watched the line of his father’s back retreat until it wavered and became shaded. Damn.
The weight of the second shovel lifted. Mavis tugged at the handle. “Go with them. I’ll pick it up.”
“I can’t let you dig,” Gavin said. “Not after that.”
She tugged again until his hold loosened. “Move aside.”
He watched as she shed her overshirt, the plaid number. She tied it around her waist, then hoisted the shovel. He moved to the right until her blade split fresh topsoil he already knew to be soft. And he watched her, her hair slicing backward just like the dull edge of the long-handled tool. The pale curve of her cheek. The lines of her. She was small with, he suspected, curves that she drowned subtly with her wardrobe of ceaseless black.
There was muscle there, too, he found. Will and might. He considered changing her nickname again, this time to Mighty Mouse. She dug without slowing or even a grunt of effort. She culled clay from its earth bed. He nodded approval, then began working beside her, letting their actions fall into rhythm.
He’d knowingly overlooked her for most of her life. Who knew Kyle’s sister would wind up an endless source of fascination?
The end of his blade met something solid as he sank it decisively into the loose ground. The impact sang up his arms and filled the air with a satisfying thunk. “Aha,” he heard Zelda utter.
Mavis dropped her shovel and knelt as he raised his blade. She didn’t hesitate to sink her hands into the red-tinged dirt, combing it up the sides of the hole.
Gavin took a knee beside her. He took over, leaving her to tug aside loose black roots moist from internment. The smell of earth was darker, richer. Gavin could practically taste it. It coated them both to the elbows as inches gave way to the flat face of a handmade box.
They worked together to loosen the ground hugging it close on either side. Finally, with one hand over and another under, Mavis hefted the box from its resting place. Gingerly, she placed it on the ground as Olivia and Gerald flanked her.
The flat of Olivia’s palm dusted the lid. Gavin leaned in until he could make out the carving of a rose. Until he could inhale Mavis’s mango scent and realized how close he was to brushing his lips across the point of her shoulder.
Gerald found a screwdriver to loosen the lid. As he pried the old screws from their corners, nobody moved.
“It should be you,” Gerald said as he looked to his wife. “Go on, love. Let’s see what Ward and his Olivia found worth saving.”
“Not me,” Olivia said. She beckoned William closer. “Come ’ere, Shooks.”
William obeyed, hesitant. “Mom. You’ve waited...”
“You never knew them,” she told him, scooting so that William could wedge his way between her and Gerald and take a knee. “I should wait for Finny, but God knows he didn’t give me a single patient bone in my body.” Placing a hand on William’s arm, she lowered her voice and said, “Go ahead.”
William paused only briefly before appeasing his parents’ ill-contained curiosity. He pried the lid free. Mavis, who had shifted over with the others, was practically beneath Gavin. He felt the excitement all but zipping from the top of her head even if it wasn’t her gasp that rent the air. “Letters,” she said.
“What’s the date on the postmark?” Olivia asked as Gerald lifted a ragged envelope to the light. “Is the stamp still legible?”
“It is.” A wondering laugh shook Gerald’s shoulders. “July 18, 1953.”
“Six months before they were married,” Olivia calculated. She handled the envelope with care. “From her to him.”
“It’s not the only one,” William said as he riffled through the collection. “The bundles tied with the ribbons are the ones she wrote, from the looks of it.”
“You can tell by the writing,” Olivia noted. “I’d forgotten how precise her penmanship was...”
“And the ones tied with the leather straps are his,” William finished. “Look, Dad. We found someone wordier than you. But I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?” Olivia asked absently as she thumbed through a stack.
“They both grew up here, or close by,” William said. “Didn’t they?”
“He was from Fairhope,” Olivia said. “She lived more toward Malbis.”
“They had cars in the fifties,” William expounded. “Why so many letters? It’s not like they lived on opposite corners of the globe. Even if they did, there were phone lines, telegraphs...”
“People used to communicate differently,” Zelda explained.
Olivia carefully unfolded a page of a letter. She sounded far off, near dreamy, when she added, “And when you love someone that much, there’s nothing like writing it down on paper.”
“It’s recorded,” Mavis concluded. “This way they could relive the feeling and pass it on.”
Gavin frowned at the side of her head. “Since when’re you a romantic?”
She glanced up. Her eyes went round when her nose nearly touched his. The gap widened as she edged back, but he saw her dark gaze race across his face in quick perusal. His mouth went dry. “I’m not,” she claimed and looked away.
“Mmm-hmm,” he said, unconvinced.
Underneath the point of his chin, Mavis’s shoulder hiked in a shrug. “It’s history, right? I like history. Especially the kind I can hold in my hands.”
Like those giant genealogical tomes back at Zelda’s.
A smile crammed, foreign, in the ball of his jaw joint. It felt out of place, but it hung there, like a lazy, back-sliding moon in its crescent. He was aware of it, just as he was aware of Mavis and aware of all the places inside him that didn’t feel dark when she coaxed it out of him.
He should move away. It was too hot to be this close. The contents of the box were too intimate. Ward and the first Olivia’s messages weren’t for him.
But Mavis smelled like earth and life and threw all the shady parts of him into stark contrast when he breathed in and filled up with her scent.
The heel of his shoe caught the lip of a hole and he nearly tripped into it. Stumbling only slightly as he straightened, he looked down to keep from twisting his ankle in any of the rest of them.
They were spread out under the dead eaves of the tree, the grass-covered glade broken up by ruts and dirt tossed haphazardly. A minefield.
No. He blinked. The battlefield couldn’t intrude here.
But he had intruded, and the battlefield was always with him. Damned if he’d ever be rid of it, anymore than the stench of the loner—the outsider.
His mind began to grind into the sick death spiral of anxiety. He
