The Almost Sisters(18)

“What did he look like?” Lavender asked. Which was entirely not the point.

“I don’t know. He was dressed as Batman,” I said. “So I—”

“Batman?” Lavender interrupted, and then she snorted. Almost a laugh. “You love Batman! Was he a cute Batman?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter,” I repeated, but a sidelong glance at her told me that it did, to her. Well, at least it was a question I could mostly answer. “Um, he was around my age. African American. Deep voice—”

“He was black? You’re having a black baby?” Lavender interrupted again.

“Well, it’s half my baby, Lavender. He’ll be biracial, so I don’t know what he’ll look like or how he’ll think of himself.”

She was staring at me, big-eyed and silent.

“What?”

“God, Aunt Leia. You are just . . . so cool.”

Rachel was going to murder me.

“No, I’m not cool,” I said. “I’m reckless, and I let feeling crappy lead me into bad decisions. For the record, it didn’t make me feel better.” Not strictly true, but in the morning I’d been half dead of hangover, so it was true enough. “He could have been a rapist, or a psycho stalker, and I brought him right up to my room. He could have had a disease. I had to get tested for a bunch of crap, which was scary and embarrassing, and I still have to take another HIV test in a couple months, just to be safe. I was completely out of control, and now this baby—who I’m glad about, don’t get me wrong. I am going to love this kid. But, Lav, my kid is going to grow up with no father.”

That one hit her close. Maybe too close. She looked away, swallowing.

“That’s going to suck. Not having a dad,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she meant for the baby or for her. Maybe both.

I backpedaled, picking a different moral. “When you drink too much, you make choices that you might not make if you were sober.”

She rolled her eyes, accepting the subject change. “They told us at school.”

“Well, I’m telling you again,” I said. “It’s easy to drink too much, especially if you’re not used to it.”

Lavender nodded, very solemn. “So you’re saying I should start drinking as soon as possible and get used to it.”

She said it so earnestly it took me half a beat to realize she was trolling me. I smiled, relieved to see the sassy kid I knew was still there, under the unhappiness.

“Exactly. Birchville is in a dry county, or else I’d stop and get you a sippy cup of bourbon.” I turned us onto Main Street. “Look, we’re almost there.”

Lavender made a face, like she was smelling something less than savory. “This is Birchville?”

Up ahead we could see Walgreens and Subway across from Tiger Gas, a nod to Auburn. Alabama fans gassed up at the Shell.

“The edge of it,” I said. “You’ll see downtown after this intersection.”

She sat up straighter, looking around as we passed Piggly Wiggly, sharing its parking lot with Movie Town.

“What is that place?”

“You rent DVDs there. They also have tanning beds in the back,” I said. In some ways driving into Birchville was like driving thirty years into the past, the streets lined with colors and concepts right out of 1987.

“That’s freaky,” she said. “A lady on the corner is waving at us.”

Dot Foster, a sweet older woman who headed the Prayers and Squares ministry at First Baptist, had spotted the rental car. I waved back, and she hurried off toward Lois Gainey’s house. Within minutes the entire town would know I had arrived, toting an unknown adolescent. If no one remembered that I had a niece, they would deploy a scout to drop by to find out Lavender’s people and provenance. In other ways driving into Birchville was a lot like driving a hundred and thirty years into the past, all the way back to 1887.

I stopped at one of the three traffic lights, studying Lav as she studied my town.

She was past Super Pretty—she was beautiful, and true beauty always came with a healthy shock of odd. Part of it was that she was so little. In the NICU she’d looked like a wrinkly purple apple with a few sticks attached, everything below the neck wasted to bird bones to protect her brain. Her body had never yet caught up. She was my height but built to scale, so that in pictures where she stood alone, she looked lanky and tall. Her face was wider than it was long, with huge eyes sunk deep and razor-sculpted cheekbones. Her nose was a small, sharp jab over a wide mouth. Now her body had changed, too, and tiny as she was, she didn’t look at all childish. I hoped she wouldn’t realize how spectacular she was until she was twenty-five and safely past letting it ruin her.

We were at the square now, the spire of First Baptist visible from any point around it. Here, on the far side, a park with benches and a fountain shared space with the library. The sides were row shops that ran around the corners: the Knittery, Sally’s Hair Emporium, Read-Overs New and Used Books, Cupcake Heaven, Pinky Fingers Nail Salon. First Baptist itself took up most of the fourth side, and the center was all church grounds and the tiny, ancient cemetery. Most of the houses on the outer ring were Victorians that had been converted into offices and stores. A few were still residences, owned by the remnants and relations of the oldest families.