I catch one of those quick kisses on the lips and let it linger. He’s right about my not being able to stay mad with him. He’s a master at dealing with me, always knowing what I need—how long I need to stew, when I need to snap out of it, and how it needs to happen. In this moment, with his strong arms around me, the night has suddenly turned to day.

This time Jillian clears her throat and I dart back to her with fresh spunk. I will find a job. I do want this house. All the time I put into building it, I ought to.

“Thanks for coming, Jill. I mean it this time,” Hezekiah shouts, bounding upstairs.
 
“I’ll see you this evening,” Jillian shouts back.

“Oh, Jilli,” I moan, walking through the French doors, “I forgot we planned to get together tonight. Now that I’m up to my neck in boxes, I’d rather work until it’s cleared away.”

“Girl, you can’t do it all in one night and you’ve got to eat. We live only ten minutes away—on the other side of the tracks.”

I give her a light shove. “Whatever, Jill.”

“Seriously, come on over.”  Jillian admires the leaf of a shrub with great intensity. “And I think Mama’s coming too.”

A jolt surges through my body. I find that interesting, that my body reacts before my mind. It wants to sit down. The involuntary shaking is a clue. I look around as if furniture appeared while my back was turned, and then I remember that it exists only in my little three-ring binder. My body doesn’t mind; it settles for the wide tiles of the loggia. Legs pulled to the chest, arms wrapped around the legs, head tucked inside, it is hoarding relief as best it can, waiting for my mind to catch up, decide what we should do. The spunk that endured all of two minutes is gone. Thanks to Jillian, the Grand Dame has made her entrance, bringing with her, as usual, tangible distress.

She is the reason I never wanted to return—Patsy Parker Campbell, whom I haven’t spoken to in three years and whom, long before that, I had banished to the outermost ring of my life. I hadn’t even processed yet what it means to be near her again. I thought I could put off consideration of that reality for weeks, maybe months. I couldn’t have guessed I’d be dealing with it the first night.

I lift my head and ask accusingly, “She knows I’m back?”

“Is it a secret?”

“I sure hadn’t told her.” 

“Well, I talk to her a little more than you do and it would have been unnatural for me to keep quiet about her daughter moving back to town.”

“You didn’t have to invite her to dinner. I have zero energy right now, and less for her. You know how she is.”  I tuck my head back down.

Jillian touches my shoulder, eases down next to me on the tiled ground, and sighs. “I’m sorry. She called this morning and I honestly wasn’t thinking I had to be guarded, so when she asked what I was doing I told her I was cleaning the house, getting ready for you all to come over. She was quiet—you know Mama doesn’t get quiet—and I felt bad and said, ‘You’re welcome to come, too, if you want.’”