Page 119 of Wreckage and Rain

"You're common." The smile is gone now. The voice is thin and shaking and the syllables come up out of her like something has been pulled. "You're a waitress's daughter. A waitress's daughter from a diner that is going to close inside a decade. You aren't. You aren't."

The sentence doesn't finish. She can't make it finish.

I look at her across the fountain. The cream silk. The pearls. The hand at her throat. The mockingbird has stopped singing. The fountain is the only sound in the garden.

I lean forward, just a little.

"Vivienne, darling."

I let the word hang.

"That word." I keep my voice as warm and bright and bulletproof as her own. "Common. You've used it on me for years. I want you to hear me use it back, so you feel it from this side."

She's looking at me. She hasn't moved.

"My mother is a waitress. My father is a cook. They own a diner in West Ashley that has fed three generations of working people in this city. They built that diner with their own hands. They paid for my college with the tips you used to leave on the table when you came in with your bridge friends every other Sunday for ten years before you knew who I was. They're the most generous people I've ever known. They love your son the way they love me, which is to say more than you've ever been capable of loving him in a single afternoon. You and Sonny built a house full of carved furniture and brittle china and you forgot to feed your own son. He came to my parents' diner for years to be fed."

Her eyes are wet. Genuinely wet. The mask has fallen.

"Summer."

I stand up.

She doesn't stand.

"I appreciate the years of training, Vivienne. I really do." I smooth the front of my jeans. Adjust the cuff of the turtleneck. "It's too bad you taught me so well."

I turn.

I walk out of the garden the same way I came in. Through the French doors. Through the parlor. Through the dining room where the seating chart used to be. Past the chandelier and the portraits and the grandfather clock. I don't look back. I don't look down. I don't feel anything until the front door is closed behind me, until I'm on the front walk with the harbor breeze on my face and the white columns of the Bennet house at my back.

Then I exhale.

I exhale for a long time.

I walk to the car. I don't run. I open the door. I sit. I close the door.

I press my forehead against the steering wheel.

I don't cry.

Vivienne Bennet, in the rearview mirror of my life, is a woman in a cream silk blouse alone on a wrought-iron bench in a garden that no one is coming to visit.

I drive away.

***

I drive to King's Diner.

It's the slow hour. The lunch crowd is gone and the supper crowd hasn't arrived. Mama is at the register in her apron with the embroidered K. Daddy is in the kitchen prepping for the dinner rush. The diner smells like coffee, bacon grease, and the brown sugar Mama melts down for her pecan pies. The G in the neon sign is flickering. The afternoon light hits the chrome counter at the angle it has hit it every afternoon of my life.

I sit at booth four.

Mama looks at me from the register. She doesn't ask. She walks behind the counter, gets the good coffee, pours two mugs, sets one in front of me and one across from her. Sits.

I drink.

"You went."