A Place to Call Home (52 page)

Erp spit a blob of frozen peach pop into Tweet’s palm, and Tweet tossed it. Brady stood nearby, and it hit him between the eyes. Evan and Hop laughed so hard, they nearly rolled off the truck.

Dozens of Maloney cameras clicked and whirred.

The high school band marched past, playing “I’m Proud to Be an American.” Fronting the leprechauns, a group of my more musical uncles, led by Uncle Dwayne, wandered along playing a high-pitched Irish jig on fiddles and uilleann pipes and tin whistles and a bodhran drum.

I felt enriched with security, confidence, love. Despite the coy new businesses and the touristy atmosphere and the strangers packed everywhere along our shady streets, we were still, at heart, familiar to one another and united in whimsy, like a favorite family story told and retold and much loved.

I thought of us that day at the carnival, of Roanie Sullivan standing below the stage, both of us isolated by our particular brands of humiliation and yet linked by that, too. And I thought about the Christmas parade, that year Big Roan ruined it, and the shame that made Roan nearly disappear into himself. Today we were together, no petty humiliations,
no shame, and it was so rich, like a sweet grape bursting on my tongue, that I could taste the happiness.

And then, suddenly, the parade skewed toward me.

Uncle Dwayne’s group halted. They stopped playing. Amanda waved her green troops forward. A flock of little people gathered around the musicians, all of them staring and giggling at me, or at Roan and me—I wasn’t sure which.

I drew back against Roan. His arms slid closer around me. I didn’t sense any surprise in him. I was totally bewildered. “Either they think we’re the secret parade judges,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth, “or they think we’re hiding their pot of gold.”

“Sssh, just wait,” Roan whispered.

I turned my head and gaped up at him. Conspiracy gleamed in his eyes. I looked at Mama, at Daddy, and then swept the faces around them. Conspiracy. I looked at Amanda’s street-centered grin. Conspiracy. I’d been had.

Uncle Dwayne began to play his fiddle, some old Irish ballad, lilting and sweet. Little people scurried, bumped into each other, rearranged themselves into a line facing Roan and me. Small hands dived inside the collars of green dresses and green shirts. Broad white cards flashed out, an uneven line of them, each one printed with a blocky green letter of the alphabet.

And there it was, printed out for the whole family, the whole town, the whole universe to see.

I twisted inside Roan’s arms and looked up at him tearfully. His eyes glistened, too. There was such joy in him, such beauty. “Surprise,” he murmured. “You’ve read all my other letters, so I thought we ought to share this one with everybody else.” Bold talk from a man who had spent his life avoiding public spectacles.

I unwound his arms, then limped into the street. I
tapped shoulders, rearranged little people, turned some flashcards to the blank side.

When I finished, I faced Roan, dimly aware of a cocoon of laughter and applause around us, but riveted to the wonderful expression on his face as he read the rearranged cards.

He stepped out of the crowd and walked toward me. I met him halfway and he took my hands. We were part of the parade now. Part of it all.

I heard Mama’s ecstatic voice. “And the bridesmaids’ dresses will be gold and mauve and …”

Uncle Dwayne struck up “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” on his fiddle.

Matthew and Tweet grinned.

From the crowd, Mr. Cicero gave me a thumbs-up.

“Good editing,” he mouthed.

The leprechauns giggled.

Roan and I gazed at each other without a shred of dignity.

Erp spit frozen peach mush at us.

Everything was absolutely perfect.

A
utumn.

The old mountain, it whispered to itself, it drew us up to its brow with the murmur of its seasons, the patient circle of life that it anchors.

We climbed up the old hiking path to the top of Dunshinnog that fall, the day after we deeded Ten Jumps to Matthew and Tweet. They were clearly in love with the lake, the cabin, its birds and animals and its room to grow.

My leg was strong, but the hike up Dunshinnog was a test I hadn’t taken yet and I had some doubts I could make it. Couldn’t let Roan down though, or myself. I had signed a contract with Mr. Cicero to buy the
Shamrock
. I was a little nervous about the responsibility but excited.

“Come on, you can do it,” Roan urged gently as I panted and climbed the last, steepest knob on Dunshinnog. He moved ahead, held out a hand. I took it, and he helped me up on the granite overhang above the valley. I punched his shoulder, then burst out laughing with victory. And he smiled broadly, at ease and pleased for us both.

We examined the small green rosettes of new foxgloves growing among their fading, majestic elders. “Best crop yet,” I claimed. “It’ll be a good year for foxgloves next spring.” We walked along the mountain’s crown, found the spot we’d discussed, then Roan pulled a canvas knapsack off
one shoulder, taking from it the old plank with our names carved on it. I held the plank high up on the side of an oak while he nailed it in place.

“The heart of the house. Right here,” he said. “We’ll sit here and look out at the sky. With the family. Friends. See the whole valley. See for miles.”

I took something from a pocket of my jeans and held it out on my palm. “This is for you. Grandpa would want you to have it. You remember when we came up here with him the first time and he played ‘Amazing Grace’?”

Roan took the old tin whistle between his fingertips. “I’ll have to learn to play it, too,” he said softly.

