Homecoming: Part Two, Chapters 7–12

His profile was smooth lines, slightly curved except where his nose jutted out and his beard jutted out at the end of his chin.

Most of the land was being used for farms, interspersed with patches of loblollies and other trees.

"I got work to do,” the woman continued, to prod Dicey.

She turned at the second stop sign and found herself on Landing Neck Road, in farm country, where broad fields burgeoned with corn or barbed wire contained cows and horses, where chickens and ducks wandered around the yards.

Half a mile down the road, Dicey saw the mailbox, dented, rusted, its post awry; llerma was all that remained of sloppily painted black letters.

The driveway ran straight between the fields. It too was overgrown. You could barely make out the ruts where car wheels would fit.

After that, you’re fresh as a daisy and the worms and maggots have you.

Maudlin, simpering fool.

Her mother simpered, simpered and looked in mirrors, all her life.

"Not that it concerns you.”
"You’re right. It doesn’t concern me one whit. Did you ditch them somewhere?”

"Don’t you lie to me, girl. If you didn’t need a place to sleep you wouldn’t have traipsed out here this morning. You wouldn’t have come around back to find me. You wouldn’t have asked Millie—did you tell her who you were?”

Dicey’s lips were tight. Her grandmother’s lips were tight. They glared at one another across the kitchen. Neither one of them faltered.

Dicey turned toward the dilapidated barn, where the truck must be.

She sat with her back to her grandmother and watched the prow of the little boat cut through the quiet water.

She loped down the long driveway without looking back.

"That’s the bathroom at the far end. Sheets are in one of the bureaus. I can’t recollect which.”

The big barn door was pulled half open. Bits had rotted out of the wood at the base of the door, as if someone had kicked at it in unappeasable anger.

A fleeting expression that might have been unaccustomed mirth, or might have been a twinge of pain, went across her grandmother’s face.

A fleeting expression that might have been unaccustomed mirth, or might have been a twinge of pain, went across her grandmother’s face.

"So what?” Dicey answered quickly. “I'll go with you Sammy. We like fishing,” she said defiantly to her grandmother.

The woman didn’t answer, but instead lifted up the basket and poured the teeming mass of crabs into the water. She slammed the lid down on top of them. You could hear them scrambling around inside the metal pot, scrabbling up to escape the steam.

The Tillermans had never eaten crabs before. They learned how to rip off the legs first, then lift back the top shell. Then you broke the crab in half, like a turnover, and picked out the meat from between sections of cartilage.

The bay had no waves and no undertows. It was as calm as a swimming pool.

They began with the honeysuckle growing up around the front porch. It had formed a massed wall that wove around itself and clung to itself with tiny tendrils. The tendrils looped and looped around anything that would hold them up.

Maybe it would burn, but she doubted that; it was lush summer growth, tensile vines and green leaves.

"That honeysuckle’s been there a long time. It’s the kind of tenacious plant I have to respect,” their grandmother said.

"Honeysuckle is parasitic,” James announced. "It can be trained and kept back, but when allowed to proliferate without controls, it chokes out other growth. It’s begun to climb over the small trees out front.”

Sammy and Maybeth emptied the crab pots for supper, and they ate at the trestle table on the porch.

Her wet shorts chafed against her waist and thighs.

The huge pot steamed and rattled as the glass jars boiled, to be sterile for the day’s canning.

"Why didn’t you say?” Dicey asked, exasperated.
Maybeth shrugged. Dicey subsided, because she knew why Maybeth hadn’t said anything.

I was down at the dock. I bailed out the boat, so the motor won’t get covered with water.

"You’ll ruin him. He’s willful and needs to learn.”

That was the end of the conversation, but not of the battle, for this was a battle, not a skirmish. Dicey knew it. She wondered if she won that battle, would she lose the whole war?

Her hair was all in tousled curls.

At least now, everything was settled, she wasn’t battling any more. She liked her grandmother, her momma’s mother. She liked her all prickly and contrary.

Do you know how long it’ll take that dithering woman to get advice from all the people she talks to and arrange to come and get you?

Their grandmother blushed. The dark red came up under her tanned cheeks. "I’ll be getting vain the next thing you know. And that’s a vice I never had. Let’s go.”

The abrupt change of topic flustered Millie.

"By the way, Millie,” their grandmother finally said, "I don’t believe you’ve met my grandchildren.” One by one she introduced them. "Liza’s brood,” their grandmother said.