POV: Savannah
She called Delia at nine-fifteen, which was late enough to be polite and early enough that she could pretend it wasn't a distress call.
"I knew you'd call tonight," Delia said, by way of answering. There was background noise — a television, a child, the particular domestic hum of a house that was full of people at all hours. "I told Marcus, I said, Savannah's going to call by nine-thirty and she's going to pretend she's just checking in."
"I am just checking in."
"Mm-hm." The sound of a door closing, the background noise muffling. Delia finding a quiet room, which in her house apparently required a physical search. "How's the house?"
Savannah was sitting on the back porch steps with a glass of sweet tea she'd made from the Luzianne bags in Cora's pantry — the pantry that had been stocked, she'd discovered that afternoon, not by Luanne but by someone who knew that Cora kept Luzianne tea and Community Coffee and a specific brand of cane syrup and had gone and gotten them. She wasn't going to think about that right now.
"The house is good," she said. "It's — someone's been keeping it up."
"Cal Broussard."
"You knew."
"Honey, everybody knows. This is Calder's Bend." A brief pause. "How was it? Seeing him?"
"Professional," Savannah said. "It was professional."
"That's not what I asked."
She looked out at the back yard in the dark — the fig tree, the strip of live oaks, a sliver of moon doing its best through the cloud cover. Somewhere down the alley a dog was making an intermittent, halfhearted case about something. The air smelled of cooling earth and whatever the neighbor two houses down had cooked for dinner, something rich with onion and bell pepper that drifted over the fence and made her chest feel strange.
"He brought his own coffee," she said. "In a thermos."
"That is extremely on brand for Cal Broussard."
"He was already inside when I woke up. Working on the subfloor. He'd let himself in with his key and taken his boots off at the door."
Delia was quiet for a moment. "He took his boots off."
"Yes."
"In your grandmother's house."
"Yes."
"Because he knows you don't wear shoes past the front door in Miss Cora's house."
Savannah pressed her finger to the condensation on her glass. "That's — yes. That's a small thing."
"It's not a small thing and you know it isn't." Delia's voice had the particular gentleness she used when she was about to say something true that you might not want to hear. She'd had that quality since they were nine years old. It was both her best feature and her most inconvenient one. "Can I say something?"
"You're going to regardless."
"He's been good to your grandmother's house, Savannah. And Miss Cora trusted him, and Miss Cora was not a woman who trusted easily. So whatever complicated thing you're feeling about him being in that space —"
"I'm not feeling a complicated thing."
"You called me at nine-fifteen on a Sunday night."
Savannah drank her sweet tea.
"Three weeks," she said. "That's the timeline. Maybe two and a half."
"Then you've got time," Delia said. "For whatever you need to figure out."
"I'm not figuring anything out. I'm executing an estate."
"Savannah."
"What."
"You're allowed to be glad to be there. You know that, right? You're allowed to be glad you came back, even if the reason you came back is hard."
The back yard was very quiet. The fig tree moved once in a slow wind, leaves catching the moonlight, and Savannah watched it and felt something in the back of her throat that she identified and categorized and set aside.
"I'll come by the diner tomorrow," she said.
"I'll save you a piece of bread pudding."
"Don't let anyone sit at the corner booth."
Delia laughed — her real laugh, the one that was too big for polite company and always had been. "There she is. Goodnight, Savannah."
"Night, Delia."
She didn't sleep.
This was not unusual in a new place — or a new-old place, a place that had been both hers and not hers for so long that her nervous system couldn't decide how to categorize it. She lay in the back bedroom under the wedding ring quilt and listened to the house. Old houses had more to say than new ones. This one spoke in the register of settling wood and the occasional tick of the baseboard heat and, twice, what she was fairly certain was a palmetto bug asserting itself somewhere in the walls, which she chose not to investigate.
She also kept smelling her mother.
Not a hallucination. Nothing so dramatic. Just the way grief operated in this specific house, which it had apparently been doing since she was a child — her mother had grown up here, had been a girl in this room, had slept under this quilt, and the house had absorbed her the way old houses absorbed the people who'd lived and breathed in them long enough. It wasn't supernatural. It was woodwork and plaster and the accumulated presence of a woman who had been entirely, vividly, specifically alive.
Savannah stared at the ceiling.
Her mother's name had been Celeste. Celeste Mabry. She had been forty-eight years old when she died, which was too young by any measurement that made sense. She had been a music teacher and a Sunday school volunteer and the kind of woman who brought the good plastic containers to the potluck and trusted people to return them, which they mostly did because she was the kind of woman you didn't want to disappoint. She had a laugh that embarrassed Savannah in public when she was a teenager and that Savannah would give most of what she owned to hear one more time.
She had brought Savannah here every summer from Nashville, where they'd lived since Savannah was three — every June through August, Grandma Cora's house on Sycamore Lane, the Atchafalaya Basin and the heat and the way time moved differently in Calder's Bend, slower and thicker, like the air had a different viscosity. Savannah had loved it and hated it in the alternating way of a child who hadn't yet learned the difference between boredom and peace.
She had not come home enough, in the years before her mother got sick.
She had not come home enough, in the years after she got sick.
She had come home for the funeral and left four days later and she had not been back in seven years and she was lying here now in the room she'd slept in every summer of her childhood and the house smelled like her grandmother and faintly, impossibly, like her mother, and she was thirty-two years old and she had been running so long and so efficiently that she had genuinely lost track of what she was running from and what she was running toward and whether those were even different things anymore.
She got up.
The kitchen at eleven-thirty at night had a particular quality she'd forgotten — the way the light over the stove caught the copper pot hanging on the wall, the way the linoleum floor was cold through socks, the way the refrigerator's hum was the only sound for three blocks in every direction.
