"I have to get home." Lena was clutching her notebook against her chest like a shield.
"You don't have to go. Come in."
Please.
I wasn't offering to be polite. I didn't want to go in there alone. A few months ago, Lena would have known that. But I guess today her mind was somewhere else, because she didn't.
"You should spend some time with your family." She stood up on her toes and kissed me, her lips barely touching my cheek. She was halfway to the car before I could argue.
I watched Larkin's Fastback disappear down my street. Lena didn't drive the hearse anymore. As far as I knew, she hadn't even looked at it since Macon died. Uncle Barclay had parked it behind the old barn and thrown a tarp over it.
Instead, she was driving Larkin's car, al black and chrome. Link had foamed at the mouth the first time he saw it. "Do you know how many chicks I could pul with that ride?"
After her cousin had betrayed her whole family, I didn't understand why Lena would want to drive his car. When I had asked her, she'd shrugged and said, "He won't be needing it anymore." Maybe Lena thought she was punishing Larkin by driving it. He had contributed to Macon's death, something she would never forgive. I watched the car turn the corner, wishing I could disappear along with it.
By the time I made it to the kitchen, there was already chicory coffee brewing -- and trouble. Amma was on the phone, pacing in front of the sink, and every minute or two she would cover the receiver with her hand and report the conversation on the other end to Aunt Caroline.
"They haven't seen her since yesterday." Amma put the phone back to her ear. "You should make Aunt Mercy a toddy and put her to bed until we find her."
"Find who?" I looked at my dad, and he shrugged.
Aunt Caroline pul ed me over to the sink and whispered the way Southern ladies do when something is too awful to say out loud. "Lucil e Bal . She's missin'." Lucil e Bal was Aunt Mercy's Siamese cat, who spent most of her time running around my great-aunts' front yard on a leash attached to a clothesline, an activity the Sisters referred to as exercising.
"What do you mean?"
Amma covered the receiver with her hand again, narrowing her eyes and setting her jaw. The Look. "Seems somebody put the idea in your aunt's head that cats don't need to be tied up, because they always come back home. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?" It wasn't a question. We both knew I was the one who had been saying it for years.
"But cats aren't supposed to be on leashes." I tried to defend myself, but it was too late.
Amma glared at me and turned to Aunt Caroline. "Seems Aunt Mercy's been waitin', sittin' on the porch, starin' at an empty leash hangin' on the clothesline." She took her hand off the receiver. "You need to get her in the house and put her feet up. If she gets lightheaded, boil some dandelion."
I slunk out of the kitchen before Amma's eyes got any narrower. Great. My hundred-year-old aunt's cat was gone, and it was my fault. I'd have to cal Link and see if he'd drive around town with me and look for Lucil e. Maybe Link's demo tapes would scare her out of hiding.
"Ethan?" My dad was standing in the hal , right outside of the kitchen door. "Can I talk to you for a second?" I had been dreading this, the part where he apologized for everything and tried to explain why he had ignored me for almost a year.
"Yeah, sure." But I didn't know if I wanted to hear it. I wasn't real y angry anymore. When I almost lost Lena, there was a part of me that understood why my dad had come completely unhinged. I couldn't imagine my life without Lena, and my dad had loved my mom for more than eighteen years.
I felt sorry for him now, but it stil hurt.
My dad ran his hand through his hair and edged closer to me. "I wanted to tel you how sorry I am." He paused, staring down at his feet. "I don't know what happened. One day, I was in there writing, and the next day al I could do was think about your mom -- sit in her chair, smel her books, imagine her reading over my shoulder." He studied his hands, as if he was talking to them instead of me. Maybe that was a trick they taught you at Blue Horizons. "It was the only place I felt close to her. I couldn't let her go."
He looked up at the old plaster ceiling, and a tear escaped from the corner of his eye, running slowly down the side of his face. My dad had lost the love of his life, and he had come unraveled like an old sweater. I'd watched, but I hadn't done anything about it. Maybe he wasn't the only one to blame. I knew I was supposed to smile now, but I didn't feel like it.
"I get it, Dad. I wish you'd said something. I missed her, too. You know?"
His voice was quiet when he final y spoke. "I didn't know what to say."
"It's okay." I didn't know if I meant it yet, but I could see relief spread across his face. He reached around and hugged me, squeezing my back with his fists for a second.
"I'm here now. Do you want to talk about it?"
"About what?"
"Things you need to know when you have a girlfriend."
There was nothing I wanted to talk about less. "Dad, we don't have to --"
"I have a lot of experience, you know. Your mother taught me a thing or two about women over the years."
I started planning my escape route.
"If you ever want to talk about, you know ..."
I could hurl myself through the study window and squeeze between the hedge and the house.
"Feelings."
I almost laughed in his face. "What?"
"Amma says Lena's having a hard time with her uncle's passing. She's not acting like herself."
Lying on the ceiling. Refusing to go to school. Not opening up to me. Climbing water towers. "No, she's al right."
