When the earthen dam upstream from Toccoa Falls College collapsed at 1:30am on November 6, 1977, sending a thirty-foot-high wall of water raging through campus, I should’ve been asleep in the white-painted crib which had belonged to my older sister Angela.
According to my mother, this is what happened that night.
Up way past my bedtime, I sneaked into the kitchen for a chocolate chip cookie. Climbing onto a wooden chair, I leaned against the counter and reached for the blue ceramic jar shaped like Cookie Monster. My pajama feet slipped from the chair, she said. I hit my head on the counter as I fell to the floor. No matter what she tried—ice, tea bags, Folgers instant coffee powder—Mama couldn’t stop the bleeding. After worrying over me for nearly an hour, she determined I needed stitches. So she pumped me full of Children’s Tylenol from a medicine dropper, then peeked into the bedroom of my sister Angela, age five, to ensure she was asleep in her narrow twin bed beneath the patchwork quilt. In the nightlight’s faint glow, my sister’s small chest rose and fell, dark hair splayed across the pillow, stuffed bunny clutched beneath one arm. Mama scribbled a note on the back of the Georgia Power bill, hoisted me to her hip, then double-locked the door behind us.
My father, a nighttime security guard at the Bible college where he was also a student, was due home just after midnight. “So you see, I thought she’d be fine,” Mama kept repeating, later on—to my father, the surviving neighbors, the clerk at Ingles Market. “Angela never woke in the night, never. And he was coming right home.”
At that point, it’d been raining for days. Mama jiggled me on her hip as she struggled with the umbrella, picking her way around mud puddles. I rested my head in the hollow beneath her collarbone, reached for her stretchy shoulder strap, and snapped it against her skin wet with raindrops. She batted my hand away—“Stop that, Tallulah”—and loaded me into the rust-orange Volkswagen Beetle, hurrying with the buckle. The ignition turned over once, twice, before it started, and we pulled away from No. 110 Residence Row.
That was her story.
I was named Tallulah after a ghost.
When the Native people were forcibly removed from northeast Georgia along the Trail of Tears in the mid-1800s, legend has it that a young Cherokee mother lost her firstborn baby girl, whether to accident or smallpox or flood, no one knew. Year after year, she returned to perch on a slab of granite jutting from the mountainside, bare legs dangling, tears mingling with spray from the waterfall.
Some say she jumped. Others say she simply came to mourn.
Her name, Tallulah, held layers of meaning including the terrible, or there lies your child.
Seeing as my grandmother descended from the Cherokee, Mama had been raised on the story my evangelical Daddy dismissed as pagan foolery. “Signs, visions, dreams—they’re gifts of the Spirit,” my grandmother used to say. When Mama was doing the telling, she emphasized the Cherokee way of nurturing, how the Great Spirit had created the earth, a floating island to provide for her children. Especially in the years following the flood, Mama clung to her Cherokee heritage as if summoning the Spirit’s maternal nature could somehow assuage her guilt. She provoked Daddy to no end, scattering feathered dreamcatchers and medicine cups filled with vinegar to ward off evil.
Since I’d turned sixteen and could drive myself, I’d visited Tallulah’s granite rock every Friday after school. When Stephens County High let out at 2:14 p.m., I drove straight up Highway 17, over the reconstructed bridges, past the shored-up embankments to Toccoa Falls—higher than Niagara, the town loved to claim. I scrabbled up the hillside, grasping roots and trailing skittering rocks. At the top, almost two hundred feet up, the granite ledge erupted from the cliffside like a tooth from a swollen gum. I felt my way forward, clutching at a scraggly pine tree, sneakers slipping on waxen needles as I leaned over the edge, far as I dared.
The first few times, I had to go alone, refusing even the company of my best friend Jess, who’d never understood my guilt. “The way Angela died”—he shook his head—“was nobody’s fault. That flood was an act of God, just one of those things.”
“But if we’d stayed home that night, I’d still have a sister. Imagine, having a sister.”
“Or all three of you might’ve drowned,” said Jess. “There’s no way of knowing. Besides, Lu, you were only two years old. How could it be your fault?”
It’s just that Mama constantly talked about Angela, how smart she’d been, how doting when I cried, like Angela should’ve been the sister who survived. “Come now, Tallulah, it was nobody’s fault,” Mama repeated like an incantation to make it true, yet somehow I got the feeling she blamed me, when she thought of me at all. As the years passed, our friends and family urged my mother to accept the tragedy, make peace with her grief, and finally move on, but her suffering only seemed to increase, back hunched, frame shrinking ever smaller like a great burden compacted her spine.
