I never intended to stay away for eighteen years. What started as a bone-deep sense of betrayal, and shame, morphed over time into anger and eventually habit and distraction. When I finally craved my family, needed them, a latent stubbornness I didn’t realize resided in me reared its head. To return to Lynchfield, Texas, would be to admit defeat, to see my father’s Roman nose lifted in the knowledge I’d been the one to give in. Not him. The idea planted me firmly in Virginia, and I waited. Stubbornness and patience. The twin pillars of the Lynchfield Noakeses.
I won in the end.
“Well, it’s about damn time.” My sister took me in from head to toe, her expression of disdain not diffused through the screen door. The bobby pin stuck through a small hole in the screen to hold notes from missed visitors pointed to her curling mouth like an arrow.
“Hello, Mary.”
She opened the screen door and I stepped into my father’s house and saw my sister for the first time in three years. I’d hoped she would be glad to see me, that she would greet me with her big, toothy grin, but I hadn’t seen that joyous, and sometimes mischievous, smile since her wedding day, and I wasn’t greeted with it now.
Mary’s gaze landed on my duffel bag. “I see you’re not staying long.”
“I have enough clothes to stay indefinitely.”
“In that?”
“In this. I assume Clark’s still sells toothpaste.”
“Clark’s Pharmacy has been out of business for nine years.”
“Has it? I’m sure a lot has changed, though this room might as well be encased in amber.”
We glanced around the den. Brown paneled walls, a ’70s-era golden-brown shag carpet which had long since been flattened into submission, a couch upholstered in a waxed cotton of large orange flowers—the last purchase my mother made before she died—a dark walnut side table and matching coffee table stacked with back issues of The Cattleman, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, and Field and Stream. A black recliner sat at one end of the couch, angled slightly toward the center of the room to imply a conversation area, but in reality was pointed toward the television sitting on a rickety metal stand across the room. The black leather slashed through the earth-toned room like a deep canyon.
“I’ve been trying to get him to replace this horrid carpet for more than ten years,” Mary said. “Said it worked perfectly fine and was a waste of money.”
“I suppose he’s not wrong.”
“There’s hardwood under here, you know.”
“Nora!” Jeremy English emerged from the kitchen, a broad smile on his face and his eyes sparkling with good humor. I put down my bag and hugged my brother-in-law.
“Jeremy. Nice to see you.”
“You, too.” He held me at arm’s length. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“You just saw me last year,” I laughed.
“It’s been two years.”
“That long? You’ve gotten fat, I see.”
Jeremy was built like a fireplug: short, stocky and all muscle, which he confessed to me at dinner two years earlier he worked harder and harder at as time wore on. We’d always gotten along like a house on fire. He was fascinated by the military, and I reveled in his pure, nonjudgmental interest in my chosen profession. He’d understood when I’d left the service after ten years, but hadn’t shown nearly as much interest in my career as a technical writing translator. Still, when he was in DC, we always found time for dinner or a cup of coffee.
“Where are the kids?” Mary snapped.
Jeremy’s smile barely slipped, but his eyes dimmed, and his sigh was almost inaudible. “Outside with Dormer. Feeding the chickens. How was your trip, sis?”
“Flight was good, but Austin traffic was atrocious.”
“Welcome to the fastest growing city in the country.” He picked up my bag and turned away, boxing out Mary. “Your room?”
I shrugged and nodded, sending signals as mixed as my emotions.
“There she is!” A fat woman wearing a leopard-print caftan waddled into the room, arms outstretched.
My face split into a grin. “Emmadean.”
My aunt enveloped me in her wonderfully comforting embrace. I closed my eyes and inhaled Shower to Shower talcum powder and White Diamonds perfume, the scent of childhood comfort for scraped knees and barbed wire fence scratches, a broken arm from being pitched from an ornery horse named Tinker. It reminded me of her laughter at my horrified reaction to the birds and the bees, her quiet understanding when I was heartbroken and, finally, her holding my hand as I lay in a hospital bed, sobbing about everything and