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But the one that burned a hole through her was What do these bones have to do with my family?
The sun had already climbed into a hot blue sky and beat unmercifully on her and her eerie find, the toe bones attached to the foot, the foot attached to the ankle. And what else? If she kept digging would she find the entire body?
She poked gingerly with her spade, each thrust meeting a sickening resistance that told its own story. The weight of sudden fear dropped her to her knees, but no matter how hard she stared at the awful thing in the hole, no matter how hard she wished she’d never taken her shovel to the roses, the bones wouldn’t go away. Bleached whiter than the wings of angels, they grew so big in Sis’s mind they took up all her oxygen, deprived her of breath and speech and hope. They grew so big she felt as if they were splitting the earth beneath her feet. Any minute now it would open up and swallow her whole, and along with her, everything she loved.
Slowly, Sis pushed herself upright. The woman who had come blithely into the garden expecting to tidy up for her sister’s wedding had suddenly become a woman whose awful discovery could destroy her family. Nothing would ever be the same. From this day on she would divide her life into two parts: before she found the bones and after.
The proper thing would be to tell the authorities, but then they’d have yellow crime scene tape all over the backyard during the wedding, reporters hounding their steps, gossips leaning on every fence post in Biloxi, speculating on the gruesome discovery in the Blake’s backyard. The scandal would be worse than when Emily got pregnant in high school and then was ditched by a boy who’d rather risk getting shot than marry her.
Frantic, Sis spaded the dirt back into the hole, telling herself after the wedding was soon enough to report this. Besides, she’d more than likely uncovered a relic, one of those Civil War casualties whose body had never been found.
She tamped the dirt carefully back into place, and then with one last glance to make sure the bones didn’t show, she stowed her spade, pulled off her gloves and went into the house.
“Lord God,” Beulah said. “You’re pale as a bar of Ivory soap. If you ain’t careful you’re gonna work you’self into a heatstroke.”
Beulah handed her a glass of water, but the lump of despair in her throat was so big Sis couldn’t swallow a single drop.
“Beaulah, do you know what’s buried under the roses?”
Setting her mouth in a straight line, Beulah turned her back on Sis and began washing dishes.
“More than likely a stray cat. I hope you covered it back up. Ain’t no sense ruining Emily’s wedding.”
“It’s not a cat. It’s a body.”
Beulah headed toward the table, a freight train gaining steam.
“You hear me good now, chile. Let it alone.”
Sis nodded or maybe she said yes through a throat so parched words got caught and couldn’t find their way out. A whole set of possibilities swirled through her mind, all of them tragic. If she could ever break free of Biloxi, she was going somewhere so frozen it wouldn’t grow a single rosebush. She’d find a place with snow so deep she’d need an Alaskan husky to find buried bones.
“I want you to go on down to the café and forget about them rosesbushes. You hear me now, Sis?”
“Loud and clear.”
“No use upsetting Emily and Jim, either. Just tell her to hold off on them German chocolate cakes. I aim to stay home and show Jim what he’s got instead of what he’s lost.”
Sis understood the things Beulah left unsaid, her comprehension so perfect she wondered if she’d ever had a normal life in the little pink Victorian house by the sea or if she’d only imagined it.
Beulah leaned down and folded her into a voluminous hug.
“Don’t you worry none. Everything’s gonna be all right, sugar pie.”
For a moment the thought of bones vanished, and Sis allowed herself to sink so deep into Beulah’s endearment she became a little girl again with her whole life in front of her, a shining path she could follow to the stars.
Three (#ulink_152c50e7-3b96-5e70-8abb-23d8a44de710)
WHEN SIS LEFT THE KITCHEN she could hear Sweet Mama down the hall, singing some rollicking old song from the Jazz Age. Did she know about the bones in the garden? The last thing Sis wanted to do was ask her and completely undo a mind already coming unraveled. Instead, she hurried up the stairs and tapped on Jim’s door.
“Come in.” He was standing on his crutch at the window with his back to the door, his shoulders hunched in a too-big pajama top and his sleep-ruffled hair sticking up like Andy’s.
The brother she’d sent to Vietnam was one she’d have confided in about the skeleton in the garden. This brother she wanted to fold into her arms and croon to the way she had when he was a child crying over a skinned knee.
“Jim, I’ll be heading to the café soon. Would you like to come with me?”
“Not today, Sis.”
He didn’t even turn around, just kept staring out the window as if he couldn’t believe the blue Gulf spread out before him, the white sand dotted with umbrellas and tourists, the seagulls wheeling through a sky the color of a robin’s egg. Sis didn’t even want to think what hell he’d seen over there, a vague euphemism she’d hated until she discovered there’s only so much horror a person can stand in one day.
