I listened to the steady patter of rain on the roof. There wasn’t another sound in the room. Amma rapped her pencil on the table.
“Nine letters. Confinement or pain exacted for wrongdoin’.” She shot me another look. I shoveled a spoonful of potatoes into my mouth. I knew what was coming. Nine across.
“C. A. S. T. I. G. A. T. E. As in, punish. As in, if you can’t get yourself to school on time, you won’t be leavin’ this house.”
I wondered who had called to tell her I was late, or more likely who hadn’t called. She sharpened her pencil, even though it was already sharp, grinding it into her old automatic sharpener on the counter. She was still pointedly Not Looking at me, which was even worse than staring me right in the eye.
I walked over to where she was grinding and put my arm around her, giving her a good squeeze. “Come on, Amma. Don’t be mad. It was pouring this morning. You wouldn’t want us speeding in the rain, would you?”
She raised an eyebrow, but her expression softened. “Well, it looks like it’ll be rainin’ from now until the day after you cut that hair, so you better figure out a way to get yourself to school before that bell rings.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I gave her one last squeeze and went back to my cold potatoes. “You’ll never believe what happened today. We got a new girl in our class.” I don’t know why I said it. I guess it was still on my mind.
“You think I don’t know about Lena Duchannes?” I choked on my biscuit. Lena Duchannes. Pronounced, in the South, to rhyme with rain. The way Amma rolled it out, you would have thought the word had an extra syllable. Du-kay-yane.
“Is that her name? Lena?”
Amma pushed a glass of chocolate milk in my direction. “Yes and no and it’s none a your business. You shouldn’t be messin’ with things you don’t know anything about, Ethan Wate.”
Amma always spoke in riddles, and she never gave you anything more than that. I hadn’t been to her house in Wader’s Creek since I was a kid, but I knew most of the people in town had. Amma was the most respected tarot card reader within a hundred miles of Gatlin, just like her mother before her and her grandmother before her. Six generations of card readers. Gatlin was full of God-fearing Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, but they couldn’t resist the lure of the cards, the possibility of changing the course of their own destiny. Because that’s what they believed a powerful reader could do. And Amma was nothing if not a force to be reckoned with.
Sometimes I’d find one of her homemade charms in my sock drawer or hanging above the door of my father’s study. I had only asked what they were for once. My dad teased Amma whenever he found one, but I noticed that he never took any of them down. “Better safe than sorry.” I guess he meant safe from Amma, who could make you plenty sorry.
“Did you hear anything else about her?”
“You watch yourself. One day you’re gonna pick a hole in the sky and the universe is gonna fall right through. Then we’ll all be in a fix.”
My father shuffled into the kitchen in his pajamas. He poured himself a cup of coffee and took a box of Shredded Wheat out of the pantry. I could see the yellow wax earplugs still stuck in his ears. The Shredded Wheat meant he was about to start his day. The earplugs meant it hadn’t really started yet.
I leaned over and whispered to Amma, “What did you hear?”
She yanked my plate away and took it to the sink. She rinsed some bones that looked like pork shoulder, which was weird since we’d had chicken tonight, and put them on a plate. “That’s none a your concern. What I’d like to know is why you’re so interested.”
I shrugged. “I’m not, really. Just curious.”
“You know what they say about curiosity.” She stuck a fork in my piece of buttermilk pie. Then she shot me the Look, and was gone.
Even my father noticed the kitchen door swinging in her wake, and pulled an earplug out of one ear. “How was school?”
“Fine.”
“What did you do to Amma?”
“I was late for school.”
He studied my face. I studied his.
“Number 2?”
I nodded.
“Sharp?”
“Started out sharp and then she sharpened it.” I sighed. My dad almost smiled, which was rare. I felt a surge of relief, maybe even accomplishment.
“Know how many times I sat at this old table while she pulled a pencil on me when I was a kid?” he asked, though it wasn’t really a question. The table, nicked and flecked with paint and glue and marker from all the Wates leading up to me, was one of the oldest things in the house.
I smiled. My dad picked up his cereal bowl and waved his spoon in my direction. Amma had raised my father, a fact I’d been reminded of every time I even thought about sassing her when I was a kid.
“M. Y. R. I. A. D.” He spelled out the word as he dumped his bowl into the sink. “P. L. E. T. H. O. R. A. As in, more than you, Ethan Wate.”
As he stepped into the kitchen light, the half-smile faded to a quarter, and then it was gone. He looked even worse than usual. The shadows on his face were darker, and you could see the bones under his skin. His face was a pallid green from never leaving the house. He looked a little bit like a living corpse, as he had for months now. It was hard to remember that he was the same person who used to sit with me for hours on the shores of Lake Moultrie, eating chicken salad sandwiches and teaching me how to cast a fishing line. “Back and forth. Ten and two. Ten and two. Like the hands of a clock.” The last five months had been hard for him. He had really loved my mother. But so had I.
My dad picked up his coffee and started to shuffle back toward his study. It was time to face facts. Maybe Macon Ravenwood wasn’t the only town shut-in. I didn’t think our town was big enough for two Boo Radleys. But this was the closest thing to a conversation we’d had in months, and I didn’t want him to go.
“How’s the book coming?” I blurted out. Stay and talk to me. That’s what I meant.
He looked surprised, then shrugged. “It’s coming. Still got a lot of work to do.” He couldn’t. That’s what he meant.
“Macon Ravenwood’s niece just moved to town.” I said the words just as he put his earplug back in. Out of sync, our usual timing. Come to think of it, that had been my timing with most people lately.
My dad pulled out the earplug, sighed, and pulled out the other. “What?” He was already walking back to his study. The meter on our conversation was running out.
“Macon Ravenwood, what do you know about him?”
“Same as everyone else, I guess. He’s a recluse. He hasn’t left Ravenwood Manor in years, as far as I know.” He pushed open the study door and stepped over the threshold, but I didn’t follow him. I just stood in the doorway.
I never set foot in there. Once, just once, when I was seven years old, my dad had caught me reading his novel before he had finished revising it. His study was a dark, frightening place. There was a painting that he always kept covered with a sheet over the threadbare Victorian sofa. I knew never to ask what was underneath the sheet. Past the sofa, close to the window, my father’s desk was carved mahogany, another antique that had been handed down along with our house, from generation to generation. And books, old leather-bound books that were so heavy they rested on a huge wooden stand when they were open. Those were the things that kept us bound to Gatlin, and bound to Wate’s Landing, just as they had bound my ancestors for more than a hundred years.