Waya Lake shriveled from its banks in the intense heat, and teenagers hung out in the shade rather than sunbathing on the shore. Kids stood in line at the shaved-ice stand ordering treats in a rainbow of colors and racing to shovel them down before they melted.
The asphalt shimmered like a desert mirage as Stella drove to the pharmacy. She needed to buy another bottle of aspirin and a Pepsi from Mr. Jordan, Blue Sky Valley’s pharmacist for the past forty-five years.
“Where are your helpers?” Stella asked him as he rang up her purchases.
“Sent them home an hour ago. The air-conditioning is having a time keeping up with this heat, and the girls were sweating like sinners in church, and boy, were they complaining. Another hour of that, and I would have lostmycool. Figuratively, of course, since this place has already literally lost its cool.”
Stella nodded. “Air conditioners should know better than to give out during summer in the South. How’s a person supposed to survive?”
As soon as she sat back down in her car, sweating through her clothes and sticking to the cracked leather seat, she opened the Pepsi, and it burned a dark pathway down her throat. Then she drove home, thinking about how she’d helped Dana find the perfect book. Excitement lit her up for the first time in months. The possibility of using her words to help library patrons thrilled her. What else would she be able to do with the words? How else could she callthem forth to help her with people, with her own life? Would it be possible to actually write a book, to become a novelist?
When Stella parked in the garage and got out of her car, she noticed flat, mud-brown words squeeze out from beneath the weather stripping on the sides of the house-to-garage door.Heat. Stale. Heavy.“That’s not a good sign,” she said. When she opened the door, a wave of hot air billowed out.
After walking into the house, she inhaled sticky, dense air. She checked the thermostat, which read eighty-five degrees. Stella pulled out her cell phone and searched for the local HVAC company, then dialed their number. An energetic employee answered and asked if Stella was having issues.
“It feels like Death Valley in my house,” Stella complained, thinking about the girls who had been working at the pharmacy today. At least that place was cooler than hers.
The bubbly voice on the other end of the line apologized, but Stella could hear the faint whir of cool air pumping into their office and the sound of ice cubes swirling around in a glass. The young woman’s concern only stretched so far because she wasn’t sweating pools on the floor.
“Let’s see, I can get someone out there tomorrow afternoon. Will that work for you?” the woman said.
“Tomorrow? I could sweat to death by then,” Stella said, then apologized. “Yes, of course. Thank you.” They scheduled a time for tomorrow afternoon when a technician would come by the house and check the system. Stella ended the call and then repeated her earlier question to herself. “How’s a person supposed to survive?”
She walked through the house and tested opening windows in the living room. Her optimism for a breeze dissipated within an hour, and her hopes that it would cool down when the sun set werelaughable when she realized the interior temperature didn’t drop a single degree as the sun plunged behind the trees.
She walked into her bedroom and opened the closet door to find something cooler to wear—perhaps a swimming suit—and something snapped beneath her foot. Stella bent over and picked up a purple crayon broken in half. Where had this come from?
Her gaze landed on an unassuming cardboard box sitting on the top shelf. There was only one word on the box, written in purple crayon years ago by Stella.
The wordWhy?slanted downward, and the wobbly letters looked like they were written with a trembling hand. Stella remembered writing the word and then tossing the crayon inside the box. She hadn’t touched that box since she was a kid.
She hesitated before reaching up and pulling it from the shelf. Closed inside were Maria Parker’s most prized possessions—or what Stella’s dad had decided to keep: a shoebox full of her jewelry, all costume and rhinestones; a few tubes of half-used lipstick and eyeshadow so retro it was probably back in style; a pair of red heels; and a sweater stitched with a bunny. Stacked on top of the assortment was a single photo album that still trapped a faint scent of women’s perfume. This was the only album Stella owned that included the whole family, when they were living as though everything was okay and everyone was still together. A sense of loss, familiar and profound, crept into her chest, almost as overpowering as the heat.
Stella remembered only scattered, mostly broken memories of her mother, like a video montage that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else watching and barely made sense to her. She doubted she would recognize Maria’s laugh or even her voice since she hadn’t heard it in more than twenty years. What she remembered most vividly was how beautiful Maria had been, with curly black hair—like Stella’s now—and her wide, infectious smile that showed all her teeth. Butdid Stella remember that because of the photos? Without these few photographs as proof, Maria might never have existed in their lives at all. She was more like a footnote in a term paper, one of those throwaway extras that no one reads and is easily overlooked as an unimportant fact.
Maria left when Stella was six years old. It was an ordinary day in the middle of fall, just when the leaves had started to change and litter the sidewalks. Maria had dropped off Percy and Stella at school with their heavy backpacks and sack lunches. She’d waved and blown them a kiss, then she’d driven off on a route that should have taken her straight to work. Except Maria never showed up at work, and she never showed up at the house again either.
Stella thought back to that night when their dad had to tell them the news—that their mother needed a break from her family, needed to gofind herself, as though it was something she had dropped off somewhere but couldn’t remember where. Turned out “finding herself” meant Maria moved to New York City to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. Stella had never told anyone that strangling truth, not even Ariel, because it sounded like a tragic plot in a novel that no one would believe. A mother of two leaves her adorable children to be raised by a single parent so she can have a 0.1 percent chance of making it on Broadway. Not exactly Hallmark movie material or going to win Maria a Mom of the Year award.
Stella never told anyone not only because it was dreadful but because of the shame and disbelief attached to Maria’s decision. Had she and Percy not been good enough to stick around for? Had they been so disappointing that Maria hadn’t bothered to send them birthday cards or holiday greetings? How could she have erased them so completely from her life? What did Maria tell people if they asked if she had children? Did she say no? Stella’s chest ached just thinking about it.
She couldn’t imagine how horrible that conversation must have been for her dad. How much he must have struggled to help two kids understand such devastating news, the same news he, too, had to try to make sense of.
As far as Stella knew, no one had ever heard from Maria again. She’d disappeared into the world as though she’d never existed. Some nights when Stella couldn’t sleep, she wondered if she might try to find Maria again, just to ask herwhy. But Stella was more afraid of finding the woman than hearing the answer. What if the answer was more heartbreaking than telling herself that Maria was a negligent parent and Stella was better off without her?
The heat in the closet pressed in all around her, and a line of sweat slid down Stella’s back. She blinked away the thoughts of Maria, and another idea tumbled through her mind.
She grabbed her phone and called Arnie. He didn’t answer, so she left him a message, telling him she was planning to have a slumber party for one at the library. There was no way she would be able to sleep in her miserable, hotter-than-Hades house. And at least in the library she wouldn’t be alone—there were half a million books to keep her company.
A scattering of cars still sat in the parking lot when Stella arrived with her slumber party accessories—one small bag of clothes, toiletries, her copy ofBeyond the Southern Horizon, and her journal; a sleeping bag and a pillow; and snacks. Once inside, she dropped her stuff beneath the circulation desk and searched for Arnie. He leaned over the second-floor railing near the fiction section and called down to her in a stage whisper.
“What are you doing back here?”
Stella craned her neck back. “I left you a message. My house feels like Arrakis. The AC gave up, and they can’t come to check it until tomorrow afternoon. Can I sleep here?”
Arnie laughed. “You’re the kind of person who would make up that story just so she could spend the night in a library. Where’s Ariel?”
Stella shrugged. “I didn’t want to bother her, and she’s housesitting four dogs, which is too full of a house for me.”