“Tallulah,” I asked. “Why did you come back, year after year? Were you real or a Spirit visitation?”
I felt her maternal hand covering mine as I grasped the rough pine bark and ventured further out onto her rock, trying not to imagine how it would feel to jump. When Jess came along with me, the two of us sat side by side, granite warming the backs of our thighs, bare legs dangling, ankles knocking together as we ripped scales from pine cones and dropped them like coins into a wishing well.
There are a thousand ways to watch water fall.
For one, you can back up panoramic, take in the whole crashing rush. Or narrow your eyes to slits, focus on the misty hiss of peripheral spray. Or my favorite: locate a single drop, that tiny particle; pretend you can follow its course toppling over the ledge, free-falling into the crowded torrent, swirling around the bottomless black pool; eddying down and down past boulders, black racers, crawdads; beneath Cat’s Claw and Black-eyed Susan; on through the whispering town toward the far end of the creek, where Angela came to rest.
Leaving the Falls was like waking from a dream.
Yesterday afternoon, I arrived home bleary-eyed, my body insubstantial and fuzzy around the edges. Trying to focus, I trudged up the front walkway past Mama’s plastic pinwheels whizzing crazily in the breeze. The moment I entered the house, she called out, reminding me about our salon appointments before last night’s Family Dance. Shit. I’d forgotten it was her twenty-year high school reunion, though Jess had complained his dad was making him go. “A dance for teenagers with their parents?” Jess had made a face. “Who thought that was a good idea?”
“It’s not my party,” I said now. “Who cares what I look like?” I went into the kitchen, wet a paper towel, and mopped sweat from my forehead, my mind’s eye still following the path of a pine scale over the Falls, on down Toccoa Creek.
“You’re all I have to show for this life, Tallulah.” Mama cracked her gum, Wrigley’s Doublemint. She pinched the gum between thumb and forefinger, folded it into a daisy-printed paper napkin, then dabbed at her magenta lipstick. “I want us both looking good.”
I collapsed onto the couch and grabbed the latest edition of Seventeen to fan myself, then I flipped to an article: “How to Get (and Keep) His Attention.” The measured relationship instructions in my teenage magazines calmed my jumpy heart. I had a habit of devouring such primers with an insatiability born of believing I’d fail miserably if left to my own devices. That, and they offered more instruction on making sense of this world than Mama seemed capable of providing.
Over the top of the magazine, I watched Mama bend close to the foyer mirror. Hands at her temples, she pulled back the baggy skin from around her eyes until it stretched tight. An old record album spun on the turntable, out-of-sync with the lazy rotation of the ceiling fan.
- The first law of flirting is to act like you don’t care.
- Chat up his buddy and ignore him.
- Research his interests and pretend they’re yours.
I flipped the page.
Diagrams of body language: Stand at an angle to him. Front-facing posture looks over-eager. Never cross your ankles, or you’ll look insecure.
“Besides,” said Mama, “you never know, an old boyfriend of mine just might have an eligible son.” She waggled her eyebrows in the mirror, jutting out her bony left shoulder, then the right. She was already dressed for the evening, in a slinky black dress with a gold metal belt that looked cold. More and more, Mama couldn’t keep weight on despite baking her biscuits from Crisco and flour, slathering them with butter. I’d begun to monitor whether she actually ate any. (No.)
Mama continued, “As a sub-freshman—back then they had sub-freshmen, can you believe it? Can’t get any lower than that—back then, I wore charm bracelets from five different boys at once. It was the devil keeping them straight.” I imagined her jangling an armful, shoving them in the sock drawer when her date arrived in a letterman sweater, or a shiny leather jacket like James Dean. But no, it’d been the early ‘70s—mini skirts, bell bottoms, polyester shifts; her blond hair varnished into a ski-jump flip.
I remember what Mama wore the night of the flood, because of the strap.
I’d reached out my fist, pulled the black strap from her tanned shoulder, felt it snap back like a rubber band. The outfit had been a Wonder Wrap Jiffy Jumpsuit she sewed for herself. I’d learned this last year during majorette tryouts, when I searched the cellar for her old baton. I found the baton in a dank corner atop a mildewed box. Hoping to score her old uniform, too, I dragged the box beneath a bare lightbulb dangling from the rafters. I did not find the majorette costume. Instead, I found debris from the night of the flood, the narrative flotsam of my family.
