The Long Road Down to the Very Beginning

I’d never heard of my Great-Aunt Grace before the letter arrived from the lawyer. Mom was pretty frail by then, in a stubborn, swollen-knuckled way. My brothers weren’t around. Rick was dead and Cal was just gone. That left me and Beth to make the long drive down to Savannah.

I was relieved to escape the farm in winter. The thigh-high snowdrifts. The mind-numbing accounting. The slow, dank days in the farm store with nothing to sell but syrupy preserves and cellar apples. No one to sell to anyway. Dan always said next year would be better. I wondered if I’d ever believed him.

Dan didn’t have any spare great-aunts lurking in the South. His ancestors had planted the trees and tended the orchard since hopping off the boat. All were present and accounted for in the withering cemetery next to the McGuinness’s cornfield. The same one where my father and Rick were buried.

The drive to Savannah took two days of neutral radio stations and tasteless rest-stop food. Beth didn’t like driving, so I took older-sister charge, planting myself behind the wheel. My knees cramped. My eyes itched. We didn’t talk much. Beth had always been quiet and I’d lost the knack of drawing her out.

The low country suited the silence, trees so tired their arms drooped to their ankles, trailing moss like frayed wedding veils. We’d left home under a gray shroud, but here the sun shone without a fuss, teasing our pale cheeks.

“Look, Fey,” Beth clipped a nail against the window. “What are they?”

Black-feathered birds clustered on a rail. Their necks snaked and cricked at strange, cartoonish angles—ominous to our Northern eyes.

“I wonder if they can fly,” Beth said, words whispering against her reflection.

“They have wings, don’t they?” I winced at my flat tone. My practical tone. My “the kids will be fine without braces” tone. Words as unyielding as the road sliding beneath our wheels, drawing us toward a level horizon.

*     *     *     

Dust hung in the shafts of light pouring through Grace’s front windows. Dust coated tables, banisters, and the unwashed coffee cup forgotten by the sink. It caught in our throats. Gathered on our fingertips. No one had been inside the house for six months.

There was a lawyer involved. There always was. Even when Rick died one turned up, though Rick hadn’t owned much besides the motorcycle. And the motorcycle was scrap.

Grace’s lawyer had sent us paperwork to bring to the crematorium. The ashes were already there, waiting to be interred at a local church. The lawyer had apologized for not contacting us sooner. There’d been complications. He didn’t elaborate on what they were, just that Grace had made all her final arrangements and set aside the funds for them. So here we were, breathing the dust of a house we’d never before set foot in, on our way to collect the earthly remains of a woman we’d never met.

Apparently, she had wanted it this way.

*     *     *     

Grace must’ve liked a fire on a winter night. Ash crumbled in the grate. Beth stirred it with an iron poker, an ivy pattern coiled around the handle. Ivy seemed a favorite. Ivy and lace. Ivy trailed across the chipped crown moldings. Lace dripped off chair arms and end tables, beneath the heavy box of an ancient TV, framed above the kitchen sink. Grace had filled her house with decorations as fine as the Spanish moss fluttering outside her door.

I liked it. The house felt airy, despite having been closed up for so long.

Of course, it wasn’t ours. Mom was the official next of kin, and there were debts. Medicare something. Tax things. Lawyer’s fees. An auction house would come tomorrow and sticker all the pieces of value. Beth and I had to decide what to do with the rest, the items too personal or worn-out to be sold. That was our inheritance.

“Do we have to sleep here?” Beth asked.

I sighed. She could afford a hotel for a few nights. I couldn’t.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s perfectly fine. The lawyer said so.”

“But do we have to?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

She stared at me through her bangs. I rubbed the back of my neck, my wedding band cold against my prickling skin.

“I’m sure Grace wouldn’t have heard of her great-nieces going to a hotel.”

“I think she liked her privacy,” Beth said.

My sister had a point. Questions we hadn’t asked drifted around us. Grace must’ve known her only sister had married, but did she know that sister had a daughter and that daughter, daughters of her own?

An engine growled, whipping through one of the city’s many squares and down the street, guttering out nearby. I found myself listening for a familiar, heel-heavy tread. For a moment, I was convinced Cal’s lanky shadow would slouch past the ivy curtains and his knuckles would rattle against the door.

