There is something wrong with Delia’s youngest son. He had always been evasive, she thinks, even as a toddler, but now she’s lucky to even catch a glimpse of him. He comes in, he darts to his room; he goes out, he slips through the side door. His gaze, even when she tries to catch it, rejects hers like a nervous liar’s.
She pushes Caleb from her mind and returns her attention to her mother’s estate documents, finally spread out in front of her, weeks following the funeral. Other than the executor’s petition set to the side, they’re all in an overstuffed folder. It holds a mix of the bank documents she needs and things her mother had wanted to save, seemingly at random. A loan document here, an old photo there.
Wiping the sweat from her brow, Delia walks toward the door to flip the switch and turn on the ceiling fan that sits above her kitchen table. The loose documents go flying, but she waves a hand and decides to track them down later. Pulling bank documents as she finds them, she begins setting them aside – tucked underneath the empty flower vase – instead taken with curiosity of what her mother had wanted to save, and whether she had thought when doing so that Delia would be here, sorting through them.
She lingers at first on the things she expected to find: family photos, recipes, birthday cards. Fond memories of better times. After several minutes, she is finally struck by a 1980s newspaper clipping reading “Out-of-Town Marchers Jeered by Locals” with a photo depicting a group on the side of the road, some in strange robes, holding signs with inflammatory statements. Policemen stand at the edge of the frame. Why had she saved this? She begins to see her mother’s form across from her, sipping coffee and pursing her lips, as she had done at this very table many times.
Now it’s 1987, and Delia is fourteen, but in the exact same seat. Her grandfather chain smokes to her left, and her grandmother stands at the stove, kneading dough for biscuits. Her mother sits beside her, chopping vegetables. No one is speaking, and a radio plays softly in the background, a news report about the march.
“He’s been yammering about that for a damn hour. I don’t see what the big deal is,” her grandfather says, drawling through the tar in his throat.
“Well, Kent and them are down there, that’s the big deal to me, but as soon as they’re here or he stops talking about it I’ll turn it off,” her grandmother answers.
Kent is Delia’s uncle. She has no idea why he’s at a march or what he’s doing there, but this is only a fleeting thought to her. Rather, she is excited to see her cousins— Kent’s son and two daughters— and to gossip with them. After her parents divorced, a minor scandal in this small town, her mother had taken a job at a coat factory and moved them both up by the Tennessee border. Through their childhoods, she’d seen her cousins almost every day, but now it was down to a few weeks in the summer and the holidays.
They are coming to Sunday dinner, a regular occasion made a bit special by the newly unusual presence of Delia and her mom. The son, Kelden, is the baby, and his parents dote on him accordingly. This gives him a personality that Delia, an only child, can neither connect with nor understand. Linda is her age and a bit buttoned-up, while Millie, two years older, is her favorite. Millie carries the wisdom of experience in Delia’s mind, but her cousin doesn’t mind deigning to impart that knowledge on her. Now she can fill Delia’s head with another spring’s worth of gossip. Nothing in Delia’s life excites her more.
“Hey,” Delia’s mother says, interrupting her daydream before it begins. “Go put on something nice for tonight.” She gestures with the knife, decorated with bits of Vidalia onion.
I don’t have anything nicer than this, Delia thinks, looking down at her cotton dress. She gets up to retreat to the bedroom she and her mother share in this house. She lays out the three other dresses her mother packed for her: two, plus the one she has on, are nearly identical. A light pink one with a frilly collar stands out. She selects the latter, a hand-me-down, figuring it will make her look the most adult by Millie’s silent appraisal.
She puts it on and retakes her place at the table. By now, steam is rising from the pot on the stove, boiling potatoes. The radio continues to drone, with the host now speaking to an “expert guest” about the incident downtown. Violence had broken out, with no shots fired but several hospitalized. Some witnesses say that Klansmen attacked marchers while police stood by, while others, including the guest, maintain that the incident started with the protestors. Delia’s grandmother listens intently while she stirs.
Her fears are allayed when Kent walks through the door, with his wife, Anne, and their three children in tow. Far from his normal prickly personality, on this night he appears lively and jovial, going as far as leaning over to kiss Delia’s cheek. Delia exchanges hellos with Anne, who pulls her into a hug. When released, she waves to the children, and tries to catch Millie’s eye, but her cousin avoids looking directly at her. Delia can immediately sense that over the past several months, one semester’s worth of school, something in Millie has changed immutably.
