MOMMA SITS IN THE CHAISE LOUNGE. Wisps of evening air sweep beneath the awning rich with the fragrance of the cove, magnolia and rhododendron, the light scent of honeysuckle. Her azaleas are still in bloom. I close my eyes and imagine I'm young again, the weight of my life yet to draw down on me. The land below the cove is not cut and scarred or ripped away for things so unnatural as an Arnold Palmer golf course, of all things. It angers me to think what is coming, and I want to do whatever I can to stop it, to stop John Boyd, but I'm afraid it's already too late.
I have made small efforts to look for the deed, sifting through drawers when Momma was out of the room. Out in the shed behind the house are boxes from the church, but nothing is there either, just a few old hymnals and fading bulletins from long-ago Sundays. I found Momma's prayer shawl, knitted by women in the congregation when my father died, moth- eaten and full of dirt. Momma said it was nothing she wanted to wear on her shoulders. It wouldn't bring my father back. There are needlepoint pillows and flyers advertising my father's tent revivals, but there is nothing as official as a deed. I have not told Momma about John Boyd. How can I tell her that the land is not hers, has never been hers, and that now, though she never had a clue, time is about to run out?
I watch her in the deepening shadows of the front porch. She sits quietly in the length of this evening, her eyes closed. Toes push against worn wood planks until her head nods with sleep. What will happen to her if she loses the land? She has struggled all her life, one of a dozen children who grew up on a farm outside Waynesville until the Depression scattered them all so far apart that she has never reconnected, never found anyone to reclaim as family. She stayed in Waynesville, lived with her mother until she died, then with a distant cousin, then with others, strangers who would take her in as long as she earned her keep. Washing, sewing, cooking meals was the full extent of her life, simply a means to survive. That is the one thing I can say about Momma— she always survived.
In her late twenties, she met my father at a camp meeting and was so taken by him that he became her world. After they married, Momma never once strayed from her duty to him, except when I was pregnant and she tried to repair the relationship between us. In the end, she even backed away from that, held steadfast to her place here in Whiteside Cove alongside him. When I look at her and think about my life, sometimes I just have to ask, am I really any different from her?
It's incredibly similar, I think, that in her sixty years, Momma never lived more than thirty miles from where she was born. And though fifteen years ago I traveled hours away to live along the flat salt marshes of the low country, I never really left either, haunted over a life unfulfilled. I remind myself that I have come here to change that. I cannot, in the end, judge my life by what I did not do. I have regretted too much already.
Inside, the phone rings, the shrill bell startling Momma awake. I tell her to let it go, but she won't do any such a thing. She hurries off the porch fixing the bun in her hair, the bottom of her dress wrinkled and sticking to her legs. I listen to her answer the phone, recognize the banter, the other man in both our lives. Her voice lifts when she calls out to me that Peck is on the line.
The coolness of the dark hallway makes me shiver when I enter the house, goose bumps along my arms as I take the phone from Momma's hand. My first thought is that it is the note that he is calling about, and I am here to take the call, not at Clay's like I was supposed to be. “Hello, Peck,” I say, and then wait for his voice. I place my finger into my ear to hear more clearly. “Hello,” I say again.
“Hey, Momma, it's Kelly.”
To hear my daughter's voice is like waking up in an unfamiliar place. I look at Momma. “I thought you said it was Peck.”
“It is,” she says.
“No,” I say, “it's not.” And then we are both confused.
“Kelly?”
“Yes, Momma.”
“Are you all right, honey? How's camp?”
Peck's voice is behind her. I can hear him coaxing, demanding, really, for her to tell me more. “Tell her,” he says. “You tell her what you've done.”
“Kelly? Where are you?” I say, though I know exactly where she is now. There is more silence than I can hardly stand, pressure building in my chest. I look at Momma, her hand to her mouth like she has had the breath knocked out of her. “Let me talk to your daddy,” I say.
“She wants to talk to you,” says Kelly, her voice off the phone, even more distant when she speaks to Peck.
“You're not finished yet,” Peck says. “I'll talk to her in a minute.”
Then silence as I wait for whatever is happening back at home to play out, my mind spinning, trying to find my daughter's path in the last four days.
“Momma,” Kelly says. “I'm at home. Ellen came and picked me up. I came home, Momma.”
I stand in the hallway frozen by what I have just heard. I can hear Peck interrupt. He takes the phone from her hand. “That's enough,” he says. “Now go to your room and stay there.”
Somewhere in what becomes the rest of this conversation, Peck tells me the story, that Kelly called Ellen Thomas and the girl drove all the way up there and back in her Volkswagen “in the middle of the goddamn night,” he says. “She's not doing shit like this. We'll be up there sometime tomorrow.”
“Is she all right?” I ask.