When had I stopped expecting Cal to show up at the end of every street? When had I started again? 

I glanced at Beth. She was engrossed by a glass fronted bookcase, neck tilting as she read the spines. She turned to frown at the rest of the room.

“Have you seen any pictures?” she asked. “Anything of Grace?”

“No,” I said, heart still thrumming in my ears. I cleared my throat. “Some people don’t like having their picture taken.”

Beth shuffled, not quite smiling. She hated pictures.

“You’re right,” I said. “There has to be something.”

A still life of pears spilling from a blue porcelain bowl hung over the mantel. Seashells were scattered on the lace-covered end tables. I wandered into the kitchen, thinking of how the kids constantly begged me to take the pictures of them in matching Christmas sweaters off the fridge. But Grace’s appliances were all smooth walls of stainless steel.

“We don’t even know what she looked like,” Beth said, following me.

A loose thread from a spider web rippled in a ceiling corner. I watched the wispy motion, throat growing dry. 

“Are you thirsty?” I asked.

We filled tall glasses with tap water and instant iced tea from a cupboard, stirred in two extra spoonfuls of sugar so our teeth were guaranteed to ache, and sat on the front steps in the slanting rays of the falling sun. It seemed lighter here than at home.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get married, either,” Beth said.

“You’re young.” An automatic response.

“I’m not, though. Not really.”

She was younger than me. She would always be younger than me. But she was older now than Rick had been when he died.

“You can’t be alone forever,” I said.

“Maybe I’m like Grace,” my sister said. “Maybe aloneness runs in families.”

That was what she did at the university—genetics. She studied families in twisted strands of numbers on computer screens, tracing what got passed along and what got left behind through the double glass of a microscope.

“Everyone finds someone,” I said.

Beth just looked at me from under her bangs, quiet and small, always knowing when I was lying for the best.

“Do you want more tea?” she finally asked. She headed for the kitchen, the sound of her flat shoes on the hardwood floors disturbing the well-preserved stillness.

Why did it matter so much to me? I had Dan, the kids, the life I’d seen ahead since I was twelve. A life not so very different from my mother’s. Why shouldn’t Beth have something else? Why did it feel like I needed to save her from these lace-frosted rooms with their dust motes and ancient trees reaching toward every window?

*     *     *    

I couldn’t sleep. Our old farmhouse was all drafts in the winter. My limbs twitched, restless without the weight of double comforters and Dan’s arm flung over me.

Grace’s high-ceilinged bedroom was dusty, like the rest of the house, but with a hint of stirring earth. It was probably mold collecting in the corners. It reminded me of spring.

Beth had refused to sleep in the master, offering to share the narrow bed in the guest room instead. I’d told her not to be silly. We weren’t six years old anymore, frightened by our brothers telling stories with flashlights held under their chins.

I threw back the cotton blanket and pressed bare feet to the creaking floor. Pacing was out of the question. Beth would hear.

I switched on the bedside lamp, wincing at the low, amber light. More lace formed a collar about the lamp base. Otherwise, the table was empty. There were no pictures or pill bottles, no book forever unfinished.

I opened the small drawer beneath, afraid of discovering more emptiness. Instead, a bird’s nest of ribbon cradled three jewelry boxes. I plucked one out, running a thumb over the balding velvet top. The hinges resisted before snapping open like a hungry jaw. Two pearls winked at me: earrings impaled on black velvet.

Were they real? Would the auction people miss them if I dropped them in my bag? Would Grace approve of such a slim deceit? Or would she tap a polished nail on her Bible and frown?

I considered showing them to Beth. She might’ve had somewhere worth wearing pearl earrings to.

After a moment, I snapped the box shut and nestled it back in the drawer. I didn’t bother opening the others. They weren’t for me.

*     *     *     

I woke up early from habit. The appraisers weren’t due until the afternoon. We needed to visit the crematorium, but Beth was still asleep. I dreaded knocking on her door, prodding her awake like one of my teenagers.

I stuck my sunglasses on my head, shoved my feet into the boots I didn’t need down here, and grabbed the keys with the large plastic tag from the door’s lockbox.

