The 4:12 commuter rail groaned against its brakes at the cracked platform of Thornbury Hollow, and the sound went through Cora Vane's teeth and into the base of her skull.
Twenty years.
She gripped the iron railing with one hand, her canvas bag in the other, and stepped down onto the platform. The concrete gave beneath her boot, a soft crumble of age, and the smell of the place rolled up to meet her: rain on coal smoke, the wet wool of someone's coat three cars down, and under it all, threaded through the air like a suture pulled too tight, the sour green rot of the river.
The Thornbury River. She had not stood this close to it since she was nine years old.
The platform stretched in either direction, a tongue of cracked pavement half-consumed by weeds pushing up through the seams. To the east, the old water tower rose above the tree line, its paint gone to rust and its lettering faded to nothing. To the west, the station house squatted low and dark, its windows boarded, its single working clock showing the wrong hour as it had for as long as anyone could remember.
Cora breathed in, slow, and let the air out through her nose.
"Miz Vane? That you?"
The voice came from her left. A woman stepped out from behind the station house, wiping her hands on a flour-sack towel. She was small, broad through the hips, with silver hair pulled back in a knot so tight it looked carved. Her apron was dusted white. Her eyes, when they found Cora's face, went wide and then wet.
"Mae Tindall," the woman said, and her voice cracked on the second name. "Lord, child. Twenty years and you come back the same day as your aunt."
Cora set her bag down. "Which aunt?"
Mae Tindall looked at her a long moment, the towel twisted between her hands. "Beatrice," she said finally. "You come back to bury Beatrice."
The name landed in Cora's chest like a stone dropped into still water.
"My aunt Bee is dead?"
"Died two days back. In her sleep, the sheriff said. Found her in the kitchen with her hands folded like she was waiting on somebody." Mae Tindall sniffed, hard, and pulled a hanky from her apron pocket. "Della's up at the house. Della and the young one, Wren. They come down yesterday on the milk run. I didn't know you was coming, or I would have told the driver to look out for you."
Cora had not sent word. She had not known, herself, until the telegram came.
"The funeral," she said. Her voice came out flatter than she wanted. "When is it?"
"Saturday. Tomorrow. They've got the carpenter coming out from Becker's Mill to do the box, and the minister's daughter is supposed to sing." Mae Tindall blew her nose into the hanky, a sound like a small trumpet. "Your grandmama would have wanted a proper fuss made. She was the fuss-making sort, your aunt Bee."
Cora picked up her bag. The strap cut into her shoulder. She had walked the length of this platform a hundred times as a girl, on her way to the river, on her way home from the river, on her way to places she was no longer sure she had permission to remember.
"The house," she said. "Is it still standing?"
"Standing and waiting." Mae Tindall tucked the hanky away and squared her shoulders. "I walked past it just this morning. The porch steps need a board replaced and the cellar door won't latch, but the roof held through the last two storms and the chimney draws clean. Your aunt kept it up. Kept it up better than any of us had a right to expect, a woman living alone out there."
Cora nodded. She did not trust herself to say more.
"Now, you listen here," Mae Tindall said, and her voice shifted, took on the singsong cadence of a woman accustomed to being listened to. "You don't have to walk that road alone. I'll drive you up in the truck, and don't you start with the I-can-manage, because I have buried two husbands and three sisters and I know what a body looks like when it's done managing."
Something in Cora's throat loosened, and she let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.
"All right," she said.
"Good girl." Mae Tindall tucked the towel into her apron and set off toward the gravel lot behind the station house, where a battered pickup truck sat with its hood up and a chicken perched on the cab. "Mind the loose step on the porch," she called over her shoulder. "And don't touch the blue jar on the mantel. That's Della's and she will claw your eyes out."
Cora followed.
Behind them, the 4:12 gave a long, shuddering sigh, and the rails began to sing as the train pulled away. The sound trailed off down the valley, into the wet air and the low hills, and was gone.
---
The truck's engine turned over on the third try, coughing blue smoke into the still air. The chicken on the cab flapped once, resettled, and fixed Cora with one yellow eye.
