“She knows who you really are, you know.”

IV

I have a savings account that was supposed to be a college fund. Dave started it for me out of my “share” of earnings from his photographs, and it is more than sufficient for me to shun employment for a few years yet, so long as I stay living at home and don’t feel the need for a Porsche. I cleaned out half of that account and transferred the rest to my checking. It was a lot of money to have at my immediate disposal, but I didn’t know how much dough I was going to need for this road trip and I was determined not to come up short.

Even though it was after midnight, I hit the road. I probably should have waited, but I’m not very patient under the best of circumstances, and it seemed best to leave while I still had all that psychological momentum built up. Besides, Macon’s only three or four hours south of here, provided the roadwork stays at a minimum. The state of Georgia is forever widening, repaving, and generally altering I-75 to facilitate the downward flux of northern tourists to their Sunshine State destination.

Welcome to Georgia: billboard space for Florida—not to mention a most miserable part of the world to be driving through in the middle of the night. There’s nothing at all to keep you awake on either side of Atlanta, and I was wishing with each passing mile that I’d put off my quest until a more reasonable hour. Tatie wasn’t going anywhere, if indeed she hadn’t left years before. Lulu had shut up when I said I’d look in a phone book, so I might expect to find Tatie still in the area. If the phone book idea was a wild goose chase, my aunt would have been the first to tell me.

This trip could have waited a few hours more, but it was too late now.

My head nodded with fatigue made more potent by the rhythmic white noise behind the music on the radio, and my eyes ached with each pair of headlights that sailed by. But Macon wasn’t far. I could make it. Atlanta was more than halfway, and its towering lights were growing dim out my back window. Less than an hour south from here I’d get within Macon’s city limits and find a hotel. Everything would be fine.

Something dusty, something charred sage and rosemary filled my sinuses and made my sleepy eyeballs itch. At first I wondered if there was something wrong with my car’s AC, but I figured out the scent’s true source before I even heard the voice.

This is madness.

I didn’t jump. I was too tired to be startled, or at least too tired to act on it. I raised my gaze to the rearview mirror and met a familiar pair of eyes, though not the ones I might have expected. The voice came not from Mae, who fancied herself my mother, but from one of her sisters—I knew not which.