following him. Even today when she was nowhere near, he was still thinking about her. He wouldn’t have been surprised to look up in the trees and see her watching them.
Rose smiled. “Em never leaves before dawn or stays out after sundown. She’s afraid of darkness. If you ask her, she’ll admit that when she was a girl someone always had to hold her hand until she went to sleep.”
Lewt looked up at the tree line, wishing Em were with them. He’d thought it strange when she touched his hand in the darkness on the corner of the porch last night. Now, he knew what it meant.
She trusted him. The woman to whom no one talked, who spent her days alone, trusted him. Maybe not a great deal, but some. In a strange way he felt like she’d given him a gift.
Boyd started the fire about the time Davis and the other two ladies arrived, laughing. As always, when Bethie was around, everyone’s mood lightened.
While the fire built to a blaze, they all gathered near, telling stories that could only be learned around campfires.
While the coffee boiled, Davis told about how Gypsy wagons used to stop and camp in a wooded area by their farm. One night, he and his older brother went down to the camp to see the fortune-teller. She was a woman, dressed in black except for one red scarf tied around her waist. She read their fortunes with her head down, never meeting their eyes. All he remembered seeing was her wrinkled face and twisted hands appearing almost deformed as she worked with the strange cards. When she finished, she stood and turned her back to them. There, where hair and a scarf should have been was another face . . . the face of a young woman, who winked at them.
Beth bought into the story. “She had two faces?”
“No, one had to be fake; problem is I have no idea which one. When we asked one of the others, he said she wore a mask on the front because it would be too frightening if people knew her head was on backward.”
“Maybe she’s been to hell.” Lewt smiled. “Like in Dante’s Inferno, where God turns all the fortune-tellers’ heads backward because they tried to see into the future.”
Beth poked him. “You read that poem? The whole thing?”
“I was bored one winter. I read everything I could get my hands on.”
“And it made sense to you?” Bethie made a face as if she’d tasted something sour.
“A friend told me the way to read it was to get so drunk you can barely make out the words. Then, keep reading and drinking and it all makes perfect sense.” Lewt smiled as he drew laughter from them all.
Boyd paced beside the fire. “Well, I for one, wouldn’t want to see into the future. It’d take all the fun out of living life.” He stopped in front of Davis. “And I believe she was simply playing a prank on two gullible boys. If her head were really on backward she’d be bumping into trees.”
Everyone laughed, and the conversation grew with the fire. By the time Rose pulled out sandwiches and fruit, everyone claimed to be starving. They ate, then spread out on blankets and talked as the day aged. They were all adults, all knowing their own mind, but something about being away from the house and the chaperones added a degree of openness, of honesty, that had been lacking before.
Boyd admitted that he worried about filling his father’s and grandfather’s shoes. Davis told of his dreams for buildings, dreams no one in Austin would probably allow him to fulfill.
Lewt could think of nothing to share, or, more exactly, nothing he wanted to share. He closed his eyes and listened. After half an hour, Rose asked him a question. When he didn’t answer, they all assumed he’d gone to sleep. Part of him wanted to absorb all their memories into his mind and make them his own.
Late in the afternoon, the wind kicked up, but no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave. Rose passed out the last of the cookies.
Lewt acted like he woke when he heard the word cookie. They all laughed and spent time telling him about all he’d missed. Only they didn’t tell their own stories, they told each other’s. Suddenly Boyd’s frightening story of being lost as a boy became funny when Beth repeated it, and Rose’s tender story of hearing ghosts