POV: Savannah
Delia's Diner had not changed in any way that mattered.
The counter stools were the same cracked vinyl — red, replaced sometime in the eighties and never again — the kind of cracked that had gone past shabby into character so long ago that replacing them now would feel like an act of violence against the place. The pie case still stood at the end of the counter with its rotating display and its handwritten index cards, the cards in Delia Senior's handwriting even though Delia Senior had been gone four years because nobody had seen any reason to rewrite them. The ceiling fan over the middle tables moved at the speed of mild suggestion. The smell was coffee and fryer oil and something sweet, always something sweet, as if the building itself had been marinated in sugar over sixty years and was still slowly releasing it.
Savannah stood in the doorway for a moment before anyone saw her.
She did this with spaces before she entered them — not a professional habit, or not only that. Something older. The need to read a room before becoming part of it, to understand the composition before she changed it by being in it. The diner on a Tuesday at eleven-thirty was half full: two older men at the counter with coffee and the studied silence of people who came here to be around other people without having to talk to them; a young mother with a toddler in the corner booth, the toddler applying crayon to a placemat with the focused ambition of someone who had opinions about color; a table of four women Savannah's age or slightly older who were having a conversation that involved a lot of leaning in, which meant it was either very funny or very good.
Behind the counter, through the pass-through window, she could see movement. The familiar geometry of someone who'd been working this space for years, every motion efficient, everything in its place.
Then Delia came through the kitchen door and saw her.
Delia Marchand Jr. was thirty-two years old and eight months pregnant and had the bearing of a woman who had decided somewhere around her third trimester to stop accommodating the world's comfort with her physical reality. She was wearing an apron over a floral dress and her hair was in a crown braid that was doing better than it should have been given the kitchen heat, and when she saw Savannah she put both hands on the counter and said, loud enough for the whole diner to hear without quite being loud enough that it was a performance: "Well it is about time."
The two men at the counter looked up. The young mother looked up. The four women looked up and then looked at each other in a way that suggested this was going to be talked about.
Savannah crossed the diner and let Delia pull her into a hug that was comprehensive and slightly breathless given the geometric complications involved. She smelled of fryer oil and the same vanilla body lotion she'd been wearing since ninth grade.
"You look good," Delia said, holding her by both shoulders and looking at her the way only people who'd known you since you were losing your baby teeth could look at you. "Tired, but good."
"You look enormous," Savannah said.
"I am enormous. I am a natural wonder. Sit down." She steered her toward the corner booth — not the toddler's corner, the other corner, the one with the torn seat cushion that Delia had put a reserved card on and that Savannah understood, without asking, had been reserved since Delia knew she was coming. "Coffee?"
"Please."
"The bread pudding's from this morning. Don't let me forget."
Savannah slid into the booth. The vinyl was warm from the sun coming through the window. The table had the particular sturdiness of furniture that had been wiped down ten thousand times, the surface slightly softened at the edges from years of elbows. She put her hands on it and felt the solidity of it and something in her chest did a thing she chose not to examine.
Delia came back with two coffees and folded herself into the other side of the booth with the slow deliberateness of a woman managing cargo. She set the mugs down, wrapped both hands around hers, and looked at Savannah.
"Tell me everything," she said. "Start with the house."
Savannah told her about the house — the repairs, the soffit, the roof flashing, the pier-and-beam question that was still unresolved. She told her about Luanne's casserole and Luanne's pound cake and Luanne's very particular silences. She told her about the red beans she'd made at midnight without quite meaning to, and Delia nodded at this like it was information she'd expected.
She did not, at first, tell her about the photograph she'd taken.
"How's the working arrangement?" Delia said, with the careful neutrality of someone asking a question they already know the shape of.
"Fine. It's professional."
Delia drank her coffee.
"He's there most of the day?"
"He comes at eight. Takes lunch. Usually gone by four or five."
"And it's fine."
"It's fine, Delia."
"Because I remember —"
"I know what you remember."
"The Guidry wedding."
"I know."
"You were twenty-two and you came back from the back steps of that reception looking like someone had rearranged everything inside you, and then you left the next morning and you never —"
"Delia."
"I'm just —"
"I know what you're just." Savannah wrapped her hands around her mug. The coffee was Delia's blend — Community Dark Roast with a small amount of chicory, the same compromise between her mother's taste and her own she'd been striking since she took over the diner. It tasted like the right answer. "It was ten years ago. We were different people."
"Were you?"
Savannah looked at her.
