The Lane
"The servants' entrance," said Celestine Delacroix, "is around back. In the lane."
She didn't come down the steps to say it. She stood at the top of them, in the arched doorway of the house on Jones Street, in a cream Chanel suit with a gardenia pinned at the lapel, and looked down at me over a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses the way you'd look at something a dog had brought in from the yard.
I was standing on the brick sidewalk at the bottom of the stoop. Eight steps of Savannah gray brick between us. With a canvas duffel over one shoulder and my grandfather's black leather medical bag in my right hand and his old barn coat on, because it was the only coat I owned and it was March and I'd come from the mountains.
It was eighty-one degrees in Savannah.
I was sweating through the barn coat.
"Ma'am," I said. "I'm Clementine Haskett. I'm expected."
"I know exactly who you are, dear." Celestine Delacroix smiled. It was a lovely smile. It had clearly been very expensive. "That's why I'm telling you which door to use."
Above her, on the iron balcony of the second floor, people were watching.
A tall golden man in a linen shirt, leaning on the railing with a glass of something amber at ten in the morning. A young woman beside him with long blond hair and enormous sunglasses, holding up her phone. Two more women I didn't know. A man in a white jacket who looked like staff.
The blonde was filming.
"Oh my God," she said, to her phone, loud enough to carry down to the street. "You guys. She brought a doctor's bag. Like a prop. From like, Little House on the Prairie." She giggled. "Is that a coat? It's eighty degrees."
The golden man laughed into his glass.
"Twenty bucks says she can't read the menu at dinner," he said.
"Hugo," said Celestine mildly, without turning around. "Don't be crude."
"Fifty," said Hugo.
I'd been told about the Delacroix family.
Doc told me. On his deathbed. In the cabin on Troublesome Creek in Breathitt County, Kentucky, eleven months ago, with the whippoorwills calling outside and his hand in mine and his breath going shallow.
Clementine. There's a promise. I made it in Korea, in 1951. To a boy named Augustine Delacroix from Savannah, Georgia. I dug a Chinese bullet out of his belly with a pocketknife in a frozen ditch outside Chipyong-ni, and he made me promise. If I ever had a granddaughter, and he ever had a grandson, they'd marry. He was eighteen. I was nineteen. We were both sure we were going to die that night.
We didn't.
He wrote me every Christmas for seventy-four years. He never forgot. Last Christmas, he wrote that his grandson's been hurt. Bad. Blinded. And that his family's circling like buzzards. And that he's frightened, Clem. Augustine Delacroix. Frightened. Of his own kin.
He asked if I'd keep the promise.
I'd said: Doc, you're dying.
He'd said: I know, honey. That's why it's got to be you.
"Ma'am," I said to Celestine Delacroix. "I been in the back of a Greyhound for eighteen hours from Lexington, and I'd like to put my bag down. If it's the lane, it's the lane." I shifted the duffel on my shoulder. "But I'll tell you now, so there's no confusion later. I'm not here to work for you. I'm here to marry Remy Delacroix. On account of a promise your father-in-law made to my granddaddy in a frozen ditch in Korea."
The balcony went quiet. The blonde lowered her phone.
Celestine's lovely smile didn't move.
"Father is ninety-four, dear," she said. "And not entirely himself. He made a great many promises in the war. Most of them, I'm afraid, he's forgotten."
"He didn't forget this one," I said. "He wrote it down. Seventy-four Christmas cards. I've got 'em in my bag."
I went around by the lane.
It was cooler there. A narrow brick alley behind the houses on Jones Street, shaded by live oaks hung with Spanish moss, with carriage houses and garbage cans and a cat asleep on a wall. The back gate of the Delacroix house was iron, painted black, with a little bell on a string.
A young woman opened it before I'd touched the bell.
Twenty-six, maybe. Dark-skinned, round-faced, in a gray housekeeper's dress with the sleeves pushed up. Her hair wrapped in a bright yellow scarf. She looked me up and down—the barn coat, the duffel, the doctor's bag—and her eyebrows went up and stayed there.
"Lord have mercy," she said. "They really sent you round the back."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't ma'am me, I'm younger than you. I'm Tallulah. Everybody says Lulu." She held the gate wider. "Come on in out the sun before you die in that coat. Mrs. Celestine's been telling the whole house since Christmas you'd show up with no teeth and a pig on a string."
"Left the pig at home," I said. "He gets carsick."
Lulu stared at me. Then she laughed. A big, startled, delighted laugh that echoed off the brick walls of the courtyard.
"Oh, I like you," she said. "That's gonna be trouble."
The courtyard was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen.
Brick walls, old and soft, covered in creeping fig. A fountain in the middle, a stone basin with a little bronze boy pouring water from a jar. Camellias, white and red, blooming in pots. Azaleas. And in the corner, so big its branches went over the walls on two sides, a live oak. Ancient. Gray-barked. Hung with moss like a grandmother's lace.
Under the live oak, in a wheelchair, sat an old man.
Very old. Small, the way the very old get small. In a pressed blue seersucker suit with a little American flag pin on the lapel. His white hair combed carefully. A plaid blanket over his knees, in eighty-one degrees. His head was tipped to one side. His eyes were half closed.
