For 8 years, my parents made me leave the house every time my brother brought his fiance over; Mom said, “She comes from a good family, don’t embarrass us”; Dad added, “Just disappear for the weekend”;
For 8 years, my parents made me leave the house every time my brother brought his fiance over; Mom said, “She comes from a good family, don’t embarrass us”; Dad added, “Just disappear for the weekend”; I did; then one weekend, I never came back; it took them four years to find out where I went.
My mother called what happened “your situation,” like it was a stain she hoped nobody would notice.
Two days before the first Easter visit, I came into the hallway and noticed six family pictures missing from the wall.
Mom said the frames were being updated.
The only photo of me left was my junior-year portrait, centered on the living-room shelf beside a white candle.
“It’s for Easter,” she said.
As she spoke, she quietly slid my seven-day pill organizer from beside the toaster into the silverware drawer.
“Mitch is bringing someone home this weekend. Her name is Avery Lockheart. Her people are Mountain Brook.”
Mountain Brook was twenty minutes from Hoover, but to Mom it might as well have been another country.
“That family has been through a terrible loss,” she added. “They don’t need to walk into ours.”
I thought she meant me.
She did.
Mitch came home from Tuscaloosa Friday night. He was twenty, studying engineering at Alabama, and still the only person who called me Stace.
He stood in my doorway while I packed a duffel bag.
“I’m sorry about all this, Stace.”
I assumed he meant our parents.
“Sorry for what?”
But he had already walked away.
The next morning, Dad placed my keys beside the sink. At 10:59, I backed out.
In the mirror, I watched Mitch’s Jeep turn onto our street with a laughing girl beside him.
She never saw me.
That was the point.
I drove forty-five minutes south to Ruth Tidwell’s peach farm in Chilton County.
Her granddaughter Casey had been my best friend since high school. Ruth took one look at my bag and didn’t ask about February.
“Hands first,” she said. “Questions can wait till supper.”
She put me to work thinning peaches.
A tree sets more fruit than it can carry. If you don’t remove enough, the branches strain under small, hard peaches until something breaks.
By noon, green fruit covered the ground.
Late that afternoon, Ruth showed me a tree everyone thought had died during the January freeze.
She scraped a twig with her thumbnail.
Under the gray bark was bright green.
“Scratch test,” she said. “Brown means dead. Green means she’s living.”
Then she released the twig.
“Green underneath. She’s just been through a winter.”
I carried that image home Sunday night.
The house smelled of ham and lilies. The candle beside my portrait had burned halfway down.
That summer, Mom began calling Avery Mitch’s fiance even though he wouldn’t propose for years.
And our house developed rules.
In May, Mom put a keyed lock on the outside of my bedroom door.
She claimed it was so Avery wouldn’t accidentally enter my messy room.
My room was the neatest in the house.
The key stayed on Mom’s ring. If she wasn’t home, I couldn’t enter my own bedroom.
My toothbrush moved to a zip-top bag in my car.
My mail disappeared before visits.
My car couldn’t be parked outside because someone might ask who owned it.
The texts arrived before every visit.
“Every weekend be gone by 11.”
Sometimes noon.
For one Fourth of July, 9 a.m.
I began recording each forced departure in a yellow notebook.
Easter became number one.
When I turned twenty, Mom began charging me $400 a month for room and board.
I was paying rent for a house I regularly wasn’t allowed to occupy.
After two years, I finally asked what Avery thought about me.
Mom answered immediately.
“She thinks you live in Atlanta. You work there. You’re very busy.”
