The gravel popped under Vera Halsey's tires like a string of small bones breaking. She eased the dented silver sedan to a stop across from the church, killed the engine, and sat for a moment with both hands still on the wheel. The hood ticked as it cooled. Somewhere in the pines behind the cemetery a whippoorwill called once, twice, then went quiet.
The stained glass in the little church's front window bled amber into the dusk. The light fell in long uneven stripes across the patch of grass where folks would come out after the service to say things that didn't help. Vera could see dark shapes moving inside. Chairs being arranged. The minister, probably, straightening the prayer books he never quite read from. She could make out a vase of white flowers on the altar, and a black cloth over something square.
She had driven nine hours from Knoxville without stopping for anything more than gas. Her lower back ached where the seat had worn a groove into her spine. There was a coffee stain on her left knee from a thermos that had tipped somewhere around Crossville. She had not cried. She had not spoken to anyone since she left the school where she taught fifth grade and told her principal she needed the week. He had looked at her over his glasses and nodded once, and that had been worse than anything else.
Vera turned the key over once more, though she knew the battery was tired. The engine caught, sighed, and steadied. She left it running. Heat still came faintly through the vents, and the radio, broken on the AM band, made a thin hash of static that kept her company better than silence would have.
She watched the church door open.
A woman came out first, stepping sideways to hold it for the person behind her. Della Minter. Vera recognized her even at this distance, even in a dark coat Vera had never seen before, by the way she moved. Quick and contained, shoulders forward, head up, the gait of someone who had walked a great many floors of strangers' houses and learned to make herself small without disappearing. Della was a traveling field nurse who had come to Briar Hollow on some county business last autumn and, for reasons she had not quite explained, stayed through the winter and into the spring and now into the second summer.
Della had roomed with the Halsey girls for one school year, back when Vera was fifteen and Della was sixteen and Edith was nine and too small to have been allowed a roommate at all but had wheedled her way into the arrangement anyway. That was a long time ago. Della had been gone for years after that. She had come back different. She had come back kind of tired and very certain about what mattered.
Della looked across the road. Her hand lifted, dropped, lifted again. Then she turned and went back inside, and the door eased shut behind her.
Vera sat for another minute. Then she opened the driver's door, and the cold mountain air came in, the kind that smelled of wet stone and woodsmoke and something green beneath both, the way the holler smelled right before a hard rain. She got out. She shut the door carefully, so it would not slam. She had not said she was coming tonight. She had told Edith on the telephone two days ago that she would try for the funeral and to please have her dark dress pressed. That was all. She had not said she would come to the wake.
She crossed the road. The pavement was damp in the cracks. A pickup truck she did not recognize sat at an angle near the side entrance. Someone had tied a sprig of cedar to its mirror, the way folks did for the dead.
The church door opened before she could reach for it. Della was on the other side, one hand on the knob, looking at her with an expression Vera could not quite read. It sat somewhere between relief and caution and something older that Vera chose not to name in her own head.
"You came," Della said. Her drawl was quick, almost clipped, the way it always got when she was feeling more than she wanted to. "I told Edith you'd make it tomorrow morning. I figured I'd have to do the sitting up alone."
"You never had to do anything alone," Vera said. "That's what I keep telling you."
Della made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Well. You look like nine hours of road and a thermos that lost its lid."
Vera looked down at the coffee stain on her knee. "The thermos," she said. "The road was fine."
Della stepped back to let her pass. The vestibule was narrow and smelled of beeswax and the old hymnals nobody ever opened. A small table held a basket of funeral home fans, the cardboard kind with the picture of the lamb on them, and a stack of church bulletins that Della had hand-lettered, each in her careful block print. Vera stopped and read the one on top. In Loving Memory of Ruth Ann Halsey. The letters were black. The R was slightly crooked. Della did not apologize for crooked letters. Vera had always liked that about her.
"She looks," Della began, and then stopped herself. She touched the edge of the table. "Edith is inside. She's been telling the minister's wife about a book she's reading. About the Briar. The minister's wife is, I think, regretting asking how Edith was doing."
Vera almost smiled. Almost. The muscles in her face started and then did not. "How is she?"