Delia had the expression she wore when she'd decided something and was waiting for the other person to catch up. It was a patient expression. She'd always been better at patience than Savannah, which had been the source of both the friendship's durability and most of its friction.
"He's working on the house," Savannah said. "I'm selling the house. There's a clear end date."
"Clear end dates have a way of becoming less clear."
"Not this one."
"Because you won't let them."
"Because I have a life in Nashville, Delia. I have a job, I have an apartment, I have —"
"Do you have people?"
The question landed quietly, the way Delia's true questions always landed, without inflection or accusation, just set down on the table between them like something she was asking Savannah to look at.
Savannah looked at her coffee.
"I have people," she said.
"Name three."
"That's not —"
"Name three people in Nashville who would notice inside of forty-eight hours if something happened to you."
The diner went about its business around them. The ceiling fan turned. The toddler announced something in the vocabulary of toddlers, satisfied and complete. One of the women at the table across the room laughed, the real kind, unguarded.
"My editor," Savannah said. "Marcus would know."
"Marcus is your colleague."
"He's also my friend."
"Okay. Two more."
Savannah pressed her lips together. "This is a manipulative exercise."
"It's a question." Delia's voice was entirely without cruelty. That was the thing about Delia — she could say the most uncomfortable things without any of the satisfaction some people took in discomfort. She said them the way she said everything, because they were true and because she thought you should know. "I'm not trying to make you feel bad about Nashville. I'm trying to ask whether Nashville is actually —" She paused, searching for the word. "Whether it's a place you live or a place you're using."
The fan turned overhead. Savannah watched it.
"That's a significant distinction," she said.
"I know it is."
"You think I'm using it."
"I think you went to Nashville because it was far enough and busy enough and you could build something there that looked like a life without requiring you to actually —" Delia stopped. Started differently. "You left after your mama's funeral, Savannah. Four days after. And you built seven years on top of that leaving. And now you're back and you're calling it executing an estate."
The words sat there.
The honest thing — the thing Savannah knew and had been not knowing, the thing she'd been filing under complicated and not yet and when I have more time — was that Delia was right. She had known Delia was right since somewhere around Baton Rouge on the drive down, somewhere around the point where the landscape changed from highway-anywhere to specifically-here, the Spanish moss and the flat green distance and the water visible between the trees, and something in her chest had done something she hadn't let herself identify.
"I'm aware," she said quietly, "that there are things I haven't dealt with."
"I know you are."
"I'm not sure this trip is — I'm not sure three weeks in my grandmother's house is the right context for dealing with them."
"What would be the right context?"
"Therapy, probably."
"Are you in therapy?"
"I've been meaning to —"
"Savannah."
"I know, Delia."
Delia reached across the table and put her hand over Savannah's. It was a brief, warm, uncomplicated gesture — the kind of touch that came from thirty years of knowing someone, the shorthand of it. "I'm not trying to fix you," she said. "I know you're not broken. I'm asking you to consider whether you're willing to be here. Actually here. Not just executing."
Savannah turned her hand over and squeezed Delia's once and let go.
"The bread pudding," she said.
Delia looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded — accepting the deflection without pretending it wasn't one, which was its own form of grace — and called toward the kitchen: "Jerome, can I get a bread pudding and two forks?"
The bread pudding came with whiskey sauce and Jerome's apologies that it was from this morning and not fresh, which Delia waved off because Jerome said this about everything and it was always fine. It was Delia Senior's recipe — day-old French bread, heavy cream, a full stick of butter in the sauce, the kind of recipe that had been written on an index card so many times the paper of the original was transparent with handling. Savannah took the first bite and felt it the way she always felt this particular thing: immediate and total, the way certain tastes bypassed every critical faculty and went directly to something older.
"I photographed the house," she said, after a moment.
Delia looked up from her bread pudding.
"I told myself I wasn't going to. I told myself I was here as executor, not —" She paused. "But the light in the morning was —" Another pause. "And then this afternoon, I was in the yard to check something, and I looked up at the roofline and the light was doing what it does this time of year, you know how October light in Louisiana just —"
"Does what it does," Delia agreed.
"And Cal was on the roof." She said it neutrally. She watched Delia not react, which was its own reaction. "He was on the roof checking the vent flashing, and I had the camera, and I —"
"You photographed him."
"I photographed the house. He was in the frame."
"Savannah."
"He was incidentally —"
"How many frames?"
She picked up her fork. "Two."
Delia pressed her lips together in the way she pressed her lips together when she was not going to say I told you so because she had more grace than that but wanted it on the record that she could have.