It wasn’t much.
Mainly the greened address plate, No. 110, which I recognized from photos of the tiny bungalow on Residence Row. There was the gray plastic tire of Angela’s Big Wheel tricycle, gouged in like a crushed skull. I ran my fingers along the indentation and shuddered. There was also a stuck-together sheaf of papers, uninteresting apart from the illustrated Simplicity sewing pattern for a Wonder Wrap Jiffy Jumpsuit, $1.75. I knew that black strap, could hear its rubber-band snap.
A question formed in my mind: Why had Mama dressed so fancy for a late-night trip to the emergency room?
An hour and a half after we drove away in the Volkswagen Beetle that rainy November night, 176 million gallons of water smashed through the campus of Toccoa Falls College—a sudden apocalypse.
The Kelly Barnes Dam had been constructed in the 1930s from silt and stable biotite gneiss to form a forty-acre reservoir. The dam had two earthen spillways, the second a backup in case water levels crested too high. In the three days preceding November 6, 1977, the reservoir had received seven inches of rain. As a result, the earthen dam burst forth, gushed 24,000 cubic feet per second off the mountainside, crashed two hundred feet, flooded the narrow box canyon, rushed campus like a tsunami, uprooted trees, heaved boulders, razed twenty-seven homes, killed thirty-nine people, twenty of them children, one of them my sister Angela asleep in her twin bed.
Later, in our new apartment on Rosedale Street, my father recounted it over and again, stubbing out his Marlboros on the metal fire escape. The frantic shouts, the siren, the bullhorn. “Wake up! Get out!” A sound like thunder, he said, or a herd of buffalos; or Jesus coming back, he hoped.
Daddy had raced downhill from his post at the guard shack, where he’d been eating Oreos and listening to a Gaither Homecoming album while studying for an eschatology exam. The flash flood keened like a banshee as Daddy slid along the muddy gravel toward Toccoa Creek turned to rapids. Sheets of roofing, automobiles, even a piano careened past. Desperate for his girls—his girls!—Daddy slogged through the torrent. Fighting off hurtling wooden planks, he struggled to see anything in the dark. Just as he made it to No. 110, the little white bungalow—it needed a good pressure-washing, he’d thought to himself earlier that day—listed sideways, twisted on its foundation, and collapsed into the raging floodwater. Unthinking, he plunged in and grasped a sailing mattress. Climbing onto the mattress, he paddled with his hands toward the bungalow’s tin roof, barely visible above the rising tide. Suddenly, the roof went under. Daddy dived into the swirling mud, thick with Georgia clay, trying to bust a window and get inside. Splintered planks turned to missiles in the rapids. Something gouged his thigh. When he could no longer tread water, Daddy hoisted his body onto the mattress and struggled for the shore. Scrambling out onto the slick grass, he crumpled to the ground and clutched his head in his hands. My father wailed into the night, believing his wife and two daughters had drowned.
Both bridges to campus were destroyed that night, so it wasn’t until the following morning that Daddy learned we had survived. When First Lady Rosalynn Carter appeared on television, shaking hands with Governor Busbee, the camera panned to an anguished crowd of townspeople, and there was Mama, wild-eyed, hoisting me on one hip. Her magenta lipstick was intact, not a hair out of place. “My wife. That’s my wife and my baby!” Daddy shouted to anybody who’d listen. By then, he was hunched under a thick wool blanket in the Red Cross tent, Angela’s small blue body having been recovered way downstream, at the end of the creek, torn bunny ear clutched in her stiff right hand.
After that, Daddy dropped out of Bible college.
In the new apartment on Rosedale Street, my parents argued bitterly. At three years old, four, five, I picked at the peeling paint of doorframes, peeking around corners to watch them yell and pace, faces twisted and frightening, their tension seeping out and taking up residence inside of me.
“What in God’s name was it like for her?” My father agonized on the fire escape, fisting clumps of his curly hair. “What if she was awake? She had to be awake. The racket was God-awful. Walter said his whole family floated up to the ceiling of their trailer within minutes. But they got out, they got out. Nobody was there to help little Angela, all alone.”
