In Silence

“Sounds like you have some thinking to do.”

A giant understatement. She turned to the Blazer, unlocked the door, then faced him once more. “I should go. I’m asleep on my feet and tomorrow’s going to be difficult.”

“You could stay here, you know. Mom and Dad have plenty of room. They’d love to have you.”

A part of her longed to jump at the offer. The idea of sleeping in her parents’ house now, after her father … she didn’t think she would sleep a wink.

But taking the easy way would be taking the coward’s way. She had to face her father’s suicide. She’d begin tonight, by sleeping in her childhood home.

He reached around her and opened her car door. “Still fiercely independent, I see. Still stubborn as a mule.”

She slid behind the wheel, started the vehicle, then looked back up at him “Some would consider those qualities an asset.”

“Sure they would. In mules.” He bent his face to hers. “If you need anything, call me.”

“I will. Thanks.” He slammed the door. She backed the Blazer down the steep driveway, then headed out of the subdivision, pointing the vehicle toward the old downtown neighborhood where she had grown up.

Avery shook her head, remembering how she had begged her parents to follow the Stevenses to Spring Water, the then new subdivision where Matt and his family had bought a house. She had been enamored with the sprawling ranch homes and neighborhood club facilities: pool, tennis court and clubhouse for parties.

What had then looked so new and cool to her, she saw now as cheaply built, cookie-cutter homes on small plots of ground that had been cleared to make room for as many houses per acre as possible.

Luckily, her parents had refused to move from their location within walking distance of the square, downtown and her father’s office. Solidly built in the 1920s, their house boasted high ceilings, cypress millwork and the kind of charm available only at a premium today. The neighborhood, too, was vintage—a wide, tree-lined boulevard lit by gas lamps, each home set back on large, shady lots. Unlike many cities whose downtown neighborhoods had fallen victim to the urban decay caused by crime and white flight, Cypress Springs’s inner-city neighborhood remained as well maintained and safe as when originally built.

Despite the fact that most of Louisiana was flat, West Feliciana Parish was home to gently rolling hills. Cypress Springs nestled amongst those hills—the historic river town of St. Francisville, with its beautiful antebellum homes, lay twenty minutes southwest, Baton Rouge, forty-five minutes south and the New Orleans’s French Quarter a mere two hours forty-five minutes southeast.

Besides being a good place to raise a family, Cypress Springs had no claim to fame. A small Southern town that relied on agriculture, mostly cattle and light industry, it was too far from the beaten path to ever grow into more.

The city fathers liked it that way, Avery knew. She had grown up listening to her dad, Buddy and their friends talk about keeping industry and all her ills out. About keeping Cypress Springs clean. She remembered the furor caused when Charlie Weiner had sold his farm to the Old Dixie Foods corporation and then the company’s decision to build a canning factory on the site.

Avery made her way down the deserted streets. Although not even ten o’clock, the town had already rolled up its sidewalks for the night. She shook her head. Nothing could be more different from the places she had called home for the past twelve years—places where a traffic jam could occur almost anytime during a twenty-four-hour period; where walking alone at night was to take your life in your hands; places where people lived on top of each other but never acknowledged the other’s existence.

As beautiful and green a city as Washington, D.C., was, it couldn’t compare to the lush beauty of West Feliciana Parish. The heat and humidity provided the perfect environment for all manner of vegetation. Azaleas. Gardenias. Sweet olive. Camellias. Palmettos. Live oaks, their massive gnarled branches so heavy they dipped to the ground, hundred-year-old magnolia trees that in May would hold so many of the large white blossoms the air would be redolent of their sweet, lemony scent.

Once upon a time she had thought this place ugly. No, that wasn’t quite fair, she admitted. Shabby and painfully small town.

Why hadn’t she seen it then as she did now?

Avery turned onto her street, then a moment later into her parents’ driveway. She parked at the edge of the walk and climbed out, locking the vehicle out of habit not necessity. Her thoughts drifted to the events of the evening, particularly to those final moments with Matt.

What did she want now? she wondered. Where did she belong?

