Synopsis | Reviews | Excerpt
Pickles are mentioned in the Bible. Cleopatra ate them as a beauty
regimen. Shakespeare put them in his plays. Mason designed jars for bottling
them. So did Ball. Did Mason and Ball fight over the King of the Pickle Jars title? I don’t know. I did know this much: I used pickles to keep fear, pride,
and my love of Jay Wakefield behind a door I would not risk opening again. Even
now.
Wakefields take what they want. MacBrides never surrender. For nearly
a hundred years, a battle of wills between these two deeply-rooted Appalachian
families has ended in defeat and heartache—most often, for MacBrides. Now the
MacBride name is barely more than a legend, and it’s up to Gabby MacBride to
deal with the pain of her childhood memories and also the challenge of a
MacBride legacy she’s only beginning to understand.
That will mean coming to terms with her bittersweet love for Jay
Wakefield, the lonely rich boy who became her soul mate when they were kids,
before the dark demands of his own legacy forced him to betray her.
Gabby comes home to Asheville.
Coming soon!
Part One
Gabby
2012
Pickles are our friends, not
just our food
PICKLES ARE mentioned in the Bible. Cleopatra ate them as a beauty
regimen. Shakespeare put them in his plays. Mason designed jars for bottling
them. So did Ball. Did Mason and Ball fight over the King of the Pickle Jarstitle? I don’t know. I did know this much: I used pickles to keep fear, pride,
and my love of Jay Wakefield behind a door I would not risk opening again. Even
now.
My pre-Christmas lecture from Tal
THEY CALLED ME the bossy one and Tal the sweet one, but in the
past two weeks, since Tal left New York for cousin Delta’s cove high in the
mountains above Asheville, North Carolina, my and Gus’s baby sister had
transformed into an Appalachian hoodoo woman. For the first time in her
life, thanks to Scottish veterinarian Dr. Douglas Firth, our biscuit witch was
in love, with extra butter on top. She now claimed to have the all-seeing
vision of a spirit bear, the earth-mother insights of a country-western singer,
and the we-must-return-to-our-roots fervor of a trout swimming upstream to
spawn.
I’m not certain mountain
trout do that, but if they do, Tallulah Bankhead MacBride had become their
honorary swimming instructor.
She emailed me before Christmas, not knowing I was in a Los Angeles courtroom
fighting to prove I hadn’t stolen five million dollars from my movie-star
partner.
Dear
Big Sister,
There’s
something going on between you and Jay Wakefield. Admit it. Not just from when
we were kids. When he came to the Cove to make that cold-blooded offer about
hiring us to work for him at Free Wheeler (when he knows we’re the rightful
heirs!), my food angels couldn’t get a good grip on his secrets and pain. But
now that Doug and I are lovers, my angels have expanded their menu! The same
thing happened when Eve was born. I’m full of aromas and everyone around me is
a glory-full meal of spiritual flavors!
It’s true
what Mama always said: It tastes good to be alive!
So here’s
what my foodie angels are telling me: Jay has turned into baking chocolate.
He’s got barely enough sugar left to qualify as "bittersweet.” He’s desperate
for more sugar. Just like when we were kids, only much, much worse. For love.
Trust. Family. For you. You, Gabby. You. He needs you like cocoa butter needs
vanilla.
I know I
told you to let me and Doug handle him. I told you not to listen when Delta was
egging you on with all that talk about, "Go after him, just remember you can
catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, Pickle Queen.”
But I was
wrong. You need to go after him. Come here. Come home.
Where we
were born. Where we belong.
I came
home. Now you and Gus come home, too.
Love, Tal
"THE HEARING’S about to start.” My lawyer laid her hand on my
shoulder. You know things are bad when your attorney keeps patting you.
My senses filled with avocado and lemon. The lawyer’s safe place.
Tal’s foodie angels brought her visions of baked goods. Mine brought
brine, peppers, spices, tastes that bit back. If my chances of walking away
without being charged with embezzlement got any worse, my lawyer was going to
turn into guacamole.
I closed the cover on my phone and stood.
I wasn’t going back to North
Carolina. Or back to Jay. Not ever. The sweet boy I
remembered was lost inside a bitter man. He’d become what he’d once hated most.
A Wakefield.