“That’s okay, Jim. Take your time. Beulah’s going to be here today, cooking up all your favorites.” That turned her brother from the window, brought the ghost of a smile. “And I imagine Em’s make you something special at the café.”
“Tell Em not to worry about me.”
“I will.” Not that it would change a thing. Emily had always shared everything with Jim, the heartache, the joy, even the measles. Sis watched her brother standing there, sagging, a posture so foreign to him she wanted to cry. “It’s a beautiful day, Jim. Why don’t you get out your convertible and take Beulah for a spin?”
“Some other time, maybe.”
What would he do all day? Hole up in the room staring out the window? Sis stood in the doorway torn between the urge to stay and take care of her brother and the need to go to the café to help Emily and Sweet Mama take care of business. In the end, her practical side won. If the café failed, they’d all go under.
She hurried to her room to dress, and then got into her Valiant and followed along behind Sweet Mama in her ancient, oversize Buick. Thank God her grandmother wrecked nothing but a hydrangea bush backing out of the driveway. And miracle of miracles, she stayed on her side of the road all the way to the café.
Still, by the time Sis got there, she was a nervous wreck. She made herself stand still in the center of the room, just breathing, grounding herself in the familiar smells of bacon and coffee and sugar and sweet, ripe peaches. Emily had already baked six Amen cobblers that were cooling on the countertop, and Sweet Mama was standing safe and sound at the coffee urns making a special pot for her customers who always asked for chicory—Burt Larson, the mailman, Tom and James Wilson, the brothers who had a barbershop next door and Miss Opal Clemson, the music teacher who claimed she’d once played the piano for a concert by Leontyne Price, Mississippi’s famed opera singer.
It seemed so much like an ordinary day that Sis could almost forget her grisly find in the garden. But the Amen cobblers were sending up thick steam you could get lost in and never find your way out of, a sure sign of a disaster so huge even Sis wouldn’t be able to contain it. The bones in the garden were just the beginning.
She pulled herself together and found her sister in the kitchen wearing a pink shirt with long sleeves, for Pete’s sake, and it was already hot enough to fry an egg in the parking lot. Still, the sight of Emily covered with a dusting of flour and elbow deep in German chocolate cakes gave Sis a momentary respite from thinking about portentous cobblers and backyard bones.
“Hey, Sis!” Emily said, smiling as she poured batter into cake pans. “Where’s Jim?”
“He’s not up to socializing yet, Em.”
“I should have known that.” Emily scraped batter off the bottom of the bowl and held out a wooden stirring spoon. “Do you want to lick the spoon?”
She took up a spot by her sister and opened her mouth for the taste of raw batter, rich with sugar and butter. It brought back memories of childhood, with Jim and Emily perched on stools at Sweet Mama’s side and Sis standing at her elbow, listening to stories of the café in its infancy, waiting their turns to lick the batter from the latest confection in progress—a German chocolate cake, a lemon icebox pie, a Coca-Cola cake or Emily’s favorite, Sweet Mama’s Amen cobbler.
“Beulah said for you to wait on these cakes,” Sis said.
“If I had waited, there wouldn’t be any spoons to lick.” Emily bumped Sis’s hip, teasing her, and then crammed the huge stirring spoon into her mouth. It left a smear of cake batter on her cheek that made her look like a little girl.
“How do you know, Em? Someday I might make a cake.”
Emily whooped. “I want a picture of that. It would be one for the walls.”
Sis stuck her finger in the bowl and dabbed batter on her sister’s nose. Emily paid her back with a smear on the chin, and soon they were doubled over with laughter.
“Oh, my goodness.” Emily put the bowl and spoons into the sink. “If I don’t get this mess cleaned up, I’ll never be ready to open.”
“I’ll rinse.” Sis wiped cake batter off her face and moved to the sink. “You load the dishwasher.”
“Good,” Emily said. “That gives us time to talk about the wedding. I was thinking of putting flower baskets in the garden instead of depending on the roses.”
Pricked with sudden alarm, Sis just stood there with the water running unheeded over the dishes.
“I don’t think you ought to have it in the garden.”
“Since when? Just this morning you said it would be fine.”
“I checked it after we talked. It looks awful out there.”
“I know it’s not at its best this time of year, Sis, but I’ve always wanted a garden wedding.”
Sis had an awful vision of Emily standing atop the bones saying I do.
“It’s too hot, Em. Everybody will parch.”
“We can put the chairs under the shade.”
“I have a better idea. Wait till November when things have cooled off.”
Could she report the bones and get the mess cleared out of her garden by November?