I didn’t know where I was going but I wasn’t afraid of getting lost on such straight streets. Rows and squares, laid out as neat as our orchard.

Savannah drew tourists even in the off-season. I recognized the uneven gaits and distracted eyes of fellow travelers. People startled by the sudden skyward slash of a steeple. People who found the scent of living things in winter remarkable.

Students clattered along the pavement on skateboards. Locals went on with their lives, crossing the same streets, buying the same coffees, checking the same emails on their phones. Routines that seemed more foreign to me than the long-limbed trees.

I twisted my wedding band, feeling the callouses from pruning shears and baling wire on my fingers.

“Where were you?” Beth asked when I returned, accusation sharp in her dust-soft voice.

“Walking,” I said, dropping a bag of groceries on the kitchen table. “Seeing the city.”

Beth retreated, toying with the potholder beneath the coffeepot. I hadn’t meant it as a barb—that she could stroll through a city whenever she liked. That because I stared at stunted apple trees and mortgaged cornfields day after day, I was owed more out of this trip than she was.

“I know it’s not a vacation,” I added, acid tickling my throat.

Beth just nodded, still picking at the crochet.

“Well, let’s have breakfast and get to it,” I said. The mother again. Practical. Doing things.

Beth relinquished the potholder to unpack the groceries.

I’d forgotten orange juice. Beth always drank orange juice for breakfast. Never coffee or even tea. Nothing warm, even on teeth-chattering, double-sweater January mornings. Unless she did, now that she lived in a place with sleek cafés on every corner. I didn’t know. I hadn’t asked.

I scraped my teeth together while she lined up cereal, coffee, milk, bread, peanut butter, and bananas on the table, forming an inventory in her head. She gave a small sigh and began searching the cupboards for a bowl. That was all.

She’d go out later and buy her own juice. Put the bottle in the fridge next to the milk, pretending like it’d been there all along. Like I hadn’t forgotten.

*     *     * 

The appraisers were two soft-bodied middle-aged men in button-down shirts and flesh-pressing wedding bands. They condoled us, then set to work with clipboards and calculators, occasionally snapping a picture of a promising piece.

We trailed them through the house, unable to answer their questions, their long, disappointed vowels rolling over us.

Were any furnishings included in the original purchase?

I shrugged. Beth pressed close to my elbow, as if we could build a wall against this shameful failing of familial ties.

Is any of the art original?

I shrugged again, seeking consolation in the golden tones of the oil-painted pears. 

The appraisers found the jewelry boxes in Grace’s nightstand and turned the pearls through their fingers, squinting to determine the quality. They spoke together like doctors at the bedside of a doomed patient.

I thought about Mom entrenched in a house grown too large, bursting with boxes of crayoned school projects, wrinkled prom dresses, and ghosts: echoes of Rick and Cal trapped in the chipped paint.

What would I take from that battered home when she was gone?

The appraisers left a flimsy yellow carbon copy of their inventory: three pages of precise writing and numbers. They’d send another copy to the lawyer when the date for the sale was finalized. That was it. They thanked us for our time, shook our hands, and closed the door.

I leaned against the wall, feeling oddly drained, yet useless, as if I’d spent a harvest day in the orchard and the apple bins were still empty.

“What now?” Beth asked.

The papers rustled in my fingers. The auction house meant to sell every last spoon as far as I could tell.

“We’ll stay till Friday,” I said. “We can go to the crematorium tomorrow. That’s it, I guess.”

Besides, I’d promised Dan I wouldn’t be gone more than a week. Stiffened laundry and cheese-crusted pizza boxes would be waiting for me, along with snow thicker than the dust in this sun-dappled hallway. 

“What about…?” Beth raised her eyes to the discolored crown molding, meaning the house.

“There’s nothing to do,” I said, frustration rankling my stomach. “It’s all for sale.”

“Maybe she already gave a bunch of things away,” Beth said. “Maybe she didn’t know there was anyone else.”

Except she knew she had a sister. A sister who might’ve had children. She knew that much. 

“Is that what you would do?” I said, harsher than I meant. “Give away everything that meant something?”

Beth shrank onto the bottom step of the curved wooden staircase. “Maybe,” she said, so quiet I had to push off the wall and lean over the banister.