Jay
Wakefield, MacBride, Nettie, Whittlespoon
Atop The Rock of Ages
1989
LOVE IS AN OPEN vein in a mountain of granite rock. Elemental. Gabby
and I were bonded under pressure, sealed in the earth, surfaced by heat,
crystalized by fire. Like sands through the hour glass, these are the days of
the lies we survived. Our Wakefield-MacBride legacy started deep inside the
rock of ages.
SAND. SILICA. SILICON Dioxide. SiO2. Known since ancient times.
Quartz. The most common working-class rock on the planet. The bedrock under the
mattress of the Blue Ridge Mountains that cover our part of North Carolina.
My great-grandfather Augustus didn’t know or care about the minerals
under the surface of Free Wheeler when he bankrupted Arlo Claptraddle by buying
his competition and driving bicycle prices into the ground; Augustus just
wanted revenge for Arlo rescuing, hiding, and winning the heart of Augustus’s
extraordinary cook, a young mountain beauty named Emma Nettie. Back in the
1940s, Emma was on Great-Grandfather’s short list for the next opening in his
long list of mistresses. Her lack of interest in the position didn’t stop him
from locking her in a room at his Asheville
mansion until she came to her senses.
She escaped and headed back to her family near the Crossroads Cove,
only to be tracked by Augustus’s hired security men. She found refuge in the
strange world of inventor and bicycle maker Arlo, whose Clapper Motion Machines
were built in the community he invented with all the whimsy of a cross between
Walt Disney and a post-Victorian Mad Hatter.
For the next ten years, she lived with, worked with, loved and
inspired Arlo, going under the name Rose Dooley. He designed a bike for her. He
adored her. He would have married her, if he hadn’t been separated from a wife
in his wealthy circles. Divorce wasn’t an option. The paperwork would have
exposed Emma’s identity.
Eventually, in the 1950s, Great-Grandfather found her. You don’t take
a woman from a Wakefield.
You don’t take anything from a Wakefield.
Not and live to talk about it.
So that, friends, is the short version of how Free Wheeler, an
abandoned and haunted bicycle village near the cove, came to be the property,
in perpetuum, of Wakefields, to serve as a warning to anyone who ever
thought about crossing us again.
Like putting a head of your enemy on a stake outside your castle
walls.
Now, that head had become surprisingly valuable.
Fifty feet beneath Dad’s Birkenstock sandals and Uncle E.W.’s
tasseled loafers lay a vein of Carolina
quartz so pure it could be pulverized into sand as white as bleached cotton.
Wakefield Mining and Land Development considered quartz a throwaway. Scrape the
valuable feldspar and mica out of the ground, separate the quartz that ran
through it, sell the quartz sand to golf courses. It made those eye-popping
sugar-white sand traps people saw on television at the Masters Tournament.
Until a little worldwide revolution called the silicon chip came
along. North Carolina
quartz became the gourmet truffle of silica, worth fortunes.
"I inherited the surface access, right?” E.W. said loudly, snapping
his fingers in the thick summer air.
One of his attorneys stepped forward with a document, as if the mere
appearance of a piece of paper was drama enough for the wild and isolated
setting. "You know that. It’s a standard easement.”
Thick blue-green mountains rose around Free Wheeler’s weedy main
street and sad, haunted buildings—all that remained of Arlo Claptraddle’s
bicycle shops, his factory and the little town he built for the workers who
became his family. A magical mountain village where people rode their
Claptraddle bicycles on pretty paths to the cottages he built all through the
valley, all the way to the fancy pavement of the Asheville Trace and into the
Crossroads Cove, where the Jeffersons and Whittlespoons and Netties and other
old families filled their bicycle baskets with fine corn whiskey; and where the
friendly roadside farmhouse of Delta Whittlespoon’s grandmother would one day
become Delta’s famous Crossroads Café Diner.
"I have the right to dig up as much of this God-forsaken piece of
Nothing as need be,” my uncle insisted, as his private security men stepped
forward with folded arms. Uncle E.W. was hated by a lot of people; nothing new
for us Wakefields, but did he really believe I, Dad and Lawyer George were
going to jump him? Behind him and his army of suits waited bulldozers and
graders ridden by men in yellow hardhats. We’d be bulldozed before we got half
a chance to attack.
"Go home, Elba,” Dad said. "We’re
rich. We don’t need more money. We need to keep what’s left of our souls.”
"My soul wants progress, Baby Brother. Job creation. Tax money going
to the coffers of our great state. And raw materials for the technology
revolution that will keep our great nation at the forefront
of...”
