Beautiful Chaos(93)

“You gonna come in already or wear a hole in the carpet?” Amma called from inside her room.

I opened the door, prepared to see the rows of shelves lined with mason jars, full of everything from rock salt to graveyard dirt. Bookshelves crammed with cracked volumes that had been handed down, and notebooks with Amma’s recipes. It wasn’t long ago that I realized those recipes might not have anything to do with cooking. Amma’s room had always reminded me of an apothecary, brimming with mystery and the cure for whatever ailed you, like Amma herself.

Not today. Her room was torn apart, the way mine was after I’d dumped the contents of twenty shoe boxes all over my floor. Like she was looking for something she couldn’t find.

The bottles that were usually lined up neatly on the shelves, labels facing out, were pushed together on top of her dresser. Books were stacked on the floor, on her bed, everywhere but on the shelves. Some of them were open—old diaries handwritten in Gullah, the language of her ancestors. There were other things I had never seen in here before—black feathers, branches, and a bucket of rocks.

Amma was sitting in the middle of the mess.

I stepped inside. “What happened in here?”

She held out her hand, and I pulled her up. “Nothin’s what happened. I’m cleanin’ up. Would do you some good to try it in that mess you call a room.” Amma tried to shoo me out, but I didn’t move. “Go on, now. Pies are almost done.”

She pushed past me. In a second, she’d be out in the hall and on her way to the kitchen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I blurted it out, and Amma stopped dead in her tracks. For a second, she didn’t say a word.

“You’re seventeen. I expect there’s more wrong with you than right.” She didn’t turn around.

“You mean like writing with the wrong hand and hating chocolate milk and your scrambled eggs all of a sudden? Forgetting the names of people I’ve known my whole life? Is that the kind of stuff you’re talking about?”

Amma turned around slowly, her brown eyes shining. Her hands were shaking, and she pushed them into the pockets of her apron so I wouldn’t notice.

Whatever was happening to me, Amma knew what it was.

She took a deep breath. Maybe she was finally going to tell me. “I don’t know about any a that. But I’m—lookin’ into it. Might have something to do with all this heat and these darn bugs, the problems the Casters are havin’.”

She was lying. It was the first time Amma had ever given what sounded like a straight answer in her life. Which made it even more crooked.

“Amma, what aren’t you telling me? What do you know?”

“ ‘I know that my Redeemer lives.’ ” She looked at me, defiant. It was a line from a hymn I grew up hearing in church, while making spitballs and trying not to fall asleep.

“Amma.”

“ ‘What comfort this sweet sentence gives.’ ” She clapped her hand on my back.

“Please.”

Now she was all-out singing, which sounded kind of crazy. The way you sound when you think something terrible is about to happen, but you’re trying to convince yourself that it isn’t. The terrible shows up in your voice, even when you think you can hide it.

You can’t.

“ ‘He lives, he lives who once was dead.’ ” She shoved me out of the room. “ ‘He lives, my ever-living Head.’ ”

The door slammed behind me.

“Now.” She was already halfway down the hall, still humming the rest of the hymn. “Let’s go eat before your aunts get into the kitchen and burn the house down.”

I watched her scurry down the hall, shouting before she was halfway to the kitchen. “Everybody get on into the dinin’ room, before my food gets cold.”

I was starting to think I might have more luck asking my ever-living Head.


When I ducked under the doorframe and walked into the dining room, everyone else was already taking their seats. Lena and Macon must have just arrived; they stood at one end of the dining room while Marian was deep in conversation with my Aunt Caroline at the other. Amma was still shouting orders from the kitchen, where the bird was “resting.” Aunt Grace shuffled toward the table, waving her handkerchief. “Don’t y’all keep this fine bird waitin’ any longer. He died a noble death, and it’s downright disrespectable.” Thelma and Aunt Mercy were right behind her.

“If you call a noble death a buckshot in the bee-hind, then I reckon you’re right.” Aunt Mercy pushed past her sister so she could sit in front of the biscuits.

“Don’t you start, Mercy Lynne. You know vegetablism is one step closer ta a world without panties an’ preachers. That there is a documentated fact.”

Lena took the seat next to Marian, trying not to laugh. Even Macon was having trouble keeping a straight face. My dad was standing behind Amma’s chair, waiting to push it in for her when she finally came in from the kitchen. Listening to Aunt Mercy and Aunt Grace peck away at each other made me miss Aunt Prue even more. But as I slid into my seat, I realized someone else was missing.

“Where’s Liv?”

Marian glanced at Macon before she answered. “She decided to stay in tonight.”

Aunt Grace caught enough to add her two cents. “Well, that just ain’t American. Did you invite her, Ethan?”