I smell the aroma of the leek tart I’m baking and hear Kayla rattling around in my kitchen. She’s poking through the drawers and cabinets. I told her to take anything she might need or want and so far she’s fallen in love with a big turquoise bowl and a well-worn first edition of The Joy of Cooking. Tomorrow, the Round Hill charity shop and Habitat for Humanity are coming to cart off furniture and clothing and kitchen items and who knows what else. It’s all going, making way for the bulldozers. Tonight’s is the last meal I’ll ever cook in this house, and that’s fine with me.
With a sigh, I turn around and walk into the kitchen. Kayla looks up from the contents of the drawer she’s examining. She holds up an eggbeater with a worn red wooden handle.
“Is this one of those eggbeaters?” she asks.
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Cool.” She sets it in the turquoise bowl she’s taking. “I’ve never seen one before. It looks like a great little invention.”
I smile. I won’t tell her that it was my mother’s long before it was mine. She won’t want it then, and who can blame her? My mother tainted everything she ever touched. She tainted this entire house. She tainted my memories. She tainted my life.
“This is my favorite thing,” she says, showing me an old salt-and-pepper-shaker set I barely remember from my childhood. She laughs as she demonstrates how the magnetized pieces come together to form the shape of a cow. “Rainie’s going to love it,” she says.
I like the sound of her laughter. She’s lighter these days, and I’m only now getting to know the real Kayla. The unhaunted Kayla. She’s a lovely young woman and I’m going to miss her. She offered to let me stay in her guest room for the few days between my house being demolished and my flight home, but I turned her down. I’m not the superstitious or squeamish type and I don’t like to think I’m still stuck in the past, but beautiful though Kayla’s house is, I don’t want to stay in those woods. I’d much rather spend these last few days in the second bedroom of Reed’s small, new-smelling condominium, with its access to an indoor pool, well-appointed gym, and serene yoga studio.
“Want me to start the salad?” Kayla asks as I lift the foil from the cheese biscuits I baked earlier.
“Sure.” I open a cupboard and hand her the salad bowl. “Use up whatever you can find in the fridge.”
Kayla talks about a trip to a Christmas shop Rainie’s class is taking, but I’m only half in the conversation. I look out the kitchen window into the backyard as I arrange the biscuits in a napkin-covered wicker basket. The day is mild for early December, and Reed and Rainie are out there in sweaters but no jackets. Reed’s pushing Rainie across the yard in the wheelbarrow. She’s standing, arms out, trying to maintain her balance. I feel the tiniest pang of sadness. Reed’s become a good friend. In another lifetime, we might have ended up together. In this lifetime, it’s not to be. I know he’s quickly grown attached to me and we’ve enjoyed sharing the bittersweet memories of our years together before SCOPE. Before Win. We even spent a few days in Myrtle Beach, where we danced and ate too much seafood and talked and talked. But Round Hill is his home and San Francisco is mine and nothing is ever going to change that fact.
Reed stops pushing Rainie and she climbs out of the wheelbarrow and runs over to the tree stump that Buddy carved into a chair sometime in the last few decades. She sits in it, kicking her feet against the bark as she chats with her grandfather. The yard is a mess, the grass unkempt and pretty well torn apart from the barbecue we had a couple of weeks ago to celebrate Buddy’s life after his heart finally gave out. I opened the house to the whole town. Buddy’s friends dug a pit in the backyard and roasted a pig. I tried to put my foot down about that. Even when I was a genuine Carolina kid growing up in Round Hill, I hated those pig pickin’s, but Reed settled me down. Buddy would have wanted it, he said, and he was right. He would have loved having everyone packed into our yard, sharing memories. The only person I didn’t invite was Brenda. I still remember how she called me a “goddamn stupid bitch” when I went to see her in the hospital after she lost her baby. That is precisely the way I feel about her now. I hope never to lay eyes on her again. She is a sick, sad, and lonely woman, stuck in the past, and I want nothing to do with her.
* * *
The salad, biscuits, and leek tart—and Rainie’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich—are ready, and Kayla calls Reed and Rainie in from the yard. We sit at the dining room table for the last time.
“Tomorrow this table is going to be gone?” Rainie asks.
“Yup,” I say. “Along with everything else.”
Rainie pats the tabletop with her small hand. “Goodbye, table,” she says. She looks at the wooden light fixture above us. “Goodbye, light bulbs.” She’s so cute.
“Everything’s going to get a second life, though,” Kayla says. “Everything will go to a big store and people will buy them and take them home and love them.”
Rainie chews her sandwich, considering this. She looks at me with worry in those big brown eyes. “You won’t have anything left if you give it all to other people,” she says.
“I have a lot of furniture in my home in San Francisco,” I say. “I don’t need any more.”
“Are you keeping anything?” Reed asks. “Memorabilia?”
“Oh, just a few things.” My smile is quick and, I suppose, secretive, because no one presses me for more information.
I found, buried in the back of my old closet, the cigar box I’d kept with me during my weeks with SCOPE. It was stuffed with yellowed newspaper articles and photographs that made me weep. Pictures of Win and Jocelyn, Chip and Paul and Curry and Greg Filburn at the school in Flint. Little DeeDee Hunt sitting on my mattress in her bedroom closet. Me, standing in front of the Daweses’ house looking serious and so committed. And a picture I’d completely forgotten I’d taken of Win sitting on the porch steps of the Daweses’ house, smiling one of his rare smiles at me. It was the night I told him about Mattie Jenkins. My throat tightens as I study that small square photograph of a young man who never had the chance to grow up. To grow old. I’m so sorry, Win.
I’ll take that box back to San Francisco with me. But first I plan to make copies of all of the photographs and newspaper articles. Reed managed to track down Win’s sister, the one who had polio as a child. The one Win cared so much about. I never knew how much Greg Filburn told Win’s family about what happened to their son and brother and how much I had to do with it, but I guess it was enough, because when I contacted his sister through email, she wrote back that she didn’t want to meet me. I don’t blame her. Still, when I found the old cigar box, I knew I wanted her to have a copy of those memories. She has children and grandchildren. They should know what a fine and committed young man their uncle was. They should know what the world lost that long-ago night.
Reed’s also helped me figure out how to make my financial plans a reality, now that I have more money than I ever expected from the sale of this property. I want to set up a scholarship in Win’s name at Shaw University, the school he attended, and I want to feed money into the community organizations that are my passion back home.