The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,43

and for a couple of reasons.

First, who wants to catch flies? They should be deflected or eradicated, not attracted. Second, anybody, male or female, who insists that you smother your personality, desires, or opinions under a sticky veneer of false gentility is a fly that’s not worth catching.

If I get to be your mom, I’ll never ask you to be sweet. I will urge you to be kind. And strong. Though it’s not always easy to do both at once, the two are not mutually exclusive. The times I’ve backed off from either are the times I’ve been most disappointed in myself.

If you’re kind and strong, people will respect you for it. Maybe not everybody, but most people, the people whose respect is truly worth having, including your own.

Chapter Fourteen

Only hours after moving into Calpurnia’s house, my body felt exactly like it had on January fourth of 2018, the day after I’d given up on a short-lived, ill-conceived resolution to join a gym. Every single muscle in my body was aching, sore, and screaming for rest, and it was barely past noon.

The morning after my meeting with Lorne, I checked out of the hotel, took a Lyft to the house, and unloaded my luggage onto the sidewalk. Besides my suitcase, I had a box with books, shoes, my favorite saucepan, and a few other essentials that Calvin had retrieved from my apartment and shipped to me, and four Target shopping bags containing sheets, pillows, towels, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, work gloves, and the biggest box of garbage bags I could find, as well as flavored seltzers, granola bars, cheese sticks, three apples, pretzel crisps, and a mug that said, “This Coffee Is Making Me Awesome.”

I have no idea why I bought that mug; it wasn’t even on sale. Maybe I hoped that drinking out of it would make it true? But since I’d neglected to purchase either coffee or something to make it in, that probably wasn’t going to happen.

It was hard to figure out what I needed to get by for the next few weeks. Calpurnia’s house was bursting with stuff, but was any of it usable? Or sanitary? God only knew what I might find once I started digging through the piles. That was why, in addition to the bedding, snacks, and other essentials, I’d also purchased four spray cans of roach killer.

A pickup truck that I assumed belonged to Lorne was parked near the gate and a dumpster was parked in front of the impassable driveway. It was already mounded with junk, but the courtyard and garden looked exactly the same to my eyes. Carting my suitcase and bags to the door was tricky. As I dodged and weaved through the detritus, I thought about a documentary I’d once seen about the wreck of the Titanic and the mile-long debris field that trailed the ship when it split apart before crashing into the ocean floor. But the walkway was nothing in comparison to what awaited me inside.

For the fiftieth time since arriving in Charleston, I tried to imagine what could have driven my aunt, who had once been as tidy, hospitable, and house-proud as any woman in Charleston, to live like this. For the fiftieth time, I came up with nothing. It was sad and awful and didn’t make sense.

I stood in the foyer, surrounded by garbage and a ponderous silence that pressed in from all sides, and felt my throat thicken. Then I felt . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . a presence? That makes it sound more spectral and eerie than was actually the case, but I definitely felt something and remembered what Auntie Cal would have said if she’d been there.

Yes, it’s awful. So sad. Now what are you going to do about it?

What could I do? I found a trash bag and got to work.

FOUR HOURS AND fifty-something trips to the dumpster later, I could walk from the front door to the bottom of the stairs without turning sideways. I’d also cleaned off the left half of the bottom two steps of the staircase. It wasn’t much, but at least it gave me a place to rest my aching body while I considered my next move.

Obviously, there was no way I was going to be able to get to the top of the stairs and clear out a bedroom before day’s end. Plus, I was running low on garbage bags. Just as I was about to call Josh