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I CALLED MISS STEEP as soon as I got home from school that Tuesday. She answered her phone after the first ring.
I could hear the TV in the background, and I imagined her standing in the living room with the cord from her old, rotary phone stretched through the doorway that led to the kitchen.
“I was just calling to see if you’d want to go to dinner. There’s something I want to talk about.”
“Blake, of course. I would love to see you. Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine,” I told her. “See you tonight?”
It was dusk when she pulled up to the front of the house in her nice, jet-black sedan. Several bats were flittering around the sky over the driveway.
As soon as I opened the car’s door, I could smell the perfume. The radio was turned to a jazzy classical station. Even after everything that had happened the past several months, Miss Steep had kept her movie-star looks and demeanor.
I got in the car, and she drove us to the diner on the square. With my suggestion, we sat in the back corner where there were no other customers in earshot.
The waitress brought us our drinks and said that she’d be back for our order. I could tell that Miss Steep was looking at my black eye.
“Do you still wonder why Morris did it?” I asked her after the waitress had wandered off.
Miss Steep looked up from where she had been contemplating what she would order from the menu. “All the time,” she assured me. “But I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.”
From there, I cut right to the chase. “Why was your perfume at the house?”
Miss Steep’s mouth dropped open and, for a moment, she was speechless. She looked confused. “Blake, I don’t...”
Before she had a chance to finish, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a folded paper towel. With my hand hovering an inch or so above the tabletop, I flipped the paper towel open and let the perfume bottle roll onto the surface.
Miss Steep made a small but audible gasp of disbelief at what she was seeing. Her right hand shot to her mouth.
“It was in Morris’s closet.” I told her. “Next to some of Mom’s stuff.”
She carefully gathered her words before speaking. “Morris and I...we...I felt bad for him, Blake. He was all alone. I never told anyone about us because...,” her eyes darted around the restaurant to make sure nobody was hearing, “after Davey died, I knew that, if people found out that your stepdad and I had been together, they would try to link what he did to that convoluted mess from mine and your momma’s past. The last thing I wanted was for people to start digging all of that up. To me, that is water under the bridge. So... under the circumstances, I thought keeping the affair secret would be the best thing to do.”
I was lost. This was the first time that I had ever heard the things that Miss Steep was bringing up. She knew Mom? And what exactly was this “convoluted mess” that she was talking about? “Under what circumstances?” I asked her.
Miss Steep lowered her hand from her mouth. Now, more than anything else, she looked surprised at the direction our conversation had turned. “You don’t know, do you?”
I didn’t answer her. Instead, I crossed my arms, flung myself back in the booth, and waited on an explanation.
“Blake, I thought you would have known by now.” She leaned forward and propped her elbows on the edge of the table. Her voice lowered to a near whisper. “Your momma... you still don’t know why she left your daddy the way she did?”
No. I didn’t. All I knew was that, when I was five years old, Dad and Mom got divorced. There had never been an explanation given to me.
Like I’ve said before, I don’t remember much about the days when the three of us had been a family. The things that I can recall are just brief images—a baby goat, a white picket fence, the vibrantly green tops of carrots in the ground, and a woman in a red cape tending a garden under the full moon.
After the divorce, Mom and I moved to Ridge Spring, and Dad went off to Georgia.
When I was seven, Mom remarried.
She died five years later.
“Your momma...,” Miss Steep started again. “She took you and ran. It was to protect you,” she said.
To protect me? Now I was prepared to hear the worst—I was ready to be told that Dad had done something horrible to her, or to me, or to the both of us, and I was now living with the bad guy. I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat. “To protect me from what?” I braced myself for the answer. Was I ready for this?
“There were arranged marriages.” The statement from Miss Steep was blunt. “Your parents were part of a community that set up marriages when the kids were very little, and your momma wanted to get you away from all of that. It was risky, but she did it to save you.”
I must have looked at her with an expression that was one of all kinds of crazy because she returned my stare with one that was equally full of genuine sorrow. “Mom and Dad...,” I said, “how long were they involved? Were they... part of those arrangements?”
Miss Steep nodded her head. “They’re marriage was arranged, yes,” she stated matter-of-factly.
