Learning to Speak Southern by Lindsey Rogers Cook

Author:Lindsey Rogers Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

The next morning, after promising Grant I’ll join him for a late lunch, I force him, hungover and all, to sneak back out the window, even though I know the ruse is pointless.

Downstairs, Cami perches on the couch, drinking her coffee smugly and waiting for an apology.

I sit down next to her. “Cami,” I begin.

She taps my hand once.

“It’s okay.”

She gets up to pour me a cup of coffee, and as she does with the cat and a treat, she gestures toward the door to the porch, coffee in hand. I sit under the roof where Grant just dangled, where the sunflowers used to be, replaced now by the newly pruned squash.

“How did you know he would forgive me?” I ask.

“Friendship like that, like y’all have, it’s as strong as blood— sometimes stronger, because you choose it.”

I nod.

She taps the sealed envelope from my mother on her knee, and I wonder again if Cami is avoiding her friend’s words.

“Is that why you forgave her?”

“Margaret was family to me.”

“Why, though?”

Why, when she was so terrible, when she was so terrible to you, I think, but I don’t ask. Why would anyone choose to be family with my mother? Even her childhood memories surely outweighed everything that came later?

Instead of answering the question I did ask, though, Cami answers the one I didn’t: “I waited too long, you know. She was too trusting, had never experienced what I had—a loss, being abandoned. I was waiting for John to leave her, waiting for him to use her, so for once I could be there to pick up the pieces. But, as you’ve probably read already, that’s not how it happened.”

She hands me the envelope and kisses the top of my head before I get another word out. Before she heads back inside, she turns to me once more, my hand lingering over the envelope’s seal.

“Admit it,” she says. “You missed us. Grant and me.”

I smile at her, realizing for the first time that maybe she needs to hear it. And I need to say it. Because it’s true. I have missed them.

“Yes. I missed y’all.”

“That was your task for the day. Congratulations.”

“My mother missed you too,” I say, because I know it’s true for the girl in the letters. But I’m unsure if Cami hears it, because she immediately spins on her heels and is gone.

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