Lovey is a first-cousin, fourteen years my senior. Neither of us is old. She's a sister I never had, a petite Southern Belle, no bigger than a buttercup, as resilient as a Phi Mu in Rush.
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| Camellias Bloom All Winter in Sandtrap, Jawja |
I was her pet, trailed her like a puppy. One of my earliest memories is her wedding. I scattered camellia petals down the aisle for her to walk on.
For reasons unfathomable to those not born of the South, I still have the land line phone number from our grandparents' Avalon Avenue homeplace. "Homeplace," one word, not two for our extended family.
That house was a high-ceilinged ramshackle Victorian affair long gone in a neighborhood fallen to urban blight. Today that same number rings in Sandtrap, generations of voices now departed.
Recently a mutual cousin intimated that Lovey might be losing it, talking out of her head. This I rejected outright. Impossible, not our Lovey. When next Lovey called, she sounded fine.
"I told you so," I reassured myself.
But then she asked to speak to Aunt Lilly, our beloved aunt, last matriarch of the big house on Avalon Avenue, twenty-five years dead.
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