While Delia is transfixed, Kent and her grandparents exchange pleasantries, with her uncle and grandfather shaking hands vigorously. They trade grunts, the words swallowed by Delia’s distraction, before Millie finally returns her stare, causing Delia to look away. Kent forcefully guides his wife and children, all put off by his newfound zeal, toward the table. They take their places while Delia follows her mother to the kitchen.
She takes the potato dish, her fingers burning slightly from the still-too-hot surface, and turns to bring it toward the table. Her mother, carrying the green beans, leans over and mutters:
“Something’s wrong with Millie. I mean, something’s different.”
Delia simply nods, but she is at once proud and terrified that her intuition had been correct. Her mother’s comment had come in a knowing tone, but in Delia there is only the feeling, and her mind races through the possibilities. Still, it comes up empty.
She carefully places the dish on the hot pad and takes her seat, between her cousins and her grandfather, who sits at the head of the table. The table barely fits the nine chairs around it, and the four kids are squeezed into a tight space. Her grandfather opens his mouth to say grace, but Kent interrupts him, his boundless energy breaching new ground.
“Pa, alright if I say grace tonight?”
Delia’s grandfather is a little startled, but nods and joins hands with Delia and her mother to his right. Kent bows his head and says a fanciful prayer, the kind which would certainly have Delia’s mother rolling her eyes. She mouths an “amen” with the rest of the family and they dig in.
The clanking of forks and grunts to pass things fill the air for a few minutes before Delia’s grandfather breaks the silence.
“Lot of commotion downtown, huh?” He gestures toward Kent.
“Oh yeah, but we took care of it.” Kent’s tone is self-satisfied.
“At least you’re not hurt. I was listening to the radio trying to see,” his mother interjects.
Kent waves a hand dismissively. “The other guys got the worst of it, to tell you the truth. Just bumps and bruises for our side. Anyway, I was out of the fray.”
His father clanks his fork down with a little gusto: “and thank god for that.” With a sigh, he continues “I want to say I’m proud of you for, uh, standing up, but I just can’t understand why you’d want to get involved, here, now.”
“Couple of guys down at the fire station let me know that those people were planning that march, and it seemed to me that it was time to do something about it. Way I see it, things don’t got to change like they say, and I want to leave the world like I found it for the kids. I want them to be good and God-fearing, like me.”
Millie, unable to help herself, lets out a snort.
“What, you got a problem with that?” Kent says, pleasantly.
His daughter, staring at her plate, does not respond.
“Thought so. Start that again and I’ll smack you into next week.” With this, Kent makes eye contact with his father, who nods imperceptibly.
The content of the conversation over dinner had flown over Delia’s head, drowned out by her own thoughts. She remains seated a moment too long while her cousins begin clearing the table, and returns from her stupor only when Millie nudges her playfully.
“You gonna help, shit-for-brains?”
Delia rises with such a start that she knocks over a glass, which thuds harmlessly against the tablecloth. Her cousins laugh, which allows her to relax a little as she begins scraping the excess from each plate in order to stack them.
“Something wrong with you, Delia? You seem a little nervous. I mean, more than usual,” Linda says, the touch of judgment remaining in her voice though she tried to remove it.
“No, no, I just zoned out a little, that’s all.” It’s true, Delia thought, that she enters virtually any situation without the self-assuredness those around her learned to adopt, but she does not appreciate having this pointed out to her. From Linda, though, whose opinion she doesn’t value especially highly, it doesn’t sting quite as much. Her heightened anxiety this evening was coming from the idea that Millie, who she long measured herself against, had outgrown her in some final way, armed with earthly knowledge beyond Delia’s capacity.
Once the dishes were cleared, their contents scraped into Tupperware or the trash, the tablecloth thrown in the hamper, Millie proposes that they walk down to the creek together, something they had done as children before they became afraid to muddy their clothes or catch crawdads with their bare hands. Delia accepts excitedly, thinking to herself that it’s not too late to make up ground.
“Mama, we’re walking down to the creek,” Mille says, heading to the door.
“Wait, you –”
Millie does not wait for the end of her mother’s sentence, instead, she bolts out the door, dragging Delia along by the arm.
“Look at you, dressed like Little House on the Prairie.”
Delia welcomes this light-hearted ribbing. “If I’m Little House on the Prairie, you’re Lucy on Dallas.” Maybe her intuition had been wrong; maybe things hadn’t changed so much.
Millie smiles, and when they reach the cross-section, she strikes a more serious tone: “I guess you might have noticed me rolling my eyes at my dad a little bit. Or a lot.”
Delia shakes her head. She had not, in fact, noticed.
“Well, anyway, let me tell you about Kent.” Her voice drips with disdain as she speaks her father’s name. “He’s been cheating on my mom. I don’t know for how long. Running around with Mae Walter.”