“She's all right,” Peck says, “but I could've about killed her when I found out. She was down on the beach surfing like there wasn't a goddamn thing wrong.”
“Did she say why she did it?”
“Well she's keeping a tight lip about it all,” Peck says. “Just said she wanted to spend her summer at the beach, not in the mountains. I told her she was full of shit.”
“Be easy on her, Peck. It's me she's doing this to, not you.” I pause then, twisting the phone line around my finger like a schoolgirl waiting to be asked out on a date, knowing that I won't go.
“You took more things this time than you did before,” he says. “Was that on purpose?”
“Peck,” I whisper into the phone. “Don't do this.”
“All right,” he says. “I just expected something more, I don't know. A note that said you would call. That was it. When, Cassie, when were you going to call?”
“It's only been a few days, Peck.”
“It's Thursday night, Cassie. You left on Saturday. Now our daughter is back at home and you don't even know a goddamn thing about it. I don't know what's going on here. Where the hell are you?”
“Peck, you know I'm at Momma's,” I say, trying to keep this conversation from becoming more than I want it to be. “I can't believe she would do something like this.”
“Well she did,” he says. “Look, we'll leave soon as we can tomorrow, try to be up there before dark. You plan on being around?”
“Of course I'll be here,” I say.
“All right then. I got lots to do before we head out. There are fires inland that are being watched. I got to make sure we're ready.”
When he says this, it stops me. “What kind of fires?” I ask.
“Brush fires over near the paper- mill land. Nothing big yet, but everyone's getting worried. I'll have to bring her up there and then get right back.”
“Just let her stay then,” I say. “That's where she wants to be, and you don't need to be driving up here and back like that.”
“No way,” Peck says. “There's another whole week of this camp. We'll be there tomorrow. She's not getting away with something like this.” And then he's gone, the phone line dead in my ear.
I look at Momma, know she is waiting for answers. “She's at home,” I say. “Kelly got one of her friends to drive up to Cullowhee and get her.”
“My lord, why on earth would she do that?” Momma asks.
“I have no idea,” I say, the lying so much easier when I'm tired. I tell Momma I want to go to bed, that I have no more information than she does for the time being until Peck arrives with Kelly tomorrow.
“I don't know. He didn't say. It'll take a while.”
“Is she upset about something, because I've never heard of Kelly—”
“Momma,” I interrupt. “She's fifteen years old. I have no idea what's going on in her head. When I was her age I thought about running away or jumping off some cliff and killing myself, anything to get out of here.”
“Cassie, no you did not,” Momma says.
“I wrote poetry about slitting my wrists, for godsakes. I hated my life at fifteen. Kelly will be all right, just wait until she gets back up here. Everything is going to be just fine.” I have upset Momma, and so I leave her there in the kitchen, walk to my room, where I close the door and free- fall onto the bed. The covers bury me.
I'm relieved to know Kelly's safe at home, though I feel foolish that I didn't even know she was gone. What kind of mother could I be to not see that she might do something like this? Why didn't the camp know she was gone? I have been so preoccupied with my own life that I have forgotten to be a mother, my intuition dulled or missing altogether. And now Peck is back on my mind, a good father bringing our daughter back to me while fires are beginning to grow in the low country. It all keeps me from sleeping, Kelly's misbehavior, the danger Peck will face sooner or later.
In the years we have been together, I have thought of fire every day. The possibility of losing him to flame and smoke haunted me each time he went to work. Many days I sat waiting for his crew to come home, wondering if he was safe, praying he made the right choices, remembered his training when it was time to walk into fire. In the morning, Peck will bring Kelly to Whiteside Cove, both of them safe, alive and well. I don't know what I will do when they get here. I don't know what I will say to Peck.
I WAKE BEFORE THERE is light. I'm not sick, at least not yet, which is a good start. The air is cool in my room, so I slip on a robe Momma has given me, my father's old robe that is big and warm. It smells of cedar, an old smell that reminds me how long it's been, how the world has changed since he died.
Ten years have come and gone since he passed away in the spring of 1960. He became a part of the history of the cove on that day, the rest of the world spinning ahead. A president was killed, as was his brother, and Martin Luther King. Men rocketed into space and now walk on the moon. There is color television, though not in this house. Kelly listens to FM radio that would have sent my father into fits. When we visit here, Kelly can find stations from Gatlinburg and Knoxville, Tennessee, the high towers of FM built on the peaks of the Smoky Mountains to penetrate deep into the surrounding coves.
When I think of how hard my father tried to keep AM stations tuned in on Saturday nights, the Ole Opry and Charles Fuller's Old Fashion Revival Hour, it all seems so primitive now. He would gather us all in the kitchen on Saturday nights listening to Reverend Fuller preach the amazing grace of God all the way from Los Angeles, California. The reception faded in and out as he moved the dial trying to catch the best signal so we could listen to the sermons and sing all the gospel hymns my father knew by heart. He would be appalled by what's on the radio today. My father would not allow FM radio, or for that matter television, in this house if he was still alive.
