Sarah Allen - The Girl Who Chased the Moon

In the silence that followed, Emily looked around and found where he had set the bags on the table in the breakfast nook. “Are you going to eat now?” she finally asked.

“I thought I might,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all. Have a seat.” He took plates and utensils out of the cabinets and put them on the table. They sat opposite each other, and together they unloaded the contents of the bags, mostly Styrofoam containers of various sizes, plus a few hamburger buns and two slices of cake.

Vance took the lids off all the containers. His incredibly long fingers were clumsy and his hands shook a little.

“What is this?” Emily asked, looking in the largest Styrofoam container. There was a bunch of dry-looking chopped meat inside.

“Barbecue.”

“This isn’t barbecue,” Emily said. “Barbecue is hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill.”

Vance laughed, which automatically made Emily smile. “Ha! Blasphemy! In North Carolina, barbecue means pork , child. Hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill-that’s called ‘cooking out’ around here,” he explained with sudden enthusiasm. “And there are two types of North Carolina barbecue sauce-Lexington and Eastern North Carolina. Here, look.” He excitedly found a container of sauce and showed her, accidentally spilling some on the table. “Lexington-style is the sweet sugar-and-tomato-based sauce, some people call it the red sauce, that you put on chopped or pulled pork shoulder. Julia’s restaurant is Lexington-style. But there are plenty of Eastern North Carolina-style restaurants here. They use a thin, tart, vinegar-and-pepper-based sauce. And, generally, they use the whole hog. But no matter the style, there’s always hush puppies and coleslaw. And, if I’m not mistaken, those are slices of Milky Way cake. Julia makes the best Milky Way cakes.”

“Like the candy bar?”

“Yep. The candy bars are melted and poured into the batter. It means ‘Welcome.’”

Emily looked over to the cake Julia had brought yesterday morning, still on the counter. “I thought an apple stack cake meant ‘Welcome.’”

“Any kind of cake means ‘Welcome,’” he said. “Well, except for coconut cake. You give coconut cake and fried chicken when there’s a death.”

Emily looked at him strangely.

“And occasionally a broccoli casserole,” he added.

Emily watched as Vance picked up the container of barbecue and forked some chopped pork onto the bottom hamburger bun. He poured some sauce on it, then topped it with coleslaw. He capped it all with the top bun and handed it on a plate to Emily. “A barbecue sandwich, North Carolina-style.”

“Thank you,” Emily said, smiling as she took the strange sandwich. He really was a nice man. She liked being around him. And he made her feel so small, like there was so much more to the world than just her problems, her grief. “This was nice of Julia to do.”

“Julia is a wonderful person. Her father would have been very proud of her.”

“I was just talking to her about the Mullaby lights,” Emily said, hoping he’d be more interested in what she’d discovered than Julia had been. “I’ve been seeing them at night.”

Vance paused in the middle of handing her the container of hush puppies. “You have? Where?”

“In the woods behind the house,” she said as she reached over and took the container from him.

“I’ll only ask you to do one thing while you’re here, Emily,” he said seriously. “Just one. Stay away from them.”

“But I don’t think it’s a ghost,” she said. “I think someone is doing it on purpose.”

“No one is doing it on purpose. Trust me.”

She wasn’t usually an argumentative person, despite her mother’s love of passionate debates. But Emily had to bite her tongue to keep from pointing out that leaving her a box of Band-Aids last night seemed pretty intentional.

“Your mother would get that same look on her face when she was a little girl,” he said. “She was stubborn, my Dulcie.” He hastily looked away, as if he’d said too much. Suddenly that old awkward tension was back, joining them at the table with apologies for being so late.

Emily toyed with the hush puppies on her plate. “Why don’t you want to talk about her?”

Still not looking at her, he said, “I get all confused about it. I don’t know what to say.”

Emily nodded, though she didn’t really understand. Maybe, like everything else about him, his grief was larger than anyone’s, so big that no one could see around it. Vance’s relationship with his daughter must have been a complicated one. But then, her mother’s relationship with everyone had been complicated. She’d been a hard woman to know. High-spirited and mercurial, she’d been like the mist from perfume. You had to be content to let a little of it sprinkle over you. And then, eventually, it went away.

She wouldn’t push him. And she would try not to be hurt by his avoidance. He’d taken her in when she had no other place to go, after all, and she was grateful. So she would talk to other people in town about her mother, find out more from them. Maybe she could find other members of Sassafras. Maybe she’d even see Win Coffey again and ask him about the relationship his uncle had had with her mother. He’d said next time he saw her he’d tell her about their history.

She liked that thought. Seeing Win again.

They ate in silence. Afterward, Grandpa Vance again checked the clothes dryer, as if something might have appeared during dinner. But again he found nothing, so he went to his room. Emily went upstairs and finished sweeping, then she sat on the balcony and waited for the lights.

And so ended her second full day in Mullaby.

LATER THAT evening, when Vance ducked out of his room to check the dryer one last time before bed, he paused to look up the staircase. He didn’t hear any more shuffling. No more scraping of a broom. Emily had settled in for the night.

It was a peculiar thing, he thought, having someone in the house again. He’d almost forgotten what it was like. Emily made the air different, vibrating, as if there were music close by but he couldn’t quite hear it. He was surprised by how much fuller he felt with her near, and he didn’t know how to handle it. Being needed was a lot like being tall-it was never really an issue until other people were around.

Vance had towered over all the other kids in kindergarten. That was his first memory of truly understanding how tall he was. Up until then, while he was certainly big for his age, he was still the shortest member of his own normal-sized family. Some kids in school teased him at first, but there a came a point when they realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pick a fight with someone who could knock them over with only the wind he caused by walking past them.

His family was gone now. Vance was the only one left of the Shelbys, and he had inherited the existing fortune. He knew he wasn’t supposed to have it all. It wasn’t supposed to all come down to him-the Shelby legacy, the Shelby name. There were supposed to be brothers and sisters who would do great things. There were supposed to be normal kids in his family. For a while there were. But his older sister, for whom the wallpaper in her room was always pink candy swirls, drowned in Piney Woods Lake when she was eleven. And then there was his younger brother, who died from a fall out of the tree house in the front yard when he was six. His parents tried for more children after that, but to no avail. They were stuck with Vance. Vance, who was so tall his feet reached the bottom of the lake, so he could never drown, and his arms reached all the way to the limbs in the trees, so he never had to climb and fall.