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“She showed up to my house the other evening, blathering on about looking for a Mr. Santos. How he was to give her a college tour as a favor to her parents.” Bernadette seemed tickled at Mia’s blatant lie, while Birdie cringed at her daughter’s ability to prevaricate on demand.
Bernadette further explained, “What she didn’t know, was that the moment I laid eyes on her I knew Lucas Santos was her father.”
Birdie lowered her chin, words bubbling in her head and then erupting from her mouth. “I’m so terribly sorry. For Rachel, for… me…” She shook her head, more tears pooling in her eyes.
“Whatever for?” Bernadette asked, tilting her head to the side as she sat in her chair and reached out to hold her hand.
What for? Where did she begin?
She covered the older hand with her own, grasping on to it tightly for strength. “For… for not showing up once I hit high school. For leaving town and disappearing all those years without a word, not letting anyone know where I was and that I was okay, and mostly, for not telling anyone about Mia. You have to believe me, Bernadette, I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell Lucas. There was too much at stake. Too much to lose.”
“Come now,” she said. “There’s no need to cry. It’s not my place to judge or ruminate about the past. I’m just glad you’re here. Today. Sometimes that’s all we get is today. So we might as well embrace it rather than hold on to grudges.”
Birdie nodded, wiping her eyes with the white paper towel Bernadette had placed on the table. Probably in anticipation of waterworks.
Not sure where to take the conversation, Birdie peered over to the cup sitting in front of Bernadette with pieces of roots floating to the top.
“So, what kind of tea is that?”
“It’s not so much tea as a remedy. A Gullah Geechee tonic made of black root and yarrow. My stomach’s been upset lately.”
“And that’s going to settle your stomach?” Birdie asked with skepticism.
“It did yours.”
“I drank that?” She crossed her arms and leaned her elbows on the table. “It looks like dirty water with roots and weeds thrown in.”
“If I remember correctly, I doctored yours with honey and elderberry juice but make no mistake, you drank it.”
Birdie sat back reminiscent of the early days.
“I remember the first time I came to your house, I asked Lucas what was up with the metal sculpture in the front yard with all of the blue bottles hanging all over it like tree branches.”
Even though the blue bottle trees were common in South Georgia, Shelby would tell her and Maisie they were the work of the devil, as well as those who believed in sorcery, and to say a prayer and shun the heathens who worshipped such evil notions.
Bernadette smiled as if recalling a memory. “Ah, yes. I had forgotten about that tree. It was to ward off shape-shifter spirits who had been wronged while on the earthly plane,” she said matter-of-factly. “The blue bottle tree was the way to trap evil spirits. Legend claimed once daylight hit the bottles, the spirits inside would die and move on to the spirit world.”
“You don’t have it anymore?”
“No, it blew away during a hurricane a few years back,” she said, staring over Birdie’s shoulder as if contemplating. “Maybe, if I had taken the time to put it back to rights, we’d still have Rachel.”
Bernadette had rarely mentioned her Gullah Geechee beliefs. But it was evident in the food she cooked, the medicinal concoctions she’d put together, and her neighbors who would stop by to visit.
Birdie later learned, after visiting the library for the first time for a reason other than detention, that the Gullah Geechee people were descendants of Africans who were enslaved on the rice, indigo, and sea island cotton plantations of the lower Atlantic Coast. Many from the rice-growing region of West Africa.
They had a language all their own. After a few months of eavesdropping, Birdie began to pick up some of the more common phrases.
When greeting her Gullah Geechee neighbors, Bernadette would say with a notable uptick of her voice, “How oonah da do?” How are you doing? Or, “We glad fa see oonah.” Happy to see you.
Then they would fall into a deeper conversation, using complex words and sentence structures Birdie could no longer follow. But she loved the lilt of their expressions and the warmth that accompanied the dialogue.
The sound of a vehicle pulling in the drive caught her attention.
Bernadette rounded the table to peer through the lace curtains, covering the double-pane window of the door.
“Now what do those boys think they’re doing?” she murmured.
Birdie peered over the woman’s shoulder and saw a casually dressed Lucas hop out of his vintage truck, and then Grant, pulling in next to him and sliding out of the driver’s seat of a much newer model.