"Same as always. Talking too much, too fast, about things that aren't quite real. Also, holding up better than she should." Della's eyes flicked to Vera's face and back. "You want me to go in first?"
"No," Vera said. "I want you to walk in beside me."
Della gave her that look again. "All right."
They went in together. The nave was small, twelve rows of dark wood pews, a low ceiling, windows along both sides. About half the chairs were full. Folks Vera half-recognized from school or from church or from sitting on porches in summer when she was young. They turned their heads. They did not smile, exactly, but their faces softened in the particular way mountain people soften at a viewing, the way that said, I see you, I know why you're here, I will not make you speak first.
Edith was at the front, beside the casket. She had her hands folded in front of her in a way that looked borrowed from someone else's mother. Her dark hair was pinned back with two old tortoiseshell combs Vera remembered from the bathroom drawer at home. Her face was pale and her eyes were bright. She saw Vera and her mouth moved but no sound came out. Then she crossed the small distance in three quick steps, and Vera put her arms out, and Edith came into them with the careful, sudden weight of a bird that has just realized it can land.
"Don't," Edith said into Vera's shoulder. "Don't be brave at me. Not right now. Not in front of all these folks."
Vera held her tighter. Edith smelled like the lavender sachets she kept in every drawer of the old house, and beneath that like something sharper, like fever, like grief just starting to set in. Vera thought of saying something, but her throat had closed itself. She had promised herself on the drive that she would not do this here, that she would do it later, alone, in the house, where the floors were the ones her mother had scrubbed.
"All right," Vera said. "All right. I'm not being brave. I'm being tired."
Edith pulled back and looked at her. Edith's face was the younger version of their mother's, the way faces echo down a line, and seeing her mother in her sister made Vera's hands tighten briefly on Edith's arms before she let go.
"Come sit," Edith whispered. "There's a place up front. I saved it. I had to move Mr. Pruitt's hat."
Vera followed her. Della peeled off toward the side aisle and slipped into a pew beside an older woman Vera did recognize, the widow Mapes, who reached for Della's hand without looking. Della gave it. The widow Mapes nodded once, at no one in particular, and that was the kind of country greeting that passed for everything.
Vera sat in the front pew, where Edith had saved her a place, and only then did she let herself look at the casket. It was closed. That was a mercy. Their mother had asked to be cremated, years ago, in one of her clear-eyed fits of practicality, and Edith had honored that. The box on the altar was symbolic, draped in black cloth, holding whatever Edith had chosen to put inside. Probably nothing. Probably a folded piece of paper with a sentence from a hymn.
The flowers on the altar were wild. Not funeral home wild, but truly wild, bluets and black-eyed Susans and a spray of something pale and leggy that Vera recognized from the slope behind the smokehouse. Edith had picked them. Edith had walked up the slope behind their house in the early morning and cut flowers with a kitchen knife and carried them down in a coffee can full of water, and she had arranged them here, badly, with the stems showing, and they were the truest thing in the room.
Edith sat beside Vera and put her hand over Vera's on the pew between them. Vera did not pull away. The minister cleared his throat at the lectern, and the room went quiet in the way rooms do when they are waiting on a man to begin.
The minister was young, new to the circuit, with soft hands and a careful manner. He spoke about Ruth Ann Halsey's long life in Briar Hollow, about her steadiness, about her gift for plain speech. He mispronounced their grandmother's name once. Edith's hand tightened on Vera's. Vera smoothed her thumb across Edith's knuckles and the hand relaxed.
After a while the service ended. Folks came up. Some of them touched Vera's elbow as they passed. Some of them said, "She's at peace now," in the same tone they would use to say, "The corn's coming in." A few of them lingered near the door, not quite ready to leave, the way people linger at a wake when the road home feels colder than the room they are in.
Della came up and stood beside the pew. "I'll drive you both to the house," she said. "I borrowed Mapes' truck. It smells like dog."
"I want to walk," Edith said.
"It's a mile and a half in the dark," Della said.
"I want to walk," Edith said again, in the voice that meant she had already decided and was giving notice.
