Page 76 of We Already Dug the Grave

I shook my head “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course it’s real.”

“There’s no way,” she said. “And even if it was… Casey was a boy you liked—that’s all. Y’all were kids.”

“How can you know that? You’re saying you don’t believe me. You still think I…I hurt him.”

“No. That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

“Then how can you say it’s not real?” I sniffed. “I mean hell, look at our family’s legacy—all the death… Shit, look at Mama and Daddy.”

Frances sighed. “Good people die, and bad men do bad things all the time. Hell, if that’s a curse then every woman in the world is cursed. ”

“Stop minimizing what I did, Frances.”

“Let me say this,” she continued. “We know what happened to Daddy—may he rot in hell. Are you really saying that he died and that Mama’s in jail because she read his fortune and fate made her pay?” She scoffed. “Doesn’t that seem a little, I don’t know, fucked up to you? Because I know what I think. Daddy wasn’t Mama’s ‘cursed thing,’ he was just a curse on his own. And as for the women and the death in our family?” Frances leaned forward slightly, her brows arched. “You know what happened to Hattie-May’s brother-in-law, our grandpa, who married off Aunt Ruth when she was just a girl?”

“He had a heart attack,” I said.

“Yeah. He had a heart attack, but you and I both know what all Hattie-May grew in that greenhouse of hers and we know how some of the women who visited her were often later listed in obituaries as the widows of men who had heart attacks.”

“You’re saying—”

“Let me finish.” Her voice was sharp. “And the old man that teenage Aunt Ruth was forced to marry? He died in a hunting accident.” She rolled her eyes. “Did you ever hear that entire story? Because I did. The ‘hunting accident’?” Frances curled her fingers in air quotes. “He didn’t fall out of a deer stand—that perv was shot.”

“What?”

“Yep. Grew up hunting, but somehow accidentally shot himself with a rifle.” She leveled her gaze at me. “I heard someone say that Ruth was the one who found him.” She shrugged. “So. There’s no curse activated by reading the fortune of our so-called beloved. These men were nobody’s ‘cursed things.’ We just happen to be women who, when wronged, fight back.” She paused. “Do you really think fate would be so misogynistic? To trap us, then punish us for it?”

“It doesn’t work that way.” I shook my head. “What about Hattie-May’s husband? She always talked about he was a good man—they were in real love. He wasn’t like the others you listed—he was her person. Then, he was sent to war and—”

“A lot of boys from Puddle Creek died in Vietnam. You know that. It wasn’t because of anything Hattie-May did. Besides. Do you really think she’d break one of their beloved rules?”

I didn’t love the scoff in her tone, but I ignored it.

I drummed my fingers against the table. “It doesn’t prove the curse isn’t real.”

The door buzzed and we both froze, watching as a middle-aged couple staggered in. Neither of us spoke again until they paid for their energy drinks and left.

“Maybe not,” Frances said. “But you can’t prove it’s real either.”

“Except Casey didn’t do anything wrong. How could he die like that if it wasn’t the curse?”

“I don’t know,” Frances said, gently. “You slept outside near the woods, in overgrown grass. Could’ve been a snakebite. Or a spider—though I’m not sure that would kill someone so quickly. He could’ve had an allergic reaction to an insect or something. And God knows what plants of Hattie-May’s were seeded nearby. It could’ve been literally anything. But whatever it was, unless you actively killed him, it wasn’t your fault. He was not your cursed thing.”

I closed my eyes and saw Casey, pale and lifeless. I shook away the image. “He was buried without a funeral, without a gravestone, without anyone celebrating his life, because of me. I should’ve told someone. Instead I…” I yanked napkins from the dispenser in a giant wad and pressed it against my eyes. “Maybe I was the curse.”

“No.” She gently touched my hands. “You were a traumatized kid who’d just gone through something horrible. You were scared. And maybe I sound like a bitch, but no one could bring Casey back to life, and I’m not sure that trashy family of his would’ve spent money on a funeral anyway.”

The steam had stopped rising from my coffee, and it tasted even worse cold.

“Maybe.” I wasn’t going to shake a decade of guilt in one conversation. “I can’t believe you’ve known all this time. What did you do after you watched me move him?”

“I crawled back into bed. I thought you’d wake me up and tell me what happened. Get the aunts to help. If I’d known it would be the last time I’d see you, I’d have sprinted into the woods and helped you dig the grave.”

“I had to leave; I was so ashamed. The idea of facing anyone was too much.” I gnawed at a chapped piece of skin on my bottom lip. “Casey was dead, and I thought no one would believe it was an accident, not after what I’d done to Shane.”

“You saved me. That’s what you did,” Frances said.

I looked out the giant window to the parking lot, where my car sat, then remembered what was inside. Why we were here. “But what about the helmet?”