“I will not have Andy start school without two parents. Okay?”
Was Emily remembering walking the halls of Biloxi High to whispers of easy and slut, her baby bump showing and Mark Jones already enlisted and gone? Was she thinking about how she’d had to sit on the sidelines while the rest of her classmates walked onstage to get their diplomas?
“Nobody’s going to call him names, Em. Not while I draw breath.”
“What are you going to do, Sis? Go to school with him every day?”
“I’m not above it.”
“You’re not going to get me to change my mind, and you might as well quit trying. I will not have my son called bastard.”
“All right. I understand. But at least think about getting married in Sweet Mama’s living room. We could buy some of those pink roses you love so much and put them in wicker baskets on either side of the mantel.”
“Forget it, Sis.”
“You could walk down the staircase and not have to trail your wedding dress in the dirt.”
“Good grief! Just let it alone. It’s my wedding and I’m getting married in the garden.”
Sis imagined Uncle Steve’s nosy wife, Ethel, poking around the pitiful rosebushes and finding the bony foot sticking out of the ground, imagined cops and pandemonium and scandal.
“But, Em, think what a hissy fit Aunt Ethel will pitch if she gets too hot out there. Or what if it starts to rain?”
“I’ve had my say, Sis, and that’s my final word.”
Emily huffed over to the stove and turned her back.
Sis wished she could start the day over. She’d sleep late and never see Sweet Mama tying plastic roses on the bush, never drive along behind her at twenty miles an hour in case she ran over another hydrangea bush. But most of all, she’d never dig up a rosebush and find bones.
Sis turned to the window and saw her nephew in the backyard, surrounded by boxes.
“Is Andy building a fort out there?”
“No. A rocket ship. He’s planning to fly me to the moon.”
“Maybe he’ll take me, too.” She looked back at her baby sister standing there oblivious in her long-sleeved shirt, expecting every downpour to yield a rainbow. “I’m sorry, Em. I’m such a grump.”
“You’re not totally grumpy. Just a little.”
“I’m going outside to cool off and visit with Andy, and when I come back inside, we’ll plan a wedding that will turn your enemies green with envy.”
“I don’t have enemies,” Emily said without a single hint of irony.
Lord, Sis hoped that was true. She raced through the door, the scent of Amen cobbler following her all the way, so strong it felt like somebody squeezing her heart. Outside, she leaned against the wall, trying to catch a deep breath. What would become of her family if she worried herself into a heart attack? It could happen. Last year a woman not three years older than Sis had keeled over on the front pew of the Biloxi Baptist Church, and her with three children to look after and a husband, besides.
“Hey, Aunt Sis,” Andy called. “How many batteries you got?”
He was standing on top of a TV box in his Superman suit, his blond cowlick sticking up in front like the crest of a baby bird, his sturdy legs beneath the too-short pants turned dark gold from a summer in the sun, the big red S on his shirt faded from too many washings. His feet were bare and his face was filled with excitement.
“I don’t have any batteries in my pockets, but I’ll bet I can find some. What are they for?”
“My rocket ship. It’s gonna take lots to get to the moon.”
Hope is such a fragile thing, a butterfly wing you could crush with one finger. Walking a thin line, terrified of leaning too far to the left or the right, Sis squatted beside her nephew at the pile of boxes.
“Let me help you with that rocket ship.”
“Me and you’s gonna build the bestest one!” Andy scrambled among the pile and came up with a box still smelling of laundry detergent. “Mommy won’t let me use a knife. Can you cut the window, Aunt Sis?”
“I can.”
As she pulled out a pocketknife and cut a window right over the T on the Tide box, Sis missed the family she might have had as if they were real, as if she had a husband who kept her picture on his desk, a daughter named Susan who had inherited her aunt Emily’s beautiful blond hair and a sturdy son named Bill after her own father, a son who loved baseball and digging for worms and sitting on the banks of the Tchoutacabouffa River with a fishing pole.
When Andy raced inside to peer out through the hole, her phantom family vanished, leaving her in the backyard of the café with a nephew whose grin lit a candle in her heart.
“Oh, boy. When I fly to the moon, I can see my daddy up there in the stars.”
If Sis were in her sister’s shoes, she’d never have painted Mark Jones as a hero. In her book, there was nothing heroic about leaving a pregnant girlfriend to face the fallout in a Bible Belt society. But what did she know about love and children? She’d never had either.
“Do you think I’ll see my daddy, Aunt Sis?”
“Maybe.”
Andy got that little boy skeptical look that said I know you’re going to break my heart with the truth but I love you enough to stand here and smile while you do it.
“If you look with your heart, and maybe wear a special pair of glasses.”