"Save your rhetoric for interviews and press releases. You want to
own every mining property in this part of the state. You’ve put most of your
investments in off-shore accounts, you’ve bribed regulators to look the other
way and bought politicians and strong-armed activists. It’s a family tradition,
I know. But this is one place where our family name is not going to be attached
to the wholesale destruction and desecration of a historic site, not to mention
a pristine natural environment.”
"I’ve been patient long enough, Tommy. There’s not a damned thing
worth preserving here. It’s just a bunch of old buildings in the middle of the
woods, full of junked bicycle parts and cobwebs.”
"It should be given to Arlo’s heirs.”
"There are none.”
"That’s debatable. Emma had a daughter...”
"No proof of paternity. And it wouldn’t matter anyway. Grandfather’s
will says this property stays in our family. If you try to hand it off to
strangers, you forfeit it to me.”
"I understand that, Brother. That’s why I’m going to protect it. I
have no choice.”
"I’ll give you twenty percent of the net profit from the quarry I
develop. You can’t legally stop me, Tommy.” He shook the document. "By God,
I’ve got mining rights. Those include the access right. An easement to come
onto this property and dig.”
I looked up at Dad with my fists clenched in the pockets of my
khakis. Did even God know that E.W. Wakefield was the majority stockholder and
CEO of one of the biggest mining companies in the southeast? That Wakefields
had been gouging fortunes out of these mountains since the late eighteen
hundreds?
Dad looked so tired. He’d inherited Free Wheeler from their father as
a throwaway gift to a sickly second son. E.W. got the good stuff—the mining
rights. Dad got the useless, pretty surface. Dad wanted it that way.
Dad leaned on his cane. A lifetime of type 1 diabetes had taken a
toll on the nerve endings in his feet. He was a tall skinny pine tree pushed
sideways by an ice storm. I stood as close beside him as I could without impugning
his dignity by shoving a shoulder into his hip to hold him up. I was tall for
eleven, but he was the size of the Olympian giants. In my eyes, at least.
"Elba,” he said in an elegant
uplands drawl, "couldn’t you just once do the righteous thing?”
"Arlo Claptraddle nearly killed Grandfather. He assaulted him. The
bastard died in prison. Rightfully so. I’ve got no qualms.”
"This place should be preserved, regardless,” Dad said.
"Sir?” Dad’s assistant whispered. He had been listening intently on a
satellite phone he clutched to one ear.
"Yes, George?” Dad looked tired. I leaned into his shadow. I loved
him more than breathing. Even more than he loved me. And he loved me even more
than he loved old buildings, history, doing the right thing, comic books, and
honesty.
Lawyer George—my nickname for George Avery—whispered to Dad, his
thinning blond hair ruffled and sweaty, his open golf shirt showing a slight
stain where his wife hadn’t quite smudged out the burp-up from their baby. Dad
could afford an entourage; he just didn’t like the idea. "You’re better backup
than ten lawyers and a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot plus three Godzillas and a team
of X-Men,” he always said to George and me.
George finished whispering. Dad looked at E.W. "Give me five minutes,
Elba. I have proof that your access rights
belong to someone else.”
Uncle E.W.’s lawyers did everything except roll their eyes and laugh.
One of them stepped forward and handed E.W. a folder. He held it up
triumphantly. "Court order,” he said. He waved the folder at the men behind
him.
A bulldozer rumbled.
My stomach clenched. I looked up at Dad’s gaunt face. Unzipping the
hip pack I always carried, I pulled out a small bottle of orange juice. "Cap’n,
it’s time to re-fuel your jet pack.”
George gave me an approving thumbs-up. "Sir, Junior Commander Jay is
making an excellent suggestion. Let’s conference in the shade of a tree and—”
Dad cut us off with a gently-raised hand. He tilted his head,
listening. In the distance, along a rutted trail that ran back through the woods
toward the place people called the Crossroads Cove, came the sound of a car
engine. Dad smiled. "The Rebels are here early. I knew they’d make it.” He
winked at me. "Darth Elba doesn’t stand a chance.”
A brown and white SUV rumbled into view. Muddy with big tires, fog
lights and blue lights on top and a Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department seal
on each side. A tall young deputy in khaki pants and a short-sleeve shirt
stepped out; from the front passenger seat popped a sexy brown-haired woman in
tight blue jeans and a tank top. She carried a big paper bag with twine
handles. It bulged with mysterious contents. Her eyes crinkled when she saw the
Us Against Them scene. She liked bad odds, I decided.