The road climbed. Mae Tindall drove the way she talked, with confidence and occasional swerves that Cora chose not to comment on. The truck's suspension complained over every rut, and the chicken had relocated from the cab to the bed, where it clucked in low, rhythmic protest. Blue smoke drifted from the exhaust and the engine ticked in the cooling air.
"Now this road," Mae said, one hand on the wheel, the other gesturing toward the windshield as if conducting the landscape, "this road hasn't been graded since your uncle Delbert passed, and Delbert would've been the first to tell you it needed grading, rest his soul. He was a man who liked a straight line and a full gas tank. Beatrice, she don't drive it. Says the truck is a death trap and the Lord provides, which is a fine thing to say when the Lord provides you a neighbor with a truck."
Cora watched the trees close in. Beech and sycamore, their leaves just turning, and beneath them the green dark of laurel that grew thick along the ditches. She had not been up this road in eleven years. The last time she had been a girl, sitting in the back of her father's Buick, her knees sticking to the vinyl, watching the same trees slide past in the wrong direction.
"Mae," she said. "How did you know to come find me?"
Mae clucked her tongue. "Wire came yesterday. Beatrice sent it down to the depot. Addressed to you, care of general delivery, Marietta. I told Hattie at the post office to hold it and I'd see to it, and Hattie said that wasn't her job, and I said Hattie, the Lord gave you two legs and a mouth, use them. So here we are. Using them."
She downshifted, and the truck groaned up a long grade. A creek ran somewhere below the road, out of sight, and Cora could hear it, a low constant murmur like someone talking to themselves.
"Beatrice asked for you specifically," Mae added, and her voice lost its sing-song. "Not the boys. Not Della. You."
Cora's hands tightened in her lap. "Is she ill?"
Mae did not answer for a long moment. The truck rounded a bend, and a house came into view, set back from the road behind a stretch of unmowed yard and a fence that leaned. Two stories, white clapboard, the paint gone to gray in places. A porch ran across the front, and on the porch a woman sat in a wooden chair, very still, her hands folded in her lap.
Beatrice.
She did not rise when the truck pulled in. She did not wave. She sat with the patience of a woman who had been sitting for some time, waiting for something she did not want to confirm.
Mae killed the engine. The sudden silence was enormous. The chicken settled. A fly found the window and drummed against the glass.
"I'll wait here," Mae said softly. "You go on."
Cora stepped out. The air smelled of turned earth and woodsmoke and something else, faint, sweet, wrong. She knew the smell. She had been sixteen the summer her grandfather died in the back bedroom, and the smell had come up through the floorboards and sat in the hallway for two days before anyone said the word.
Her legs carried her up the porch steps. The third one gave under her weight, just as Mae had warned. Beatrice looked up. Her face was the color of old parchment, and her eyes were dry, and her mouth was a thin straight line.
"Cora," Beatrice said. Her voice was thin and reedy, the kind of voice that could cut glass if it chose to. "You took your time."
"I came as soon as I could."
"As soon as you could." Beatrice repeated the words as if tasting them. "Yes. I suppose you did."
She rose, then, slowly, one hand on the chair arm, the other pressed flat against her side as if holding something in. She was smaller than Cora remembered. The years had taken the breadth from her shoulders and left her sharp, all angles and attention.
"Come inside," Beatrice said. "I have something to show you. And something to give you, and I will not give it twice, so you listen the first time."
She led the way through the front door. The parlor was dim, the curtains drawn, the furniture draped in white sheets that made the room look like a row of ghosts at attention. On the mantel sat a blue jar, glass, with a lid. Cora's eyes went to it, and Beatrice saw her looking.
"Don't touch that," Beatrice said. "That belonged to your grandmother, and she willed it to no one, which means it stays where it is until I decide otherwise."
They climbed the stairs. The wood complained under their feet. The smell grew stronger, layer by layer, sweetness and something chemical beneath it, something that caught at the back of the throat. Cora breathed through her mouth. She had learned that trick at sixteen and never unlearned it.
The bedroom door was open. Light from a single window fell across the foot of an iron bed, and across the figure lying in it.
