Just Like Home(69)

“That’s all gonna be over soon, though,” she said.

“I don’t think so. Now that you’re home, I don’t think it’ll ever be over.”

She shook her head. “I’m not staying here. I’m selling the place soon as Daphne’s finished.”

His reaction sent a violent shiver up Vera’s spine. It rooted her to the spot, kept her from trying to follow him as he walked away toward the house he’d grown up in. It kept her from calling after him. It took the breath from her lungs.

He smiled at her, and he looked up at the Crowder House, and he shook his head.

“Nah, Vee. That house would never let you leave.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


Vera could not concentrate on dinner that night. She could not concentrate on her mother, or on James Duvall, or on the promise of a full night’s sleep.

All she could think about was what Brandon had said.

Nah, Vee.

“Are you listening to me?” Every time Daphne spoke, a smell as thick as a taste filled the room. Sweet, sharp lemon, with something earthy and dark underneath. “I said, there’s going to be press after I’m gone. You should figure out where you’re going to go.”

Duvall didn’t seem to notice the smell. Vera studied her own hands, breathing shallow through her mouth. One hard thing at a time, she’d told herself earlier that day, as if the project of the bed and the project of talking to her mother were equally difficult. As if she could have prepared herself for what it would be like to see Brandon.

That house would never let you leave.

She longed for the feeling of the headboard falling on her elbow. At least that had been painful in a way she could swear at.

“Maybe I’ll just stay here,” Vera said flatly, after she’d let the silence go for a little too long. “We’ll see. Or, well, not we. I’ll see.” Bad, she thought reflexively, pinching her own arm under the table. Who says things like that?

Daphne flicked the edge of a spent paper cup with one thick thumbnail. She was talking slowly. “Oh, they’ll come. Sniffing around here, just like before. You’ll want to lie low, like you did back then. Just in case.”

“I wasn’t lying low,” Vera protested. “You wouldn’t let me—” She cut herself off, not wanting to finish the sentence in front of Duvall.

“Wouldn’t let her what?” he asked, a forkful of once-frozen macaroni halfway to his mouth.

“She hid his letters from me,” Vera said evenly. “Did she ever tell you that? I only just found them a few days ago—”

“Letters?” Duvall asked, his lips wet. “From Francis? Personal ones?”

Vera kneaded one aching shoulder with the opposite hand. She hadn’t had time to shower before dinner after all, and her skin was still tacky with the sweat she’d broken from dragging that damned bedframe onto the lawn. “Personal ones,” she confirmed grimly.

Duvall steepled his fingers. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to take a look. Communing with a person who has crossed over is so much easier if you’ve got their words to work with.”

“They’re probably all about how much he loved you,” Daphne murmured.

Vera looked to her mother with weary suspicion, wary of a trap. “Why do you think that?”

The air in the room grew heavy, and Daphne’s voice took on a slow, rhythmic timbre. “Because I watched it. I watched you eat up his love like a crab eating a seafloor corpse, one pinch at a time. You devoured the way your father would light up whenever you walked into a room.”

“Now, Daphne,” Duvall interrupted. “You don’t need to—”

Daphne didn’t seem to hear him, seemed to have forgotten that he was there. She stared at Vera with bottomless black eyes. “You brought home your failed tests and your skinned knees and your certificates of participation, and you exchanged them for his attention. You sat at the dinner table and you made him laugh with your unfunny jokes, jokes that only the two of you seemed to understand, and you took it, you took the laughter. I saw you take it and knit it into yourself so it could never leave you. Do you understand? I saw. I saw it all.”

Vera didn’t understand what her mother was doing, didn’t understand this sudden outpouring of memory and honesty. But Vera did understand what her mother was saying, because Vera remembered it too. She remembered the feeling of her father’s love and attention. She remembered holding it right in the middle of her tongue so it wouldn’t melt too fast.

“Don’t get me wrong.” Daphne’s head tilted to one side, her unblinking eyes still on Vera, until her ear nearly touched her shoulder. “I loved you. I’ll always love you. But I hated you too, at least for a time.” There it was, and it struck Vera like a quick, brutal kiss on the mouth. I hated you. “I think I had to,” Daphne continued in that same low, rolling rhythm, her neck still folded at that impossible angle. “Is one possible without the other? I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them. There’s the thin hate we have for strangers.” At this, so fast Vera almost didn’t catch it, Daphne’s eyes flicked for just a moment to James Duvall. “And then there’s the thick, true, smothering hate we have for those we know best. And that, Vera-baby, that’s what I had for you. That’s what bubbled up in me and stuck.”