Delia knows of Mae Walter from church. Ms. Walter, a widow, is the object of lust among all the boys in town, and the object of ridicule among the women. Delia had caught enough of the hushed comments from both groups to know. “Oh,” she responds. “Does your mom know?” She is intrigued by the drama but has no idea how to respond to it or what to ask.
Millie scoffs. “I don’t think so. I haven’t told her. ‘If you tell anybody, I’ll kill you. Dead serious,’” she adds, mocking her father’s deep drawl. “Oh, and worst of all, he named me Mildred.”
Delia pauses to laugh at Millie’s dry humor, then says “Oh, so he knows you know?”
“Yeah. I caught them red-handed, necking in an alley downtown. It was still light out, too.”
Delia shakes her head disapprovingly but offers no verbal response.
“I think that’s why he’s gotten into this white power stuff, too,” her cousin continues. “Her brothers are all into that. They probably talked him into going today.”
Delia has never thought about any of this, and Millie, sensing her discomfort with that aspect of the subject, drops it in favor of schoolyard gossip. They speak like this, the kind of friendship and sexual drama Delia is well-prepared for, as they enter the woods on the way down to the creek. Delia’s saddle shoes sink in the mud, but she doesn’t mind as the water’s rush reaches her ears and the moisture hits her face. With these sensory experiences, her self-consciousness almost melts away. She begins to feel at ease.
She and Millie sit on a large rock by the creek bed, no longer willing to splash freely as they had when they were younger children. At a lull in the conversation, Millie lets out a pained sigh.
“I have to tell you something else.”
Delia is at attention. “Go ahead.”
Millie shifts uncomfortably. “Ok. Well, you see, I’ve been, uh, fooling around with Paul McLean. Remember him from Sunday School when we were little?”
Delia says she does. “What do you mean, ‘fooling around?’”
Millie lowers her gaze, and Delia understands, abstractly. She had heard from other girls the things they did or wanted to do with boys, but Delia herself had never done anything more than kiss without tongue.
“One night a little while ago I let it get a little too far, and…”
“Oh.”
“Yep, I’m fucking pregnant. Stole a test from the drugstore so I didn’t have to be seen buying it. I just found out, and you’re the first one I’m telling.”
Delia puts an arm around her favorite cousin. She feels awkward doing this, but the overwhelming need to do something won out. Millie rests her head lightly on Delia’s collarbone.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m not even looking for advice or anything. I just needed to tell someone.”
“Are you thinking about getting rid of it?” Delia blurts out.
“You mean like an abortion? Yeah, I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know where to go or anything like that.”
“Me either.” As far as Delia was out of her depth, she realizes at this moment that Millie was further. What she had taken as earthly knowledge was simply worry, not altogether different from what she felt nearly every day of her life, just concentrated and with higher stakes. “I want to help.”
Millie smiles, knowing that Delia doesn’t know how but appreciates the sentiment. A sentiment which is as genuine as Delia had ever felt.
“Just don’t tell your mom or anything, all right?”
But Delia would, just after hugging and exchanging goodbyes with her grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. Sitting in the car, her mother is adjusting the rearview mirror, the engine rattling.
“So Millie is pregnant,” her mother says authoritatively, out of the blue.
“How…how did you know?”
Her mother lets out a laugh that Delia perceives as a little rueful. “So I was right. I don’t know how I knew – I could just see it. Feel it. She’s about to be in a world of trouble, huh?”
“Not if I can help it,” Delia says in a resolute voice that surprises her.
“What…oh you mean she’s going to get an abortion? An abortion, really, Delia? Get real. You’d better not get involved.”
Delia, as it would happen, does not. Her mother pens a letter to Millie, explaining that Delia told her about the pregnancy. Millie, with this as her cue, runs away from home and, with the help of a particularly sympathetic teacher, does, in fact, get an abortion. She bounces around through the rest of her teenage years, disappearing from the family and going no-contact with them all, Delia included. About twenty years later, Delia looks for her and finds out that she lives, happy it seems, in Nashville. Delia, for reasons she cannot pinpoint, decides not to reach out.
Delia starts from her protracted daydream when someone walks through the door. It’s dusk by this point. Caleb, her son, slips into the house and grunts a hello before darting to his room. He’s dressed normally, but on his wrist, she notices a pretty gold bracelet, the kind she would’ve been happy to wear as a teenager. She says nothing.
Amy Cadence is a writer, musician and MFA dropout currently living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work seeks to situate characters in the current moment, politically and physically, often drawing from her own experience as a poor trans woman in the American South. She is currently working on her debut novel.