“We couldn’t have known it would happen,” Mama cried.
“So much could’ve happened. What if she woke up alone and—”
“She never woke up, never—”
“—wandered outside looking for you? Hell, we don’t know that she didn’t. Maybe she wasn’t even in the house. Is that better or worse?” On and on Daddy struggled, imagining my sister’s final minutes on this earth until bald spots dotted his head where he’d yanked out tufts of hair.
From the doorway, it was my name I heard repeated, over and over. “Tallulah had to go to the emergency room, middle of the night. Tallulah needed stitches. Tallulah Tallulah Tallulah.”
The Family Dance was held at the old Elks Lodge.
True to promise, Mama presented me hairsprayed, lacquered, and beruffled against my will. She, on the other hand, was effulgent, a plugged-in neon sign. Her clanging bangle bracelets matched her thin gold belt, and she’d applied shimmery eyeshadow, channeling the past perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not. Abandoning me in a cloud of the Opium perfume she hadn’t worn in years, Mama dashed across the room toward the punch bowl. She squealed and clasped hands with a woman wearing what appeared to be a 1970s prom dress.
I stood there coltish, ankles crossed. Looking down, I un-crossed them.
Jess approached, holding two plastic cups. “Wow,” was all he said.
My cheeks heated. “I’m her dress-up doll.”
“Washed your half of the truck.”
Jess and I had been friends since our toddler swim class at the Doyle Street Pool. It’d been the year of the flood, everyone scrambling to sign up for distraction or precaution or both. When the instructor mandated diving into the deep end, I cried, and Jess thrust his melting American-flag-striped Bomb Pop into my hand, syrup trailing down my arm and dripping from my elbow. Our friendship was sealed. Later, we exchanged puppy love crushes. Then, freshman year, we dated for exactly one month before I ended things, saying we were better off as friends. What I didn’t say: I couldn’t let anyone get that close, not anyone as nice as Jess. On our one and only car date, Jess sponged off his muddy Ford pickup, passenger side only, and it became a tradition.
Now my stomach twisted, thinking of the way I treated Jess, yet he remained loyal. I sipped at the punch and grimaced. “Spiked already.”
Jess’s eyes were on the dance floor. “He’s totally going to embarrass me.”
His dad, not in the usual faded Levi’s but a three-piece suit, writhed and buckled among the fifty or so adults, equally flailing. Reaching into his suit jacket, he withdrew a flask, dashed liquor into his cup and that of the woman in the prom dress, then sent her whirling. The woman crashed into a microphone stand, which they scrambled to set upright. A mirrored disco ball fractured their laughing faces.
Mama stood at the refreshment table surveilling the front entrance from the corner of her eye, ankles tightly crossed. I knew class reunions caused people anxiety, but Mama looked ready to come unglued. “This is a regular anthropological study,” I said to Jess. “Didn’t anyone stay married?”
As the loudspeaker crackled out Neil Diamond, Mama dropped her empty plastic cup. She straightened her gold belt, fluffed her hair, then started for the door. A good-looking boy had just arrived—about my age, khaki pants, navy blazer. The boy scowled and pulled at the knot of his striped tie. Next to him stood a big man with wavy, salt-and-pepper hair—his father, I guessed.
“Logan,” Jess called to the handsome boy, waving him over. “Tallulah Rabun, meet Logan Walker. Logan, this is my oldest friend Tallulah.” I recognized Jess’s show-and-tell voice from our cross-legged kindergarten circle at Big A Elementary.
The handsome boy smiled with gleaming teeth, and my neck heated. Red splotches would soon kaleidoscope across my cheeks.
Stand at an angle to him.
I jutted out my left hip, lifted my chin. Jess looked away. He often referred to my relationship choices as kamikaze-dating: “It’s like you’re hell-bent on hurting yourself.”
Mama swanned toward us, glistening gold, face alight. The wavy-haired man folded her into his chest, held her there a beat too long, thick fingers splayed across the back of her head. As they sauntered off together, I couldn’t breathe. The man held Mama by the waist like my father had, nights they danced in the tiny kitchen on Residence Row, me clinging to their knees. I could still smell the pot roast in the oven, the woody aroma of the Marlboros which Daddy called a thorn in his flesh.
We watched my mother sway too close to Logan’s father on the dance floor.
“High school sweethearts.” Logan twirled the brass buttons of his sport coat. He’d shoved actual pennies in the slits of his loafers.
