“Tell him hello from me!”
The looks Angie got as she walked through town were mostly friendly or curious; a few people said hello and looked like they would have gladly stopped to talk. Any other time she would have done that, but just now she couldn’t afford to. If she let herself be distracted, if she stopped to think, she’d lose her resolve.
One plate-glass window after another reminded her that she wasn’t wearing makeup, that she had tied her hair back with a rubber band, and that the shirt she was wearing over jeans had a rip in the pocket. She was overdressed for the weather but underdressed if she compared herself to the other women her age who passed her on the street.
She had never been able to manufacture any real interest in fashion, and rarely remembered to look in the mirror. The good clothes she had brought with her to Ogilvie were basic: a dark dress for formal wear; a lighter, dressier one that she had worn to every wedding she had attended for the last three years; a single sundress; a straight black skirt; and a good white silk blouse. She couldn’t remember the last time she had bought anything new. When there was extra money she bought another lens for her Nikon or put something aside toward new equipment.
She had never worried much about this particular failing until John had come along. John, who wore expensive clothes so casually and so well. He had an eye for line and color and he never asked, as other men sometimes had, if his shirt matched his pants. More than that, he had never, not once, said a word to her about her clothes, good or bad; he never seemed disappointed in what she wore, although she herself felt at a disadvantage walking down the street next to him. He was elegant and beautiful and strong, and next to him she often felt like a puppy that needed grooming.
Angie thought of going home to change, or at least finding a store where she could buy a cap or scarf or something to cover her hair, but then she had no money on her, even if any of the shops along this part of Main Street would offer something so mundane.
The merchants of Ogilvie, it was clear, catered to tourists who came for day trips from Savannah and to the wealthy parents of its undergraduates. She passed Thomasina’s, which seemed to be doing a brisk brunch business; an artisan jeweler; a crowded café-bakery; a clothing boutique with a linen sheath in the window that glimmered in the light. It was made for a long, thin woman who had no bust and no hips, and Angie would have looked like a sack of potatoes in it, which was beside the point: she couldn’t afford a dress like that, and she had no place to wear it. It was an elegant dress, for cocktail parties at the dean’s house or an evening in Savannah at the theater. An Audrey Hepburn, a Jackie Kennedy, a Caroline Rose kind of dress.
Next came a shop called Shards, which advertised itself with a scattering of paper-thin china teacups over a tumble of black velvet in its single window.
We buy antique china, porcelain, and glassware
was written in fine calligraphy on a small card in the window, and under that:
Con-stance Rose Shaw, Proprietor. Appraisals by appointment only.
The Rose sisters might have the unruliest sons in all of southeast Georgia, but they were good at other things. Next to Shards was an antique shop, Re-Runs (Eunice Rose Holmes, Proprietor), and beyond that, Fat Quarters (Pearl Rose McCarthy). Connie, Eunice, and Pearl monopolized a full half of the choicest block on Main Street, directly across from campus.
Angie passed a real estate office and an old-fashioned drugstore with large colored-glass vials in the window and then came to Ogilvie Books. A banner spanned the full length of the window: OGILVIE CELEBRATES FIFTY YEARS OF DIVERSITY.
Every book Miss Zula had written was here, in first and more modern editions, many of the jackets sporting silver or gold embossed medallions for one literary prize or another, a galaxy of small stars. Angie wondered if Tony had already been here to shoot stills. The truth was he probably had been, but she should have been with him, making contacts and setting up interviews. Instead she had been hiding in Ivy House. That would have to change.
In the middle of the display of books was a photo of a very young Zula in a cap and gown, accepting a diploma from a portly man. A newspaper article dated 1952, matted and framed, stood beside it on a carved oak easel. The headline was still dark and clear: “Ogilvie College Awards Diploma to Local Negro Woman.”
“What a difference fifty years make, eh?”
Angie jumped, a hand pressed to her heart, and then stepped back against the window.
“Rob.”
Rob Grant, a younger, darker, and more easygoing version of his brother, had never been one to stand on formalities. He kissed her on the cheek and gave her a hug that smelled of the bakery bag he held in one hand, yeast and dark sugars and cinnamon.
“Angie, I was wondering when I’d run into you. Don’t you look good.”
“So do you. So you ended up back in Ogilvie after all.”
“Where else, for one of Lucy Ogilvie’s boys? And Kai—my wife?—Kai is on the math faculty here.”
“I heard that someplace. You look happy.”
“I gave up on the law and I married well. What’s not to be happy? Hey.” He held up the bakery bag. “I’m on my way home for a late breakfast. Kai wants to meet you, and there’s coffee on. Unless you’ve already had breakfast?”
“I ate with Miss Zula and Maddie.”
Rob raised an eyebrow. “The Rose girls’ monthly goddaughter breakfast? Miss Zula must like you. So are you coming?”
His eyes were brown while John’s were blue, and Angie remembered quite suddenly playing poker with the two of them on a rainy Sunday afternoon. He had been in law school then, and she had liked him tremendously. He was the only good thing to remember about that particular weekend, and she had the idea that he might actually understand, if she were to tell him what she was about to do.
She said, “I am on my way to find John. There are some things I need to talk to him about.”
