POV: Savannah
The GPS lost confidence somewhere around mile marker 7 on Parish Road 18, which was about right. Calder's Bend had always resisted being found by people who needed a signal to get there.
Savannah turned it off and drove by memory.
It came back the way muscle memory always does — not as thought but as body. Left at the water tower with the peeling pelican. Straight past the Dollar General that hadn't been there when she was growing up and already looked like it had been there forever. Slow down at the railroad crossing even though a train hadn't run these tracks in fifteen years, because Grandma Cora said slow down at the railroad crossing and some instructions outlive their reasons.
Right on Sycamore Lane.
She almost missed it.
Not because the street had changed — it hadn't, not meaningfully, the same live oaks with the same sidewalk-buckling ambitions, the same three houses with the same three families inside them, probably, the Thibodaux place and the Melancon place and then Grandma Cora's place at the end of the lane like a period at the end of a sentence she'd been trying not to finish.
She almost missed it because the house was yellow.
Not the gray-white she'd been carrying in her memory for seven years, the paint she remembered as faded and peeling at the corners, the color of something that had given up on being a color. This was yellow — warm and deliberate, like someone had made a decision about it. The shutters were a clean cream. The porch railing, which had been listing to the left since approximately 2009, stood straight.
Savannah put the car in park at the curb and sat there.
The engine ticked.
She had driven four hours from Nashville with the windows cracked and a podcast she didn't listen to running in the background because she needed the noise without needing to actually hear anything. She had rehearsed, in the specific way she rehearsed uncomfortable things, which was to say she had made a list. Mental inventory of what this trip required of her. Three to five days, maximum. Meet with the realtor — Janet Fontenot, who had apparently sold half the parish and was described by Aunt Luanne as extremely motivated, which in Aunt Luanne's language meant she'd already been told the commission. Walk through the house. Assess the repairs. Authorize whoever needed authorizing. Get the thing listed. Get back to Nashville before the editorial meeting on the fourteenth.
The list did not include sitting in a parked car staring at yellow paint like it had personally wronged her.
She got out.
The air hit her first — that particular Louisiana October air that hadn't decided yet whether it was summer or fall and had reached an uncomfortable compromise between the two, warm enough to feel like effort, cool enough to remind you that something was ending. There was a pecan tree in the front yard that hadn't been there when she was a child, or maybe it had been small enough that she'd never catalogued it, and it had dropped half its yield onto the porch steps. They crunched under her boots. A wind chime she didn't recognize hung at the porch corner and made a sound like someone clearing their throat.
The key was in her jacket pocket. Luanne had mailed it to her three weeks ago with a note that said take your time, baby and meant the opposite.
She didn't use it yet.
She stood on the porch and looked at the door — the original door, she thought, or restored to look like it, dark wood with a glass panel at the top that Grandma Cora had always covered with a lace curtain from the inside. The lace was still there. Light came through it, that pale late-afternoon light that turned everything amber and soft and made even ordinary things look like they were worth photographing.
She was not going to photograph this. She had made that decision in the car, somewhere around the Baton Rouge bypass. She was here as an executor, not a documentarian. She was here to see what needed doing and arrange for it to be done.
She unlocked the door.
The smell reached her before anything else did.
It was not the smell of a house that had been empty. That was the first thing that registered, before her eyes had adjusted to the interior light, before she had taken a second breath — the smell was of wood and beeswax and the faintest trace of something that might have been chicory coffee, might have been memory, might have been both. It was the smell of Grandma Cora's house the way it smelled when Grandma Cora was in it. Not preserved. Tended.
The living room was clean. Not just unmolested by time — actively, deliberately clean. The wood floors had been polished. The furniture was covered with the same cotton sheets Cora always used when she went to stay somewhere for a spell, the pale blue ones that lived in the cedar chest at the top of the stairs, but they'd been shaken out recently — no dust along the top edges. On the side table near the window, someone had left a small glass jar with a few late-season wildflowers in it, dried now to papery whispers of themselves but still upright, still arranged.
Savannah stood in the center of the living room and did not move for a long moment.
She was a good photographer because she had trained herself to read a room the way other people read faces — the information was always in the arrangement of things, in what was present and what was conspicuously absent. What this room was telling her was that someone had been here. Not burglarized. Not vandalized. Maintained. The floors, the linens, the cleared gutters she'd noticed from outside, the porch railing that stood straight.
The yellow paint.
She walked through the house the way you walk through a place you've tried to stop loving — quickly, taking inventory rather than impressions, not letting her eyes rest on anything long enough for it to mean something. The kitchen: clean, the cast iron on the stove lightly oiled, the old Formica counters wiped. The back bedroom that had been hers when she visited summers: bed made with the wedding ring quilt she'd slept under every August of her childhood, tucked in at the corners the way Cora always tucked it, military-tight and purposeful. The bathroom: a slow drip from the cold tap that needed a new washer, the only thing that seemed genuinely unattended.