“Funny, she never mentioned it,” I said. “And, you two? How do you know each other?”
“Our dads were buddies, back in high school,” said Jess. “Logan’s family moved from Toccoa to Atlanta, right after the flood. He and I”—Jess elbowed Logan—“room together every summer at baseball camp.”
I could not look away from the thick hand, not my father’s, stroking my mother’s hair. Mama had never even dated, not that I knew of. “How could I?” she’d protested. “Not after what happened to our family. Who can have a life after that?” Now her head rested on Logan’s father’s lapel like a weary child. I’d never seen my mother look so peaceful, face free of the worry lines that etched her forehead.
Logan’s too-strong cologne was making me dizzy.
Chat up his buddy and ignore him.
I downed my punch then grabbed Jess’s hand. “Let’s dance.” I pulled him past the awkward parents, lacing my fingers around his neck. Over his shoulder, I locked eyes with Logan. “You never told me about him.”
Jess only shrugged.
“Does he have a girlfriend?” The line of questioning was cruel. I kept Jess at a distance for his own protection.
Jess looked away. “What do you even want with him, Lu?”
As anticipated, Logan beelined across the dance floor and tapped Jess’s shoulder.
A Diana Ross song faded, and the mayor of Toccoa, class of ’71, stumbled forward and grasped the microphone. “How about some testimonials?” boomed the mayor. “I know you folks have some stories to tell.” He launched into an anecdote about dressing up in astronaut gear for the space-themed Homecoming parade of 1969, just after the lunar landing, during which he’d overheated and required an ambulance. The mayor got a laugh then passed along the microphone. Two or three other parents shared stories that elicited chuckles or groans. By the time the mic reached Mama, Logan had sidled close to my side. Presumptuously, he took my hand. Stupidly, I let him, ignoring Jess’s rolled eyes.
“Lot of water under the bridge, so to speak.” Mama’s words slurred slightly, and my heart fluttered. How much punch had she drunk? I held my breath. “Good gosh,” Mama said, “Nixon was President. The Beatles just broke up. I could fill up my car for forty cents a gallon, or Ralph Maudlin did, remember that, Ralph? At the Mountain Mart on Currahee Street?” Then her mood turned somber. She swallowed and cleared her throat. “We had no idea what’d come after graduation, did we? Some of us would lose loved ones in the great flood. Wayne here knows.” Mama gestured toward Logan’s dad. “Doris, Pam, you know what I’m talking about.” Mama’s eyes landed on me. She took in the hand-holding. “Oh, look. Tallulah’s found a friend. You know I always say, Tallulah’s all I have to show for this life, after that night.”
“Here she goes.” I shrank behind the poofy sleeve of the prom dress smelling of mothballs.
Jess drew closer, like his body could shield me from her words.
“Bless her heart.” Mama pressed a hand to her bony chest. “Tallulah saved both our lives that night. If she hadn’t had to go to the emergency room, we’d have both been lost. My precious Angela. You know she would’ve been nineteen this year? Same as your girl, Doris. Of course, it was nobody’s fault. Tallulah hit her head is all, had to have stitches.” Mama swiped a tear from her eye.
Logan’s dad gently removed the microphone from Mama’s hand.
My face burned hot. “I have to go.” I dropped Logan’s hand.
Early this morning, I lowered my body to the sun-warmed granite of Tallulah’s rock. I unlaced my sneakers, caked-on clay like dried blood. A cascade of pine needles fell away from the ledge, down over the Falls.
“Tallulah, did you jump?” I said. “Did you come here to join your child or let her go?”
The rising sun made me blind. I wiggled my toes in the cool and breathed in the smell of pine resin. No matter what Jess or Mama or anyone said, it should’ve been me, as the whole town seemed to know.
If she hadn’t had to go to the emergency room, we’d have both been lost.
A hawk winged across the sky. I recalled diving into the deep end of the Doyle Street Pool, Jess’s Bomb Pop, syrup running down my wrist. It would be hard on Jess, but he was the strongest person I knew. Mama would grieve, too, but maybe she would finally come to love me the way she loved Angela. I only hesitated at the thought of Daddy, wherever he was, how sad he would be to lose a second daughter. Swallowing against the ache in my throat, I pictured my namesake Tallulah, her dangling legs and waiting arms.