The deputy opened the SUV’s back door. A little old man in overalls
climbed out, and the deputy helped him put on a dark formal coat over the
overalls. Then the woman took his arm to steady him. With her acting as his
prop, the three of them headed our way.
The warm June air brought a scent to me. Bread, buttery, rich. The
woman smiled down at me as if she knew I was hypnotized. She reached inside the
bag. "Here. You must be Jay.” Her mountain drawl was as soulful as the aroma
around her.
I glanced from her to Dad. He nodded. I took the plastic-wrapped
biscuit she offered. It was bigger than a grown man’s fist and still warm from
the oven. The aroma went through the shield of my skin and up my arm. I’d been
biscuitized.
"Delta, Deputy. I present Jayson Wakefield. Jay, this is Deputy Pike
Whittlespoon and Mrs. Whittlespoon.”
"Very pleased to meet you,” I said. My hand felt heavy and happy,
holding the magical biscuit.
Deputy Whittlespoon cupped my shoulder in a fatherly way, then
stepped aside. "Thomas, this is Judge Rescule Solbert. Been retired a few
decades but still sits on the bench once a month over in Turtleville—”
"See here, now, you conniving Wakefield horn-rimming rock hound!” the
ancient Jefferson County judge said loudly, shuffling toward Uncle E.W. Delta
set her bag of biscuits down and hustled along beside him, though his agitated
quickstep seemed pretty secure. He dug a veined hand inside his coat and pulled
out a piece of paper, which he held up between wizened fingers. "Nineteen
sixty-nine! The Dog House. We called it a ‘private club’ to keep the preachers
and the church ladies and the law of a damn dry county satisfied. Jack Farmer
and his daughters ran it out of what had been the old Little Finn River Road
Toll Store. Had a coupla TVs, a pool table, some card tables, a bar, a juke
box, dart boards. Had a cooler full of good beer and a locker full of better
liquor.” He shook the paper under E.W.’s nose. "Little Finn River Road. You Wakefields know that
name. You murderin’ bunch of thieves. Wiped out all those MacBrides back in the
thirties, turned that whole valley into a tomb... your devil
granddaddy, rot in hell, Augustus Wakefield—”
The security men leapt forward. So did Delta. She planted herself
between the judge and his goons, her hands on her hips.
Her husband called out, "Don’t hurt ’em, pussycat.”
E.W. sliced the air. "Old man, say what you’ve got to say.” Uncle
E.W. drew himself up to his full six-four, disdaining the withered old mountain
judge and his colorful details of the local road house. "Is there a point to
this?”
Judge Solbert grinned at him from behind Delta’s freckled shoulder,
showing a fake-perfect bottom denture but no upper teeth.
Judge Bulldog.
"The point, Elba Wyatt Wakefield, is that I was there the night your
daddy wagered this property’s digging rights in a poker game. And he lost. I
witnessed the transaction and signed it.”
Uncle E.W.’s mouth drew up in prune. "I assume you’re waving a copy
of that so-called wager?”
"Tee hee, you bet, you greedy bastard. Go back to Asheville and figure out how to gouge
fortunes out of these hills somewhere else.” He shoved the paper into my
uncle’s hand. "Mary Eve Nettie won the easement in that game. Won it fair and
square. I knew Wakefields can’t be trusted, so I got a lot more witnesses’
signatures besides my own, that night.”
E.W. glanced at the paper as if it repelled him, then flung it at his
lawyers. They huddled over it like crows ganging up on a snake. One look at
their combined stare of dismay said the snake was a big one.
E.W. shoved past Delta and the judge, thrusting his finger at Dad as
he advanced. "That goddamned right is useless to whoever this Mary Eve Nettie
is! I’ll buy it from her!”
"She’s my cousin,” Delta called, "and she knew what it was worth, and
she didn’t want this place destroyed. She said so until her dying day.”
"Then she left the access right to an heir.”
"That would be me,” Delta said. "And you can go to hell. I’m keeping
it.” She looked at Dad. "No offense, but it’s better off with me than with you,
cause if I get ‘accidentally’ dead thanks to your brother, a whole of pack of
hillbillies will wage war on him until the end of time. You can’t beat that.”
Dad smiled. "No, I can’t.” He nodded to George. "Explain the legal
fine points to E.W. and his team, George.”
