen out and her hair fell down her back unceremoniously.

We nursed our glasses in our sweaty palms and sat near enough to smell each other’s musk, but not near enough to touch another. We watched the gray water swirl and race down the shore. We watched the unlucky mosquitos fall into the wide-open mouths of bass and carp with their murky scales glimmering in the sunlight for a fleeting moment.

“I didn’t know you drank tea,” Winnie finally said. Her voice cracked and she tilted her head down as her cheeks flooded with blood.

I smiled softly despite myself and nodded.

“S’like water to me now,” I said, not looking at her, but across the river.

Then we sat quietly again for a while. If my voice sounded different to her or if my answer surprised her, she did not show it. She was still sat with her back curved around her knees and her eyes were distant and untrained.

I wondered if she missed her mother and if I reminded her of that part of her life. Maybe it hurt to be near me.

“Do you ‘member that time,” Winnie started slowly, measuring her volume and words, “when we got your old weddin’ dress and decorated it with flowers and stones and sand and then let it go on down the river? And we said goodbye to the old Jane?”

I made a noise involuntarily, one that told her that I remembered and it hurt to think of those warm golden days when our knees were always bumping and our hair was always wet. It hurt to remember how rose-colored everything was back then.

“I reckon that was the nicest thing I ever did for you. I shoulda done more than just that.”

I nodded.

How I used to ache for these words from her lips, for an ounce of recognition, to be acknowledged by a creature as beautiful and possessing as she. She had never spoken to me in that gentle manner, had never spoken words so thoughtful and kind. She didn’t realize how often I’d reflected on that day and how gratifying it was to let my old self float down the river until it sank beneath the surface and disappeared.

“I feel…I feel real rotten about some things I’ve said to you.”

Finally, I looked at her. The sun was drenching her unconfident figure in a golden light that juxtaposed her blue mood considerably. Her knees were pressed deeply in her cheeks and her face was red as tears streamed down her pale face. She was looking at me with the saddest blue eyes I’d ever seen--the same ones I saw in the car the night we got to Charleston..

Watching her cheeks grow wet, I thought of Billy’s wet cheeks and furrowed eyebrows, the ones I’d left in the apartment on Charry Avenue. Billy’s cry had been louder than Winnie’s, more angry and less weepy. It seemed that I often made people cry without meaning to, which was a power I newly possessed.

“Hush, now. No cryin’ in the mud,” I simply whispered, feeling the heavy anchor of guilt and grief scrape my chest.

It was probably only the fourth time I’d seen her cry, and the first time I’d seen her cry over me. She did not cry at her mother’s funeral. She stood motionless before the casket dressed in a black shift dress and smart heels, staring at the walnut casket expectantly. I watched her the entire funeral, waiting for her to break as her father had done when Pastore David had begun his service.

Winnie did not comfort her father, nor did she move to hold her kid brother Elliott when he began to squirm and whine. Her aunt was holding him, swaying and whispering lowly in his ear as the sermon droned on.

It wasn’t until the casket began to lower and the choir began Amazing Grace that Winnie’s eyes suddenly widened and her breathing became so sharp and shallow that people from behind her were patting her back and holding her shoulders.

I remember wanting to bat them off and watching her face contort in a grief-stricken expression that a young woman her age should never have to embody. Still, she did not cry, but panicked watching the woman who birthed her lower into the ground. The finality of it all was finally catching up, grazing our heels with steel-toed boots and a penchant for inflicting pain and we were tired from running.

Suddenly her hand was flopping and gripping at my thigh, desperate, and I was just quick enough to catch it with my own before she tore the fabric of my only black dress. Her fingernails left half-crescent scars on the back of my hand. I thought maybe she would fall down or throw herself onto the casket that held her mother, but she suddenly looked at me.

Determined tears were falling from my eyes but I nodded to reassure her and she nodded back, face becoming so flush that she may have run a fever for a few minutes. I stepped closer to her and she shook and we watched the wood disappear below the surface of the ground.

“Sometimes I feel like I died too,” she said, sniffing, “when my mama died.”

I scooted closer to her and let the air readjust around our new nearness before she laid her head on my arm. She cried for a long time and the birds still sang and fish still swam and the trees still swayed in the still blowing-wind.

She’d been without a shoulder to cry on for a long time and the world still turned with no regard to Winnie Christina Avery, the most impetuous and beautiful woman that ever touched the soil of Bitter Wood. Perhaps she was shocked that life kept churning forward, even when she was drowning in the wake of her despair.

