Southern Lights - A Novel Part 9

"That's it? You went out with the hottest guy in school and 'it was fun'? Did he kiss you?" Julianne wanted all the details. She had learned that from her mother. Gossip was their stock-in-trade.

"Of course not. We don't even know each other. Besides, it would be dumb to get involved with anyone now. We're all leaving for college, and I'm only here for a few months." She was practical about it. She wasn't looking for romance, just friends, which made her even more appealing. She didn't have the desperation of some of the girls in school who were always looking for boyfriends.

"There's nothing dumb about going out with Turner Ashby. Did you know his father has oil rigs all over Biloxi? My mama says he's one of the richest men in the state. And," And," she said for emphasis, "he's cute. And the captain of the soccer team. What else do you need?" Savannah was well aware that playing soccer wouldn't get him far in life, it took more than that. And she didn't care about his father's oil wells. "Did he ask you out again?" she said for emphasis, "he's cute. And the captain of the soccer team. What else do you need?" Savannah was well aware that playing soccer wouldn't get him far in life, it took more than that. And she didn't care about his father's oil wells. "Did he ask you out again?"

"No. Don't be silly. I just went out with him last night." She was totally relaxed about it.

"He will. Guys always like girls like you who don't give a d.a.m.n about them."

"I didn't say that. I liked him. I'm just not going nuts about it, like you," she teased.

"I bet he asks you out next weekend," Julianne said, sounding moonstruck and hopeful.

"I hope not. I think my mom's coming. She said she'd try, but she may not make it till the following weekend."

Julianne made a disgusted sound. "Who would you rather go out with? Turner Ashby or your mother?"

Savannah answered without an instant's hesitation. "My mother."

"You're sick." Julianne promised to check in with her again later that day to see if Turner had called her yet.

Daisy was the next member of the interrogation team.

"Who was that boy who picked you up last night?" she asked casually over pancakes in the kitchen.

"Just a boy from school."

"That's all?" Daisy asked, looking disappointed. "Is he in love with you?"

"No," Savannah said, smiling. "He hardly knows me."

"Are you in love with him?"

"No. I don't know him either," she said, her feet firmly on the ground.

"Then why'd you go out with him if you're not in love with him?" Daisy asked, looking disgusted.

"Because we wanted to eat dinner and see a movie, and I figured I might as well do it with him, since he asked." Daisy nodded at the logic of what she said, but found it pathetically unromantic. Their father walked in, in his tennis clothes, while they were talking.

"Was that one of the Ashby boys I saw you leaving the house with last night?" he asked with equal interest. Clearly, her dating life was the hot topic in town.

"Yes."

"Nice kid?"

"I think so. He seemed like it," Savannah conceded.

"I play tennis with his father. They've had some hard times. His wife died last year. A drunk driver hit her on Highway 526, five miles from home. It must be hard on the kids."

"He didn't say anything about it. We just talked about school." Tom nodded, and told her that Henry was coming in from New Orleans that afternoon.

"He's anxious to see you. He'll be home for dinner tonight. Travis and Scarlette are coming over too. The whole family will be together," he said, looking happy, as Luisa walked into the kitchen and ignored him. She said she was going to the country club for a spa day that was just for women. Tom said he was picking Henry up at the airport, and Luisa said she'd be home in the late afternoon. She left the house five minutes later, and when they were alone again, Savannah offered to take Daisy to the aquarium, which sounded like fun to both of them. It was called the South Carolina Aquarium, and was said to be very good.

She and Daisy left the house at eleven o'clock, walked all over the aquarium, and had lunch there, and came back at three in the afternoon. Tallulah said their father had just left to pick up Henry, so they played Go Fish and War and Hearts and Gin Rummy, and shortly after five o'clock Tom and Henry walked in. Daisy flew down the stairs to greet her brother. He was a year younger than Travis and was a handsome young man with a powerful athletic build. He had played football in college and instead of UVA had gone to Duke. Savannah knew that he had been an art history major and eventually wanted to teach. He wasn't interested in business like his older brother or his father, and he was working in an important art gallery in New Orleans, and as an intern at a museum. He was interested in curating too.

After Henry had lavishly hugged his younger sister, he looked up the stairs and saw Savannah smiling at him. She looked no different than she had as a little girl, as Travis had already told her, just bigger.

"I am sooooo happy to see you," Henry said softly, as he came up the stairs to where she stood and folded her into a bear hug. "I am so glad you're here. Travis and Daisy already told me all about you. I came home this weekend just to see you." And the way he said it, she believed him. They walked back down the stairs and into the living room. Fortunately, Luisa hadn't come home yet, or she would have objected to his making a fuss over Savannah. But Henry didn't care. He had never danced to his mother's tune.