The porch swing creaked. A figure separated from the silhouette of the overgrown sweet olive at the end of the porch. Her steps faltered.

“Hello, Avery.”

Hunter, she realized, bringing a hand to her chest. She let out a shaky breath. “I’ve lived in the city too long. You scared the hell out of me.”

“I have that effect on people.”

Although she smiled, she could see why that might be true. Half his face lay in shadow, the other half in the light from the porch fixture. His features looked hard in the weak light, his face craggy, the lines around his mouth and eyes deeply etched. A few days’ accumulation of beard darkened his jaw.

She would have crossed the street to avoid him in D.C.

How could the two brothers have grown so physically dissimilar? she wondered. Growing up, though fraternal not identical twins, the resemblance between them had been uncanny. She would never have thought they could be other than near mirror images of one another.

“I’d heard you were back,” he said. “Obviously.”

“News travels fast around here.”

“This is a small town. They’ve got to have something to talk about.”

He had changed in a way that had less to do with the passage of years than with the accumulated events of those years. The school of hard knocks, she thought. The great equalizer.

“And I’m one of their own,” she said.

“It’s true, then? You’re back to stay?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That’s the buzz. I thought it was wrong.” He shrugged. “But you never know.”

“Meaning what?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest.

“Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“No, of course not.” Annoyed with herself, she dropped her arms. “I had dinner with your parents tonight.”

“And Matt. Heard that, too.”

“I thought you might have been there.”

“So they told you I was living in Cypress Springs?”

“Matt did.”

“And did he tell you why?”

“Only that you’d had some troubles.”

“Nice euphemism.” He swept his gaze over the facade of her parents’ house. “Sorry about your dad. He was a great man.”

“I think so, too.” She jiggled her car keys, suddenly on edge, anxious to be inside.

“Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“What?”

“If I talked to him before he died.”

The question off-balanced her. “What do you mean?”

“It seemed a pretty straightforward question to me.”

“Okay. Did you?”

“Yes. He was worried about you.”

“About me?” She frowned. “Why?”

“Because your mother died before the two of you worked out your issues.”

Issues, she thought. Is that how one summed up a lifetime of hurt feelings, a lifetime of longing for her mother’s unconditional love and approval and being disappointed time and again? Her head filled with a litany of advice her mother had offered her over the years.

“Avery, little girls don’t climb trees and build forts or play cowboys and Indians with boys. They wear bows and dresses with ruffles, not blue-jean cutoffs and T-shirts. Good girls make ladylike choices. They don’t run off to the city to become newspapermen. They don’t throw away a good man to chase a dream.”

“He thought you might be sad about that,” Hunter continued. “She was. He hated that she died without your making peace.”

“He said that?” she managed to get out, voice tight.

He nodded and she looked away, memory flooding with the words she had flung at her mother just before she had left for college.

“Drop the loving concern, Mother! You’ve never approved of me or my choices. I’ve never been the daughter you wanted. Why don’t you just admit it?”

Her mother hadn’t admitted it and Avery had headed off to college with the accusation between them. They had never spoken of it again, though it had been a wedge between them forever more.

“He figured that’s why you hardly ever came home.” Hunter shrugged. “Interesting, you couldn’t come to terms with your mother’s life, he her death.”

She jumped on the last. “What does that mean, he couldn’t come to terms with her death?”

“I would think it’s obvious, Avery. It’s called grieving.”

He was toying with her, she realized. It pissed her off. “And when did all these conversations take place?”

Hunter paused. “We had many conversations, he and I.”

The past two days, her shock and grief, the grueling hours of travel, the onslaught of so much that was both foreign and familiar, came crashing down on her. “I don’t have the energy to deal with your shit, even if I wanted to. If you decide you want to be a decent human being, look me up.”

One corner of his mouth lifted in a sardonic smile. “I didn’t answer your question before, the one about my opinion of the local buzz. Personally, I figured you’d pop your old man in a box and go. Fast as you could.”

She took a step back, stung. Shocked that he would say that to her. That he would be so cruel. After the closeness they had shared. She pushed past him, unlocked her front door and stepped inside. She caught a glimpse of his face, of the stark pain that etched his features as she slammed the door.