I go into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and find Momma in the backyard sitting quietly, looking out toward Whiteside. It is blanketed in hues of deep purple and blue, the air still holding on to the nighttime chill. I join her and can tell she is still upset with me for not being forthcoming about Kelly, about what is going on. “I just don't understand it,” she says, her voice full of surprise as if she breathed it in last night and held it there until now. “Why would Kelly run away like that?”
“I guess she didn't want to come up here so soon,” I tell her.
“But she's always enjoyed her visits,” she says. “What's wrong, Cassie?”
I mistake her question as being about Kelly's behavior and say, “She's a teenager, Momma. You just don't remember me that way. When Peck gets her back up here, everything will be okay.”
“I wasn't talking about Kelly,” Momma snaps back, “I was talking about you. Something's wrong, beyond that baby inside you, and you're not talking about it.” She gets up in a huff and walks back inside. She's had it with me.
I sit quietly watching the light catch fire along the rim of Whiteside, the sun finally rising. Momma returns, having changed into her gardening clothes, a large brimmed hat and gloves, a small hand rake and hoe. She's on her knees in her garden removing weeds, complaining about me to her tomato plants, checking the lettuce for bugs. It's my being here that brings disruption. I know that, but what about John Boyd? When he gets through with her, she will have nothing left at all.
I think about Clay, see him as another part of my life in chaos. I need to talk to him too, let him know I am here and that things are not as I expected them to be when we left Garden City Beach. I leave Momma in her garden to go inside and find Clay's number in my purse, a number I haven't memorized yet, though it is almost exactly the same as Peck's down at the fire station—just the first three digits rearranged and, of course, an entirely different area code. My hand shakes dialing the number. I tell myself that he can't be home this time of day it's too early. He will still be at the station because there is so much to do with a new crew and all.
I remember Peck's first weeks at Garden City Beach, how he stayed on- site around the clock to prepare the station to come online. They poured concrete, helped raise the Quonset over the cured slab. Surfside gave him one truck, a pumper that came late and was in need of repair. He and Partee had to fix it all by themselves. I made lunch and dinner, helped Lori move in furniture and arrange the office once the walls were raised. Clay will find the same at his station, the small cinder-block garage in need of more than just paint and a fire engine.
I'm about to hang up, relieved that Clay isn't home, when I hear his voice on the other end, an odd, flat, monotone “Hello” that I don't recognize at first.
“Clay,” I say. “It's me, Cassie.”
There's a brief uncomfortable silence, and then his words stretched out of a yawn. “Well hey,” he says, “where you at?”
“I'm here at Momma's,” I say. “Did I wake you up?”
“That don't matter,” he says. I can hear him push himself up off the couch or the bed or maybe the floor for all I know. “I've needed to talk to you,” he says. “I didn't know what happened. I thought you were coming back down here.”
“I wanted to,” I lie, “but things have gotten sort of complicated. Kelly ran away from camp.”
“I know that. Coach Lambert called,” he says. “I needed to talk to you, Cassie, find out what happened, but I didn't have a number.”
“I know. I'm sorry I didn't call sooner.”
“Kelly didn't give her real address or phone number when she registered on Sunday. Did you know that?”
“No, I had no idea. We had a fight, so I let her go in by herself and do all of that.”
“Well, you shouldn't have done that,” he says. “Coach Lambert couldn't find a way to get ahold of you, so he called me.” I can feel the heat in his words, his anger close even though he is back in Walhalla. “I wanted to come up there 'cause I got worried. I wanted to see if there was something wrong, like maybe she had wandered off, gone off the side of a mountain or something, but I didn't have an address either. Hell, I didn't even know where you were. You never told me where you lived.”
“I know, that was stupid,” I say. “I'm sorry. She got a friend to drive up here and get her on Wednesday night. Can you believe that?”
“She's not in favor of what we're doing, I know that,” Clay says.
“I shouldn't have involved her in this. I should have brought her up here by myself.”
“Yeah, maybe that's what you should've done then.”
The click of his lighter puts our conversation on hold. It would've been better for me to go to Walhalla and talk to him face-to-face, not wake him like this. “Look,” he says, “I talked to Coach Lambert. If she's there by tomorrow, she can work back into the pitching rotations for Saturday's game, but he can't guarantee anything else. He told me if I heard from you to tell you that.”
“Okay then, I'll have Peck take her on up there as soon as he comes in.”
