Winter Loon(85)

I started the engine, then cut it. Why had I come here if not to be seen, if not to show this woman the letter Ruby had left for me and to ask if she knew my father? I lifted the lid of the tomato box and took out the envelope Ruby had so carefully laid on top. I slapped it on the palm of my hand for courage but fumbled it when I heard the rap on my window glass. I leaned over and scooped up the envelope with one hand and she was there, making the roll-it-down motion.

“Excuse me,” she said while I was still cranking down the window. “Who are you and why—”

Her tone changed and she said again, “Who are you?”

She took a couple of steps back from the car and I got out. “My name’s Wes. Wes Ballot.” I extended my hand and she took it, but she never stopped staring up at me. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, glancing back to her house. “It’s, well, I’m looking for Miss Aveline Blue. I’m wondering if that’s you. If you’re her, Aveline Blue, I mean.”

We stood there in the street, two people locked in the past. Finally, she spoke again. “I know who you are. You look just like Moss.” Her voice died down to a whisper. “It’s like looking at a ghost.”

“I know I take after him,” I said, and she nodded.

“Maybe not the mouth but the eyes, my God.”

I’d only felt my father’s blood roiling in me. I’d never felt it do what it was doing then—thickening up and gurgling, blushing my face. She was the kind of person who stands a little closer than what’s usually comfortable, and she was up close to me, looking me over. I’d have taken a step back, but in that way you let a dog sniff you first, I didn’t want to cause suspicion. Her eyes had tiny lines in the corners that would have made her look cross if it hadn’t been for the deep dimple in her right cheek. Her blue eyes flickered and her lower lip twisted up as she bit the corner. I’d had plenty of time to practice all I would say to this woman, but I was dumbstruck, imagining my father standing in the spot where I stood, maybe holding a beer or the brown wax duffel bag he took with him on the road.

She put her hand to her mouth, then dropped it again. “Let me look at you.” I stood stock-still while she surveyed me. Her hand was back to her mouth. She read my face like it was a palm.

“Where’d you come from?”

“I’ve been living with my grandparents. Minnesota. It’s, well, I got this letter and I—maybe I shouldn’t have come. It’s just . . .” I tried to organize my thoughts, but the miles I’d traveled logged in my veins and I could feel the tire treads rumbling the marrow like I was still driving. She rescued me from my bumbling.

“We don’t need to stand out here. Come on up to the house so we can talk better.”

I followed Aveline, watching her ample top and bottom crowd out the middle of her pale pink uniform with each twitch of her hips. The old woman stood in the doorway and squinted at me through her thick lenses. “Well, look what the cat drug in!” she said. “Where you been, Moss?”

“Mama, this is Wes, not Moss. Moss is—I’m sorry, Wes. This is my mom. Geneva.”

I wanted to hear her say it: Moss is dead. “It’s nice to meet you, ma’am.”

“You sure you’re not Moss?” the old woman asked.

“He’s sure, Mama.” Aveline’s voice snapped with tension. She must have heard it, too, because she softened toward her mother and guided her into the house.



BLUE-AND-YELLOW BUNCHES OF WALLPAPER FLOWERS plastered the sunlit walls. Little lace mats sat under every candy dish and lamp and on all the armrests. There was a faint smell of soap and roses. I imagined myself curled up on the davenport, blanketed beneath the crocheted afghan.

She snuck up on me, quiet as could be. I felt her first, pushing against my ankles, weaving through my legs. The mewing. Her fur, a gray-and-white watercolor, ruffed at the neck and fanned out like a feather along her tail. I bent to pick her up and she collapsed against me, mew turning to purr. “Elizabeth,” I whispered, burying my head in the cloud of fur.

Mrs. Blue had settled into her rocker by the front window. “Even the cat thinks he’s Moss.”

“Mama, please. Wes, why don’t you come with me into the kitchen and let me get you something. And you can bring Elizabeth. She probably wants something to eat anyway.”

I followed her through the living room past an upright piano and into the yellow kitchen, Elizabeth safe in my arms for the first time since Bright Lake.

“Have a seat,” she said. “Looks like Elizabeth missed you.” There it was again, that tension, contempt even, in Aveline’s voice.

“I’m sorry to drop in like this.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m glad to have you. I’m just, well, surprised isn’t the half of it.”

She handed me a glass of water and sat down in the chair across from me.

“Can you tell me how it is you knew to come here?”

I’d rehearsed the conversation, thinking I would go all the way back to Bright Lake. But I wasn’t sure I was ready for that story quite yet. I took in the details of the kitchen—white stove, white cupboards, a rounded refrigerator covered with finger-paint art, flecked countertops, canning jars filled with beets and beans lining the shelves, the hanging plant with spidery offshoots dangling next to—