At night, I rarely sleep. Mostly I set up on the porch and worry about everything from the only story I know, a story that does not have the peaceful hum of quiet contentment , to what the hell have we been doing since old Al Gore came out with that movie about global warming – must be twenty five years ago now – to the world coming to an end because of this God-dammed never-ending war in the Middle East to the river out there backing up in the next hurricane and wiping away everything we've ever known.

S ome things, you can't tell your children. It's too close, too hard. But you can tell the next generation, once they're grown, that is. It takes the distance of time. That, and something else. It's almost as if it's finally just more important to be known. I don't know, maybe it's just wanting to control how we're remembered. I give no guarantee what I am going to tell is the truth.

You see that sun closing in on the river, like a golden coat of promise? How would you remember that sun, if it never rose again?

*

Shellie Rae—your real Grandma—when she left... she said she was commuting my sentence to time served.

She said that in time I'd be grateful. Of course I didn't see it that way, at the time.

Oh, I guess I knew it was coming, the way you know from the drought in winter the next summer's going to be worse than anything you've seen yet. I knew alright, but I thought it might go away, like a spell of cold weather, a little thing time would take care of, a narrow place we'd come through in the end.

Somewhere back there, a good while before she left, we'd stopped making the kind of life we'd agreed on, the way young folks do, the life everyone in this town's had for better than two hundred years, the life we were happy to have. It was as if we were continuing a Southern tradition, carrying it forward, wearing it proudly, even if it was a little worn at the elbows.

The main problem with confession, and the real reason I haven't done it 'til now, is the way it dredges up the past; it burdens the present with carrying sorrow indefinitely. The freight of apology, the impulse to sympathy—they turn into nothing more than a sorry state of affairs. So, how to stop picking at the scabs of guilt and its cohorts: fear, disappointment, desire, and the off chance, the almost no chance, that something will change, that someone will say it's all right, you didn't know, it wasn't your fault.

A Southern fairy tale was what Shellie Rae called our life. A white table cloth of politesse . I guess she was pretty steamed when she said that.

Look at that sun, dipping down red in the river…like a thread of something braided together.

*

That is what she said. It was when she started going over to the university again that we started arguing about things and coming apart. I thought she'd changed on me, without consulting me. I was angry, but I didn't let it show.

I did realize, later on, it was possible she didn't know herself what was happening. Some things you can't know when you're young and they surprise you, even though you've seen them sneaking up all along.

Charlotte, your Grandma Charlotte, she said, when we got together after Shellie Rae left, she said these things happen because they're meant to. They happen when we're ready. Shellie Rae must've known it too. Must be something women get to know and men, maybe we just don't know so much.

Shellie Rae, she was drawn to school, loved it, never felt better than when she was discovering all those things she'd been told she wasn't smart enough to learn back in high school. No one encouraged girls back then, you know. Well, no, maybe you don't know, but girls nowadays, they don't think twice about going to college and getting' jobs. Shoot, we even got a woman president! They're better at it than the boys, it seems now.

Oh, it spiced things up for a while, I'll give you that.

But then, Shellie Rae started saying our life was slipping into a repetition of our parents' lives. She said we couldn't be only remaking my folks' life if we wanted to be ourselves, and the more she tried to change us, she said the more it felt like we were in a trap that resembled her folks' lives.

Her folks' lives.

They were like magnets brought close together, their mutual attraction and repulsion producing a terrible, complicated dance. Her mama would take a notion and her daddy would just wait for her to get over it, but her mama didn't get over things. There was no arguing with her, no reasoning. She stewed and worried. I didn't understand, of course. Nobody did. Probably nobody ever understood, except maybe Shellie Rae.

Knowledge like that comes into your field of vision from a distance, and sharpens up as you get closer to it yourself. Your Grandma Charlotte, she told me that, too.

You feel that? Temperature's dropped. Not so's you'd notice much, as damp as it is. But the cicadas' hum, it just dropped a pitch or two.

