Page 17 of August Lane
Birdie had called her brave, but that man made her the biggest coward. There was no way she could face him, not when her life was a desolate canyon. The only music she still made was as a back row alto in the First Baptist choir, because it was a Lane family tradition. Birdie was the first to sing at the church, sending her elegant soprano to the rafters in a way that caught the eye of a deacon almost twice her age. Caroline, Birdie’s oldest daughter, led the praise and worship team despite having an average voice, something appropriate for lullabies and starting happy birthday songs. Then came Jojo, the star, hitting those impossibly high notes that made the congregation thank almighty God for such a blessing.
August didn’t sing like Jojo or Birdie. She didn’t even have her aunt Caroline’s lifeless tone. Her voice was throaty chaos that insisted on getting louder instead of higher, with a vocal fry that her grandmother had given up trying to train out of her years ago. It was a voice people called interesting but never beautiful, the kind you couldn’t comfortably sink into. Every choir director had buried it beneath more polished singers to tame its impact, which had bothered her when she was younger and desperate to be on someone’s stage. These days, she was grateful to have a small sliver of something that used to be her world.
But Luke wouldn’t see it that way. “What sliver?” is what he’d say, if he bothered to speak to her at all. “Your mouth was moving, but I couldn’t hear a thing.”
August’s hopes of slipping into the church unnoticed evaporated as soon as she entered the sanctuary. A line of heads whipped around to stare. Shirley sat in the front pew, proudly displaying a large bruise onher chin. To her left was Terry, a lifelong apostate, stuffed like a sausage into a dark suit he’d pulled from the back of his closet. His eyes were fixed firmly on the floor.
A rough hand jerked her backward until she stood behind a tall, skinny body encased in a jarring floral print that reminded her of Birdie’s bedsheets. Mavis Reed’s wide-brimmed hat was supposed to be pinned at a jaunty angle but had skewed sideways into an imperfect lurch, a flaw that was completely out of character. Her cousin kept an iron grip on her pastor’s wife image, which included being photo ready at all times in outfits she copied from Pinterest andGreenleafepisodes.
Still facing the congregation with a fake smile, Mavis hissed, “What are you doing here?” Her chignon was an oil slick, the relaxed hair slathered with a pound of Eco Styler and pulled tight enough to make her skin pucker at the edges. Paired with her bared teeth, the effect was slightly ghoulish.
“It’s Sunday,” August said. “Where else would I be?”
Mavis shot her murder eyes and then dragged her to the pastor’s study. She rounded on August the moment the door closed. “Are you trying to start another fight? Or finish the last one?”
“I didn’t start anything.” The image of Shirley’s flailing arms flashed in her mind. “I defended myself when she slapped me.”
“You slept with her husband and showed up at her house.”
“Terry slept withme,” August snapped. “He told me they had filed for divorce. And I was only at the house to return a gift he should have given Shirley, not to rub it in her face. I was doing him a favor.”
“Of course you were,” Mavis said, with a sigh of weariness that made August feel like she’d failed some test. “Why did you trust him? He can’t be the first man who ever lied to you.”
August immediately thought of Luke. Mavis didn’t know what he’d done, but she knew enough about August’s history to recognize a pattern. Mavis had witnessed the high school Richard Green debacle. She’d watched August unravel when Luke disappeared. Now she had a front seat to this latest dumpster fire and probably thought she’d earned the right to wear that “I told you so” grimace on her face.
August loved her, but they had become friends the same way mostcousins in small towns did: by default. They had nothing in common. Mavis was soft-spoken and well behaved, while August never saw the point of being either. There was always a hint of judgment on Mavis’s part, starting when she’d been plopped into August’s childhood bedroom and forced to share her dolls. They were never clean enough or cute enough for Mavis to sink comfortably into make believe. August could sense her cousin’s snobbery and would punish Mavis by putting the dolls’ clothes on backward or giving them ridiculous names that made her cousin tongue-tied when she tried to say them.