They sat down and talked for a while, and he asked pertinent questions, what she liked, what she did, what her favorite music was, her favorite books and movies, the names of her friends. He wanted to know all about her. And his eyes grew sad when he asked about her mother.

"I didn't like to write when I was a kid, so I didn't. But I always thought about her, and about you. Your mom did something very special for me when she was married to our daddy," he said solemnly, as though he was about to share an important secret. "I'm dyslexic, and your mama tutored me for all those years. I hated the tutor I had, so she did it. I think she took cla.s.ses to learn how to do it. Anyway, thanks to her, I got through school. I never forgot it. She was the kindest, most patient woman I have ever known, the spirit of compa.s.sion and love." Tom had been standing in the doorway and heard Henry say it, and walked away with a pained expression. Neither Henry nor Savannah had seen him there, and then he disappeared.

"She never told me," Savannah said honestly. "That's pretty good if you got into Duke."

"It's a good school," he confirmed.

They went on talking, and eventually Luisa came home from her spa day. She came to kiss her son, and then rapidly went upstairs to change. She wasn't happy to see him talking to Savannah, but she didn't comment, and she found her husband looking unhappy in their room. He had forgotten about Alexa tutoring Henry for all those years, and how loving she had been about it. Remembering it made him feel sick.

"What's wrong with you?" Luisa asked him, noticing how unhappy he looked.

"Nothing. Just thinking. How was your spa day?"

"Very nice, thank you," she said coolly. She had no intention of warming up to him again until Savannah went back to New York. She was planning to punish him for the entire time, to teach him a lesson. She wanted him to get the message loud and clear so he didn't bring her back again. She was not going to tolerate having Alexa's daughter in her house. But so far she was overruled.

The atmosphere at dinner that night was lively and jolly, thanks to Henry. He told funny jokes, did hysterical imitations, and teased everyone, including his mother. Travis was far more reserved, although a nice person too. Scarlette loved her soon-to-be brother-in-law, and he teased her mercilessly too, about the size of the wedding. Scarlette said her younger brothers did the same. Henry was twenty-four and he looked young, but there was also something more sophisticated about him. Savannah wondered if living in another city had shown him more of the world. Travis still lived in the family coc.o.o.n in Charleston. And even their father had done so all his life. Only Henry had really left home, although he had chosen another southern city. But New Orleans was bigger and more sophisticated than Charleston, and he seemed to spend a lot of time in London and New York. He knew all of Savannah's favorite haunts in New York.

With Henry in charge of most of the conversation, everyone was in a good mood, even his mother. She asked him at the end of dinner how that lovely girl was that he went out with the previous summer, and he gave her a strange look.

"She's fine, Mama. She just got engaged."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said, gus.h.i.+ng sympathy for him, and he laughed.

"I'm not." Henry talked a lot about someone called Jeff who was his roommate. Apparently he was from North Carolina, and they had taken several trips recently. Luisa didn't ask about him.

By the time they finished dinner, everyone's sides hurt from laughing, and after they went back into the living room, Henry played cards with the girls. They were still playing when his parents said goodnight and went upstairs. Travis and Scarlette had left by then, since there was a breakfast shower for Scarlette the next day. She said she would have asked Savannah, but she'd be bored to tears. And Travis had told her she'd better not invite Savannah or his mother would be livid, so she hadn't, but felt terrible about it. But she did what Travis said.

Luisa would have liked to keep Henry away from Savannah too, but there had been no obvious way to exclude her from the evening, and she knew Henry would have objected and accused her of being rude. He never hesitated to challenge his mother, and tell her when he didn't like her behavior. He wasn't afraid of her. And Daisy had already told him on the phone that their mother had been awful to her, so he had gone out of his way to be nice to Savannah at dinner. And when he said he had come home just to see her, it was true.

Daisy fell asleep during their card game, and Henry gently carried her upstairs to her bed, while Savannah went to her room. Henry knocked on her door to see if she was decent. She was in her nightgown, brus.h.i.+ng her teeth, when he came in. He strolled right into her bathroom to chat with her, like a real brother.

"I like having another sister, one I can really talk to," he said, smiling at her in the bathroom mirror. "You've been gone for way too long."

They sat down in her room and talked some more then. He said he wanted to move to New York or London in a few years, once he figured out if he wanted to work in a gallery, a museum, or a school. But working in the art field was his dream.

"You don't want to come back here?" She looked surprised. People in the South seemed to stay close to home and cling to their roots, judging from what she had seen so far.

"Too small for me," he said simply. "This is a very small provincial city. And being gay is too complicated for me here." She looked at him in surprise.

"You are?" She hadn't figured that out, and his mother had asked about a girl he had gone out with the year before.