Della looked at Vera. Vera looked at Edith. Edith's chin was set in a way that Vera recognized. It was the way their mother had set her chin when she had been told something she did not care to hear.
"Walk with her, then," Vera said to Della. "I'll bring the car. I'll meet you there."
Edith's shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. Della nodded. "Don't let her take the shortcut through the Briar," Della said, quieter. "She will try."
"I always try," Edith said. "You just never let me."
Della put her hand briefly on the back of Edith's neck and left it there for a moment. Then she let go. "All right," she said. "All right, you two. I'll see you at the house."
The church emptied by degrees. The minister's wife came and touched Vera's wrist and said the right things, which Vera received the way one receives a clean glass of water from a stranger, with thanks and without thinking. Vera walked out onto the front steps. The night had come down fully now. The church sign out by the road was lit from below, the white plastic letters spelling BETHEL BAPTIST in a font that had yellowed with sun. Across the road, her dented silver sedan sat where she had left it, still ticking faintly as the engine finished giving up its heat.
She crossed the road and opened the driver's door. The seat was cold. She sat down and put the key in and the engine caught on the second try. The static from the broken radio filled the cab like the sound of distant rain.
In the rearview mirror she could see two small figures starting up the road on foot, one taller, one shorter, the taller one slightly ahead, the shorter one swinging her arms the way Edith had always swung her arms when she was thinking. The road curved and the pines swallowed them, and then the only light behind her was the amber wash from the stained glass, falling on the empty grass where the wake had been.
The static from the radio hissed low and even, like breath through teeth. Vera sat with both hands on the wheel and did not turn the key. Something in her left palm felt wrong. She raised her hand toward the green glow of the dashboard and turned it over.
A slip of paper lay folded once across her palm, the creases already softened from warmth, as though it had been there longer than she had known. She did not remember Della pressing it there. She did not remember Della's fingers at all. But she remembered the weight of a hand on the back of her neck, a thing meant for Edith, and after it, the way Della had stood close behind her in the receiving line and said something about the coffee being weak, a thing no one would have remembered, and in the middle of that sentence, the small dry press of a palm against the side of her hand. That must have been it. Della had been quicker than anyone gave her credit for.
Vera unfolded the paper with her thumb. The note was short. Della's handwriting had the slope of someone who had learned penmanship in a one-room schoolhouse and then spent too many years writing on her own knee.
Ver. She was afraid of something. Find out what. D.
Vera read it twice. She folded it again and put it in her coat pocket, against her ribs. She could still feel the small pressure of Della's fingers in the muscle of her hand, the way a bruise remembers a shape. She turned the key and the engine caught on the second try, and she pulled out onto the road with the yellow plastic letters of BETHEL BAPTIST shrinking in the mirror until the pines ate them.
The road home ran along the ridge above the Briar. The trees pressed in on both sides, but their crowns were ragged with the season and a hard moon came through in places, throwing the asphalt into pieces of silver and black. Vera drove slower than she needed to. She kept her eyes moving, not because she expected anything, but because the dark felt less lonely when she looked at it.
She passed the Anders place. The long porch light was off, but the kitchen window was lit, and she could see the shape of old Mr. Anders standing at the sink with his back to the road. He did not turn. She had stood beside him at the wake and he had taken her hand and said nothing, only nodded, and then let go before she could thank him. That was how a lot of them had been. Mr. Tine at the post office had nodded the same way. Mrs. Pruitt had come in late and stood near the door and then gone out again without speaking, the way you pass a house where someone had died. A few had spoken. Mrs. Calloway had said, "Your mother was a good woman," in a tone that meant she had been deciding all day whether to say it. Hank Brewer had come up and stood beside her in the receiving line and offered his hand and then taken it back without shaking, and walked on. She had felt the absence of the shake more than the offer of it.
Della had been the only one who had not measured the moment. Della had stood with her and Edith in the corner by the window the whole hour, and had kept her hand at the small of Vera's back, and had spoken when anyone spoke to them, and had once stepped forward and taken a plate of cold ham from a well-meaning neighbor and handed Vera a fork and said, "Eat something, Ver, before you fall over." Vera had eaten. She had not known she was hungry.
