The Almost Sisters(70)

I stalked away past the loblolly pine tree, hung with a hundred white crisscross banners that shone pale in the moonlight. I was savagely glad to leave the house marked and marred behind me in this way, if only until morning. The Mack family had left crosses of their own in yards, years back. I turned by the tree, stepping into its shadow with my outsize black shirt swirling around me.

She called after me, “You better make them kids come clean this up! You hear me! You better!”

And I would, too. I’d come down and watch them do it and ask Birchie and Wattie to come as well. The town needed to see us making the kids do what was right. I needed every human from my South to stand behind us. Maybe they would. After all, Wattie was beloved at Redemption, and at First Baptist only twenty or so people had moved to sit behind Martina Mack.

On the other hand, the seats behind my family had not exactly filled to bursting. I’d been heartened to see that some of the younger members of the church, led by Jim and Polly Fincher, had moved into the Partridges’ regular pew, right behind ours. The dear old Partridges themselves had simply moved back a row and stayed. We had at least five more families than Martina Mack. Still, most of the congregation had packed itself uncomfortably into the center seats, uncertain. Undecided.

I felt my shoulders squaring. I wasn’t twelve years old anymore. I was a Birch in Birchville. My brown-skinned son would be a Birch in Birchville, too, yet he would be nothing but that ugly word to trash like Cody Mack. He could not live in the town as I knew it. He would not live in the South or even America as I knew it. I hadn’t truly understood how deep and old and dangerous this was, until tonight.

We couldn’t hide up in our house and wait for them to choose. This was a war. An old, old war that had started before I was born and would likely not be finished in my lifetime, but I had to fight it. I was going to have to learn to fight it.





16




I stomped toward home so deep in thought that I almost jumped out of my skin when Lavender materialized out of Martina’s darkened side yard.

“You took her down hard! You are such a badass,” she told me, grabbing my hand. She’d circled back and heard the fight then. Good.

“Don’t say ‘ass,’” I chided, which wasn’t very Cool Aunt of me, but I was firmly on the mother side of the pond right now. I was mothered up, mothered out, enmothered in such fierce, protective rage on Digby’s behalf. My son was growing bigger and thumpier every day. He would be born, and I was seeing with fresh eyes the world he would be born into. “And also, do not ever, you hear me, sneak out in the middle of the night to meet a boy. You should be home already, not hanging out in the wee hours of the night listening to me shriek like a harpy at a little old lady. You are going to be so grounded.”

She shrugged, unconcerned, swinging our hands between us. “Totes worth it.”

I shook my head. Well, maybe to thirteen it was. Hugh was very, very cute. I took a cleansing breath, feeling a bit better with my niece’s hand in mine. I secretly loved that she had called me a badass, loved that she was on my side. More than that, she was on Digby’s side. I hoped hard that her whole generation would be like her.

“Do people still say totes?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. But just, like, ironically,” she told me. “Do me and Hugh really have to go back and fix her yard up?”

“Absolutely,” I said, and speaking of ironic, I was engaging in some next-level irony right now, wasn’t I?

I’d decided to protect Birchie, even though she’d done the worst thing that a human being could do. She’d taken a life. I was firmly on Wattie’s side, too, and Wattie had helped her hide the body. But would I let my equally beloved niece get away with some petty vandalism against roaring jackasses? Apparently not.

Lavender blew a raspberry. “She deserved it, though.”

“Oh, totes,” I said, very California, and she laughed. “I’ll help you clean up.”

We were at the end of Pine Street now, where it bumped into the square. We turned and headed down the pavement on the side with the old houses. The streetlights were on the other side, by the square itself, but I thought for this conversation we could use a little shadow.

As we passed the Darian house, I paused to check the side yard, to be sure the other budding felon had made it home safely. The ladder was gone, and Hugh’s window was closed. I took these as good signs.

Lavender, looking up at the dark window, said, “He wanted to wait with me. I told him I’d be safe with you, and you might kill him.”

“I might still, but not for rolling Martina’s house. That boy is too old for you,” I said. I was calmer, and I thought Digby had calmed, too. He spun in a slow pinwheel at my center.

“It’s not like that,” she said. “We’re just friends.”

“It’s actually a lot like that, or you would have invited Jeffrey along on your midnight ramble,” I said. I shot her some side-eye, but she said nothing. It was a very telling silence. “Be his friend in the living room with your mom right upstairs and me in the kitchen. Be friends at Cupcake Heaven with Jeffrey there, too. Don’t be friends alone at two a.m. You aren’t ready for that kind of nighttime friend.”

“Okay,” she said, too flip and immediate for me to believe for one red second that she meant it. But when she spoke again, she was serious. “It’s just that Hugh gets it, you know? I swear we aren’t all flirty or talking gushy crap. We talk about, like, our lives. Real stuff. My dad and his mom. Jeffrey gets too upset. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but me and Hugh, we do want to.”