"I am. Jeff is my partner. I told my parents I was gay when I was eighteen. Dad wasn't thrilled, but he's okay about it. My mother acts like she forgot and doesn't know, no matter how often I remind her. Like the girl she asked me about going out with. She knows I don't go out with women. I figured out I was gay about a year after your mom left, when I was fifteen. By sixteen I knew for sure. It shouldn't be a big deal, but for some people it is-my mother, for one. She's going to ask me about the women I go out with till I'm a hundred years old. She's probably hoping I'll get 'cured.' My being gay just wasn't in her plan. I think she's relieved I don't live in Charleston. It would be too embarra.s.sing for her, and too hard for me. She still lies to her friends."

"How weird," Savannah said, looking puzzled. "What difference does it make to her?"

"It's not 'normal,' as she puts it, or 'right.' But it is for me."

"That's just who you are," Savannah said, smiling at him. "It shouldn't be a big deal. Does Daisy know?" she asked, curious about it.

"They'd kill me if I told her, but she'll figure it out sometime. I don't think Travis is too thrilled about it either. He's a lot more like them than I am. He's a small-town boy who wants to do everything he can to make them happy and fit in their mold. I'd commit suicide if I married Scarlette, but she's just right for him, a nice southern girl."

"You're sounding like a Yankee," Savannah teased him.

"Maybe I am at heart. There are a lot of hypocrisies I don't like here, or maybe it's just a small-town thing. I hate seeing people covering up what they really think and feel, just to be polite or fit in. There's a lot of that here. It's all okay, if you have a couple of Confederate generals in the family, but not a gay son, at least not in this family. They tolerate it, but don't like it. s.h.i.+t, for all we know, maybe all those generals were gay." They both laughed, and then he looked serious again. "It wouldn't have mattered to your mother. She was the most loving woman I've ever known. I didn't know I was gay when she was here, but afterward I wondered if she knew before I did. She's very sharp."

Savannah nodded, proud of her mother.

"Is your mom okay?" he asked her, and Savannah nodded. "She really got a s.h.i.+t deal from my mom and dad. I take it she never remarried, from what Travis said the other day. I asked him."

"No," Savannah said, "she didn't. She's only thirty-nine, though. But she's still pretty mad about your dad," she said honestly. "Or hurt, I guess."

"She has a right to be," he said, equally honest. "My mother really screwed her over, and Dad let her. I think their relations.h.i.+p has been lousy ever since, but Dad stays in it, and my mother walks all over him. She walked out on all of us when she left my dad. And everyone conveniently forgets she did. That's just the way it works." He looked disapproving as he said it.

"I've seen it," Savannah admitted. "She's furious about me."

"Too bad. He should have brought you back here years ago. I feel terrible that I never reached out to you or your mom. I let it happen too. I was fourteen then, and I hated what they were doing. And then, I don't know, high school, college, life, I never did anything about it," he said. "But I'm glad you're here. I hope I see your mom too one of these days. I have a lot to tell her."

"She's going to try and visit me every couple of weeks. We had a great time last weekend. She didn't want to come back here, but she did."

"It must be tough for her," he acknowledged, as Savannah nodded. They were both thinking about Alexa, and then Henry finally got up, gave her a hug, and went to his own room. Daisy had slept in her own bed that night. And Savannah lay under the covers thinking about what Henry had told her. She didn't see what difference it made that he was gay. But she was from New York, not from Charleston. Things were different here.

Chapter 13.

As Julianne had predicted, Turner Ashby asked Savannah out again. They went to RB's Seafood Restaurant and Raw Bar for dinner, and they talked about more personal things. He told her about losing his mother the year before. He said they were doing okay, but it was hard on his father and younger brothers. There were tears in his eyes as he said it, so it was obvious that it was hard on him as well, but he didn't say it. He didn't want to look weak to her. Turner said he was glad he was leaving for college, it was too sad at home without her. And Savannah talked about growing up essentially without a dad. They both agreed that it was nice she was getting to know him now, although it was difficult dealing with her evil step-mom. Savannah told him about it and he was shocked, although he had never liked her either, and always thought she was a sn.o.b. Now he knew she was cruel as well, and rude.

Turner was a very kind, thoughtful, respectful person, and he treated her with all the grace and good manners for which the South was known. He said he really enjoyed her company, and wanted to see her more often, but she said her mother was coming to visit the following weekend. He asked if she minded if he'd drop by the house sometime, and she said that was fine. It was more like an old-fas.h.i.+oned courts.h.i.+p than two high school seniors dating, but at the end of the second date, he kissed her, which Savannah liked a lot. They were having a very nice time together, and she promised to introduce him to her mother when she came back to town.

She told Alexa all about it, who started getting nervous again. What if Savannah fell in love? What if they got married and she stayed in Charleston? She rattled her worries off to her mother, who laughed at her this time.

