“Austin, nobody was hurt,” said his grandfather, “and it was nothing but an old barn.”
And Wade Sibley, thought Austin, was nothing but a colored man.
“There’s no need to stir the ashes,” said Austin’s grandmother. “It won’t change a minor event. Now it’s late, and we all need to go to bed. If what you want is an apology for not wrapping our arms around the man in his hour of need, Macey, I give it to you. It was wrong of us.”
The moon had come out.
Sand and rock glittered. Clumps of wet beach grass shimmered. Water chattered over miles of beach and sandbar.
Austin walked Macey back to her grandparents’ house.
He was betraying Macey, as her family’s past had betrayed her, but his decision to go home was so entire that he was afraid of her. She would be the only thing to keep him here, and he no longer wanted to be here.
They brushed against the lilac hedge. Thick purple scent choked the night air.
“When I met Venita,” said Macey slowly, looking at the sky and not at Austin, “I felt a friendship coming through. Not the slow kind, where you know somebody all your life, and you sit near each other and the years pass. But the fast kind, where it’s just there, and it’s a privilege.”
She was no longer the goddess of revenge. She was someone thin and lonely. If he touched her, if he permitted himself one thought, one more breath of lilac, he would want to sit next to her and together let the years pass.
“I don’t want you to go,” she said. “But if you do …” Her voice wavered. “Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for saving my life.”
And if he might have touched her, he would never know, because she did not look at him again, but held up her hand, a pale star of fingers in the dark, to stop him from speaking or following, and she walked on alone into her grandparents’ house.
The porch gave her trouble.
The very same tall, round white pillar she touched for support had been in the seventh photograph, where neighbors admired a fire.
He was a friend of the privilege kind, she thought, and he’ll be gone as completely as Venita. Just gone, and I can’t stop them.
In the kitchen, her grandparents were waiting with smiles and a dessert.
Macey was scorched. Her love for Papa and Nana would never look or smell or feel the same.
And neither would the world.
She reached for the phone, dialing blindly, and when her mother answered sleepily, Macey realized how late it was; her parents, knowing she was at Nana and Papa’s, had gone to bed. “Mom, come and get me. Now.”