Without much thought, I stroked her hair and stared across the water to the tall elms and oaks lining the shore and fighting for their place in the sun. Our peach tea glasses were sitting in the mud with melting ice and swarming bugs, but I didn’t want to move. I had so badly and so quickly needed to leave Bitter Wood that I forgot about the certain peace familiar people brought to my heart.

When Winnie finally raised her head from my shoulder, she straightened out with a new sense of dignity that I had yet to see any other person come close to. She wiped her cheeks and unfolded her body until her legs were straight. She looked at her red knees then took a breath and faced me again.

“I’m sorry I was so mean.”

I nodded and reached for her hand to give it a squeeze—the same kind of squeeze I’d given her at the funeral. It’s okay. I’ve got you.

I’d always been the one out of both of us to comfort, whether I was comforting her or comforting the people she couldn’t. It was peculiar because I didn’t particularly feel like a comforting person nor did I much feel that maternal instinct people always spoke of. Sometimes I wondered if I was a product of my mother’s loveless upbringing, like she had tainted me, passed onto me that inability to love others. Each time I made someone cry, even if I was crying too, I felt that sticky feeling crawling up my thighs with nails sharper than rose thorns. You’re like her.

But then I would touch Winnie’s hair or wipe her cheeks or let her wipe her nose on my blouse without a second thought about it and I knew I was better than my mother—at the very least in those minuscule ways. Sometimes I would even stroke my own cheek when I cried and coo at myself. Poor baby. It’s gonna to be alright.

“I think we could both be not very nice,” I said finally.

Winnie shook her head.

“I was vicious,” she insisted, voice wavering.

She was vicious. Her anger was similar to that of a cornered wild animal: the fur on her back would rise and ruffle and her sharp, white teeth would flash under red lips.

“The world’s viscous to us,” I said quicker than I meant to. There was a certain curtness in my voice that made Winnie stiffen.

And just like that, she was done crying and I was done stroking her hair. We still sat near each other, listening to the quiet hum of the earth that buzzed all around us.

I wondered if Winnie thought of me leaving Bitter Wood as losing her best friend or if she just viewed it as me, Jane, moving away and that was that. Maybe she thought it would be the same without me. Maybe she only came because there was no one else that would sit and listen the way I would.

“S’good here,” I finally offered, absently pulling grass from the ground by the fingerful, “feel like I’m gettin’ from Aunt Josie what I never got with my mama.”

I was telling the truth. Aunt Josephine was a warm woman with a comforting touch and even tone. She was so kind and so loving that I often cried and mourned the parts of my life I’d spent without her—the same way I used to mourn my life before Billy.

It was so strange to live in a home where people spoke to another—so strange to live in a home with a woman who liked to come in my room to chat about records or the news and who bought me dresses and knick-knacks that made her think of me. The first week I’d lived there, I’d mentioned in passing how much I enjoyed 100 Grand candy bars and every day since, there was one sitting on my nightstand.

“I always thought your mama wasn’t very nice,” she whispered.

Rarely did I speak of my unpitying mother and my detached father, but rarely did Winnie ever ask. My eyes welled with tears and I blinked them away quickly. I thought of my mother in her newly empty house and wondered if she was happy that it was empty. I imagined the small smile on her lips when she realized she never had to see my orange swimsuit drying in the bathroom, never had to hear the low hum of my radio, never had to buy a gallon of milk again.

“She’s not a kind woman, Winnie. Never was.”

“Was she bad to Rudy, too?”

Rudy still felt like a sore subject for us. All the confessions left unuttered hung between us like linens on a clothesline. Winnie’s knuckles were turning white from how hard she was gripping herself.

“She was real cruel to me, but I don’t think she loved either of us.”

I thought of my brother’s fleeting grip on my hand, of his engine revving, of his voice torn from the screams that filled the house just before I’d come home. I thought of my mother watching from the doorway, a certain smugness tugging at her lips, but a nervousness holding her fidgeting hands.

“Just hold on, kid.” And then he was gone, tires screeching under the weight of his car packed window-to-window with his belongings.

“Was it hard after he left?” Winnie asked.

I knew that it was probably hard for her whenever my brother left town, especially since he left with Vivienne and didn’t go as far to even tell Winnie he was leaving. I knew that Winnie probably wanted to be the one sitting in his front seat, hair whipping in the wind, his hand gripping her thigh as miles of empty highway stretched out before them like an unused canvas.