“In that case”—he took her elbow—“you’ll have to come along. We share the house with him . . .” His voice trailed away.
Angie gave him her best, clearest, most intense smile. “Until he gets married. It’s okay, Rob.”
“Until we find a place of our own,” Rob said, but he gave her an appraising look that said he might have given up the law, but still understood a great deal about the way people lied to themselves, and others.
It was a ten-minute walk, long enough for Rob to give her his personalized, highly suspect history of the neighborhood and for Angie to begin to panic. He was in the middle of an anecdote that involved the adolescent Grant boys, a tire swing, a six-pack of beer, and somebody called Louanne who was now the chief of police, when Angie stopped just where she was.
Rob looked at her expectantly. “Rethinking?”
She nodded.
“You know,” he said slowly, “I live there, too. You’re welcome in my home anytime.”
“You think he won’t want to see me.” If she could have snatched the words out of the air, she would have done that.
“Oh, he wants to see you,” Rob said. “As much as you want to see him.”
She hiccupped a laugh, started to say something that was a lie, and stopped herself.
“I never took you for a coward,” said Rob Grant.
Angie hesitated a moment, and then caught up with him. After a while she said, “Do you mind very much having to move out?”
Rob shrugged. “I thought I would, but it turns out that looking for a house with Kai is an experience not to be missed. And John would never really be happy anyplace else. Something the Rose girls have yet to figure out, as they are still trying to talk him into moving into Old Roses.”
“Old Roses?”
“The family place. You were there for Miss Junie’s birthday. The occasion of the wayward arrow? The Rose girls have got it in their heads that Caroline should stay there for good and keep an eye on Miss Junie.”
“And what does Caroline want?”
Rob stopped short, a thoughtful look on his face. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say one way or the other. It’s mostly her sisters who talk about it.”
Angie thought of Caroline Rose at Miss Zula’s table, and how she had disappeared from the conversation as soon as Harriet had come in.
She said, “Miss Zula asked Caroline to work with me and Rivera. She said Caroline is the best source of information about the town, next to her mother.”
After a while Rob said, “It’s true that Caroline is one of those people who’s good at listening, so she hears a lot.” He gestured with his chin. “Here we are. It’s not Old Roses, but it’s where my mother grew up and we’re all fond of it.”
Set back in a garden was a pale yellow two-story house. The windows were tall and narrow, with white woodwork and shutters, and a deep porch spanned the entire width of the house. The garden was in full bloom with flowers Angie couldn’t name, and more flowers bloomed in pots along the edge of the porch and between chairs piled with cushions. And, inevitably, there was John Grant sitting on the brickwork step, looking directly at her.
He had just come off the river. His skin was still flushed with exercise, water glistening in his short hair, his skin damp. Sweat was shining on his bare shoulders and in the hollow of his throat and on his legs, and Angie understood one thing: she should never, ever, have come.
SEVEN
I am going to say this straight out: I don’t think it’s proper to be digging around in matters that don’t concern you and that you can’t understand because you are, forgive my bluntness, Yankees. I don’t know what the university was thinking, inviting you all to come pry in our business, and I have written them a letter saying just that. The past is past. Leave it be.
Your name:
none of your business.
I have a story you might want to hear about the summer of 1973, when my second cousin Anita Bryant came to visit. It has got nothing to do with Miss Zula but it’s a good story anyway.
Your name:
Howard Stillwater. I own Stillwater Used Cars, and can be found there six days a week from seven in the morning ’til six at night. When you get ready to replace that pitiful excuse for a vehicle you drove down here, come and see me, I’ll do you up right.
It made perfect sense, John Grant told himself, that his brother would take it upon himself to force this reunion. Suddenly the wound on his upper thigh, mostly healed, began to itch. He pulled the towel from around his neck and laid it over his lap while he watched Rob cross Lee Street with Angie beside him, and he tried to think what he could possibly say to her, given the mood she was in.
It was not something he could forget in five years or fifty, the way Angie Mangiamele’s face gave away her temper. The only comfort, and it was a small one, was that she wasn’t wearing the old Nirvana T-shirt she had had on this morning when he saw her by the river. She had changed into a different, equally familiar shirt, two sizes too big, an old Hawaiian print with a tear in the pocket. The T-shirt, he imagined, she had left hanging on the post of her bed.
John closed his eyes and leaned forward, forearms propped on his knees, hands hanging.
“A little early for a nap, isn’t it?”
“Rob, I think I hear your wife calling you.”
When he opened his eyes she was there, five feet away. Her hair had grown out again, a coiling mass that reached halfway down her back, dark brown with hints of red in the light. There were some new things—a scar at the corner of her mouth, another piercing in her right ear—but mostly she was still Angie, unforgettable. She was looking at Rob, who had a hand on her shoulder.
“I know when I’m not wanted. We’ll be waiting on the back porch.”
She gave him a tight nod and a tighter smile, and then he was gone, but not before he threw John a particular look, the one that said he had doubts about his big brother’s ability to handle the situation.
There was a moment’s silence filled in by the sound of a lawnmower’s ineffective sputter and, more insistent, birdsong. John was thinking that Rob was right, he had no chance in the world of handling this situation, when Angie spoke.