Until then, I had believed that, despite their later differences in life, Mom and Dad had loved each other at some point in time when I had been a kid. But now Miss Steep was saying that they were forced to marry one another. Love had nothing to do with it. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You’re wrong. They loved each other.”
“The community had a person that they called The Sower. It was The Sower’s responsibility to announce who would be paired together. On a full moon night, The Sower would plant carrot seeds in the garden. When the carrots sprouted, the green tops would spell out the names...”
As she was talking, I recalled something from the house where I’d lived with Mom and Dad. There had been a framed photo of a garden plot that hung on the wall in the hallway. In the picture, their names—James and Lisa—were spelled out in carrot tops that were shooting up from the dark soil. Was what Miss Steep telling me actually true?
The hazy image that I have from the full moon night, when I’d been peeking around the picket fence and watching the woman in the red cloak, now made sense to me. The woman was The Sower. She had been planting seeds.
All of this I was hearing was crazy. It was too much to take in. I stood from the booth. I had to get out of there.
“Blake, wait.” Miss Steep reached up and touched her hand on mine. “Sit back down. There’s a few more things that we need to talk about.”
From where I was standing next to the table, I asked, “Like how you know about all of this?”
“I was part of it too, and I ran away not long after your mother.”
With the knowledge that she had known my parents, even lived in the same community as them, my mind went back to that full moon night when I had been a kid watching The Sower in the garden from behind the picket fence. There had been someone else with me. It was a boy with hair so blonde it was nearly white. Davey. Until then, I’d thought that the day that Davey and his mother walked into the pool store had been the first time we’d ever met. Now, the realization that all of our pasts were tangled together was a punch to the gut. “I’m ready to go home,” I said.
“Blake, we’re not through talking yet.”
“I said I want to go home. You can take me, or I can walk.” I started to turn and make my way to the exit.
Relenting, Miss Steep reached to her purse. “I...just let me pay and we’ll be out of here.” She craned her neck to look around. “Waitress?” She waved the ticket in the air.
The waitress hustled over and took the ticket and debit card from Miss Steep. “We decided against dinner,” she said. “He’s... not feeling well.”
“I’ll be outside,” I said and left Miss Steep alone in the restaurant.
The ride home was awkward, to say the least. We both sat in silence. Miss Steep had turned the radio all the way down to nothing. It was as if she was waiting on me, or her, to break the horrible silence that hung between us.
Finally, we pulled up to my house.
––––––––
“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL me about Mom?”
Dad was sitting in his favorite recliner. In front of him, the TV was blaring some kind of obnoxiously loud action flick.
“What are you talking about?” He started to sit up, and I could tell that he had been sleeping.
“Mom, Dad. Miss Steep said that when y’all were younger you were both part of some kind of weird community that dictated who you would marry.”
With the remote, he set the TV’s volume to mute. “Why did she tell you that?”
“It doesn’t matter why. What matters is that I get an explanation.”
“Blake, I don’t know how...”
“Tell me, Dad.” My voice cracked.
He let the recliner’s footrest down. It was a harsh, grating sound. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in the palms of his hands. After a heavy sigh, he looked up at me again.
“Both of us grew up in that world. The community leader, The Caretaker, was the one that decided who we would marry. The Caretaker passed the names along to The Sower, and The Sower would...”
I nodded my head. I had heard all of this before, and I finished Dad’s story for him. “She would plant carrot seeds, and when they sprouted it would spell the names of those who had been paired together. Miss Steep already told me, but what was the point of it?”
“It was supposed to be a self-sufficient community. We were living off the grid. We had our own law and order. We grew all of our own food. Everything was there for us. Even now, parts of it sound great, and I can see how somebody could fall for it. But the truth was that The Caretaker controlled everything. We gave our lives to him, and, in return, he decided how the course of our lives would go, who got what, and so forth. Your mom and I... we wanted to get out of it, and we decided that the best thing to do would be for her to split.”
“So you never loved her?”
“Blake, it wasn’t a matter of whether I loved her or not. The two of us getting married was what was going to be. We loved you, don’t you see that? The only way for you to have a normal life was to get you away from it.”
“Where was it? The community?”
“It was here,” Dad said.
And my heart sank.