POV: Savannah
Aunt Luanne arrived at four-thirty with a King Ranch chicken casserole, a pound cake that was not the pound cake from the freezer but a fresh one, a Tupperware of potato salad that Savannah suspected had been made yesterday and was being presented as today's, and an agenda.
She did not announce the agenda. She didn't need to. Savannah had known Luanne Mabry-Thibodaux for thirty-two years and could read her the way she read rooms — by what was arranged, and what was conspicuously absent, and what the whole composition was quietly insisting on.
What this composition was quietly insisting on was stay.
"You look thin," Luanne said, by way of greeting, setting the casserole dish on the kitchen counter with the authority of someone reclaiming territory.
"I'm the same size I've been for six years."
"That's what I'm saying." Luanne turned and looked at her — a full assessment, the kind that started at the top and worked down and didn't pretend to be anything other than what it was. She was a tall woman, Luanne, broad-shouldered and deliberate, with silver hair she wore natural and close-cropped and skin several shades deeper than Savannah's mother's had been. She had their grandmother's eyes: dark and slightly amused by everything, like the world was a long joke she'd heard before and still found funny. "Nashville not feeding you?"
"Nashville feeds me fine."
"Mm." Luanne opened the refrigerator, assessed its contents — the pound cake from the freezer, now thawed, a half-empty jar of Cora's fig preserves, a carton of creamer that Savannah had stopped at the Gas-N-Go for on her way back from the hardware store that morning — and made the sound she made when she'd confirmed a suspicion. She put the potato salad on the second shelf with the practiced precision of a woman who knew exactly how much space she was taking up and was comfortable with all of it.
Savannah sat at the kitchen table and watched her aunt move through Grandma Cora's kitchen and felt the particular vertigo of being in a place where you are loved in ways you are not entirely sure you deserve.
"Cal Broussard was here this morning," she said.
"I know." Luanne didn't turn around.
"You could have warned me."
"I told you he'd be by."
"You told me he'd be by. You did not tell me he'd be there at five-forty-five in the morning with a key, inside the house, while I was asleep."
Luanne turned around now, leaning one hip against the counter, arms crossed in the loose way of someone who is comfortable and also immovable. "Did he frighten you?"
"No."
"Did he do anything untoward?"
"Obviously not."
"Well then." She turned back to the counter and began looking for the casserole dish lid.
Savannah pressed her fingers against the grain of the kitchen table. It was the same table that had been here since she was a child — oval, solid oak, six chairs, one of them with a leg that rocked slightly unless you put a folded piece of paper under it. Someone had done the paper trick recently. She could see the edge of it.
"He painted the house," she said.
"I know he did. Looks beautiful, doesn't it."
"Luanne. He's been — he's been maintaining this house for two years. Without — I mean, nobody said anything to me about —"
"Your grandmother asked him to." Luanne said it gently, which was its own kind of pointed. "You know how she was about this place. She wasn't going to leave it to sit and go to pieces while she was at Meadow Pines. She trusted Cal."
"She could have hired someone."
"She did hire someone. She hired Cal."
"She could have told me."
Luanne found the lid and set it beside the dish and was quiet for a moment. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a car went slow down Sycamore Lane, someone who lived here and drove at the speed of a street they'd driven ten thousand times.
"You weren't always easy to tell things to, baby," Luanne said. Not cruel. Not even particularly pointed. Just true, in the way that Luanne was true, the way she'd always been — she didn't dress things up and she didn't undress them either, just left them sitting there exactly as they were.
Savannah looked at the table.
"No," she said. "I know."
Luanne came and sat across from her, folding her hands on the table in the way she folded them in church. "The house needs about three weeks of work before Janet can list it. You knew that coming in."
"I knew there'd be repairs."
"Now you know the scope." She paused. "You can stay here while he works. He'll be in and out — he's a professional, Savannah, he doesn't need supervising. You can do what you need to do and he'll do what he needs to do and by Thanksgiving you can have an offer in hand if the market cooperates."
"The market's not great right now."