"Wel , women are a different species."
I nodded and tried not to look him in the eye. He had no idea how right he was.
"As much as I loved your mother, half the time I couldn't have told you what was going on in her head. Relationships are complicated. You know you can ask me anything."
What could I ask? What do you do when your heart almost stops beating every time you kiss? Are there times when you should and shouldn't read each other's minds? What are the early warning signs that your girlfriend is being Claimed for al time by good or evil?
He squeezed my shoulder one last time. I was stil trying to put together a sentence when he let go. He was staring down the hal , in the direction of the study.
The framed portrait of Ethan Carter Wate was hanging in the hal way. I stil wasn't used to seeing it, even though I was the one who had hung it there the day after Macon's funeral. It had been hidden under a sheet my whole life, which seemed wrong. Ethan Carter Wate had walked away from a war he didn't believe in and died trying to protect the Caster girl he loved.
So I had found a nail and hung the painting. It felt right. After that, I went into my dad's study and picked up the sheets of paper strewn al over the room. I looked at the scribbles and circles one last time, the evidence of how deep love can
run and how long loss can last. Then I cleaned up and threw the pages away. That felt right, too.
My dad walked over to the painting, studying it as if he was seeing it for the first time. "I haven't seen this guy in a long time."
I was so relieved we had moved on to a new subject, the words came tumbling out. "I hung it up. I hope it's okay. But it seemed like it belonged out here, instead of under some old sheet."
For a minute, my dad stared up at the portrait of the boy in the Confederate uniform, who didn't look much older than me. "This painting always had a sheet over it when I was a kid. My grandparents never said much about it, but they weren't about to hang a deserter on the wal . After I inherited this place, I found it covered up in the attic and brought it down to the study."
"Why didn't you hang it up?" I never imagined that my dad had stared at the same hidden outline when he was a kid.
"I don't know. Your mother wanted me to. She loved his story -- the way he walked away from the war, even though it ended up costing him his life. I meant to hang it. I was just so used to seeing it covered up. Before I got around to it, your mom died." He ran his hand along the bottom of the carved frame. "You know, you were named after him."
"I know."
My dad looked at me as if he was looking at me for the first time, too. "She was crazy about that painting. I'm glad you hung it up. It's where he belongs."
I didn't escape the fried chicken or Amma's guilt trip. So after dinner, I drove around the Sisters' neighborhood with Link looking for Lucil e. Link cal ed her name between bites of a chicken leg wrapped in an oily paper towel. Every time he ran his hand over his spiky blond hair, the shine got shinier from al the grease.
"You shoulda brought more fried chicken along. Cats dig chicken. They eat birds in the wild." Link was driving slower than usual so I could keep an eye out for Lucil e while he beat time to "Love Biscuit," his band's terrible new song, on the steering wheel.
"Then what? You'd drive around while I hung out the window with a chicken leg in my hand?" Link was so transparent. "You just want more of Amma's chicken."
"You know it. And Coca-Cola cake." He hung his drumstick bone out the window. "Here, kitty kitty ..."
I scanned the sidewalk, looking for a Siamese cat, but something else caught my eye -- a crescent moon. It was on a license plate stuck between a bumper sticker of the Stars and Bars, the Confederate flag, and one for Bubba's Truck and Trailer. The same old South Carolina plates with the state symbol I had seen a thousand times, only I'd never thought about it before. A blue palmetto and a crescent moon, maybe a Caster moon. The Casters real y had been here a long time.
"Cat's stupider than I thought, if he doesn't know about Amma's fried chicken."
"She. Lucil e Bal 's a girl."
"It's a cat." Link swerved, and we turned the corner onto Main. Boo Radley was sitting on the curb, watching the Beater rol by. His tail thumped, one lonely thump of recognition, as we disappeared down the road. The loneliest dog in town.
At the sight of Boo, Link cleared his throat. "Speakin' a girls, how're things with Lena?" He hadn't seen much of her, though he'd seen more than most people had. Lena spent most of her time at Ravenwood under the watchful eyes of Gramma and Aunt Del, or hiding from their watchful eyes, depending on the day.
"She's dealing." It wasn't a lie, exactly.
"Is she? I mean, she seems kinda different. Even for Lena." Link was one of the few people in town who knew Lena's secret.
"Her uncle died. That kind of thing changes you." Link should've known that better than anyone. He'd watched me try to make sense of my mother's death, and then a world without her in it. He knew it was impossible.
"Yeah, but she hardly talks, and she's wearin' his clothes. Don't you think that's sorta weird?"
"She's fine."
"If you say so, man."
"Just drive. We have to find Lucil e." I looked out the window at the empty street. "Stupid cat."
Link shrugged and cranked up the volume. His band, the Holy Rol ers, shuddered through the speakers. "The Girl's Gone Away." Getting dumped was the theme of every song Link wrote. It was his way of dealing. I stil hadn't figured out mine.