“You will. I’m sure. He always knew who to trust with the traditions.”

Roan put his arm around me. There was no need to doubt the serenity in his eyes. He was happy. He’d come back to where we both belonged. He’d found his place. He touched just a fingertip to my lips. An old kiss, from childhood. In the slowly gathering dusk, the cool and ripe harvest time of the year, we sat down on the ledge close together. The wind rose gently, a pure song. We shared the view across land and sky, remembering, and looking beyond.

A former newspaper editor and multiple award winner for her novels and contemporary romances,
DEBORAH SMITH
lives in the mountains of Georgia, where she is working on her next novel.

B
y the time Gib Cameron found us, my sister and I were failed southern belles who could no longer count on the kindness of strangers. We lived like gypsies. Home was a forgotten memory. Like lost birds, we had migrated to a cold climate. Our distant connection to Gib and his family was all we had left of an innocent and proud past.

“Pride and self-respect are earned, not given by birth,” Pop always told us, when we were growing up amid the gothic gentility of New Orleans. “Nothing else matters.” He had had more pride beaten into him than any man deserved, and it nearly destroyed us.

Ella had developed a chronic case of what would have been called the fancies in more polite eras, and I was well on my way to becoming what would have been deemed a pinched-heart hellion. In more polite eras, of course.

Purists might insist my sister and I were never southern belles to begin with. Pedigree alone should have disqualified us. Our steel-magnolia family tree included one Japanese grandmother and one grandmother of Swedish extraction, who was a truck-stop floozy. Our father was a California-bred Italian-Asian American, not to mention a Communist. He spent his childhood in a California internment camp
during World War II. His Japanese mother—my grandmother Akika—died there, and Pop swore he’d hate the United States government for the rest of his life.

So maybe my sister and I were doomed from the start.

When I was a child my piano tutors told stories about the Phantom Alligator Lady of Bayou Caveaux. Rumor had it she was a failed concert pianist, though when I was a little girl none of my tutors would admit she existed except in self-serving piano-tutor mythology.

They claimed folks glimpsed her around one of the concrete-walled, rusty-roofed little houses off a swampy back road a few miles outside New Orleans. She had doomed her career, her youth, her very soul because she let worldly distractions steal her art. Thus she turned into a crazy, bitter old failure who lured children into her home and forced them to play an untuned upright until they died, mind you—and then she carried their bodies outside and fed them to her alligators. I guess you could say she was the ultimate music critic.

I not only believed in the Alligator Lady, I carried the fear of her into adulthood. I heard her whispering encouragement in the back of my mind like a ten-cent harmonica gone sharp.

I pictured myself growing old and mean, peering spitefully out my windows at strangers while I eked out a living, teaching piano lessons to nose-picking ten-year-olds who deserved no better audience than my asthmatic pet toy poodle—which I would name Dog, or Poodle, because my mind would be gone by then. And while my students practiced I’d drink iced tea mixed with gin as I apathetically watched the poodle hoist his tiny hind leg and pee on dusty scrapbooks filled with clippings that proved I’d been a child piano prodigy, once upon a time.

And those clippings might have been all that was worth telling about Venus Arinelli. Or about any Arinelli, I guess. We were culturally jumbled but southern clear through by the grace of a god who obviously knows where odd people will best fit in. Yet everyone is made up of parts and pieces of their family’s music. The saddest thing is to forget where our songs end and our parents’ begin, because each of us plays the next note for them.

For now, I was sinking into silence.

W
hen the Oklahoma City federal building blew up, Ella and I had just signed a six-month contract to perform in the piano lounge of a hotel in New York. It was the best job we’d had in years.

“You and your sister are fired,” the manager announced. “Pack up your equipment and get out. I won’t have people like you working in my club.”

The tv sets above the club’s bar were turned to CNN, where a tape replay showed rescue workers carrying dead and injured children from the rubble in Oklahoma City. Ella had been pale and hollow-eyed for two days. I was scared and on alert, expecting trouble.

“We have a contract,” I reminded the manager, a burly man whose suits cost more than he paid us in a month. “And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I know about your old man,” he replied, jerking his head toward the tv, his face as red as the rare prime rib served in the bar’s dining room. “A couple of federal agents are in my office. They want to ask you and your sister some questions. They say you’ve got connections to antigovernment groups.”

“They always do. If a kid throws a rock at a government
building, these guys show up wherever we are and ask us if we know who did it. But we have nothing to do with that. We never had anything to do with it. We just want to be left alone to earn a living.”

“Government agents don’t ask questions unless they think you know something. I was in the Army. I believe in this country. I don’t want my business associated with a group of immoral fanatics.”

“Neither do I, but they show up more often than a government holiday.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The FBI. Government men. It was a joke.”

“You think our government is a joke?”

“Not at the moment. Look, my sister and I need this job, but I won’t apologize for my father. He wasn’t a monster.”

“That’s enough! Get out of my club. You’re trouble.”

This wasn’t the first time Ella and I had been fired because the Feds dropped by to tell our boss we were Max Arinelli’s daughters. I dragged myself back to our dressing room. Ella was watching CNN on a portable tv and crying softly.