I turned my wedding ring, resisting the urge to ask who she would give her favorite things to when it was time.

The moment stretched between us. I remembered climbing the rusted water tower back home with my brothers and laughing together for hours, stars blazing in a black sky above us. It had been easy with them.

Sisters were harder. The expectations were higher. I searched for something to offer her. It seemed necessary, though she’d outgrown me.

“We could spend the weekend,” Beth said.

“What for?” But I knew. To linger on the steps, drinking iced tea, trying to remember the way back to the beginning. “Anyway, I can’t.”

Beth sprang up as if I’d slapped her.

“That’s all right,” she mumbled, and fled up the stairs.

*     *     * 

I nearly went out again. My legs were restless, my back unused to not aching. I wanted to move. To saturate my eyes with green, living trees. To breathe all the dirty city smells and fill my burning stomach with something I’d never tasted before.

Grace’s couch was stiff, meant for sitting politely with fine china balanced on your knee. I forced myself to keep still, eyes on the Turkish-style rug the appraisers had seemed secretly enthralled with. The pattern left me dizzy.

No one had mentioned what Grace had done for a living. No traces of a career lingered in her home. There were no cheap plaques for forty years of sterling service to a company. No teacher’s gradebooks stacked on the bookcase. No sculptor’s tools or chef’s-caliber knives rattling around in a drawer.

Perhaps she hadn’t worked. Perhaps the house, the rug—all of it—had been bought by someone else. I smiled, lips twisting. A romance gone to dust. Beth might like that.

I plucked a seashell from the end table’s tasteful arrangement. The tight, creamy coil shot through with gray was heavier than I’d expected. I’d always thought of seashells as fragile: an abandoned home, dried out and empty. But this one felt solid.

Beth found me there later, still idly weighing the seashell. Shadows stretched across the room. I realized the hollow feeling in my stomach was hunger. I’d only eaten half a peanut butter sandwich before the appraisers arrived that afternoon. The same feeling must’ve brought Beth downstairs. She stalled in the doorway, dragging a toe along the floorboards.

“We could go out for dinner,” she said. “My treat.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I said, back rigid against the couch cushions.

“I’d like to. I haven’t been anywhere yet.” Her head rose and ducked again, her eyes barely visible behind her bangs. “And we’re leaving on Friday.”

I let out a long breath, the seashell a small anchor in my hand.

“All right,” I said. “But you don’t need to pay.”

“I know,” Beth said. She looked at me and kept looking.

“Well, we’ll see.” I stood up to close the curtains. “You should pick the place.”

Beth clicked a lamp on. We probably should’ve hugged and said we were sorry. But I didn’t know how to start.

“What’s this?” Beth asked, picking up the shell.

“Oh. Nothing.”

Beth traced a finger over the gray swirl.

“It’s pretty,” she said with her quiet smile.

“Thanks,” I said. Proud. As if I’d rescued it from the tide myself.

She held it out. “You should keep it.”

I curled my fingers around the shell, my wedding band clicking against the hard surface. No one would miss it, tucked away in my duffel bag.

“Only if you take something, too,” I said.

Later, key lime pie still puckering my lips, I noticed that the swath of lace from the end table where my seashell had nestled undisturbed for years was gone. I smiled, glad we both had something of Grace’s to keep. A secret to share.

A memento of a life we’d never known.

*     *     *     

We drove out to Tybee Island before starting home because neither of us had ever seen the ocean.

When I saw all that vast, sandy nothing, I thought of Cal. Maybe he’d set down roots in a shack behind shifting dunes. Such a place would suit him. Would suit all the Cooly children, really. Except me. It made me lonely in a way that snow-blanketed fields, empty and glaring under a distant sun, never did.

People were scattered all down the beach—walking, scuttling after children, huddled in flimsy chairs, shrinking to nothing in the distance. The constant waves made me press my arms across my middle. Beth noticed my shiver.

“It’s still warmer than home,” she reminded me with a smile.

I peeled my whipping hair away from my face. A storm was blowing in, warm and gray. It wouldn’t last long, but it’d be enough to drench us if we didn’t duck into one of the cluttered bars along the beach road offering twenty flavors of daiquiris.