Della Calloway had been a tall woman. Death had not diminished her. She lay on her back, her hands folded over her breast, her hair arranged as if for church, her eyes closed. She wore a cotton nightgown with a lace collar, and on the bedside table there was a pair of reading glasses and a book turned face down, a finger marking the page. The window was cracked an inch. The curtain moved, barely.
"She was like that when I found her," Beatrice said from behind her. "Tuesday morning. I brought her breakfast. She had asked for eggs the night before. I said, Della, you know I cannot abide the smell of eggs cooking before nine, and she said, Beatrice, a woman of eighty-three is allowed to want what she wants. So I cooked the eggs, and I brought them up, and she was like that."
Cora did not move. She looked at the reading glasses, at the finger in the book, at the lace collar that someone had ironed that morning or the morning before.
"How long," Cora said.
"The doctor said since sometime in the night. Her heart, he said. Likely in her sleep." Beatrice's voice did not waver. "I have not moved her. I did not know how you would want it. The boys are gone. Della is in Charleston. You are the only one left who knows how this family does things."
Cora turned. Beatrice stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, the other hidden in the pocket of her apron. The light from the hallway made her face half in shadow.
"I am sorry," Cora said.
"Don't be sorry. Be useful." Beatrice drew the hidden hand from her pocket. In it were two things: a brass house key on a twisted wire ring, and a sealed manila envelope, thick, the flap glued and pressed flat with a thumbnail. "Your grandmother left instructions. Verbally, to me, and in that envelope, to you. You are not to open it."
"Aunt Beatrice."
"You are not to open it," Beatrice repeated, "until after the reading of the will, which will be Friday at the lawyer's in town. Not before. Not at the house. Not in the truck on the way home. Not tonight after the lamp is lit and you are alone with your thoughts and think, just a peek, just to see my name, just to make sure I am mentioned. No."
She held the items out. Cora took them. The key was warm from Beatrice's pocket. The envelope was heavier than it looked, and something inside it shifted when she tilted it, a soft dry sound, like leaves.
"The key is to the house," Beatrice said. "Your grandmother's house. Not this one. The one in the holler, where your mother grew up. I have kept it up, but it is yours now, and whatever is in that envelope will tell you what she meant you to do with it. I have my guesses. I will keep them to myself."
Cora looked at the envelope. The glue on the flap was already yellowing. There was no writing on the front.
"She said," Beatrice added, and her voice changed, dropped lower, took on the cadence of a woman repeating words she had heard and could not quite believe, "she said, Cora will know what to do. Cora always knows what to do. I said, Della, Cora has not set foot in this county in eleven years, and Della said, she will come. I said, what makes you so sure, and Della said, because I am asking her. And that was the last conversation we had about it."
Beatrice's mouth trembled, just once. She set it firm again.
"Friday," she said. "The lawyer. His name is Mr. Pendry. He will read the will. You will be there. The boys, if they choose to come, will be there. Della, if she can get off her sickbed in Charleston, will be there. And you will open that envelope in that room, in front of witnesses, the way your grandmother wished. Not before."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And you will stay here tonight. In the spare room. I will not have you driving down that road in the dark. Mae can sleep on the settee if she has a mind to, and I expect she will, because that woman has not slept in her own bed a night in twenty years if there was a friend within twenty miles to gossip with."
Beatrice turned and went down the stairs. Cora heard her footsteps, slow, deliberate, and then the creak of the porch chair as she sat back down.
Cora stood in the doorway of the bedroom. Della lay in the bed. The curtain moved. The fly that had drummed on the truck window was now on the ceiling, walking in slow circles.
She put the envelope in her coat pocket, against her ribs. She put the key on the ring finger of her right hand, where it sat heavy and strange. She looked once more at the reading glasses, at the book, at the lace collar, and then she went downstairs, out onto the porch, and sat in the chair beside Beatrice without saying a word.
Mae came up from the truck with a basket covered in a dish towel. "I brought bread," she called from the yard. "And soup. And don't say you aren't hungry, Beatrice, because I can hear your stomach from here and the Lord hears it louder."
