The Liar

As she stepped back, she was caught in a round-the-back bear hug. She recognized the wonderful prickle of whiskers, wriggled around and hugged. “Grandpa.”

“I was just saying to Vi the other day, ‘Vi, something’s missing around here. Can’t quite put my finger on it.’ Now I got it. It was you.”

She reached up, rubbed her palm over the stone-gray whiskers, looked up into his merry blue eyes. “I’m glad you found me.” She laid her head against his barrel of a chest. “It looks like a carnival here. Everything full of fun and color.”

“It’s time you came back to the carnival. You fixing to stay?”

“Jack,” Clayton muttered.

“I’ve been ordered not to ask questions.” Those merry eyes could turn pugnacious in a finger snap—and did. “But I’m damned if I won’t ask my own granddaughter if she’s fixing to stay home this time.”

“It’s all right, Daddy, and yeah, I’m fixing to stay.”

“Good. Now Vi’s giving me the hard eye ’cause I’m keeping you from her. At your six,” he said, and turned her around.

There she was, Viola MacNee Donahue, in a bright blue dress, her Titan hair in a sassy curling wedge, big movie star sunglasses tipped down her nose, and her eyes bold and blue over them.

She didn’t look like anyone’s granny, Shelby thought, but called out to her as she flew over the lawn.

“Granny.”

Viola dropped her hands from her hips, threw out her arms.

“About damn time, but I guess you saved the best for last.”

“Granny. You’re so beautiful.”

“Aren’t you lucky to look just like me? Or like I did some forty years back. It’s the MacNee blood, and good skin care. That little angel of yours has the same.”

Shelby turned her head, smiled as she saw Callie with cousins, rolling on the grass with a couple of young dogs. “She’s my heart and soul.”

“I know it.”

“I should’ve—”

“Should’ves are a waste. We’re going to take a little walk,” she said when Shelby’s eyes filled. “Take a look at your daddy’s vegetable patch. Best tomatoes in the Ridge. You put the worry aside now. Just put it aside.”

“There’s too much of it, Granny. More than I can say right now.”

“Worry doesn’t get things done, it just gives a woman lines in her face. So you put the worry aside. What needs doing will get done. You’re not alone now, Shelby.”

“I . . . forgot what it feels like not to be, so all this seems like a dream.”

“This is what’s real and always has been. Come here, darling, hold on awhile.” She drew Shelby close, rubbed her back. “You’re home now.”

Shelby looked out at the mountains, smoked with clouds, so strong, so enduring, so true.

She was home now.

5

Somebody brought out her grandfather’s banjo, and in short order her uncle Grady’s wife, Rosalee, had a fiddle, her brother Clay his guitar. They wanted bluegrass, the music of the mountains. Those high bright notes, the close harmony of strings plucked and sawed stirred memories in her, lit a light inside her. A kind of birth.

Here were her beginnings, in the music and the mountains, in the green and the gatherings.

Family, friends, neighbors swarmed the picnic tables. She watched her cousins dancing on the lawn, her mother in her yellow heels swinging little Jackson to the rhythm. And there, her father with Callie in his lap having what appeared to be a very serious conversation while they ate potato salad and barbecued ribs.

Her grandmother’s laugh carried over the music as Viola sat cross-legged on the lawn, sipping champagne and grinning up at Gilly.

Her mother’s younger sister Wynonna kept a hawk eye on her youngest girl, who seemed joined at the hip with a skinny guy in torn-up jeans her aunt referred to as “that Hallister boy.”

As her cousin Lark was sixteen and as curvy as a mountain road, Shelby figured the hawk eye was warranted.

People kept pushing food on her, so she ate because she felt her mother’s own hawk eye on her. She drank champagne even though it made her think of Richard.

And she sang because her grandfather asked her to. “Cotton-Eyed Joe” and “Salty Dog,” “Lonesome Road Blues” and “Lost John.” The lyrics came back to her like yesterday, and the simple fun of it, singing out in the yard, letting the music rise toward the big sunstruck blue bowl of the sky, soothed her battered heart.

She’d let this go, she thought, let all of it go for a man she’d never really known and a life she knew had been false from the first to the last.

Wasn’t it a miracle that what was real and true was here waiting for her?

When she could get away, she slipped into the house, wandered upstairs. Her heart just flooded when she stepped into Callie’s room.

Petal-pink walls and fussy white curtains framing the window that looked out on the backyard, and the mountains beyond it. All the pretty white furniture, and the bed with its pink-and-white canopy all set up. They’d even arranged some of the dolls and toys and books on the white bookcase, tucked some of the stuffed animals on the bed.