“Yeah.” It was all I wanted to say.

I didn’t want to tell her how horrible my mother was when he left. I could still feel her ghost lying in my bed, breath stained with dark wine and makeup melting down her flat face. The words she uttered, so cruel, but coated in the sugar of her alcohol.

“I couldn’t get myself to love you, Jane.”

It had almost been gratifying for her to confirm what I’d always known.

“I miss Rudy,” Winnie bravely said, not looking at me. “We was close.”

“When did it start?”

I didn’t know why I was asking; I didn’t want to know, really, but it felt like the right thing for a girl to say. If I told Winnie how apathetic I’d been to the whole situation after Rudy had admitted it, she wouldn’t feel guilty. I wanted her to feel guilty. All the times they wandered off and came back with untucked pockets and tangled hair when they thought I was sleeping; I wanted her to know that I’d always known.

Winnie shifted uncomfortably.

“We flirted. But nothin’ happened ‘til last spring.”

I nodded for her to continue. I was relishing in her agonizing movements. There was that flair from Thelma, a small part of her that lived somewhere in my soul, embedded in my DNA.

“Right around the time he started seein’ Vivienne, huh?” I said.

Winnie turned deep red and put her head in her hands. She really was so beautiful. I figured that if things were different, she would be in Hollywood, sending me Chanel No. 5 scented postcards that she wrote on with a glass pen.

“We talked a lot about you, you know,” she said, panicked.

A tingle ran down my spine. I thought of my watery-eyed brother and my friend laying in his childhood bedroom, chests heaving still, sharing stories of me.

I blushed so deeply that Winnie said it looked like I was getting some sun.

“He loves you a lot,” she added. She paused, debating on whether she should tell the story she had thought of.

I nodded for her to continue.

“He used to tell me this story. I laughed the first time he told it, but his face was so serious. I think he said it happened when you were ten. You were playin’ with him and Randy Flynn in the backyard while your mama was watchin’. He said that when you pulled the strap of your dress off your shoulder to get some sun, your mother marched over to you and slapped your hand.”

I didn’t know what was stinging more: the back of my hand, which felt wounded all over again, or my eyes.

“He said it was so loud it sounded like a clap of thunder. I only laughed because it was such an absurd thing for a mother to do. You didn’t even have tits yet. And she probably had you in a long dress, anyway.”

A cotton dress, thick and itchy, tripping me up while we ran around.

“Well, after you ran in the house, Rudy said Randy was cacklin’. Rudy threw the baseball right at his eye. Randy went home with a black eye and Rudy never played with him again.”

My throat was so tight that if someone poked me with a needle, I would hiss and deflate.

“I never knew that.”

Winnie studied me after she heard the crack in my voice. Maybe she thought I was going to cry, but I wasn’t going to let myself.

“People loved you,” she tried.

“I didn’t leave because I thought no one loved me,” I said swiftly.

Winnie looked hard at me and I knew what she was going to ask before she did. My heart raced and my palms started to sweat. Was it really happening? Was I going to have to say what to her what had been happening? The thought made me nauseous.

“Why’d you leave? I thought things were goin’ well with you and Billy-?”

I screwed my eyes shut at the mention of his name. It still sent a shockwave of grief down my spine. I didn’t want to give in to the intense emotions surrounding his name, his face. I wanted to move forward, pretend for a little while that I always had lived in Charleston with Josie in her big house.

But the memories were there, an inferno blackening the most delicate parts of myself. Every person I’d met, who’d been something to me, and the ways in which they’d hurt me.

Most dominantly, I thought of Billy. He always called me Jaybird and never smoked his cigarettes around me. His fingers, which had explored and coaxed, and the rings that studded his knuckles that were not yet scarred. I thought of the way he smelled in the mornings and the heat that radiated off his skin though he always claimed to still be cold. I thought of his mother, Birdie, and his sister, Bea, who were so kind to me that I felt like I’d always been Billy’s girl. The love we shared was so deep and so all-encompassing that I’d wished fervently that we’d met as children so I never knew what it was like to be without him. All the years before him seemed wasted. How had I gone nineteen years without knowing him?

Winnie was still looking at me expectantly, but in a gentle way.

“I don’t know if you’d get it, Win,” I whispered. And that was the honest truth.

She cracked a smile, one that was as kind as it was tepid.

