THREE

After lunch, Mama tried to get me to go with her “in search of civilization.”

“You aren’t the only one going through real-life withdrawals. Only place I’ve been in four days is the grocery store. I need to see people. Real, live people. Come with me. It’ll do you good, too. We’ll go exploring.”

I weaseled out of it by saying I didn’t get to run yet, since I’d gotten delayed when I met Deacon outside that barn. The truth was, I wanted to scope out all the stuff left behind in the house without her hovering and making snide comments about my daddy’s family. As soon as she peeled out of the driveway, I walked from room to room, trying out mismatched chairs and sitting on an ancient couch that was so stiff it could have been used as a diving board.

Portraits of my ancestors hung everywhere—ancestors I’d never even known about. Mama said the pictures were coming down the minute the movers brought our stuff from Georgia. She didn’t like them all staring at her—said it made her feel judged. “They’re all so stuffy,” she’d complained.

I lifted one from the wall and checked the back. Along the bottom, written in faded ink, it said Alexander Austin, 1879. Most all of them had legible writing and were lined up around the rooms in order of year, starting with Alexander on the wall below the staircase and ending with Micah in the front hallway. But none of those people smiled. Not one. It was the most unsmiling family I’d ever seen.

Upstairs, in my room, was the only photo I had of my daddy. It was taken when I was about six, the year after Mama and Peter got married, and the only time my daddy came to see me in Georgia. We’d been at some kind of fair with a carousel. My daddy stood almost as tall as the pole coming out of the middle of the horse I rode—white, with a flowing pink mane and tail, and a golden saddle. He’d wrapped his giant hands around my waist and held on while we went around and around. After the ride was over, he paid a photographer for two copies of the picture he took of us and gave one to me. The other he’d tucked inside his shirt pocket. I’d slipped mine inside the waistband of my shorts and walked carefully to my room when I got home so it wouldn’t fall out. Since that day, the picture has lived in the one place I knew Mama would never look—inside a book.

I got that photo and carried it around the house, holding it up next to each of the sketched portraits, trying to compare the people on the walls to the man in the photo. It was hard to tell if there was any likeness. It was even harder to see anything of myself in those people. I happened to like smiling.

There was only one portrait in the front room, which Mama called a “parlor” and had ruled off-limits to me. She said the furniture in there was valuable, and if we got in a pickle about money, she could sell something to tide us over. But once I opened the doors and saw that lone portrait hanging over the piano, I had no choice. I had to go in. That person was smiling.

Ever so carefully, I lifted the carved gold frame from the wall and checked the back. Benjamin Austin, 1942. He looked more like my daddy than any of the others, partially due to the mass of wild hair springing from all over his head, and partially because he smiled like he had a secret. That one time my daddy had come to Georgia, Mama’d made a big deal after he left about the way he’d let his hair grow “all long and shaggy.” In my shadowy picture, his eyes were focused downward, on me, but his mouth curved up into a tiny smile, like he was pleased with himself for something no one else knew about.

Looking at the two of them, my daddy and Benjamin, my heart did that little drop thing, the same way it did when I had to leave Atlanta without saying good-bye to Irene. Maybe I was finally feeling some sadness over his passing. Maybe I wasn’t flawed after all. And maybe, while I was stuck here in Vermont, I could learn a little something about him and eventually even have a good cry.