Southern Lights

Daisy fell asleep during their card game, and Henry gently carried her upstairs to her bed, while Sava

“I like having another sister, one I can really talk to,” he said, smiling at her in the bathroom mirror. “You’ve been gone for way too long.”

They sat down in her room and talked some more then. He said he wanted to move to New York or London in a few years, once he figured out if he wanted to work in a gallery, a museum, or a school. But working in the art field was his dream.

“You don’t want to come back here?” She looked surprised. People in the South seemed to stay close to home and cling to their roots, judging from what she had seen so far.

“Too small for me,” he said simply. “This is a very small provincial city. And being gay is too complicated for me here.” She looked at him in surprise.

“You are?” She hadn’t figured that out, and his mother had asked about a girl he had gone out with the year before.

“I am. Jeff is my partner. I told my parents I was gay when I was eighteen. Dad wasn’t thrilled, but he’s okay about it. My mother acts like she forgot and doesn’t know, no matter how often I remind her. Like the girl she asked me about going out with. She knows I don’t go out with women. I figured out I was gay about a year after your mom left, when I was fifteen. By sixteen I knew for sure. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but for some people it is-my mother, for one. She’s going to ask me about the women I go out with till I’m a hundred years old. She’s probably hoping I’ll get ‘cured.’ My being gay just wasn’t in her plan. I think she’s relieved I don’t live in Charleston. It would be too embarrassing for her, and too hard for me. She still lies to her friends.”

“How weird,” Sava

“It’s not ‘normal,’ as she puts it, or ‘right.’ But it is for me.”

“That’s just who you are,” Sava

“They’d kill me if I told her, but she’ll figure it out sometime. I don’t think Travis is too thrilled about it either. He’s a lot more like them than I am. He’s a small-town boy who wants to do everything he can to make them happy and fit in their mold. I’d commit suicide if I married Scarlette, but she’s just right for him, a nice southern girl.”

“You’re sounding like a Yankee,” Sava

“Maybe I am at heart. There are a lot of hypocrisies I don’t like here, or maybe it’s just a small-town thing. I hate seeing people covering up what they really think and feel, just to be polite or fit in. There’s a lot of that here. It’s all okay, if you have a couple of Confederate generals in the family, but not a gay son, at least not in this family. They tolerate it, but don’t like it. Shit, for all we know, maybe all those generals were gay.” They both laughed, and then he looked serious again. “It wouldn’t have mattered to your mother. She was the most loving woman I’ve ever known. I didn’t know I was gay when she was here, but afterward I wondered if she knew before I did. She’s very sharp.”

Sava

“Is your mom okay?” he asked her, and Sava

“No,” Sava

“She has a right to be,” he said, equally honest. “My mother really screwed her over, and Dad let her. I think their relationship has been lousy ever since, but Dad stays in it, and my mother walks all over him. She walked out on all of us when she left my dad. And everyone conveniently forgets she did. That’s just the way it works.” He looked disapproving as he said it.

“I’ve seen it,” Sava

“Too bad. He should have brought you back here years ago. I feel terrible that I never reached out to you or your mom. I let it happen too. I was fourteen then, and I hated what they were doing. And then, I don’t know, high school, college, life, I never did anything about it,” he said. “But I’m glad you’re here. I hope I see your mom too one of these days. I have a lot to tell her.”

“She’s going to try and visit me every couple of weeks. We had a great time last weekend. She didn’t want to come back here, but she did.”

“It must be tough for her,” he acknowledged, as Sava

Chapter 13

As Julia

Turner was a very kind, thoughtful, respectful person, and he treated her with all the grace and good ma

She told Alexa all about it, who started getting nervous again. What if Sava

“She’s seventeen years old. She’s not going anywhere. They’re just having fun.” Alexa realized it was true and calmed down.

Her nerves were on edge these days. The trial was seven weeks away, and she had a thousand details on her mind. No new victims had turned up, and she was preparing her case with infinite precision and care.

The day after Sava

“What are you doing here?” her grandmother asked sharply, startled to see Sava