“You know how many men I’ve charmed?”

That was the honest truth, too. She was almost never alone, especially in the evenings.

Whenever I didn’t say anything, she cautiously put her hand over mine.

“What happened? I mean, really. You two was so in love. I was so jealous.”

He was always looking at me, which made me nervous and fidgety in the beginning, but quickly made me feel adored and protected. I was safe within his gaze, from others and myself.

Whenever I started throwing up in the mornings and my stomach became bloated and I couldn’t stand the scent of tomato sauce anymore, he turned his gaze to me even more than he had before. We both felt a sort of fear and immaturity when it came to the predicament. I knew he wanted to say something to me more than anything, but didn’t in fear that if he did, I’d become upset. I never said it aloud because I didn’t want it to be my reality.

Sometimes, late at night, I would wake up and his hand would be very gently laying on my stomach, which was swollen, but not rounded yet. On those nights, I would lay there, staring out the big window in our bedroom and quietly weep. Even in his sleep, he could not help telling me what he wanted. I knew what he wanted without him ever verbalizing it and I knew because his touch was the gentlest it had ever been. He was not a rough man, but that touch was light enough to hold tissue paper without crinkling it.

He cared. He was gentle. He wanted it.

“I was pregnant.”

Winnie blinked in surprise but stayed completely still.

“You…were pregnant?”

I knew she was probably imagining some shady alley and a skeevy doctor with dirty tools and my teeth sunken into an unwashed rag. She was imagining pain and blood and infection pulsing through my body. That’s probably what I would think, too, if she told me that she had also been pregnant once.

I nodded, taking a deep breath, inhaling the April air in a composing manner.

“The blood started very quietly on a very cold, snowy night in January. And it just never stopped.”

All the towels in Billy’s apartment had to be thrown away and none of my underwear had been salvageable. I’d stood in the shower for hours, watching the water turn pink, cringing at every cramp. It was so strange that it was happening to me and so strange that I didn’t know how to feel about what was happening.

I cried because of the pain and Billy cried because I was crying and it was frustrating that he could not help me. I was growing pale and weak and Billy wanted to take me to the hospital, but I’d been too scared and stubborn. I fainted for the first time sitting in the long-cold bathwater while Billy slept on the floor beside the tub.

“Oh, Jane.”

Oh, Jane. Poor Jane. She was pregnant and then she wasn’t.

“It was bad. It was really, really bad. And he wanted to keep it.”

It was weird finally talking about it, especially with someone who was not directly related to the situation. Winnie was the only other soul in the world who knew besides Billy. A strange sense of relief wrapped around my tense tendons and coaxed them to ease their grip.

“Did it hurt?”

I nodded, not trusting the integrity of my voice. The pain was totally consuming, but hadn’t I enjoyed some of it? It was penance—I was bleeding my sin out and in a truly physical, personal way. God was punishing me and I was relishing in it.

“Did you wanna keep it?”

My throat was dry.

“I don’t think I can be a mama.”

I had finally said it out loud. It was there, in the open, a confession. It was so sinful for a young fruitful woman to say such a nasty thing. Didn’t I know that’s what I was made for? Hadn’t I learned by now that it was my duty to bear children?

It was like I was purging some deep, dark secret. Like I was finally coming clean after feeling filthy for so long. It had felt like my own failure, but being loved by a woman who shared blood with my mother had opened my eyes to something I’d never seen before: I never knew what it was to be cared for by a parent. I was never mothered and did not know how to mother or love a child that came at such an inconvenient time.

“What do you mean you can’t be one?”

Winnie wasn’t judging me, just inquiring.

It was hard to articulate. I kept ripping grass out of the ground by the fistful.

“I just don’t know how to be. I don’t know if I wanna be. He wanted it and I wasn’t sure. It made me feel scandalous. Ain’t mamas supposed to love their babies from day one? Good mamas?”

Winnie had the hint of a smile on her lips.

“I think any unmarried nineteen-year-old in West Virginia would feel exactly the same way you did.”

My breath caught in my throat like a bubble unwilling to pop.

I’d hardly thought of how others would react to my pregnancy if it had kept. Billy and I would have to get married immediately and Pastor David would probably be the one to marry us and we would probably be married in the little church a few blocks away from my childhood home. My dress wouldn’t fit right not only because I was trying to hide in it but because it would be from the discount rack at Belle’s Bridal. I would cry all day and Billy would stoically let me the way he always did.

