The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,17

three months in 1981, earning a little money and more than respectable reviews, one of which referred to Sterling as “a rising star among Southern playwrights, a young DuBose Heyward in the making.” It was a prophecy Sterling spent the rest of his life trying to fulfill.

Teaching English at the college paid the bills, but everyone in the family understood that my father’s true mission in life was to write another, even more insightful and successful play. The mission for the rest of us was to support him in this endeavor. It sounds grim on the surface, I know, but we were so proud of him. Back then, Sterling was such a joyous, outsized personality.

Even in the summer, he wore waistcoats under a wrinkled linen jacket with the chain of his father’s gold watch draped from the pocket. His voice boomed, “God bless all here!” whenever he came home from the college and smacked kisses onto the lips of his adoring, waiting women before disappearing into his office to work until dinner. He ate heartily, laughed easily, made big sweeping gestures with his hands, and basked in the glow of small-town brilliance, a glow that I didn’t realize extended no farther than the state line until I went to New York and discovered that no one, apart from a few moldy academics and aging theater junkies, remembered Fragrance of Wisteria or my father.

But when I was growing up, Sterling was the sun and the rest of us proud planets in his orbit. But it was Aunt Calpurnia who made the planets spin. She made sure the house ran smoothly and the meals were served on time, that Beebee took her blood pressure medicine and Momma got to her doctor appointments, that Sterling wasn’t disturbed, and that everyone was happy and had everything they needed to stay that way, including me.

Calpurnia was my mother in every way but biologically. Blessed with boundless energy and the world’s loudest and most easily triggered laugh, Calpurnia was always ready to listen, never dismissive of my problems or discounting of my feelings. But she was also very practical and consistently steered me toward solving problems instead of wallowing in them.

“That’s terrible. Really, sugar, simply awful. You’ve got every reason to be upset,” she would say with sincerity and a satisfyingly shocked tsk of her tongue whenever I came to her with a problem. “Now what are you going to do?”

Now what are you going to do?

It’s not a complicated philosophy, but a lot of the time, it works. I’m not always good at spotting holes before falling into them, but thanks to Calpurnia, I can usually find a way to climb out. When people first started writing to me for advice, I tried to think of what Calpurnia would have said and how she would have said it, back in those days when she was still herself and we were still a family, before the accident.

I was twelve years old and away at summer camp when it happened. Aunt Calpurnia was driving my mother to one of her many doctor’s appointments when a driver coming from the opposite direction crossed the yellow line and hit them head on. My mother was killed instantly and Calpurnia ended up in the hospital with internal bleeding and a skull fracture. It was too much for Beebee; she had a massive heart attack at my mother’s funeral and died the next day.

It would be years before the casualties reached their full count. Calpurnia survived but was never the same. Neither was Sterling. Before the accident, everything revolved around his work. After the accident, everything revolved around his grief. The moment the other driver had decided to unwrap a cheeseburger instead of watching the road had forced the survivors onto a different path, a southbound highway that led to the end of the continent and the end of my family. I wasn’t an orphan yet, but I might as well have been.

It was terrible. It was awful. It was tragic. But more than anything else, it just was and no amount of wallowing would change that, so now what was I going to do? The only thing I could: get on with life as best I could. Calpurnia’s teachings were hardwired into me even after she forgot them herself. Even after she forgot me.

I hadn’t talked to her since I was twelve, hadn’t even seen her face since I was twenty-one. But she was always there in the back of