The mere mention of Peck's name brings silence. Before I left the low country, when Clay was more a source of strength to me, I might have meant what I say next, but now I do it to break the silence, to ease the uncomfortable distance between us. “I don't know what I would do without you,” I say. “Thank you for taking care of this.”
“I don't know why I did it,” he says. “You took all your things when you left.”
“You knew I had to come up here for a while.”
“I guess. I just thought you'd be back by now, at least leave something here, take the goddamn key—you know, put down some sort of a stake in all of this.”
“I think the stake I put down is rather large, don't you?”
Of course this gives him pause. I can hear him inhale from the cigarette, makes me ache for one, the pack still out in the car hidden from my mother. “It's large enough,” he says, exhaling smoke, “no doubt. Look, I don't mean to hurt you, Cassie. It's just hard.”
“I know. It's hard for me too,” I tell him.
“Are you okay with him coming up there?” he asks.
This time I appreciate his concern. Even through the distance of the phone, I can feel his worry. “I can handle Peck,” I say. “It's Kelly. I don't know what I'm going to do when I see her.”
“Well, she did this because of me and you. I wouldn't put too much blame on her.”
“It's time she learned the world doesn't revolve around her,” I say. “She needs to learn it's hard sometimes.”
“Just be careful, that's all I'm saying. She's just fifteen.”
I don't really want Clay telling me what to do with Kelly. It gets under my skin, even as I'm trying to be nice, trying to apologize for my behavior. Some lines don't need to be crossed, whether you're lovers or not. I'm smart enough to keep that to myself right now, shift the conversation. I tell him instead that I don't know when I'll get back to Walhalla.
“Just take your time,” he says. “I got my hands full as it is.”
“I'll call you soon and we can talk about everything.”
“About you coming back down here?”
“Yes, about that too,” I say. I wait again, this back-and-forth uneven, the whole conversation awkward from the start.
“So if I need to reach you?”
“Not this number, Clay, not yet. Please understand. I can't let you have it. I don't want a call coming to this number. I'll call you.”
“And if I'm not here?”
“I can call the station.”
“Then I should give you that number,” he says, his words snapped off with an impatience I choose to ignore.
I know he's hurt, but he's also scared because he's put a lot into this move as well. His stake is just as big as mine, the fear of failing as a chief and having nothing after all is said and done. “Yes, please, I'll need the number,” I say, trying to sound cheerful about wanting it.
I look around for something to write with and am startled to find Momma standing half in, half out of the hallway. The worried look on her face tells me she's heard the whole conversation. He calls out the number, but I don't hear it. I don't take it down, my response to Clay's voice dulled by Momma's presence. “I'll call you later,” I say. “I have to go now.”
I hear him say something about staying in touch, his voice trailing off as I hang up the phone. The expression on my mother's face tells me she knows what I'm up to. “You left Peck, didn't you?”
“Don't be silly,” I say, pushing past her and into the kitchen. The morning's chill has yet to fade from the room. The water from the spigot at the sink is cold as I fill the coffeepot. I need a cup of coffee.
“Then what was all of that about?” Momma asks. “Who were you talking to?”
“You shouldn't listen in on my telephone conversations,” I tell her. “That's not right.”
“It's not right what's going on here, Cassie. You're pregnant,” she reminds me. “Is that baby yours and Peck's or not?”
I feel Momma's stare pressing me, waiting for me to come clean. “I'm not pregnant,” I say, though I can't imagine my words are anything more than wishful thinking.
“Whose baby is it, Cassie?”
For a moment I stand at the stove watching the sun push down along Whiteside, the deep shadows in the cove finally burned through with light. “I don't know,” I say, finally. “It could be ei-ther's. This is not the way it was supposed to be this time.” I turn off the stove. The coffee I need will have to wait. I sit down at the table, my head in my hands.
We stay there for a long time, Momma stroking my back as I tell her what I have done, the flood of story helping to somehow strengthen us both. I tell her of Peck and Clay, of Kelly and her land. The news of John Boyd comes particularly hard. “John Boyd's my friend,” she says, hoping the words will make it so.
“No he's not,” I say. “But that's what he wants you to think.”
We go back and forth about Peck and Clay, her questions stinging. “Why would you do such a foolish thing?” she says.
“I'm sorry I keep disappointing you,” I tell her. “I just needed something different than what I was given.”
“Sometimes you don't get to choose that way, Cassie. You take what you get, and make it work.”
“I'm not you,” I tell her, the words hurting more than I intend for them to.
“You look at that girl of yours,” she says. “You look at Kelly and then tell me again that you want something different. She's a blessing, and so is Peck. Count your blessings, Cassie.”
We talk for a long time, hurt each other with more words, cry, and then fight our way through it all to find love. We stay there in the kitchen throughout the day while the sun moves across White-side Cove, Peck and Kelly yet to arrive, still somewhere on the road.