"She's seventeen years old. She's not going anywhere. They're just having fun." Alexa realized it was true and calmed down.

Her nerves were on edge these days. The trial was seven weeks away, and she had a thousand details on her mind. No new victims had turned up, and she was preparing her case with infinite precision and care.

The day after Savannah had gone out with Turner Ashby, she drove over to see her grandmother on her own. She had a free afternoon, and she thought it might be a nice thing to do, although she wondered if she should have called first. She found her sitting on the porch, dozing in her rocking chair with a book in her hand. Eugenie's eyes flew open as soon as she heard footsteps on the porch and she was surprised to see Savannah looking down at her, in a yellow sweats.h.i.+rt and jeans.

"What are you doing here?" her grandmother asked sharply, startled to see Savannah there.

"I thought you might like a visit, so I came by," Savannah said cautiously, as her grandmother frowned.

"You should have called first. We don't like northern ways here," she scolded her. "Southerners are polite."

"I'm sorry." Savannah looked instantly apologetic and somewhat mortified. "I'll come back another time and call first." She started to leave and her grandmother pointed sternly to a chair.

"No, you're here now. Sit down. Why did you come here?" She was curious about her, and Savannah looked scared. Her grandmother was a daunting figure, even as an old lady.

"I just thought it would be nice to visit. I like hearing all the stories about the war, the generals, the battles. We don't learn much about that in New York." It was true, but she had come mostly to be kind to an old woman, but couldn't say that to her.

"What would you like to know?" Her grandmother smiled and was intrigued by the request. There was southern blood in her after all.

"Tell me about your family. It's part of my history too."

"Yes, it is," Eugenie acknowledged, and she liked the idea of sharing it with this young girl. It was the best way for ancestors to be remembered and history to be pa.s.sed on, telling stories from one generation to another.

She began with her great-grandfather, when he had come from France, and made her way down through several generations, marriages, and generals, when they came to Charleston, how much land they owned, and how many slaves. She made no apology for it, she said it was essential for cultivating the land, and how many slaves you owned was considered part of their wealth in those days. Savannah winced at that. It was a new idea to her, and not one she liked any more than any other culture that had owned slaves.

They eventually made it to the Civil War, and Eugenie's eyes lit up. She knew every date and detail about every major battle in the South, all the ones that had been fought in and around Charleston, who had won them, who had lost. She added personal stories about who people were married to, if they'd been widowed, and if they'd remarried. She was a walking encyclopedia of Civil War and Charleston history, and Savannah was fascinated as she listened. Her grandmother had a fine memory for dates and details and talked for hours. No one had ever listened to her in such rapt attention for as long. It was dinnertime when she stopped. She had been revitalized by remembering every detail and sharing it with Savannah. And she had promised to share some books with her as well. Savannah actually loved it, and it intrigued her to think that she was related to some of those people. It was a whole other side of her life and history that she had never known anything about and wouldn't have otherwise, were it not for her grandmother's recollections.

Savannah thanked her profusely before she left, helped her into the small parlor where she liked to sit at night, and left her with one of her two ancient maids and kissed her cheek.

"That's South Carolina blood in your veins," she reminded Savannah, "and don't you forget it! That's not just Yankee blood in you!"

"Yes, Grandmother," Savannah said, smiling at her. She had had a wonderful afternoon, and was still thinking about it as she drove back to Thousand Oaks.

Daisy complained about where she'd been so late, and Savannah said quietly that she'd been to see their grandmother.

"All by yourself?" Daisy looked surprised as Savannah nodded. "It's so boring there!" Daisy hated going to see her, there was nothing for her to do, and her grandmother was so old. She hated all that "general" stuff her grandmother talked about.

"No, it's not boring," Savannah defended her. "She knows everything about everything and everyone in the South. I learned a lot." Daisy made a face in response. She couldn't think of a worse way to spend an afternoon. When her grandmother tried to tell her about her roots, she didn't want to know. She'd rather stay home and watch TV. Seven years older, Savannah had soaked it up like a sponge.

Daisy's parents were out at a dinner party that night, together for once, so Savannah never got a chance to tell her father about the visit. But his mother told him the next day when he stopped by to see her after lunch.

"She's a very good girl," Eugenie said, looking at him. He had no idea who she meant, and he thought it was the maid, whom she often referred to that way. She also called male employees "boys," which seemed rude. But it was of her times.

"Who?" Tom said, looking blank.

"Your daughter," she said with a spark in her eye he hadn't seen in a while.

"Daisy?"

"Savannah! She came here for a history lesson, about the South. She listens carefully, remembers everything. That's southern blood in those pretty young veins. She wanted to know everything about our family, and more. She's a very special girl."

"I know she is," he said, looking amazed. "She came here alone?"