He didn't move when I came through the gate.
"Mr. Augustine," said Lulu softly. "He sits out here mornings. Dr. Boyd says the air's good for him." Her voice changed. "He don't talk much anymore. Not since Christmas."
I looked at him.
At his face. His color. The way his hands lay on the blanket. The way his chest moved—shallow, slow, too slow.
I put down my duffel.
I crouched in front of his wheelchair on the old bricks.
"Mr. Delacroix," I said. "Sir. My name's Clementine Haskett. I'm Elijah Haskett's granddaughter. From Troublesome Creek."
Nothing.
I looked at his eyes. Half closed. I reached up, gently, and lifted one eyelid with my thumb.
The pupil was a pinpoint.
I let it go. I took his wrist. Thin as a bird's. Pulse fifty-two. Regular. Slow.
"Lulu," I said, very quietly, without turning around. "What's Dr. Boyd got him on?"
"I don't know. Something for his nerves. Mrs. Celestine gives it to him herself. In his juice. Morning and night."
I sat back on my heels.
I knew what pinpoint pupils and a pulse of fifty-two meant in a ninety-four-year-old man who'd been "not himself since Christmas." I'd seen it in the hollows of Breathitt County a hundred times. Doc had shown me. In old people whose families wanted their pension checks.
Frightened, Doc had said. Of his own kin.
"Clementine Haskett."
I turned.
A man was standing in the French doors to the house. At the top of the three stone steps down to the courtyard.
Tall. Lean. Dark auburn hair, a little too long, falling over his forehead. A white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A black walking cane in his right hand, the kind with a silver handle. And dark glasses. Even in the shade of the courtyard.
He didn't look at me. He couldn't. His head was turned slightly to the left of where I was.
"You came in the back," he said. His voice was low and dry and very tired. "My aunt's idea, I assume."
"Yes, sir."
"Don't call me sir. I'm thirty-one." He came down the steps. Carefully. The cane tapping each one. He knew exactly how many there were. "I'm Remy. The one you're supposed to marry." He stopped at the bottom. "The blind one."
"I know who you are."
"Then you know you can still go home." He turned his head toward my voice. The dark glasses caught the light. "There's a Greyhound at four. I'll pay for the ticket. First class, if they have it. You don't owe my grandfather anything, Miss Haskett. And I don't need a nurse."
I stood up.
I looked at him. The cane. The glasses. The way he stood—very still, very straight, his weight a little forward, listening.
And something else. Something I noticed and didn't say.
When I stood up, his head moved. Very slightly. Not toward my voice—I hadn't said anything. Toward the movement.
Toward the shape of me, standing up.
"Doc made a promise," I said. "Hasketts keep 'em."
"Your grandfather's dead."
"I know. I buried him." I picked up my duffel. "And I'm not a nurse, Mr. Delacroix. I'm here to marry you. Not to cut your meat."
Remy Delacroix was quiet for a long moment.
Then the corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. Like a man who hadn't smiled in fourteen months and had forgotten how.
"Not to cut your meat," he said. "Lulu, did you hear that?"
"I heard it, Mr. Remy," said Lulu, from the gate, grinning.
"Write it down," said Remy. "I want it on my tombstone."
Dinner was at seven. In a dining room with a crystal chandelier and a table that seated twenty and portraits of dead Delacroixes on every wall. Eleven people. Eleven forks at every place. A menu card in French, handwritten in gold ink.
Hugo had fifty dollars on me not being able to read it.
I read it. Out loud. When Blair Kingsley—the blonde, it turned out, was Hugo's fiancée—asked me, sweetly, across the table, if I'd like her to explain the menu, sweetie.
"Velouté d'asperges," I said. "Suprême de volaille, sauce Albufera. Pommes Anna." I set the card down. "Asparagus soup, chicken breast in a foie gras cream, potatoes in butter. I'd have done the chicken with a little tarragon, myself. But it's your house."
The table went very quiet.
Hugo Delacroix put fifty dollars on the tablecloth in front of Blair without a word.
The old man was at the end of the table. In his wheelchair. With Lulu beside him, spooning soup. His eyes half closed. Not eating.
When the plates were being cleared, I got up and went around the table to him. To say goodnight. Celestine watched me do it with her lovely smile.
I bent down beside his chair.
"Goodnight, Mr. Delacroix," I said.
And his hand came off the blanket.
Fast. Faster than a sedated ninety-four-year-old's hand had any right to move. It closed around my wrist like a vise. Thin, cold, shaking, and very, very strong.
His eyes opened. All the way. For the first time. Blue. Faded. And perfectly, terribly clear.
He pulled me down. Close. His breath on my ear.
"Elijah's girl," whispered Augustine Delacroix. So quietly that nobody else at that long table could have heard it. "You came."
"Yes, sir."
His grip tightened.
"They're poisoning me," he said. "In the juice. Every night." His faded blue eyes held mine. "And when I'm gone, they'll do the boy."
Then his hand went slack. His eyes closed. His head tipped to the side.
And across the dining room, Celestine Delacroix said, pleasantly, "Is something wrong, Clementine? You look as if you've seen a ghost."
