The Book of Lost Friends(25)

I survey the bowed, splotched porch ceiling, wonder how long it might be before this sort of thing starts happening inside the house. “Maybe I can get the landlord to put on a new roof.”

Aunt Sarge scratches the skin around her ear, smooths a few stray wisps into a short, slicked-back ponytail bun of chestnut hair. “Good luck with that. Only reason Nathan Gossett kept this house up at all was because Miss Retta was like part of the judge’s family. She was hoping to get back here after her stroke. Now that she’s passed and the judge’s passed, I can pretty much guarantee—Nathan Gossett would be just as glad to let it all fall in. Doubt if he even knows someone like you rented this place.”

My back stiffens. “Someone like me?”

“Out-of-towner. Woman moving in alone. This isn’t that kind of house.”

“I don’t mind it.” My hackles are rising. “I was moving with my boyfriend…fiancé…but, well, you can see it’s just me here.”

Sarge and I have another one of those moments. An instant in which some sort of line has been crossed, and we’re standing on the same side, strangely simpatico. It’s fleeting, like the sudden breeze that kicks up, carrying the scent of more rain. I cast a worried glance.

“That won’t get here for a couple hours yet,” Sarge assures me. “Be gone by tomorrow morning.”

“I hope my drip pan can hold off the tide until then.”

She checks her watch and starts down the porch steps. “Put the trash can under it. You’ve got one, right?”

“Thanks. Yeah. I will.” I’m not about to admit the idea never even crossed my mind.

“Be back tomorrow.” She lifts a hand in a manner appropriate for either a dismissive wave or flipping someone the bird.

“Hey,” I call just before she climbs into a red pickup truck with a ladder in the back. “How do I get to the judge’s house from here? Someone said it’s close enough to walk across the field.”

“LaJuna tell you that?”

“Why?”

“She likes to go there.”

“LaJuna? How does she get all the way out here?” My house is five miles from town.

“Bike, I imagine.” Sarge meets my curiosity with a wary look. “She’s not hurting anything. She’s a good kid.”

“Oh I know.” In truth, I haven’t a clue about who LaJuna really is, other than that she was nice to me at the restaurant. “It seems like a long bike ride, that’s all.”

Aunt Sarge pauses by her truck, studies me a moment. “Shorter by the old farm levee lane. Cuts across back there.” She nods toward the orchard behind my house and the tilled field beyond, where the crops are knee-high and bright green. “Highway goes around all the property that was Goswood Grove. The farm levee lane cuts right through the middle of the plantation, takes you past the back of the big house. When I was a kid, farmers still came and went that way to bring crops to market and their cane to the syrup mill, especially the old folks farming with mules, yet. Couple miles makes a big difference when you’re moving at two miles an hour.”

My mind hiccups. Mules? This is 1987. I’d guess Sarge to be only in her thirties.

“Thanks again for coming by so quickly. I really appreciate it. I can’t be home tomorrow to unlock the house until after school.”

She squints again at the roof. “I shouldn’t need to get in. Probably have it fixed and be gone before you get here.”

I’m a little disappointed. LaJuna’s aunt is perhaps a bit gruff, but she’s an interesting personality. And she knows things about Augustine, yet I get an inkling that she’s not exactly an insider, either. Her perspective could be helpful. Besides, I’d really like to make a friend or two here.

“Of course.” I try again. “But if you end up still being around when I get home, I usually brew some coffee after work. Sit out on the screen porch in back and have a cup.” It’s an awkward invitation, but it’s a start.

“Girl, I’d be up all night.” She opens her truck door. Stops one more time and gives me the same perplexed look I got when I asked Granny T to speak to my classes. “You need to lay off that stuff in the evening. Messes with your sleep.”

“You’re probably right.” Lately, I don’t sleep, but I blame job trauma combined with financial stress. “Well, if I miss you tomorrow, you’ll leave a bill for me? Or drop it by the school?”

“I’ll stick it in your screen door. Got no interest in that school.” She departs without further niceties.

I’m reminded that Augustine operates under some unwritten code I neither understand nor can communicate in. Trying to decipher it is like being tucked in the back bedroom of my father’s New York apartment, sitting on the edge of a daybed with my suitcase between my knees, listening as my dad, his wife, and my grandparents conversed in rapid-fire Italian, and wondering if my little half sisters, lying in their beds in the adjoining room, could understand what was being said. About me.

I push that memory aside and hurry back into the house, where I trade my work treads for the duck shoes I used on rainy college campus days. They’re the closest things I have to boots, and they will have to do. Hopefully, I won’t be wading through anything too deep in order to find this levee lane. I want to at least give it a try before the rain starts again.