*

I thought Shellie Rae was pursuing a dream, fulfilling herself. I was happy for her. I was glad to do dishes and fix dinner. I liked that since I was retiring, closing the old mill. We'd sold off the timber land by then. I thought she'd get a job that would give her the recognition she wanted. I thought we had evolved pretty well into a modern couple, sharing the chores and everything else.

To be honest, I was always glad to let her take the lead. I thought she was going to create something for herself, something I couldn't name, except that I couldn't give it to her.

She was good at everything she tried. She had a force to her. People were always impressed, even a little scared by what all she knew, and it always surprised her. Somewhere, inside, I guess I knew she wanted a knight in shining armor, like in a fairy tale, to make up for what she suffered. I thought she understood that wasn't me.

The kind of thing that would happen, we'd be at the Railley's or the Hounsley's, with people who were discussing something, politics or any old thing. It could be anything. She'd give an opinion and it was pretty impressive, her thinking. You could tell she'd read up on it and thought about it, or maybe even that she was just asking a question nobody had thought of, maybe playing the devil's advocate. Someone would take offense; it was usually a man because the women always slipped out to the kitchen. I saw her tensing up, as if she'd suddenly lost faith in her own words when they started in arguing with her, like she'd fallen behind a veil of rage. I guess I should have put a hand on her back, should have taken a step closer, even if I thought she was being wrong-headed. If I'd done that, she might have been able to finish her thought without pulling back or getting' all het up. And the others, they would have accepted her instead of being all worried and fearful of what she might've meant. Nothing scared her more than that fear.

But she was resilient. I'd see her get over it and turn her energy to something new, full of hope. She'd slip away in concentration like a satellite escaping its orbit. I tried to keep up, but I didn't follow all that well, I guess. Each passion was like a new language, a code, and I didn't have the key.

She told me the closer she came to finding out that you got to already have inside whatever it is you want in order to get it sent back to you from others, the harder it was not having a mirror in the house.

That's how she talked some times. I didn't understand it. I'd always piss her off saying, there's a mirror right there in the hall, or in the bedroom. And she'd fold her arms and then let 'em go, and run her hand through her hair. She had short hair. And she'd get cross with me for being concrete, she said. Of course that made me feel dumb, kind of scared me, like I was not keeping up again.

She said she felt like she was being torn apart. Even though she loved my mama, she said, she didn't want to be like her anymore—homemaking and supporting her man, who got all the credit for everything. She wanted an identity of her own, wanted to stand naked in a field, feel the wind on her skin, like in that old Lucinda Williams song, see if she could be herself.

That sun's almost gone now. Almost gone.

*

Shellie Rae's mama, your great-grandma, she was a complicated person. Her name was Deirdre. Shellie Rae had a hard time with her mama but as she got older, and just before she left she was saying, as scary as her mama was, she understood she just wanted to be accepted in spite of her flaws, even for her flaws, and not required to be something other people wanted her to be. They all wanted the same thing in the Beauregard family—that was Deirdre's family name, you know—and there wasn't enough for any of them, not for even one person in that family, let alone to go around. Not even the boys.

Deirdre's brothers practically killed each other over the money that was left to them. But it was never a substitute for what went missing.

All that hunger in a woman just made Shellie Rae's mama crazy. Shellie Rae said she felt as if she was being pushed into that same craziness. She said if she didn't go crazy with the loneliness of it, watching herself become her mama, it would kill her. That was when she took sick.

See, that? Even the yellow's poured itself right out of the sky. Black as the river now, that sky, as if that sun's gone forever.

*

It ran in the family, that fearful hunger in the women.

Shellie Rae wrote it all down and it's in a trunk up in the attic. I didn't read it for a long time, not for a long time. I didn't even know she'd left those things up there. And I'll give it all to you, but I wanted to tell it to you myself, as much as I know, and some of what I learned from reading the journal.

Your great-great-grandma, Shellie Rae's grandma and Deirdre's mama—Isabelle was her name—she was the kind of woman, according to Shellie Rae, that everyone wanted a piece of, small and pretty as all get-out. The men wanted to touch her and the women were afraid to not have her as a friend. She was… well, I'll give you an example I remember from the journal. When sharing a recipe, Isabelle'd leave something out or put in something wrong as she copied it for the friend who'd asked for it. She was known to do worse than that if anyone did such a thing to her. Mean as a polecat she was, when she wasn't at the other end, being real sweet.

