Somewhere Between Luck and Trust

“No.” Georgia thought back to her day. She’d had a handful of students in the office for one reason or another, including two girls. “Where did you find it?”

“On your desk.”

Georgia guessed one of the girls had probably lost it. Maybe the clasp had opened and it had slipped off her wrist. “Just leave it there, sweetheart. I bet the owner will come in on Monday to see if it’s here.”

“It’s got all kinds of little things on it. Animals and houses and other cool stuff.”

“They call that a charm bracelet. They were popular when I was a little girl, and I guess they still are. You buy a bracelet, then you buy or ask for charms that relate to things you do. It’s kind of a record of your life.”

Edna reluctantly set the bracelet on Georgia’s desk. “I’d like one.”

“If you’re still interested at Christmas, that might be a good thing for your Santa list.”

Edna grinned. Of course she hadn’t believed in Santa Claus since she was five, but she liked to play along.

Georgia had been at the school for too many hours, and she was ready to leave before anything else happened. “Did you do your homework?”

“I did most of it at school. I just had a little more, so I’m all finished.”

“Then let’s blow this joint.”

Edna collected her backpack and a fleece jacket she’d tossed on a chair. “Mom’s going to be at the Goddess House when we get there?”

“I have to stop by my house first, so probably. She said she’d make dinner for us.” For the first time Georgia noticed that her office had actually been cleaned. The rug looked freshly vacuumed, and her wastebasket had been emptied. Even the shelves and the uncluttered portions of her desk looked as if they had been dusted.

Apparently Tony had begun to take her seriously, which was a nice insight to take into the weekend.

“Can we stop on the way up the mountain and look at the view?” Edna asked.

Georgia put her arm around her granddaughter’s shoulders. The girl strongly resembled her mother. Same dark hair and olive skin, but green eyes instead of the golden-brown of Samantha’s, and a straight, sloping nose.

As she sometimes did, Georgia wished she knew where those green eyes had come from. Her own eyes were the color of her daughter’s. Samantha never talked about Edna’s father; his identity was the one secret she held close. But she had told Georgia that he had brown eyes, like her own.

Quite possibly the green was at least partly due to an ancestor in Georgia’s own family, but that was a secret, too, one Georgia would never have the answer to. She had no information about her parents, at least nothing she wanted to know. She’d come to terms with that years ago, but sometimes? Sometimes when she looked at Samantha and Edna, she yearned to be able to tell them exactly who they were.

Other than her beloved daughter and granddaughter.

“We’ll stop at the overlook,” she said, smoothing Edna’s wild hair back from her oval face. “Maybe we can get a good photograph or two before the sun starts to set.”

Edna gave her a quick hug, and Georgia forgot everything except how glad she was to be this child’s grandmother.

Chapter Four

WHEN SHE WAS growing up, Cristy’s father would often make her sit in a corner of the parsonage basement as punishment. While he paced back and forth in front of her, shaking his head, she would unsuccessfully squirm to find a comfortable spot on the unforgiving wooden chair. Then, just as she was certain her father had forgotten she was there, he would ask why she had done something—or sometimes, why she hadn’t. He would listen to her halting explanations, and finally hand her a sheet of paper and tell her to list everything she had done wrong, and what she had learned from the consequences.

The child Cristy had tried to cooperate, but in later years the teenager had refused. The Reverend Roger Haviland had never touched his daughter in anger, but when Cristy couldn’t or wouldn’t do what he wanted, he’d always left her there to consider her sins until bedtime. Had he ever asked what she’d learned from this “ritual,” she would have told him that after thinking about it, she had concluded that all sins were best committed after dinner.

But he had never asked.

Today, as she got out of Samantha’s car and gazed up at the old log house that was home until fate tossed her elsewhere, her father’s question sprang into her mind. Not why she had done what she had, since that was irrelevant, but what she had learned.