Beatrice made a sound that was almost a laugh.
The afternoon settled over the house. Somewhere down the valley a train sounded, far off, and the rails carried the hum of it up through the trees and into the yard, where it faded, and was gone.
Cora's hand closed over the envelope in her pocket. Thursday was tomorrow. Friday would come. And Friday, she would learn what her grandmother had meant her to know.
gravel announced her before she reached the porch.
Wren Calloway stepped off the Calloway land and onto the dirt road that ran the length of the hollow, and the crunch of her boots was the only honest sound in the whole valley. She had not wanted to come to the funeral. She had not wanted to come back to this place at all, but the fire had taken the house and the insurance had taken longer and her mother had said, in that flat, exhausted voice of hers, that they would stay with Grandmother Beatrice until the money came through, and so they had come, and now the funeral was tomorrow, and Wren needed coffee the way a drowning person needs air.
Mae's Kitchen sat at the bend in the road where the holler opened up into something that pretended to be a town. It was not a town. It was a general store with a diner attached, run by a woman who had been feeding the hollow since before Wren was born. The sign out front had not been repainted in thirty years. MAES KITCHEN, it said in peeling green letters, and underneath, in smaller script: HOME COOKING AND NEWS.
Wren pushed through the screen door and the bell above it gave its small, tired jingle. The place was empty except for the hiss of the coffee pot and the slow tick of a ceiling fan that only worked on one speed. The smell of grease and coffee grounds and something sweet, maybe a pie, wrapped around her like a hand.
Mae Tindall came through the swinging door from the kitchen before Wren had even reached the counter.
"Well, if it isn't little Wren Calloway," Mae said, and her voice was warm and slightly nasal and it carried the sing-song cadence of a woman who had been saying things twice for sixty years. "Lord, child, you got tall. Or did
Or did you always stand that tall, and I just never stood close enough to notice."
Wren blinked. The question had been cut in half, but Mae Tindall did not wait for answers. She was already reaching for a mug, already turning back toward the kitchen, her voice trailing behind her like the tail of a comet.
"Sit, sit. Coffee's fresh, and before you ask, yes, I already heard about your granddaddy. Sit down before you fall down."
Wren sat. The booth was red vinyl, cracked along the seat, and it gave a small wheeze of protest under her weight. She pressed her palms flat against the table and felt the grain of the wood through her fingertips, rough where someone had sanded it decades ago and never finished the job. The window beside her framed the road, and through it she could see the long curve of the holler climbing up into gray morning, and at the very top, almost invisible, the thin finger of smoke that meant her grandmother's chimney was still breathing.
Mae came back with the coffee. She set the mug down with a soft click and did not retreat.
"Your mama called me last night," Mae said. Her voice had lost some of its sing-song. It was still warm, still slightly nasal, but there was something careful in it now, the way a woman sounds when she is choosing which truth to offer first. "She called and she didn't talk. That is, she talked, but she didn't say anything. You know what I mean."
"Yes ma'am."
"She wanted to know if I had anything fit to wear."
Wren looked up. Her mother had not mentioned this to her. Her mother had not mentioned much of anything since they arrived, beyond the logistics of beds and towels and which shelf held the plates. Della Calloway had moved through her own mother's house like a ghost, polite and quiet and a stranger in every room, and Wren had begun to wonder if perhaps her mother had learned to become invisible on purpose, somewhere along the way, as a kind of survival.
"She didn't say what for," Wren said, though she knew.
Mae's mouth softened. "A funeral," she said, and the word fell between them like a stone into still water. "Aunt Ruth's, over yonder at Piney Fork. Lord have mercy on us all."
There was a silence. The coffee pot hissed in the kitchen. The ceiling fan turned, slow as a prayer.
"Your granddaddy on your daddy's side," Mae said, and now her voice had that gentle, relentless quality of a woman who had decided that information was a kind of mercy and she was going to dispense it whether you wanted it or not. "He went peaceful, they say. In his sleep. That is more than some of us get."
"Is that what they're saying."