Slowly I stood, granite solid beneath my bare feet. My body swayed with the spindly pine tree, waterfall misting my shins. I peeled my fingers, one by one, from the thin tree trunk then stepped toward the ledge jutting out over the canyon. My toes curled over the edge. I imagined dropping like water over the Falls, circling, drifting down toward the end of the creek, toward my sister.
I lifted my arms high above my head.
“Talllulah! Lu, wait.”
I rocked backward on my heels, fought for balance, crouched feral on the rock like a cornered animal.
Jess crested the top of the mountain, panting, tee shirt dark with sweat. He darted onto the ledge, grasped the pine with one hand, yanked my arm with the other, dragged me protesting backward.
I shoved him away and tried to focus, sunspots blurring my vision. “Why are you here?”
Jess refused to let me go. Still grasping my wrist, he bent double and struggled to catch his breath.
I tried to wrench my arm free. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Lu. Had nothing to do with you.” Jess straightened and looked me in the eye, not letting go of my arm. “Logan told me the whole story. Last night, he was drunk after the dance. Said his dad confessed the entire thing. That night—” Jess hesitated “—the night of the flood. They were together, your mom and Logan’s dad. Tallulah, your mother went out that night to meet Wayne Walker. You might’ve had to go to the emergency room, I have no idea, but your mother went out to see Wayne.”
I took a step backward, blinked.
Jess drove to my house in silence.
We pulled into the driveway, and I jumped from his truck before it stopped. I charged past the spinning pinwheels and banged open the screen door. The plastic flowers on the mantel rattled in their waterless vase.
“Mama,” I yelled. “Mother!” She had a record going, something croony and sweet. I yanked up the needle with a scratch.
Mama poked her head from the kitchen, white swath of flour streaked across her forehead. “What on earth are you shouting about, Lu? I’m making biscuits.”
“You lied! All this time you lied.” I glared at her through narrowed eyes. “All these years, I trusted your story. I didn’t know any better. Who can you trust, if not your own parents?”
Jess entered the house behind me. He held the door, so it fell shut with a soft bump.
“How could you let me take the blame for your affair, Mama? I needed stitches, you said, when all along it was you. Your fault we went out. Your fault Angela was left home alone. She was only five years old!” I pulled at my hair with balled fists.
Mama sat heavily on a kitchen chair. The worry lines were back, blanched white like flour in the sifter. She looked up at me with empty eyes. “Who would hold it against you? You were only a baby.”
“I held it against me.” I slammed my fist into my thigh. I smelled the biscuits, beginning to burn. “Did you even take me to the hospital?”
Mama’s eyes shifted to the dreamcatcher hanging from a nail.
“Did Daddy know about Wayne?”
Mama was an abandoned house falling down, her answer whispered from the cellar. “When I told him the truth, that’s when your Daddy left us.”
I ground my teeth. “You, with Wayne Walker last night, in front of God and everyone.” Shivering, I recalled the man’s thick fingers against her hair.
“Comfort. Wayne was always a comfort. He understood what it was like for me, so bored and neglected at home, your father out all hours of the night.”
“Working the night shift to put food on your table!”
Mama sniffed and straightened her back. “Like it or not, Lu, we’re alive to this day because I went out to meet Wayne that night, though I’ve often thought the survivors have it worse. Like I always say, it was nobody’s fault.”
“No, Mama, that’s not true.” I backed away from her. “It was your fault. You left Angela home alone. You can’t take responsibility, even now?” I shook my head. “For so long, I’ve carried around this guilt, thinking I’m so terrible.” Turning on my heel, I pushed through the screen door and called over my shoulder, “Your biscuits are burning.”
Outside the breeze had died down, plastic pinwheels stilled. Jess opened the passenger side door, scrubbed clean. We drove through the quiet town with the windows rolled down.
“Did you always know?” I finally asked.
Jess adjusted the rearview mirror. “Logan had said things. Always made me wonder.” He wound along Highway 17, past Stephens County High, past Ingles Market, on through the town square, the old courthouse mid-renovation and surrounded by scaffolding. He made a right.
“No, Jess, no. I’ve had enough of the Falls. Besides, I know she’s not there—Tallulah, or my sister.”
“Yeah,” said Jess, “but maybe you are.”
I stared out the window so he couldn’t see my face. “Jess?” I said. “Thanks for washing my side of the truck.”