That was most of their shared childhood, a discordant dance of mutual antagonism. But sometimes fun would find them unexpectedly. One of August’s jokes would land, Mavis would start laughing, and her cousin would transform into a regular girl, one who found terrible puns funny and was secretly afraid she would never be as perfect as their family needed her to be.
That was who August tried to reach now. The insecure little girl who snort-laughed when she learned Russian dolls were full of themselves. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I just want to sing.”
Mavis shook her head with an exasperated sigh August had heard a million times. It said: Why are you like this? Why are we related? And why can’t I bring myself not to care? “If Birdie were still here, she would—”
“She’d want me to sing,” August interrupted. “She always wanted that, even when she couldn’t…” Her words trailed off as the memory took hold. On Birdie’s worst days, music could sometimes bring her back to herself. August would sing “A Song for You” and Birdie’s eyes would uncloud, her lips curved into the coy smile of a woman with secrets. But Mavis wouldn’t know that. She’d cared for their grandmother from a distance: dropping off meals, researching clinical trials, and harassing the nurses Jojo hired into quitting out of frustration. Micromanaging Birdie’s care had been her only coping strategy. She couldn’t sit still with the pain of losing someone slowly.
Mavis looked away, blinking rapidly. “Phillip doesn’t want you at the service. It’s too distracting.”
“Oh. That’s who this is about.” August had never liked Mavis’shusband. She blamed him for Mavis’s decision to abandon her career and become a full-time first lady. He and Mavis went to law school together at Emory, and he’d opened a small practice in his wife’s hometown instead of joining the big private firm in Atlanta where he’d clerked. Phillip was young, devout, and charismatic, which thrilled their aging congregation, but made August uneasy. For someone so ambitious, he’d slid eagerly into Mavis’s small-town life as if he’d wanted something easier to conquer. That included her cousin, who he constantly browbeat with Ephesians 5:23 if Mavis said anything about going back to work.
“What am I supposed to do?” August stared at the closed door. “I can’t change what happened. And you know how stuff like this goes. Everyone’s excited, but it’ll die down, eventually.”
Mavis said, “I’m sure you’re right.” But she didn’t sound convinced. “Still, it’s probably best to skip Sunday service for now. At least until Terry stops coming.”
It took a moment for Mavis’s words to sink in. “You’re banning me?”
“No, you are not being banned. Take a break. Go to Zion Temple across town.”
“It’s in the old Dollar Tree. They wear jeans to service.” They also played music on a boom box from a CD collection they hadn’t updated since the nineties. The service was an endless loop of God’s Property and Kirk Franklin. “They don’t have a choir.”
“I’m sure they have a microphone and a stage.”
A small one. She’d be up there alone, staring at a sea of fidgeting congregants who wondered why they were being subjected to her failed dreams. “It’s not about that,” August said, tempted to admit the truth. Luke was coming. She couldn’t face him empty-handed.
Mavis gripped her shoulders and leaned down to look August in the eye. “Take a break. Breathe. Have you cried once since we lost Grandma?”
“There’s no point,” August said, because she hadn’t. Not since they really lost her, which was long before Birdie stopped breathing. Now her grief would only sting and prickle, like a limb that had fallen asleep.
Luke was relieved to discover that King’s Kitchen smelled the same as when he’d left Arcadia, like burned coffee and bacon grease. It never mattered what time of day it was or which meal the kitchen was churning out at a rapid pace. Those two scents would prevail, seeping into the wood-paneled walls and parquet floors from open to close. Luke had assumed, at a minimum, the quality of the appliances would have improved over the years. The coffee maker was famous for scorching and underheating its contents simultaneously. He remembered stumbling inside, exhausted and starving after a long night dealing with his mother and being offered a tepid mug along with a Sundown over-easy breakfast on the house. August would ignore his promise to pay the bill, grumbling about overinflated prices while sneaking extra bacon onto his plate.