Neither of us mentioned beginning our long drive north. We sipped watery cocktails, worrying our straws, widening rings seeping through our coasters.

The bar was the most familiar thing we’d found. A dim place people gathered in because it was there. A necessity not quite bordering on desperation.

“Do you wonder what it would’ve been like if we’d visited when we were kids?” Beth asked.

I imagined heat wrapped about our shoulders like a blanket. Air so thick the boys sprawled like dogs on the porch boards, while Beth floated in the magnolia-scented water of the clawfoot tub. Aunt Grace and me by a sputtering fan in the kitchen, bent over some task. Husking corn, maybe? No, that was a job from home. Shelling peas? Was that something Southern women actually did? Marking time by the plink, plink, plink of peas into a bowl.

“Mom could’ve used a break,” Beth went on. “Like you get with Jen and Joe in 4-H.”

“That’s just after school,” I said. “And then they come home, tired and hungry with a trail of dirty clothes. It’s not like they go to camp.”

Jen was already leaving printouts around from some sleep-away place with archery and kayaking. We both knew she wouldn’t be going. Not with that price tag. But the compromise would be her dropping 4-H. And what Jen didn’t have to do, Joe wouldn’t do. So the battle lines were drawn and the war was already over.

“Maybe I’ll stay longer this summer,” Beth said.

I nodded. “Mom would like that.”

So would my kids. They liked eating dinner with their aunt from the city. It made them dream of faraway things.

Jen wasn’t two when Rick died. Cal left before I was even married. He might have kids of his own by now, growing up somewhere I’d never been. I might be an aunt and never know it. Was that how it started? With our grandmother and Grace? Perhaps Beth was right. Perhaps there was something lonely running through our blood, stretching our bonds thin.

Perhaps one day my granddaughters would open a letter from a lawyer and be shocked to learn they had a Great-Uncle Cal.

Did I still have a photo of him? Of the four of us when we were young and could still be persuaded to wrap our gangly arms around each other? I hoped I did.

“Maybe we’ll send the kids to you for a week,” I said. “They’re old enough. They’d like the city.”

“And you’d like a break?” Beth smiled.

“They’re going to leave anyway. They should get a taste of it.”

Beth drew a finger around the sugared rim of her glass. “You could leave, too,” she said, voice soft in the static bar.

I turned my face to the open doorway, where rain brought a salt tang over the threshold. Grace’s ivy-wrapped house wasn’t ours to keep. But maybe if I looked hard enough, I could find my brother in a house by the sea. Or Dan and I could sell the farm and buy an apartment in the city, close to Beth. There were other lives out there. Other chances.

The wind rattled the plate-glass door. The smudged chalkboard propping it open teetered, but didn’t collapse. I shifted, turning my shoulder to the draft.

“Someone ought to stay,” I said. “For Mom.”

For Rick, sleeping by the cornfield. For Cal, in case he ever wandered home.

Beth straightened up, brushing her bangs back, a childhood posturing I hadn’t seen in years. One she had used when she wanted to look older.

“It doesn’t have to be you,” she said.

I laid a hand on the bar. The worn grain reminded me of my tightly coiled seashell: dried out and solid.

“It does,” I said. “We both know it does.”

Beth hunched over her drink, hair dancing into her eyes.

“I’m happy,” I told her. The big sister. The mother. Resigned. Reassuring. “Sometimes.”

“Me too,” Beth almost laughed. “Sometimes.”

The rain continued pelting the sidewalk. I wondered how much longer we could justify poking our straws into melting ice before we’d have to make a dash for the car and start home, clothes sticking to our skin.

“I think Grace was happy,” Beth said, suddenly.

“I hope she was,” I said.

And though I’d never known her, I meant it.

B. B. GARIN

B. B. Garin is a writer living in Buffalo, New York. Her e-chapbook New Songs for Old Radios is available from Wordrunner Press. Her work has appeared in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Luna Station Quarterly, freeze frame fiction, 3rd Wednesday, and other publications. She is currently a prose reader and editorial feedback writer for The Masters Review and CRAFT Literary. Connect with her on X @bb_garin or bbgarin.wordpress.com.