Hunter Stevens was a man pursued by demons. To hell with his, she thought, twisting the dead-bolt lock. She had her own to deal with.

CHAPTER 4

Hunter gazed at the row of unopened bottles: beer, wine, whisky, vodka. All sins from his past. Each a nail in the coffin of his life.

He kept them around to prove that he could. Such a strategy went counter to traditional AA teaching, but he was a masochistic son of a bitch.

Hunter thought of Avery and anger rose up in him in a white-hot, suffocating wave. Once upon a time they’d been the best of friends: him, Matt and Avery. Before everything had begun spinning crazily out of control. Before his life had turned to shit.

He pictured her sitting next to Matt at his family’s dinner table. All of them laughing, swapping memories. Reveling in the good old days.

What part had he played in those memories? Had they shared stories that hadn’t included him? Or had they simply plucked him out as if he had never existed?

Shut out again. Always the one on the outside, looking in. The one who didn’t belong.

“What’s wrong with you, Hunter? What went wrong with you?”

Good question, he thought, gazing at the bottles, squeezing his fists against the urge that swelled inside him. The urge to open a bottle and get stinking, fall-down drunk.

He’d been down that path; he knew the only place it would lead him was straight to hell.

A hell of his own making. One populated by children screaming in terror. One in which he was helpless to stop the inevitable. Helpless to do more than look on in horror and self-loathing. In despair.

Hunter swung away from the bottles. He sucked in a deep breath and moved deliberately away from the kitchen and toward the makeshift desk he had set up in the corner of his small living room. On the desk sat a computer, monitor glowing in the dimly lit room, fan humming softly. Beside it the pages of a novel. His novel. A story about a lawyer’s spiral to the depths.

If only he knew the story’s end. Some days, he thought his protagonist would manage to claw his way up from those depths. Other days, hopelessness held him so tightly in its grip he couldn’t breathe let alone imagine a happy ending.

He pulled out the chair and sat, intent on channeling his energy and anger into his novel. Instead, he found his thoughts turning to Avery once more.

What caused a man to douse himself with a flammable substance and strike a match?

He knew. He understood.

He had been there, too.

The blinking cursor drew his attention. He focused on the words he had written:

Jack fought the forces that threatened to devour him. To his right lay the laws of man, to his left the greatness of God. One wrong step and he would be lost.

Lost. And found. He had come home to set things right. To start over. He had already begun.

And now, here was Avery.

All together again, he thought. He, Matt and Avery. The same as when his life had begun to implode. How would this affect his plans? The timetable of events he had carefully constructed?

It wouldn’t, he decided. Things would be set right. His life would be set right. No matter how much it hurt.

CHAPTER 5

Avery bolted upright in bed, heart pounding, her father’s name a scream on her lips. She darted her gaze to the bedroom door, for a split second a kid again, expecting her parents to charge through, all concerned hugs and comforting arms.

They didn’t, of course, and she sagged back against the headboard. She hadn’t slept well, no surprise there. She’d tossed and turned, each creak and moan of the old house unfamiliar and jarring. She had been up a half dozen times. Checking the doors. Peering out the windows. Pacing the floor.

In truth, she suspected it hadn’t been the noises that had kept her awake. It had been the quiet. The reason for the quiet.

Finally, she’d taken the couple of Tylenol PM caplets she’d dug out of her travel bag. Sleep had come.

But not rest. For sleep had brought nightmares. In them, she had been enfolded in a womb, warm and contented. Protected. Suddenly, she had been torn from her safe haven and thrust into a bright, white place. The light had burned. She had been naked. And cold.

In the next instant flames had engulfed her.

And she had awakened, calling out her father’s name.

Not too tough figuring that one out.

Avery glanced at the bedside clock. Just after 9:00 a.m., she noted. Throwing back the blanket, she climbed out of bed. The temperature had dropped during the night and the house was cold. Shivering, she crossed to her suitcase, rummaged through it for a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt. She slipped them on, not bothering to take off her sleep shirt.