"That is what they're saying." Mae leaned her hip against the counter, and her apron strings trailed almost to the floor. "Now. What do you want to eat. And do not say nothing, because I will make you eggs anyway and we both know it."
Wren almost laughed. Almost. The laugh got halfway up her throat and turned into a breath that came out foggy in the cool air of the diner.
"Eggs," she said. "Thank you, Mrs. Tindall."
"Mae," Mae corrected, already moving. "You are too old for Mrs. Tindall, and I am too tired for it. Mae. Lord, child. When did you get to be a teenager."
The kitchen door swung shut behind her. Through the small wire-reinforced window in its upper half, Wren could see Mae moving, reaching for a bowl, for the cast iron skillet that had lived in this kitchen longer than Wren had been alive. The sizzle of butter hit the air a moment later, sharp and warm, and Wren wrapped her hands around the coffee mug and let the heat soak into her palms.
She had not wanted to come to the funeral. That was the truth of it, and she did not know if it was a forgivable truth. Her grandfather had been a quiet man with rough hands and a habit of leaving a single dollar on the counter at the diner, folded into a triangle, every single time. He had taught her to skip stones at the creek behind his house, the year she was seven, and he had not laughed at her when she threw every single one into the mud. He had just nodded and said, smaller stone, and handed her another, and that was most of what she remembered of him. That, and the smell of his coat, which had been tobacco and cedar and something else she had never been able to name.
She did not know how to miss him yet. She was waiting for it, the way you wait for a storm you have been told is coming, and in the meantime the sky was just sky, and she was just sitting in a diner booth with her hands around a mug.
The bell above the door jingled.
Della Calloway came through it the way Della Calloway came through every door, with her shoulders set and her chin level and her eyes already taking inventory of every person in the room. She wore her black coat, the one with the torn lining, and her hair was pulled back so tight it changed the shape of her face. She looked, Wren thought, like a woman who had been awake for a week.
"There you are," Della said. Her voice was rough, slightly hoarse, with that smoker's undertone that she had never quite managed to shake, and she spoke the way she always spoke now, in short deliberate sentences, each one a small brick laid in a wall. "I have been looking for you."
"I couldn't sleep."
"I know."
Della crossed the diner in three strides and slid into the booth across from Wren. She set her hands on the table, palms down, and did not pick up the menu. She looked at her daughter, and Wren saw her mother do something she almost never did, which was to let her face soften without first trying to hide it.
"I should have told you," Della said. "About the dress. Mae found me something. Dark green, yours, if it fits. She is altering it as we speak."
"Mama."
"I should have told you, and I did not, because I was afraid if I said the words out loud in front of you, then it would be true." Della's voice thinned on the last word. She paused for a long time, the kind of pause that in Della Calloway meant she was choosing the next sentence very, very carefully. "Your grandfather is dead, Wren."
"I know, Mama."
"You do not. You do not know yet. You will, when it is your turn to know, and not before." Della reached across the table and pressed her thumb, hard, into the back of Wren's hand, once, and let go. "Eat your eggs when they come. We leave at ten."
The kitchen door swung open. Mae came out with a plate in each hand and the smallest, kindest smile on her face that Wren had ever seen on anyone, and she set the plates down and slid into the booth beside Della without being asked.
"Well," Mae said, and her voice was warm and slightly nasal and entirely certain. "We are all here now. We are all together. Let us eat, and then let us go say goodbye to that sweet man, and let us do it the way he would have wanted, which is fed and on time and not making a spectacle of ourselves."
Wren picked up her fork. Her mother picked up her coffee. Outside the window, the smoke from her grandmother's chimney climbed the gray morning sky without hurry, and somewhere up the holler a dog was barking, and somewhere else a screen door was closing, and the day was beginning whether any of them were ready for it or not.
Wren took a bite of her eggs. They were good. They were exactly what she needed.
She was going to be all right, she decided, and the deciding made it so, at least until ten o'clock, at least until the funeral, at least until the long ride home with her mother and her grandmother in a car that smelled like cedar and old grief.
For now, there was coffee, and eggs, and the three of them together in a red vinyl booth at the start of a day that could not be put off any longer, and that, Wren thought, was enough.