"Janet says it's fine."
"Janet says everything is fine, that's what Janet does, she's a realtor."
Luanne almost smiled. "Are you going to stay in the house?"
Savannah looked around the kitchen. At the cast iron on the stove, the lace curtain on the window over the sink, the calendar on the wall — still on September of two years ago, a photo of the Atchafalaya Basin at sunrise, Spanish moss and copper water. Nobody had turned the page and she was suddenly, unreasonably grateful for that. For something being left as it was.
"I wasn't going to," she said. "I thought I'd stay at the La Quinta on 190."
Luanne's expression conveyed, without a single word, exactly what she thought of the La Quinta on 190.
"But the house is —" Savannah stopped. Started again. "It's in good shape. It doesn't make sense to pay for a motel when the house is —"
"In good shape," Luanne said, evenly.
"Yes."
"Because someone took care of it."
"Yes, Luanne."
"Someone who happens to be coming by tomorrow at eight to start on the back bedroom subflooring and the kitchen soffit and who will be here most days for the next several weeks."
Savannah looked at her aunt. Luanne looked back with the dark, slightly amused eyes. The refrigerator kept humming.
"Is there something you want to say to me directly?" Savannah said.
"I have been talking to you directly this entire time," Luanne said, with perfect composure. "Help me set the table."
They ate at the oval table with the wobbling leg, the King Ranch chicken between them and the fresh pound cake on the counter for after, and Luanne talked — about Meadow Pines and Grandma Cora's good days and less good days, about the neighbor's dog that had been digging under the fence, about the Thibodaux family reunion that was going to be either wonderful or catastrophic depending on whether two specific cousins were seated near each other or not. She talked the way she always talked, steady and warm and full of the specific texture of this place, and Savannah ate more than she'd intended to and felt something in her shoulders she hadn't noticed carrying begin, slightly, to release.
This was the thing about Luanne. You could be frustrated with her — and Savannah was, in the particular way you were frustrated with people who saw you more clearly than you preferred — but you could not be cold in her presence for very long. She radiated a specific heat that had nothing to do with temperature, the warmth of a person who was entirely and permanently certain that the people she loved were worth the trouble of them.
"Tell me about the work you're doing," Luanne said, over pound cake. "In Nashville."
"Photo editing, mostly. Some shooting for the magazine."
"But your own work."
Savannah moved a crumb around her plate. "I've been developing a project."
"For how long?"
"A while."
"What kind of project?"
She looked up. Luanne was watching her with the patient expression of someone who had time. "A photo essay. Long-form. About — about identity. Specifically biracial identity in the South, what it means to be between things, to not be fully claimed by either side of yourself." She stopped. She didn't talk about this project. She'd been not talking about it for so long it felt strange to hear it out loud in someone else's kitchen. "I've been circling it."
"Circling it," Luanne repeated.
"Developing the concept."
"For how long?"
"Luanne."
"I'm asking."
Savannah set her fork down. "Eight years, approximately."
Luanne nodded slowly, as if this had confirmed something. She took a sip of sweet tea. "You know," she said, "your mother used to say that you could look at anything in the world through that camera of yours. Anything except yourself."
The kitchen went quiet.
Savannah had heard her mother's voice in this room a thousand times — her mother had grown up at this table, had peeled shrimp and snapped beans and done homework here, had brought Savannah here every summer, had cooked at that stove with Cora's cast iron — and she still wasn't prepared for it. For the sudden presence of her. For the way grief worked in this house specifically, like it knew where to find her.
"She wasn't wrong," Savannah said, after a moment.
"No," Luanne said softly. "She usually wasn't."
They sat with that.
Outside, the pecan tree dropped something onto the porch roof with a sound like a single knock. The wind chime answered. The evening had come in while they were eating, the way Southern evenings came — not announced, just suddenly there, the sky going from gold to violet without any of the intermediate steps you thought you'd see if you were paying attention.
"I need to ask you something," Savannah said.
"Go ahead."