That done, she headed to the kitchen, making a quick side trip out front for the newspaper. It wasn’t until she was staring at the naked driveway that two things occurred to her: the first was that Cypress Springs’s only newspaper, the Gazette, was a biweekly, published each Wednesday and Saturday, and second, that Sal Mandina, the Gazette’s owner and editor-in-chief had surely halted her father’s subscription. There would be no uncollected papers piling up on a Cypress Springs stoop.

No newspaper? The very idea made her twitch.

With a shake of her head, she stepped inside, relocked the door and headed to the kitchen. She would pick up the New Orleans Times-Picayune or The Advocate from Baton Rouge when she went into town this morning.

That trip might come sooner than planned, Avery realized moments later, standing at the refrigerator. Yesterday she hadn’t thought to check the kitchen for provisions. She wished she had.

No bread, milk or eggs. No coffee.

Not good.

Avery dragged her fingers through her short hair. After the huge meal she’d consumed the night before, she could probably forgo breakfast. Maybe. But she couldn’t face this morning without coffee.

A walk downtown, it seemed, would be the first order of the day.

After changing, brushing her teeth and washing her face, she found her Reeboks, slipped them on then headed out the front door.

And ran smack into Cherry. The other woman smiled brightly. “Morning, Avery. And here I was afraid I was going to wake you.”

“No such luck.” Avery eyed the picnic basket tucked against Cherry’s side. “I was just heading to the grocery for a newspaper and some coffee. You wouldn’t happen to have either of those, would you?”

“A thermos of French roast. No newspaper, though. Sorry.”

“You’re a lifesaver. Come on in.”

Cherry stepped inside. “I remembered that your dad didn’t drink coffee. Figured you’d need it this morning, strong.”

Her mother had been a coffee drinker. But not her dad. Cherry had remembered that. But she hadn’t. What was wrong with her?

“Figured, too, that you hadn’t had time to get to the market.” She held up the basket. “Mom’s homemade biscuits and peach jam.”

Just the thought had Avery’s mouth watering. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I had a real biscuit?”

“Since your last visit, I suspect,” Cherry answered, following Avery. They reached the kitchen and she set the basket on the counter. “Yankees flat can’t make a decent biscuit. There, I’ve said it.”

Avery laughed. She supposed the other woman was right. Learning how to make things like the perfect baking powder biscuit was a rite of passage for Southern girls.

And like many of those womanly rites of passage, she had failed miserably at it.

Cherry had come prepared: from the basket she took two blue-and-white-checked place mats, matching napkins, flatware, a miniature vase and carefully wrapped yellow rose. She filled the vase with water and dropped in the flower. “There,” she said. “A proper breakfast table.”

Avery poured the coffees and the two women took a seat at the table. Curling her fingers around the warm mug, Avery made a sound of appreciation as she sipped the hot liquid.

“Bad night?” Cherry asked sympathetically, bringing her own cup to her lips.

“The worst. Couldn’t sleep. Then when I did, had nightmares.”

“That’s to be expected, I imagine. Considering.”

Considering. Avery looked away. She cleared her throat. “This was so sweet of you.”

“My pleasure.” Cherry smoothed the napkin in her lap. “I meant what I said last night, I’ve missed you. We all have.” She met Avery’s eyes. “You’re one of us, you know. Always will be.”

“Are you trying to tell me something, Cherry?” Avery asked, smiling. “Like, you can take the girl out of the small town, but you can’t take the small town out of the girl?”

“Something like that.” She returned Avery’s smile; leaned toward her. “But you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that, in my humble, country opinion. So there.”

Avery laughed and helped herself to one of the biscuits. She broke off a piece. It was moist, dense and still warm. She spread on jam, popped it in her mouth and made a sound of pure contentment. Too many meals like this and the one last night, and she wouldn’t be able to snap her blue jeans.

She broke off another piece. “So, what’s going on with you, Cherry? Didn’t you graduate from Nicholls State a couple years ago?”