We would have to pretend like I got pregnant on our honeymoon, which was really just a weekend in Charleston in a little hotel, because that’s all we could afford. I would have to go to the doctor and lie about my last period and they would know I was lying and it would be embarrassing. I would have to be a wife and I would never go to college.

We would buy a house that was too expensive and Billy would have to stop working at the bookstore and get a job that paid better, but that he hated. Maybe he would be a carpenter or work in a cubicle somewhere. He wouldn’t get to pick his own hours and he would never make it in time to the Farmer’s Market and he wouldn’t get to drink red wine every night with whatever dinner I’d make before he got home.

He would still be very kind and love me very much and would try to make me excited, but I would never truly be excited. I would be crippled with anxiety each day that passed, each time I was kicked from within, each time a neighbor was too friendly. I would try to love the baby, but it would be hard. I didn’t know how to change a diaper or swaddle a newborn, nor did I know how to keep a child breathing for eighteen years.

“It’s beyond just that, Win.”

Though Winnie’s mother had passed, she knew what it was to be loved by a mother. Winnie didn’t long for children the way other girl’s her age did, but she would know more than I did and probably be better at it. That thought made my face red.

“Would havin’ a baby make your mama be good to you?”

I chewed on that for a long time.

Thelma would fill her role as grandmother-to-be, but only when it was in the eye of the public. She would wear her pink linen to my baby-shower that the church would put on, but she would not sit beside me as I opened presents. She would not answer the phone if I’d call for advice, for comfort. She would not come to the hospital when the baby was born and if she did, she would certainly not hold the baby.

If I was good with the baby, if I loved it, if I was a good mother, she would hate me even more. It was another thing I had that she did not. She would resent me and grow more bitter with every tooth that sprouted in that baby’s gummy mouth. She would not babysit. She would not buy them birthday presents. She would not give them aged advice or sneak them snacks I didn’t let them have. She would grow colder and smaller until she was frost on the wall of her bedroom.

“No,” I whispered.

She patted my hand and that was that.

“Tell me somethin’ you haven’t told anyone else,” she said suddenly.

I smiled a little bit, thinking hard. Josie was wonderful to talk to, but it had been a long time since I’d had someone my age to relate to. I was hungry for more.

“Billy named the baby Marigold. He told me that.”

Instead of asking me how it made me feel or where he was or if we were going to get back together, she picked up our glasses, handed one to me.

“To Goldie, for havin’ the worst timin’ of any unborn baby.”

Our tea was very watered down, but we clinked our glasses and drank it down just the same.

Dusk was beginning to roll in from the East. We were sitting closer, our glasses tipped over and forgotten, our hands clammy. Her feet were bare, too, and our breathing was synched. The toads croaked and the cicadas cried. The wind tickled our arms and blew through our hair. The river eddied and the sweet fragrance of lilac lingered as the sky grew darker and the air cooler.

“Do you wanna stay the night?” It felt like the right thing to say.

Winnie shook her head, teeth lowering into her bottom lip. She watched a little bat flutter from one tree to the next in a flash of blue-black.

“Not tonight.”

I nodded.

After that, we slowly got up, letting our muscles unfold beneath our skin. My dress was wet from the mud and Winnie fruitlessly attempted to wipe her pants off before she would dirty her seats. I carried the glasses in one arm and put the other around her back. We walked like that, connected like two strands of hair from the same head, all the way to her car. Josie was sitting on the rocking chair on the front porch with a mug in her hand. I nodded. She smiled.

Winnie climbed in her car and there was a small flurry of things friends say to each other when they leave. See you soon. Call you later. Miss you. Had a good time. Have to check my calendar. Get home safe.

There was a fleeting moment of panic as she drove away from me. I didn’t know when I would to see her again. I imagined she was crying, too, except she wouldn’t have an Aunt Josie to sit with when she got home. She would go home to the house her mother birthed her in and lay in her bed that still smelled like her life before her mother was gone. She would listen to the buzzing from the television in the living room, her father motionless in the recliner as Family Affair droned on. She would probably listen to her little brother dream through their bedroom wall. Maybe she would want to be in someone else’s bed or maybe she wished she’d stayed in Charleston, at least for dinner.

Her taillights became tiny red dots in the distance and as I held my breath, eyes burning with tears, they disappeared into the unfamiliar dark trees.

I wished she’d stayed for dinner, too.