Lawyer George puffed out his chest in a way that said, Yes I got
my degree at No Name U instead of Duke, while working as a waiter at a Red
Lobster, so what? He rattled off a long explanation of the current status
for a vague mining right passed down by inheritance from Augustus to William
then parlayed out of William’s ownership via a poker game twenty years ago, now
owned by Delta Whittlespoon.
When he finished, Judge Solbert cackled. "That, fellows, is
ten-dollar lawyer talk for ‘Y’all are up shit creek on this one.’”
E.W. exploded. "That access right is mine, and I will regain
it, Tommy, even if I have to twist your arm or break your neck or find your
weak spot I will, and if you get in my way again—”
"You’ve never frightened me,” Dad said, which I didn’t doubt, because
Dad believed in guardian spirits, in angels, and said that powers bigger than
any of us had made the stars and the earth, the rocks of ages, the eternity of
love. E.W. and all his minions couldn’t beat that. But Dad’s voice had a
thready sound I recognized. Probably a drop in his blood sugar. "Don’t even
try,” Dad started, then halted.
Lawyer George grabbed his arm. I tossed the shoulder pack and he
unzipped it.
"Dad, drink some OJ!”
I got between Dad and E.W., who continued to head straight toward us,
finger jabbing, face furious. A rush of things happened: security men running
up, Deputy Whittlespoon jumping in the middle, but I focused on E.W.’s stomach.
I was tall for my age, so when I drew back a fist it was level with my uncle’s
breastbone. Because I went to an alternative education school (the courses
included Spiritual Wealth, Leadership Ethics, and Community Living,) my sports
were also alternative, meaning yoga and non-violent tai chi.
I opted for something out of Dad’s collection of Kung Fu movies.
I jabbed my uncle in the soft spot below the ribcage. Solar plexus.
He clutched his chest and went down.
Behind me, so did Dad.
"HOLD HIS HAND, sweetie, hold his hand and pray,” Delta Whittlespoon
whispered in my ear as Dad died. Her arms were around me from behind, her cheek
was pressed close to mine, but we both sat there helplessly as Deputy
Whittlespoon performed CPR and Lawyer George talked intensely to Dad’s
cardiologist in Asheville.
Dad’s big, thin hand was clenched so tight inside both of mine I thought he was
holding on, but it was me doing all the holding. He seemed to be looking up at
me but also at the trees and the mountains, the funny old buildings of Free
Wheeler, loving me and all of that.
Take care of it for us, Jay.
I will. I swear.
He saw farther into the heart of the air, the Appalachians,
the universe, until finally he got so far away he couldn’t hear me begging him
to stay.
Uncle E.W. stood off to one side, holding his stomach, not even
crying.
Watching me, the heir.
Gabby
Smoke got
in their eyes
THE DAY I FIRST met Jay I was armed for trouble and in a mood to
whack strangers. Again. Five sneaky neighbor kids, three street bums and two
dogs had tried to steal food from the front-yard smokers. It wasn’t like they
couldn’t get free handouts. A big sandwich board right by the front walkway
said, If You Can’t Pay Today, You Can Pay Later. Right beside that sign hung a
big iron cow bell. All a person had to do was clang it. Me or Gus would come
around from the back yard, bringing take-out boxes, and we’d fill them up, no questions
asked.
Only dogs and Daddy’s buddies in the police department got a pass on
the clanging rule. Nobody else.
Mama—Jane Eve Nettie MacBride—said God gave her and her children—me,
Tal and Gus—the gift of food magic as our special way to offer love to others.
To feed the heartsick and needy, to soothe the dispirited. After all, who knew
when we might be serving up a buffet to an angel, unawares?
Daddy—Stewart MacBride—however, said that God helped those who helped
themselves, and that he and Mama were going to restore the Nettie-MacBride
family names to their rightful place in mountain society. Make people stop
whispering that they were cast-offs raised by kinfolk, both from histories
rumored to be scandalous. Family was everything. Mama and Daddy’s merged pride
would bring a golden glow back to the MacBride name. They would open a
restaurant, like Mama’s cousin Delta Whittlespoon had done over at the
Crossroads Cove, and it would be the best restaurant in Asheville.
Daddy couldn’t cook, but he could be a redheaded Rock of Gibraltar.
His first calling: Family. Taking care of Mama and us. Second? Taking care of
the good citizens of Asheville and his fellow
police officers, just as he’d taken care of his brother soldiers in Vietnam. Third:
Making our family so rich that we could hire people to whack people who stole
from the front-yard smokers.