“Harvard on the bayou to us grads. And it was last year. Got a degree in nutrition. Not much call for nutritionists in Cypress Springs,” she finished with a shrug. “I guess I didn’t think that through.”

“You might try Baton Rouge or—”

“I’m not leaving Cypress Springs.”

“But you’d be close enough to—”

“No,” she said flatly. “This is my home.”

Awkward silence fell between them. Avery broke it first. “So what are you doing now?”

“I help Peg out down at the Azalea Café. And I sit on the boards of a couple charities. Teach Sunday school. Make Mom’s life easier whenever I can.”

“Has she been ill?”

She hesitated, then smiled. “Not at all. It’s just … she’s getting older. I don’t like to see her working herself to a frazzle.”

Avery took another sip of her coffee. “You live at home?”

“Mmm.” She set down her cup. “It seemed silly not to. They have so much room.” She paused a moment. “Mama and I talked about opening our own catering business. Not party or special-events catering, but one of those caterers who specialize in nutritious meals for busy families. We were going to call it Gourmet-To-Go or Gourmet Express.”

“I’ve read a number of articles about those caterers. Apparently, it’s the new big thing. I think you two would be great at that.”

Cherry smiled, expression pleased. “You really think so?”

“With the way you both cook? Are you kidding? I’d be your first customer.”

Her smile faltered. “We couldn’t seem to pull it together.

Besides, I’m not like you, Avery. I don’t want some big, fancy career. I want to be a wife and mother. It’s all I ever wanted.”

Avery wished she could be as certain of what she wanted. Of what would make her happy. Once upon a time she had been. Once upon a time, it seemed, she had known everything.

Avery leaned toward the other woman. “So, who is he? There must be a guy in the picture. Someone special.”

The pleasure faded from Cherry’s face. “There was. He—Do you remember Karl Wright?”

Avery nodded. “I remember him well. He and Matt were good friends.”

“Best friends,” Cherry corrected. “After Matt and Hunter … fell out. Anyway, we had something special … at least I thought we did. It didn’t work out.”

Avery reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.”

“He just up and … left. Went to California. We’d begun talking marriage and—”

She let out a sharp breath and stood. She crossed to the window and for a long moment simply stared out at the bright morning. Finally she glanced back at Avery. “I was pushing. Too hard, obviously. He called Matt and said goodbye. But not me.”

“I’m really sorry, Cherry.”

She continued as if Avery hadn’t spoken. “Matt urged him to call me. Talk it out. Compromise, but … “ Her voice trailed helplessly off.

“But he didn’t.”

“No. He’d talked about moving to California. I always resisted. I didn’t want to leave my family. Or Cypress Springs. Now I wish … “

Her voice trailed off again. Avery stood and crossed to her. She laid a hand on her shoulder. “Someone else will come along, Cherry. The right one.”

Cherry covered her hand. She met Avery’s eyes, hers filled with tears. “In this town? Do you know how few eligible bachelors there are here? How few guys my age? They all leave. I wish I wanted a career, like you. Because I could do that on my own. But what I want more than anything takes two. It’s just not fai—”

Her voice cracked. She swallowed hard; cleared her throat. “I sound the bitter old spinster I am.”

Avery smiled at that. “You’re twenty-four, Cherry. Hardly a spinster.”

“But that’s not the way I … It hurts, Avery.”

“I know.” Avery thought of what Cherry had said the night before, about loving someone to the point of tragedy. In light of this conversation, her comment concerned Avery. She told her so.

Cherry wiped her eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything crazy. Besides,” she added, visibly brightening, “maybe Karl will come back? You did.”

Avery didn’t have the heart to correct her. To tell her she wasn’t certain what her future held. “Have you spoken with him since he left?”

Fresh tears flooded Cherry’s eyes. Avery wished she could take the question back. “His dad’s gotten a few letters. He’s over in Baton Rouge, at a home there. I go see him once a week.”

“And Matt?”

“They spoke once. And fought. Matt chewed him out pretty good. For the way he treated me. He hasn’t heard from him since.”

Avery could bet he had chewed him out. Matt had always returned Cherry’s hero worship with a kind of fierce protectiveness.