"The repairs." She folded her hands on the table, mirroring Luanne without meaning to. "Cal gave me the scope this morning. He said three weeks, maybe two and a half. Subflooring in both bedrooms, the kitchen soffit, some work on the back gallery railing, the sill in the bathroom." She paused. "He also mentioned that before we list, Janet's going to want to see the foundation documentation, and he said there may be —" She checked her notes from the morning, which she'd written on the back of a gas station receipt because she was her grandmother's granddaughter. "He said there may be some work needed on the pier-and-beam foundation on the northeast corner. He said he'd need to get under the house."
"Okay," Luanne said.
"That's a significant repair, Luanne. That could add cost and time."
"Could."
"If the foundation needs substantial work, it changes the math on the sale. We'd have to decide whether to repair and list at market, or list as-is at a lower price, or —" She stopped, because Luanne was looking at her with an expression she couldn't quite read. "What?"
Luanne was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "Cal can look at the foundation. He'll tell you the truth about it. He's not going to pad the scope."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I've known James Calloway Broussard since he was eleven years old and tracked mud through my sister's kitchen after a crawfish boil, and I have never once known him to be anything other than exactly what he says he is." She stood, began gathering plates. "That's not nothing, Savannah. In this life, that is genuinely not nothing."
Savannah sat with that while Luanne ran water over the plates, the sound of it filling the kitchen, ordinary and domestic and entirely, painfully familiar.
"He said he'd come by at eight," Savannah said. "Tomorrow."
"Then you'll want to be up before eight." Luanne set the plates in the drying rack and dried her hands on the dish towel that hung from the oven handle — the same dish towel hook, the same placement, unchanged. "The coffee's in the freezer, the chicory blend. I expect you already found it."
"I found it."
"Good." She folded the dish towel and turned around. "Will you be alright here tonight? By yourself?"
Savannah looked at her. At this woman who had driven forty miles with a casserole and a pound cake and a Tupperware of yesterday's potato salad, who had sat across from her and said the true things without weaponizing them, who was now standing in her dead sister's mother's kitchen asking if she'd be alright.
"I'll be fine," Savannah said.
Luanne held her gaze for a moment. Then she crossed the kitchen and put both arms around Savannah's shoulders — a firm, brief, unambiguous hug — and said into the top of her head, "Your grandmother loved this house. But she loved you more. Whatever you decide about it, she'd just want you to actually decide. You understand me?"
Savannah understood her.
She stood on the porch and watched Luanne's taillights disappear down Sycamore Lane and then stood there a while longer, her arms crossed against the cooling evening, looking at the street that looked exactly like itself.
She went inside and looked up the parish building permit database on her phone. Cal Broussard's restoration practice came up immediately — twelve permitted projects in the last three years, all historic structures, all completed within scope and on timeline. One citation from five years ago for starting work three days before permit approval, which told her he was the kind of man who occasionally let his certainty that something needed doing outrun the paperwork, which she found herself, inconveniently, more sympathetic to than not.
She found the foundation section of the house's original 1944 construction documents, which were scanned and available through the parish historical archive, a fact that surprised her enough that she stopped and looked at the ceiling. Someone had digitized them. The archive notes said the scanning project was sponsored by the Calder's Bend Historic Preservation Society.
The Historic Preservation Society's listed contact was Broussard Restoration.
She put her phone down.
She sat in Grandma Cora's living room in the quiet evening and thought about three weeks and a pier-and-beam foundation and a man who had annotated the original construction documents of a house he didn't own into a digital archive for a town to keep, and she thought about her mother at the table in the kitchen and the photograph she hadn't taken and the project she'd been circling for eight years, and she thought, without meaning to, about the back steps of the Guidry wedding and the sentence that never got finished and whether there was something in her that had been doing that — leaving sentences unfinished, leaving rooms before the important part — for the last ten years without knowing it was a pattern.
The wind chime moved.
She picked her phone back up and typed a text to her editor in Nashville: Going to need three weeks. Maybe a little more.
She sent it before she could revise it into something smaller.