Chapter 2: Roots in Red Clay
I drove forty-five minutes south, my tires chewing up the asphalt until I reached the only sanctuary that made sense. Casey Tidwell had been my closest confidante since our junior year horticulture class. Her grandmother, Ruth, operated a sprawling peach farm down in Chilton County—twelve acres of ancient, twisting trees rooted in iron-rich red clay.
I hadn’t called ahead. Ruth marched out into the gravel lot, aggressively wiping her soil-stained hands on her denim thighs. She eyed my pathetic duffel bag, looked at my hollow eyes, and didn’t ask a single question about the February hospital stint.
“Hands work first,” she barked, her voice like grinding stones. “Questions can wait for supper.”
She marched me into the orchards and taught me how to thin fruit. In the cruel month of April, a peach tree sets astronomically more fruit than its branches can physically support. If left to its own devices, the tree yields a harvest of hard, undersized pits, and the branches snap under the suffocating weight by mid-July. Survival requires violent curation. You must walk the rows and twist the tiny green spheres off by hand, discarding two out of every three.
By midday, the red earth beneath my boots was carpeted in rejected, dying fruit. It felt exactly like a family decision. I kept that thought buried behind my teeth.
As the sun bled orange across the horizon, Ruth led me to the edge of the property where a solitary, barren tree stood amongst a sea of green. Casey’s uncle had condemned it after a brutal January freeze. Ruth pinched a brittle twig and viciously scraped the gray bark with her thumbnail. Beneath the dead exterior lay a brilliant, wet streak of emerald green.
“Scratch test,” Ruth murmured. “Brown means it’s a corpse. Green means she’s fighting. Everyone is so damn eager to break out the chainsaw after a bad winter. Most folks are just impatient cowards.” She released the branch. “She’s just survived a winter. Give her a minute.”
I drove back to Hoover on Sunday night, a crescent of that wet green bark still wedged beneath my thumbnail. It was 9:00 PM. The house smelled nauseatingly of glazed ham and artificial Easter lilies. The white candle beside my photograph had melted halfway down. Nobody burns a decorative candle halfway to the wick by Sunday evening. I desperately tried to convince myself it was a harmless aesthetic choice.
By the first summer, my mother had preemptively upgraded Avery from ‘girlfriend’ to ‘fiancée.’ It would take Mitch five and a half years to actually purchase a ring. During that agonizing purgatory, our household mutated into a covert operation. Unspoken laws calcified into scripture.
In May, a locksmith arrived and drilled a heavy-duty deadbolt into my bedroom door. The lock faced the hallway. My mother smoothly justified it, claiming it was to prevent Avery from “accidentally wandering into my mess.” My room was the most immaculate space in the house. The brass key was strung onto my mother’s keyring, right between her Buick fob and the church kitchen master. If I required access to my own sanctuary, I had to formally request entry. It was the only portal in our home that locked a human being in.
The system rapidly metastasized. My toothbrush was banished to a Ziploc bag in my car’s glove compartment. My mail was intercepted and vaporized before weekend visits. I was forbidden from parking on our own street because a vehicle naturally invites inquiries regarding its owner.
The texts materialized a few days in advance, always possessing the same sterile rhythm. Every weekend. Be gone by 11.
That sweltering July, I purchased a cheap yellow notebook with curling cardboard edges. I retroactively logged Easter as entry number one. I drew a harsh, black tally mark every single time I was evicted. Looking back, those scratches of ink were the only tangible proof I possessed that my reality wasn’t a hallucination.
When I turned twenty, the financial extortion began. My mother framed it as a “vital lesson in adult responsibility.” I wrote a check for four hundred dollars every thirty days, scribbling Room and Board on the memo line. I was literally financing my own ghosthood.
In 2016, standing at the kitchen sink, I finally broke. “What exactly does Avery think of me?” I asked, a tremor in my voice. Avery had dined at our mahogany table forty times. Surely she questioned the permanently locked door at the end of the hall.
My mother didn’t even pause her aggressive scrubbing of a frying pan. “She thinks you live in Atlanta. She thinks you are a very busy, successful career woman.” She shoved a wet plate into my chest. “Do not make me out to be a liar, Anastasia.”
I swallowed the lie. It was intoxicatingly logical. It explained the lock, the missing car, the absence. It was the most compassionate deception she ever spun. It also wasn’t the real one.
The first catastrophic crack in the foundation occurred in March of 2018, when my maternal grandmother passed away. The funeral was held in Hoover. Because Avery attended everything, I was formally barred from the sanctuary. “You may stand at the very back of the graveside service,” my mother dictated. “Family only up front.”
I stood in the freezing rain, hovering near a cemetery oak. After the lowering of the casket, a funeral director pressed a leftover program into my freezing palm. I read the obituary inside the icy cabin of my car.
June Hadley is survived by her devoted daughter, Lynette, and her beloved grandson, Mitchell.
I read the text until the letters blurred. I was legally dead in print. But as I watched the mourners disperse, my breath hitched. A woman in a faded green cardigan, flanked by a medical aide from a Tuscaloosa group home, approached my mother.
The stranger reached out, her voice a desperate rasp. “Linny?”
My mother’s spine turned to steel. She refused to acknowledge the woman, her nails digging viciously into my father’s arm as she dragged him away. Nobody called my mother Linny. And as my father sprinted back to the grave under the guise of “forgotten sunglasses,” spending four minutes speaking to the strange woman, a chilling truth settled in my bones. My erasure wasn’t a unique phenomenon. It was an inherited disease.
