The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,16

end up and that you’ll be lying next to somebody you love.”

Calvin read the inscription on the headstone. “‘Until the times of restoration of all things, whereof God spake . . .’”

“Acts 3:21. My father’s favorite verse, probably because it was obscure. Sterling lived in fear of being thought ordinary.”

“Well, I think it’s nice. A nice sentiment anyway. Do you think it’ll ever happen?”

“Like you said, a nice sentiment.” I placed a hand on the headstone and pushed myself to my feet. “Ready to go?”

“You don’t want to see your aunt’s grave?”

I should have but I didn’t. Maybe in a couple of days, I told myself, before we flew back to New York. But it was too much just then.

I’d tried so hard to forget this place. Maybe that was a mistake. After seeing their graves, shaded by the spreading branches of venerable live oaks and crape myrtles festooned with Spanish moss, sequestered behind the brick walls carpeted with ivy that softened the noise of traffic and clop of horse-drawn carriages loaded with camera-clicking tourists, I could just about believe they truly were resting in peace.

It would be different to stand at Aunt Calpurnia’s grave. There would be no headstone, not yet. The sod wouldn’t have taken hold yet and the ground, so recently disturbed, would be unsettled. It was too soon. I was too raw.

“Maybe later. I’m kind of tired.”

“Do you want to go to the house?”

“Let’s just go back to the hotel.”

“Okay. But remember, we’ve got a seven o’clock reservation at Fig.”

We were only going to be here for four days, just long enough for me to settle things with the attorney and put the house on the market. I was not here to sightsee. But Calvin had a list of twenty-seven restaurants he wanted to try before we left.

“Can I beg off? I’m not very hungry.”

Calvin blinked twice, staring at me like I was speaking a foreign language.

“You understand I’m talking about Fig, right? Buckskin pumpkin soup with crème fraiche? Fish stew Provençal with shrimp, squid, mussels, and butterbeans? Fig is on top of every single Charleston ten-best list. It was a very tough reservation to get. I dropped names, Celia. I called in favors.”

“There’s no reason you can’t go without me,” I said. “It’s just that . . . I’m sorry, Calvin. Just for tonight, I think I need to be on my own.”

He worked his lips for a moment, as if he was thinking about arguing, then exhaled loudly through his nose.

“Fine. I get that. I guess.”

“Starting tomorrow, I’m all in. Promise.”

“I’m bringing you back a dessert,” he said, making it clear that this was nonnegotiable. “Do you want Asian pear tarte tatin or butterscotch pot de crème?”

CALVIN HAD USED his old restaurant connections to get us a deal at Zero George, one of the best boutique hotels in Charleston. My room was spacious and elegant, the bed made up with crisp, ironed sheets and a pile of fluffy, cloud-soft pillows. If this had been a vacation rather than a confrontation, an assault by the memories I’d worked so hard to wall up, I might have enjoyed it.

I guess this is the part in the story where the heroine normally reveals her traumatic childhood. But mine wasn’t, not as it started out. We were happy.

Or maybe just I was.

We were three generations in one house. Grandma Beebee was a kindly and benign presence, fat and pillowy as a mound of bread dough, who knitted sweaters that were too hot to wear and played languid hymns on the piano every morning, never seeming to care that the Charleston humidity kept the instrument permanently out of tune. Her daughter-in-law, my mother, Genevieve, called Jenna by everyone but my father, was likewise benign but for different reasons. She suffered from lupus, a debilitating autoimmune disease. With all her medical problems, she just didn’t have the energy to be a mother, and what little she did have was spent almost exclusively on my father. She worshipped him. We all did, in our way.

After the birth of one daughter, followed by a decade of almost annual miscarriages, Beebee birthed a son at the age of forty-three and the family rejoiced. Sadly, my grandfather didn’t live long enough to see his only son’s greatest achievement.

At the tender age of twenty-two, Sterling penned Fragrance of Wisteria, a beautifully written and tragically resonant, if not quite groundbreaking morality play about an interracial Romeo and Juliet during the Vietnam era. It ran off-Broadway for