Standing under the shade of a massive oak tree at the bottom of a rock-crusted hillside, she realized she had carried away two things from her eight months in prison. One, that trusting anybody, no matter how nice they seemed, was foolish. And two, that there was no point in fighting for justice, because the world wasn’t a just or fair place. You were either lucky or you weren’t.

Samantha walked around the car, stretching her arms over her head. “Long trip. How are you doing?”

Cristy’s stomach was tied in a million knots. She was sorry she had eaten lunch, because even now, hours later, she wasn’t sure the hamburger was going to stay down. After lunch and shopping she had napped most of the way here, but the sleep hadn’t relaxed her.

She felt Samantha watching and met her eyes.

“I say we take a walk,” Samantha said. “Just a short one. Once everybody gets here you’ll be bombarded. My mom. Edna. Fresh air might be a good transition.”

Overhead a bird was chirping in rhythm, as if practicing feathered Morse code, but otherwise the clearing was silent. No noise from the road, no hunting dogs in pursuit of some small, terrified creature. The silence seemed to thrum with foreboding.

“It seems so...” Words eluded her. “Large,” Cristy finished at last.

“The house?”

“The outside. I could walk and walk and nothing would stop me. If I came to a fence, I could just step over it or walk around it....”

“They call that freedom. It’s going to take a little getting used to.”

“We were outside a lot in Raleigh. There were places to walk, unless you were in the segregation unit. But it wasn’t like this.”

“Yeah, we’re short on razor wire at the Goddess House. And we got rid of the guard tower last week. It messed up the view.”

Samantha was pointing out that she no longer had to worry about prison officials, but Cristy didn’t know how to respond. There was no razor wire or guard tower, but she still felt imprisoned by fear.

Samantha started along a path leading toward what looked like an old barn in the distance. “Since we had to get it last week, we put your car in the barn. Let’s take a peek, then I’ll show you around a little more.”

Cristy was afraid to venture off with Samantha and more afraid to go up to the house alone. What she could see of it looked foreboding, too, as if the long front porch sheltered glass-paned eyes that were watching and waiting for her to make a mistake. Reluctantly she fell into step.

“The house is really off by itself, isn’t it?” Cristy said.

“If you follow this path a ways you have neighbors. Bill and Zettie Johnston live maybe a quarter of a mile over the crest of the hill. Really nice folks. I’m sure you’ll meet them. By the road you’re not far from the Trust General Store, and there are people all up and down these hills. There’s even a community center down the main road a bit, what used to be the local school before they consolidated, and from what Zettie says, they schedule events there from time to time.”

Cristy realized she had better sound more confident, or Samantha might be afraid to leave her alone. “I hope that didn’t sound like I was complaining. I like silence. My little house in Berle...” Her voice trailed off.

“I’ve been there. Your employer’s daughter stored all your things in her attic, but Taylor and I—you’ll meet Taylor and her daughter, Maddie, one day soon—we drove to the flower shop to pick up some florist tools she hadn’t packed. I saw your house behind it and peeked in the windows.”

Cristy already knew that Samantha and the other woman, Taylor, had driven to Berle to pick up her belongings and car, but now she thanked her again.

Samantha hesitated. “The house where you lived has been for sale for a few months. No one’s living in it now.”

“I guess Betsy’s Bouquets will be sold, too.”

“Betsy’s daughter wants to sell, but it’s not a good time to sell anything. She sent you some things that belonged to Betsy. She said nobody else would appreciate her mother’s tools the way you would.”

Cristy was so touched that for a moment she couldn’t speak. Betsy had hired her when she dropped out of high school, and when her angry parents told her to pack her bags, Betsy had given her the little house behind the shop to live in. The arrangement had been mutually beneficial. Betsy had believed in Cristy as no one else had, and when she had suffered her first heart attack, she’d gratefully turned over much of the work to her young employee, supervising and instructing from a comfortable chair in the workroom. In turn Cristy had gotten the best possible education in floral design, as well as a roof over her head and a loyal friend.