I didn't know her, although I guess I saw her; might've even met her once or twice at church when I was a child. In the journal you'll see how Isabelle's brothers died around the turn of the last century of yellow fever. There was a lot of it around here, of course. This was all fever country back then. Her daddy never got over losing those boys. He thought Isabelle was a silly, frivolous thing and never talked to her unless he had to. Never let her speak at the dinner table. Claimed it ruined his digestion.

In the journal it tells how Isabelle killed herself with a handful of sleeping pills, or whatever they had back then, in the sixties it was, and a glass of whiskey. Just went to bed and locked the door. The maid found her in the morning when she tried to bring the breakfast tray. Seemed to come out of the blue. They'd just come home from a trip around the world. It was high summer.

Shellie Rae wrote that she remembered her mama's reaction to Isabelle's death, said Deirdre turned darker after that, darker than ever. It didn't get better over time. And when Deirdre's daddy died, too, Deirdre just seemed to shrink the space she had to control with herself and Shellie Rae's daddy inside it.

Over yonder you can just see the last glint of Old River, lying back in the swamp now, cut off from the big river.

*

Shellie Rae's mama, that's Dierdre, outlived her daddy, but not by much. She wrote that her mama couldn't breathe without him being there. Without her daddy, her mama took up all the oxygen in the room. Shellie Rae called her daddy a thin plant taking out the carbon dioxide and sending back just enough oxygen to sustain life. She said that was what she hated. And she saw me doing that. To me it was just who I was, and I didn't notice anything. But the more scared she was of becoming her mama—like something unformed and dangerous that could fill a room and crowd everyone else out—the more she saw me becoming the single tree in the corner with just enough leaves to make a little breeze, not enough to live, just enough to not die. When I read that, I cried. Her daddy hadn't known what to do for her mama. He didn't have what she needed. And neither did I.

Look at that barge slipping up the river, just resting on the current…

*

When she left, Shellie Rae said she had to be able to live on her own, without me holding her down. She said she had to learn to make a sea-anchor. I didn't understand at all. It was like she tore the ground right out from under me. Like she was just out of reach and I couldn't stretch my arm any further.

I would be okay, she said. I wouldn't be off shore for long. She named the couples here in town that we knew who would take me up instead of her. That was pretty near every one of the old families. Made me angry to think anyone would not take her up when she needed them so much. But I didn't try to stop it. I didn't even see it happening. They invited me to dinner, and I went. I had to get on with my life. She said someone would come along with a casserole and snap me up, someone who could fend for herself but who wouldn't scare me with it, or who wouldn't notice the gap. Someone who would be glad to be there for the fall in the bathtub, the blood in the stool, the difficulty peeing. She really said all that. It flattened me like a trailer in a twister. I didn't think she needed a protector. I didn't see how I could've done that.

Look at that sliver of moon up there in that black sky. Not a star. Not a single star.

Margot Miller was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, 1972-74. She earned a mid-life Ph. D. in French literature.
Miller now writes fiction, poetry, does a bit of translation (for money), teaches French women writers (in translation) at the Academy of Lifelong Learning, Chesapeake Maritime Museum, St. Michael's MD, and took up oil painting in the fall of 2007. When not painting, she is working on a novel, or possibly it is the other way around.
Miller's creative work (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) has appeared in The Northern Virginia Review vol xx March 07, ChickFlicks, Write Side Up, Static Movement, Long Story Short, Subtle Tea, BluePrint Review, Salomé, Moondance, Mosaic Mind, Fringe, The Angler, Steel City Review (nominated for a Pushcart), Toasted Cheese, and others.
Miller is the fiction editor for The Delmarva Review, a founder and host of Miles River Open Readings and a member of the Friday Morning Artists, the St. Michaels Art League and the Talbot County Visual Art Council.