Family Family Family. Always Family. If you weren’t some kind of
Family to us, you weren’t on the radar. Not in Daddy’s world. Or mine.
Jay
Jay
becomes the landlord
"TURN THERE, PLEASE,” I said to Lawyer George.
He and his wife and their baby now shared the top floor of a 1910
piano manufacturing factory Dad had left me, just a block off the busy streets
of Pack Square.
Even after Dad renovated it, the high-ceiling, thick-beamed industrial loft was
drafty and haunted; even when Dad was with me, it felt like we were floating on
a forgotten cloud above the streets just one story below. I liked the feeling,
still.
Lawyer George steered Dad’s vintage diesel Mercedes out of town and
down a steep hill into the old river district, where the shells of forgotten
mills and factories moldered along the French Broad.
Dad (and now I) owned three properties the city kept threatening to firebomb,
but he had been talking to local artists about turning them into studios.
Lawyer George had all of Dad’s notes about that.
"Across the river?” Lawyer George said worriedly, as if we needed
shots and a passport. He waved a hand against the summer wind. The Diesel
Farter had no air conditioning. We puttered across the bridge above the French
Broad and up the hill into the wilds of West Asheville.
Kind of the ’burbs that time forgot. Some old brick store fronts lined the main
drag that ran atop the ridge, forming a spine for steep, narrow streets that
dropped down through thick forest and kudzu jungles. Most of the houses were
little clapboard cottages from before the 1950s, and they weren’t in good
condition.
"Delta said this is where they live.”
She said if I wanted to "do right,” I could at least make friends
with Jane Eve—Emma’s daughter—and her family. Nobody would ever know if Arlo
was Jane Eve’s father; he had been in prison for attacking Great-Grandfather
when Jane Eve was born. The dates were vague; there had been another man in
Emma’s life after Arlo went to prison. No one talked about the details, and
Emma died when Jane Eve was just a few weeks old.
So Jane Eve MacBride—a Nettie on her mother’s side—was probably not
the Claptraddle heir, and I couldn’t give her Free Wheeler anyway, if she was.
I’d keep very quiet about all that history.
The less your uncle knows about the places and the people you love,
the safer they’ll be, Dad had always
told me.
"I hope these people have electricity,” Lawyer George said.
"Plumbing. A roof. I should have asked my wife to pack my camping gear.”
We turned off down a lane where wisteria and trumpet creeper vine
hung over the pavement in purple/orange chaos. We rattled past fallen mailboxes
and overgrown foundations, skirting the fingers of cracked driveways that
disappeared into the roots of trees that owned them now, and rounded a curve
into what, by then, seemed to me to be a wonderland of nothing.
That’s when the sides of the lane opened up, having been bush-hogged
enough to let cars park on the sides. A line of cars two dozen long filled both
sides, stretching down the shady lane and around another curve. Pickups and old
sedans, BMWs and junkers, minivans and Jaguars. Even a couple of small tour
buses.
The hair rose on the back of my neck. Must be a funeral.
Lawyer George drove slowly, arrowing between the narrow space left in
the middle. People strolled past, casually dressed, many carrying take-out
boxes and containers. Beyond the bend, a huge oak tree shadowed a big new metal
mailbox painted white with MACBRIDE on the side in fat red letters. Parked cars
continued past the mailbox and down a wooded hill.
I gazed out my open window at an old cottage sporting fresh paint and
lots of repairs, a sunny, mown lawn full of metal monsters I couldn’t quite
describe, and a big side yard—over an acre—filled with picnic tables shaded by
a couple of big trees plus tents and umbrellas. Every table was full of people,
and every person was busy eating mounds of food off mismatched china plates.
I pointed at an Asheville
police car parked far down the lane. "Mr. MacBride is a police officer. It must
be all right to park on the street. I’ll take over from here. You go in and
discuss the lease offer. I’ll park the car.”
After all, I tested at a learner’s permit level of maturity according
to my teachers at Horizon. The Horizon
Academy was that
alternative-ed school. I had a feeling Officer MacBride wouldn’t be impressed
by tests that included a section on psychic awareness. But I was a Wakefield and accustomed
to certain privileges. Lawyer George hemmed and hawed, then shrugged and gave
in.
I was determined to be the master of my lonely fate and to honor
Dad’s devotion to doing good things for the people around him, the community,
the less fortunate than us. Somehow, this web of the spirit would hold our
islands together, would keep their foundations inside us.
