Category:

BECCA

Becca sat on a bench by a window in the living room, a book open in her hands though the daylight was fading and she hadn't yet switched on the lamp. Would-be rain hung heavy in clouds dark against the silvering sky. She had left the front door open behind her after coming home from work at Dr. Carson's office, an unusually cool September breeze too welcome to bar, even with the screen door off its hinges awaiting repair—an invitation to night bugs.

She could hear Lottie in the kitchen tapping lids back onto paint cans with the wooden handle of a screwdriver, done for the day with whatever she had been painting. Perhaps the cupboard again, or the kitchen chairs. Maybe the buttons on her winter coat or the mate to yesterday's shoe.

The sound sent Becca's gaze to the painted morning-glory vines that twined a gray flood line circling the room a few inches high on the walls. Lottie had embellished it rather than painting over it, acknowledging the great flood of '27, four years back, that had left only a faint mark on their own lives, but had ravaged towns up and down the lower Mississippi River Valley. Lottie, who had been Becca's second mother for most of Becca's life, referred to the morning glories as her collaborative work with the river and had signed it in one corner with her usual Carlotta! underscored with two tiny waves. That, like most everything about Lottie, had delighted Becca. Never mind that a young Becca had been informed by more than one schoolmate that Lottie was known as the town nut. Becca had been undaunted by such talk, by the whispers of children in the schoolyard and the snide looks from the town's elite. Now, at twenty-one, Becca still held that Lottie was the most interesting and brilliant mother in town, rendering all the others utterly ordinary.

Mapleton had loved Lottie once. In the first few years after she arrived there, before Becca came to live with her and for a time afterward, she had been something of a local celebrity, her oil paintings—landscapes and portraits, mostly—having earned her a respectable, though modest, income. Her reputation had spread beyond Mapleton, some of her riverscapes selling to buyers as far away as Nashville and New Orleans, one hanging in a gallery up north somewhere. At home, she had been in high demand, painting portraits for the more affluent families in town, some of whom, those of a certain old-money set, hung them in gilded frames in the ornate foyers of their tarnished antebellum homes.

In time, Lottie had grown weary of all that. She gave up commissioned portraits, painting instead only those faces she found especially interesting, most often farmers or laundresses, the elderly or the very young, misfits of various sorts, some of whom she enfolded as chosen family. Those portraits she gave away, which did not go over well with her former patrons. And with that, the eccentricities that had once lent Lottie an artistic mystique were recast in an unfavorable light.

These days, Lottie preferred painting items around the house, works that, as she told Becca, made her happy when she caught sight of them as she went about life. She had painted intricate borders around their mirrors and doors, and a trompe l'oeil sparrow hatched from an egg on the stovepipe. Their bread box was a masterpiece.

The two of them, Lottie and Becca, were so close that Becca had needed a week to decide if she would rather live with Lottie when Ben Chambers asked her to marry him. She loved Ben, but she had loved Lottie longer. In the end, Ben had won her over, with Lottie's blessing—perhaps because of Lottie's urging—and on this evening, this seemingly ordinary evening, Becca was six days shy of her wedding.

As twilight dusked the living room, Becca closed her book. Lottie came in from the kitchen to sit beside her on the plain pine bench by the window, taking Becca's hand, as she often did of late, and humming softly. Becca was about to ask her what she had been painting that day, when a lightning bolt flashed sky-to-earth outside the window, chased by an earsplitting thunderclap that startled them both. Immediately following, as if tossed by a divine hand, a yellow globe of electric light rolled through the open doorway. Neither woman spoke as the ghostly sphere, roughly the size of a melon, glided soundlessly into the room. It passed by them mere inches from Lottie's knee. Becca barely breathed. As it continued on, they watched, frozen, as if the slightest movement might draw the thing toward them. They saw it rise slightly, and before Becca could collect herself enough to determine a course of action, the lightning ball found the open window across the room and whirled out into the gloaming.

"What on earth...?" Becca was still clutching Lottie's hand. "If that thing had hit one of us..." Then she was on her feet and dashing across the room to slam the door against whatever it was.

"Lovely," Lottie whispered, her eyes gleaming. Then they were glistening, and a tear slid down her face.

"Lottie? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You're crying. What is it?"

Lottie stood, her face lined with worry even as her eyes were still lit with a kind of wonder. "You wouldn't understand," she said, laying her hand briefly on Becca's shoulder before turning back to the kitchen.