She stood at the window at the end of the hall — the one that looked out over the back yard and the old fig tree and, beyond the property line, the strip of live oaks that screened off the alley — and pressed two fingers against the glass.
Someone has been taking care of this.
Not Aunt Luanne — Luanne was in Baton Rouge most of the time and had a hip that had been giving her trouble. Not a cleaning service; a cleaning service would have left things impersonal and slightly wrong, the way houses looked after strangers had been through them. This was personal. Someone who knew the house. Someone who knew to use the blue cotton sheets and not just cover the furniture with whatever was available, someone who knew the cast iron needed oil and not just a wipe-down.
She should have felt grateful.
She mostly felt caught off guard, which was a feeling she had very limited patience for.
She pulled out her phone and called Aunt Luanne.
"Baby." Luanne answered on the second ring, which meant she'd been holding the phone. "You made it. How's the house?"
"Luanne." Savannah kept her voice measured. "Who has been in this house?"
A pause. A very brief, very deliberate pause of the kind that Aunt Luanne had been perfecting for sixty-one years. "What do you mean?"
"I mean it's been cleaned and maintained and there are flowers on the side table, dried flowers, someone put them there, and the floors have been polished and the gutters are clear and there is fresh paint on the exterior of a house that has been sitting empty for two years." She stopped. She had not meant to say all of that. "I mean someone has been here."
"Well," Luanne said, in the tone she used when she was about to say something she'd already decided to say before the question was even asked. "Cal Broussard's been keeping an eye on it."
The name landed in the quiet room like a stone dropped in still water.
Savannah did not say anything for three full seconds.
"Your grandmother asked him to," Luanne continued, in the slightly faster cadence she used when she was pre-empting objections. "Before she moved to Meadow Pines. You know how she was about that house, she wasn't going to just leave it to sit, and Cal does historic preservation work, that's what he does, and he was happy to —"
"She didn't think to mention that to me."
"Savannah, honey. Your grandmother made a lot of decisions in those last months that she didn't —"
"To me specifically." She said it quietly, which was worse than saying it loud, and they both knew it. "She didn't mention it to me specifically."
Another pause. Luanne, to her credit, didn't fill it with noise.
Outside the hall window, the fig tree moved in a slow wind. One of the neighbors had a radio going — something old and country, just the outline of a melody from where she stood.
"He knows you're coming," Luanne said. "I expect he'll be by tomorrow."
Savannah closed her eyes.
"Alright," she said.
"There's a pound cake in the freezer. I put it there last week. And the Melancons next door have the spare —"
"I have the key, Luanne."
"I know you do, baby. I know." A beat. "It's good you're there. That house needs somebody in it."
Savannah didn't answer that. She said she'd call tomorrow and hung up and stood in the hallway of her grandmother's house that smelled of beeswax and tended things, and she pressed her back against the wall and looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling had been re-plastered at some point. Clean seams, smooth work. She could see where the old water stain had been — faint discoloration at the edges of the repair, the ghost of it — but someone had taken the trouble to fix what was above your head when you weren't looking.
Cal Broussard.
She had not said his name out loud to anyone in seven years. She was not going to examine what it meant that she could still, immediately, call up the exact quality of the silence that had passed between them on the back steps of the Guidry wedding reception, ten years ago, the two of them slightly warm with somebody's homemade wine and the whole night pressing in, warm and Spanish-moss-heavy, and she had been twenty-two years old and leaving in the morning and he had looked at her and started to say something that she had never heard the end of because she'd stood up and gone back inside.
She had always told herself it was timing.
The house creaked in the way old houses creaked, not alarmingly but conversationally, the way a person shifts in a chair to let you know they're still there.
She pushed off the wall. She found the pound cake in the freezer, wrapped in foil with Luanne written on the top in black marker, and she set it on the counter to thaw. She located sheets in the cedar chest — the blue cotton ones, all of them freshly laundered and folded, and she did not think about who had done that — and she made up the back bedroom with the wedding ring quilt.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the last of the afternoon light and looked at her hands.
She had photographed thirty-two countries. She had been in rooms where the light was so extraordinary it felt like a moral experience. She had a talent for looking at things so precisely that other people could feel them, a talent she'd honed and sharpened and made a career out of, and she had not been able to photograph her mother's face in the last year of her life because every time she raised the camera something shut down in her chest, and she had left this town four days after the funeral and she had not come back.
She had come back now.
The wind chime on the porch made its small sound. Somewhere in the attic, something settled.
It's good you're there, Luanne had said. That house needs somebody in it.
Savannah lay back on the wedding ring quilt and stared at the re-plastered ceiling and thought about a man she hadn't spoken to in ten years who had been keeping her grandmother's house alive while she was gone, and felt something turn over in her chest that she had no word for and was not yet ready to name.
She was asleep within ten minutes, boots still on.
She had not meant to sleep here tonight.
She had not meant to do a lot of things.