She came around the long curve where the road dipped and the Briar opened on her left, a black tongue of creek water below the guardrail. The willows along the bank were bare and white as bones. She slowed without meaning to. She did not look for the figure her mother used to claim she saw sometimes on the far bank, the woman in the gray shawl who walked and never made a sound. Vera had never seen her. Her mother had, or had said she had, and that was its own kind of seeing.
She made the turn onto the lane. The lane was a quarter mile of gravel that ran between two pastures, and at the end of it, the house sat sideways on its bones. The Halsey house had been built by her great-grandfather in the last year of the war, and everything that had been done to it since had been a kind of apology. The porch sagged on its posts. The roof had been reshingled twice in Vera's lifetime. The back step had been replaced once and shimmed twice. The yard had not been mowed in three weeks because Vera had not had the heart to ask Edith to do it, and Edith had not had the heart to offer.
Vera pulled up beside the house and cut the engine. The quiet came down over her like a hand. A dog was barking somewhere up the ridge. A screen door slammed in the distance, the sound of someone else's home. She sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel, listening to the engine tick and the creek talk to itself, and then she got out.
She did not go around to the front. She went up the porch steps and tried the front door. It was locked. She had locked it herself that morning, after she and Edith had left for the church. She went back down the steps and around the side of the house, her boots crunching on the gravel path that ran along the porch. The kitchen light was off. The back porch light was off. The back door, when she came to it, stood three inches ajar. The latch was unbroken, but the wood around the strike plate was splintered outward, a pale fan of fresh pine against the dark stain of the old door.
Vera stopped.
The dog up the ridge had stopped barking. The creek was the only thing left moving.
She put her hand flat against the door and pushed it open. The hinges did not creak the way they should have. They had been oiled. Someone had oiled them in the last day or two. The smell that came out was cedar and old wool and the particular dust of a house that had been closed in summer, and under it, faintly, the ghost of mothballs. Her mother's smell. The smell of the closet in the front bedroom where the good quilts were kept.
She stepped in. The kitchen floor gave a small complaint under her boot. The table was where it always was. The dish rack was empty. The clock above the sink ticked on, patient and indifferent, the way it had ticked all her life. The bread box on the counter was closed. The curtains at the sink were drawn. Nothing in the kitchen was out of place.
She crossed to the doorway that led into the front room. The doorframe was old, the wood warped, and she had to pull the door toward her to open it. The front room smelled of lamp oil and the dried lavender her mother had kept in a bowl on the mantel. The bowl was on the mantel. The Bible was on the small table by the chair. The chair had the impression of her mother's small body still in it, the cushion smoothed where she had sat. The photograph on the wall of Vera's father in his younger days was straight. The crocheted runner on the back of the sofa was not quite straight, but it never was.
Vera went back into the kitchen and down the hall. The hall was narrow. The coat tree by the front door stood with her mother's old cardigan still on it, the sleeves hanging down like empty arms. The linen closet was closed. The bathroom door was open and the light was off. Her mother's bedroom door was closed. Vera put her hand on the knob.
The knob turned. The door opened inward. The room smelled of lavender and of the faint, dry undertone of medicine. Her mother had been ill at the end. Not loudly. The way the house itself was ill. The bed was made. The pillow still had the dent of her mother's head. The quilt was pulled up to the chin of an absence. The window was closed. The curtain was drawn.
The nightstand was where it always was, on the right side of the bed, the side her mother had slept on. There was a glass of water on it, half gone, the surface of the water undisturbed. There was a small dish that had held her mother's rings. The dish was empty. The rings were not in it. Vera touched the rim of the dish and then withdrew her hand. Her mother had been buried without her rings. She had taken them off the night before, in this room, and given them to Edith, and Edith had given them to Vera, and Vera had put them on her own hand for the funeral and then, when no one was looking, into her coat pocket, where they lay against her ribs beside Della's note.
The nightstand was not the thing. The thing was the drawer. The bedside drawer was a shallow one, the kind that runs on a single wooden track, the kind that drifts over the years if you do not press it back. Her mother had been particular about the drawer. She had pressed it back every night before she turned off the lamp. Vera had seen her do it a hundred times. The drawer was skewed now. A full inch out of true. The track was empty. The journal was gone.