"The project," Savannah said. "The one I've been circling."
"The biracial identity essay."
"Yes." She looked at the bread pudding. "Being here — being in this house, being in this town — I keep thinking about it differently than I have been. I've been thinking about it as a concept for eight years. Identity as abstraction. But being here, in my grandmother's house, in a place where I'm — where the town looks at me and sees Celeste Mabry's daughter, where that means something specific, where my face means something specific —" She stopped. "I think the project is here."
Delia was very still.
"I think I've been avoiding doing it here because doing it here would mean being here," Savannah said. "And being here would mean —"
"Feeling it," Delia said.
"Yes."
The diner breathed around them. The toddler had fallen asleep in the corner booth, collapsed against the window with the absolute commitment only small children and the very tired achieved. The two men at the counter had been replaced by a single older woman with a crossword. Jerome was doing something involving a sheet pan that clanged once and then was quiet.
"What would it look like?" Delia said. "If you stayed long enough to do it."
"I don't know yet." She looked at her hands. "Longer than three weeks."
"How much longer?"
"I don't know."
"The house doesn't have to sell before Christmas."
"Luanne would disagree."
"Luanne," Delia said, with the fond exasperation of a woman who had known Luanne Mabry-Thibodaux her entire life, "would disagree with the weather if she thought it was moving too fast." She leaned forward slightly. "What does the project need?"
Savannah thought about it honestly. "Time. Access. Being inside the place instead of passing through it." She paused. "I'd need to interview people. Spend time with people. I can't do that in three weeks."
"No."
"I'd need to actually — I'd have to actually be here."
"Yes," Delia said, simply. "You would."
They sat with that.
"He's going to be in the house for three weeks regardless," Delia said, after a moment, and there was no inflection on it, she just put it there.
"That's not —" Savannah started.
"I'm not suggesting anything. I'm noting a fact."
"It's a separate consideration."
"Absolutely."
"The project and the — whatever you're implying about Cal — those are completely —"
"I'm not implying anything about Cal." Delia's eyes were very clear and very direct. "I'm saying you've spent eight years not doing the thing you most need to do because it would require you to be somewhere instead of passing through. And now you're somewhere. And it turns out there's also a man there who knew to use the blue cotton sheets and has a key to your grandmother's house and takes his boots off at the door."
Savannah opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Delia picked up her fork. "More bread pudding?"
She walked back to Sycamore Lane instead of driving.
It was four blocks and the afternoon was the particular Louisiana gold that happened between three and five o'clock when the light came in low and turned everything it touched into a version of itself worth looking at twice. She had her camera. She had not made any decisions about the camera.
She shot three frames on the walk: the sidewalk buckled by a live oak root at the corner of Main and Pelican, the root so large it had become a feature rather than a problem. The water tower with the peeling pelican, the bird faded to a ghost of itself, wings still open. The entrance to Sycamore Lane, the arch of live oaks over the street, the light coming through in columns, the house at the end visible through the green.
Her phone buzzed. A text from her Nashville editor — three weeks works, check in when you can — and below it, unsent, the text she'd half-drafted to her therapist she didn't have yet: I think I need to talk to someone. I think I've been—
She hadn't finished it. She closed the phone.
Cal's truck was gone from the driveway. He'd been done by four-thirty, which he'd mentioned this morning — I'll be out of your way by four-thirty — and she'd said you don't have to be out of my way and he'd looked at her for a half second and then said four-thirty and that had been that.
She stood on the porch and looked at the yellow house.
I think the project is here.
She said it out loud, once, to no one, to the wind chime and the pecan tree and the late afternoon and the house that had been standing since 1944. It sounded true spoken aloud in a way it hadn't entirely sounded inside her head.
She went inside.
The Dutch oven was on the stove where she'd left it. There was a note on the counter, on the back of a piece of scrap paper, in handwriting she didn't recognize but that she knew immediately — square and deliberate, architectural handwriting, the kind that had been trained toward precision:
Flashing on vent replaced — should hold now. Roof looks sound otherwise. Starting on the cabinet box tomorrow. — CB
Below that, written and then apparently reconsidered and written anyway:
The beans were good.
She stood at the counter and read it twice. Then she folded it and put it in the pocket of her jacket, which she recognized as a strange thing to do with a contractor's note and did anyway.
She picked up her camera.
She stood in the kitchen doorway and looked down the long axis of the shotgun house — the hall, the rooms opening off it, the light at the far end — and she raised the camera and she took the shot.
She was staying.
She hadn't said it yet to anyone who needed to hear it. But she was staying.