But when I look again, it’s never her. And my heart squeezes.
On the drive back down to Kinter, Honey tells me family stories about my great-grandparents and my grandfather. Great-aunts and great-uncles. Some distant cousins.
But she doesn’t tell me about my mom.
She doesn’t tell me any more about Dempsey Fontenot, either. Not even when I come right out and ask.
She just sighs and says, “Our eyes are on the front of our heads for a reason, Grey. Let the past stay where it belongs.”
Then, when we get home, she goes straight into the kitchen and starts chopping up the holy trinity.
Onions.
Green peppers.
Celery.
A time-honored Louisiana recipe for ignoring hard questions.
The evening heat is unbearable. But the weather isn’t nearly as oppressive as the silence.
Or the secrets.
So I pull on my mud boots and head out toward Li’l Pass, almost without realizing where I’m going.
When I get there, Zale is already waiting for me on top of the old trailer. Just like he knew I was coming. I think about what Case said after that fight out on the dock. About Elora’s murderer.
You find whoever it is she was runnin’ around on me wit’ and I bet you’ll find who killed ’er.
Fear tickles at me like a little spider walking across my skin, and I wonder one more time whether Zale was telling me the truth about him and Elora being just friends.
But then he looks up at me, and there is so much honesty in his eyes. I don’t see any shadowy corners where he could hide a lie like that. So I pull off my boots and crawl up to sit next to him in the purple light.
“Hi,” I say.
Somewhere a chuck-will’s-widow begins its evening song, and a chorus of frogs decides to sing backup. The bayou is coming to life all around us.
And I suddenly feel shy and awkward. Like I don’t know what to say next. But then he smiles at me, and there’s so much I want to tell him.
I start with the fight between Case and Hart.
The bloody Saint Sebastian medal. Elora’s good luck charm. How I thought Case was the one. And how Hart says he isn’t. How he can feel the truth of that now.
So we’re right back where we started.
“Did she ever tell you about anyone else?” I ask. “A new boyfriend?”
But Zale shakes his head. “Even that last night I saw her, when she told me she was leavin’ town, she never said who with.”
We sit together in the falling dark while the electric air dances around us. I see the energy coming off Zale in waves that look like heat rising up off the highway. The flies are biting at me something awful, but I never see one land on him.
“Honey says people didn’t like your daddy because he was too powerful.” He doesn’t ask who Honey is. Just like he didn’t ask who Hart is. Or Case. And it makes me wonder how much Zale knows about us.
About all of us.
“She says people were afraid of him. That he could bring storms.” He’s studying me with those fire-and-ice eyes. “You can do that, too, can’t you?”
“Do you know what Zale means?” he asks me. I shake my head, and he gives me a big grin. My heart skips a beat. Or three. “It means ‘strength of the sea’。 I was a hurricane baby.”
It still feels so strange just sitting and talking to Zale like this. But it feels right, too. And that seems strange itself, until I remember that he’s one of us. One of the Summer Children.
Just like Elora. And all the others.
Like Hart.
For a second, I think about those dark curls. And my fingers itch. I remember the way Hart laughs, deep in his throat. How he used to tease me. And I get overwhelmed with missing him.
The way he used to be.
The way we used to be.
But then that feeling fades away, and this beautiful fog rolls in to take its place inside my head. And I’m grateful.
“A huge storm blew in the night I was born,” Zale is telling me. “Moved right across Keller’s Island. My daddy tried to hold it back, but it was too strong for ’im. He couldn’t stop it comin’。 And my mama couldn’t stop me comin’。”
“You were born into the storm,” I say, and he nods.
“I wasn’t two minutes old when the wind took our little shack. Blew it clean away. Sucked me right outta my mama’s arms.”
A couple stray clouds are scattered across the sky, but when Zale waves his hand, they roll off. Just like he shoo’d ’em away.
“When dey found me, I was lying in a big old mud puddle. Safe and comfortable as you please. Storm raging all around me, except right dere where I was. In that little bubble, my mama said there wasn’t even breeze enough to move the little curl on the top of my head.”