Vera stood still. Her hand rested on the edge of the drawer. The wood was smooth and cool. She could feel, under her thumb, the small grit of something that had been scratched there, perhaps by her mother's own thumb, perhaps by someone else's. She did not know. The room was very quiet. The clock in the kitchen ticked. The creek outside said its piece and did not repeat itself.
She straightened and looked at the room. The wardrobe. The chair. The small rug by the bed. The shelf above the headboard, where her mother had kept the few good things she had owned, a glass jar of buttons, a framed picture of the Briar in winter, a small enameled box that had been Vera's grandmother's. The box was closed. She opened it. Inside were three hairpins and a folded square of paper with her father's handwriting on it, the date his license had expired. She closed it again.
The desk. The desk was in the corner by the window, a small drop-front writing desk her mother had used for bills and letters and the lists she had kept of the things she meant to do. Vera crossed to it and pulled down the front. The pigeonholes inside were empty but for a few receipts and a pen. The drawer on the right side, the deep one, was open a hand's width. She pulled it all the way out. It slid on its track with a small wooden sigh. Inside, where the bills had been kept, was a square of dust where a square of paper had lain for a long time. The square was gone. The dust was not.
Someone had come into her mother's house in the last two days, while Vera and Edith had been busy with the arrangements, while Della had been in and out, while the Briar had been doing whatever it does when no one is watching. Someone had oiled the hinges so the door would not announce them. Someone had jimmied the back door, carefully, so the splintered wood looked almost like weather. Someone had opened the bedside drawer and taken the leather-bound journal her mother had kept for thirty years, the journal in which her mother had written down the weather and the names of the birds and the things the Briar had said to her when no one else was there.
Vera did not touch anything else. She went back to the bedroom doorway and stood in it. The hallway was dark behind her. The kitchen light was off. The house was still and cold around her, the way a held breath is still and cold. She thought of her mother in this room in the last week of her life, propped up on the pillows, the lamp turned low, writing in the journal with the small fountain pen that had been her mother's mother's. She had not asked Vera to read it. She had not asked Edith to read it. She had written something every night, and then she had put the journal in the drawer and pressed the drawer shut, and Vera had watched her do it from the doorway, and had not asked.
Vera put her hand in her coat pocket. Her fingers found Della's note, and beneath it, her mother's rings. The rings were cold. The paper was warm. She stood for a long time in the doorway of her mother's room, with the dark behind her and the dark ahead of her, and listened to the clock in the kitchen count out the rest of the evening in its small indifferent way.
She did not call out. There was no one to call to. Edith was walking up the road with Della, the two of them talking, perhaps, or not talking, the way sisters and the women who have loved sisters do. The neighbors were in their houses, behind their lit windows, with their own clocks and their own griefs. The Briar was out there somewhere, saying what it said, and not to her.
Vera took her hand out of her pocket and went back down the hall, and through the kitchen, and out the way she had come in, leaving the back door ajar behind her, because she did not want to touch the splintered wood again and because she did not want to shut anyone out, or in, who might still be waiting.
She went around to the front of the house and sat down on the top step. The wood of the step was cold through her coat. The gravel of the lane was silver in the moonlight. Somewhere far up the ridge a dog began to bark again, and then another answered it, and then the two of them stopped, and the quiet came down heavier than before.
Vera put her hand in her pocket again and unfolded Della's note with her thumb. She read it in the dark, by feel. Ver. She was afraid of something. Find out what. D.
She folded it and put it back. She sat on the step with her mother's rings against her ribs and Della's note against the rings, and she watched the road for the two figures she knew would come up it eventually, the taller one slightly ahead, the shorter one swinging her arms. When they came, she would tell them what she had found. When they came, they would decide together what to do. When they came, the house would not be empty again.
She did not move. The Briar said its piece. The moon moved a hand's width across the sky. Somewhere, in a house she could not see, in a drawer that had been oiled shut and prized open, a leather-bound journal lay open on a stranger's table, and the handwriting in it was not hers, and it was not Edith's, and it was not Della's, and it was afraid.