She didn't turn on the overhead light. Just the stove light, which was enough.
She stood at the counter and looked at the kitchen and let herself look — really look, the way she looked at things before she decided whether to photograph them, reading the composition, the light sources, what the space was saying about the people who'd used it.
This kitchen had made thousands of meals. Had hosted arguments and reconciliations and homework and grief and the specific, unrepeatable joy of a holiday morning with people you loved filling every available inch. The cast iron on the stove had been her grandmother's mother's before it was her grandmother's. The wooden spoon in the ceramic crock by the stove had a crack in the handle that Cora had wrapped with twine sometime in the nineties and nobody had seen any reason to replace it.
Savannah opened the pantry.
Cane syrup, Luzianne tea, Community Coffee, a bag of white beans, dried thyme. A can of tomatoes. Red pepper flakes. Everything someone who knew Cora's kitchen would know to stock. She stood at the open pantry door and felt the specific weight of being known — of a space being known, of someone caring enough to know what it needed.
She took out the bag of white beans.
She didn't know why. She set them on the counter. She found the onion — there was an onion, because of course there was — and the celery and the bell pepper, and she found the andouille in the refrigerator, two links wrapped in paper from the butcher, and she understood then that whoever had stocked this pantry had stocked it as if someone might arrive and need to cook, might need the specific comfort of making something real in the middle of the night.
She put the beans in a pot to soak. She would make a proper red beans and rice tomorrow. She hadn't made it in six years, not since the last time she'd been in Louisiana, not since — she didn't finish that thought.
She sat at the kitchen table with her tea and her phone and she pulled up the photographs on her camera from that morning — she'd shot the house before she'd made her decision not to, before she'd given herself the rule about being here as executor and not documentarian. She'd shot it in that first hour of daylight before Cal arrived, moving through the rooms with the particular silence of early morning and the light coming in at angles that did exactly what morning light always did in old houses, made everything luminous and temporary at once.
She scrolled through them.
The living room, the cotton sheets over the furniture, the dried wildflowers on the side table catching the light just so.
The hallway, the re-plastered ceiling, the ghost of the water stain at the edges of the repair.
The kitchen window, the lace curtain backlit, the shape of the pecan tree visible through the gauze of it.
The back bedroom — she'd taken this one before she'd made her bed, the wedding ring quilt folded at the foot, the window, the morning light. There was a quality to it she didn't expect. It looked inhabited. Not staged, not documentary — inhabited, like the room itself was breathing.
She stopped scrolling.
There was a photograph she didn't remember taking.
She had. She could see the angle — she must have been standing in the bedroom doorway, must have turned without thinking the way she sometimes did when something arranged itself in her peripheral vision and the camera responded before the conscious mind caught up. The frame was the kitchen, shot through two doorways, the long axis of the shotgun house doing what shotgun houses were designed to do, drawing the eye straight through. The kitchen at the far end, in early morning light, with the copper pot and the lace curtain and the wooden spoon in the ceramic crock, and at the edge of the frame — just at the left edge, barely in it, a hand on the counter.
Cal's hand. She hadn't seen him arrive. He must have come in while she was in the back bedroom, and she'd turned with the camera without knowing he was there, and caught just his hand on the counter, the roughness of it visible even in this resolution, the deliberate set of it, as if he too were reading the kitchen and finding it said something he recognized.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she put her phone face-down on the table and pressed both palms flat against the wood and breathed.
She was not going to make this into something. She was here for three weeks. She was going to get the house repaired and listed and she was going to sell it to someone who would — she made herself think the rest of it — someone who would probably update the kitchen and pull out the cast iron hooks and replace the linoleum with something that photographed better on a listing website, and that was the nature of things, that was what happened, and she had made peace with it before she got in the car in Nashville and she was going to stay at peace with it.
The beans sat in their pot of water on the counter.
The copper pot hung in the stove light.
The house breathed around her, slow and certain, the way it had breathed since 1944, the way it had breathed through her grandmother's whole life and her mother's childhood summers and Savannah's own, all those August mornings waking up here under the wedding ring quilt, all that time she'd had and hadn't known to be careful with.
She turned off the stove light and went back to the bedroom.
She did not sleep for a long time.
But at some point the house settled in a particular way — a long, low creak from somewhere in the walls, like something releasing — and after that she did.
In the morning the beans were soaked through, pale and swollen and ready.
She found the cast iron Dutch oven in the cabinet under the stove where it had always lived, and she set the beans on low with the andouille and the trinity — onion, celery, bell pepper — and the thyme, and she let it start while she made coffee.
She was standing at the stove when she heard the truck in the driveway at seven fifty-eight.
She heard the engine cut.
She heard, after a moment, the door.
She heard the particular sound of boots being removed on the porch, the dull knock of them set aside, the pause before the knock at the door that he didn't need to knock at but knocked at anyway.
She crossed the kitchen and opened it.
He stood on the porch in the early morning in his work clothes, thermos in hand, and he looked at her and then past her into the kitchen, and something crossed his face — there and gone, quick as light moving — when he registered what was on the stove.
"Red beans," he said.
"I found the andouille," she said.
He looked at her for a moment. Just a moment. Then: "You soak them overnight?"
"Yes."
He nodded, slowly, as if she'd answered a question he hadn't asked. Then he said, "They'll be done by lunch."
"That's the idea."
He stepped inside. She stepped back. He moved toward the workroom and she went back to the stove, and the house arranged itself around them — two people in the same space, the smell of beans and andouille and chicory coffee, the morning coming through the lace curtain — and neither of them said anything about how completely, unexpectedly ordinary it felt.
Which was, she thought, stirring the pot, its own kind of information.