came true—like the time she said a deer needed Antigone’s help and Antigone found a deer, pregnant, near collapse, and cornered by three wild dogs near the back gate. Antigone ran off the dogs and rescued the deer. A few weeks later, the deer gave birth to twins.
Antigone didn’t know if she believed in psychics, but she didn’t
not
believe in them either. A woman with a “mystery and miracle growing inside her,” as Antigone’s mother described gestation, had to keep her options open.
“Have you felt the baby yet?” asked Star.
“Maybe in a few weeks,” Antigone answered, glancing at the pretty child, who would someday be model tall and beautiful. Her dark hair, worn in several braids, curved around high, milk chocolate brown cheekbones. But the cheekbones were not her most arresting feature. It was those soft blue eyes, so piercingly mysterious, that nailed you. Those eyes knew secrets.
She and Antigone were sitting, resting their backs against a boulder at the edge of the pond on the O. Henry Deer Farm. They each sipped at ice teas with lemon while Fancy, a fawn born on the farm, lapped at the pond. Occasionally, Fancy glanced their way, wiggled an ear at a pesky fly, and then returned to drinking. Antigone loved the pond as much as Fancy did: the peaceful water, the tall pine trees hovering along the edges, the lazy pace. Insects floated on the surface until a frog flicked out a tongue or a fish rocketed up from the deep.
“I think it’s going to be cool having a baby around,” Star said. “You and Sam are going to be the best parents, I just know it.”
Antigone envied the child’s confidence, something she was far from feeling. She inhaled the scent of pine. Her mind, which earlier had been turning in dozens of circles within circles, was slowing. Soon it would be incapable of even a half flip. Her hands felt heavy. Her neck and shoulders could hardly support her head. She leaned back against the rock and thought of babies.
There were so many decisions to make, so many chances to do the wrong thing. Parenting was a minefield, and she felt she was wearing big clodhopper boots. Antigone realized, for the first time, how vulnerable parents were, how powerless they were in the face of love.
“It’s crazy, but I already feel like I’d do anything for this baby,” she said.
Star pulled her knobby knees up under her chin. “Mama says babies turn your life upside down, so it’s a good thing they’re cute.”
Star had been firmly in that cute stage when Earthly Sims, a single mother, brought her baby daughter to town. As Antigone held Baby Star, Earthly, fresh from a divorce and desperately needing to start over, dug into a mushroom quiche at the O. Henry Café counter and talked. About leaving her job as a lawyer at the ACLU in Atlanta; about splitting from her traitorous husband, Chester, a once brilliant ACLU litigator but now corporate hack “who got too many people out of messes they didn’t deserve to be gotten out of”; and about her sister who worked at the mill in Mercy.
“I’m not disillusioned,” Earthly had said with a big sigh. “I’m just tired of the law, of Atlanta, of Chester. I need a break.”
Antigone had inherited a nice chunk of Mercy from a never-met, never-married uncle who noted in his will that “a child with a disadvantage needs the money more than the rest of my worthless family.” The bequest, on the western edge of town, included three abandoned storefronts; a long-closed restaurant named after the short story writer O. Henry; a garage, complete with a rusted hydraulic lift, broken pumps, and empty fuel tanks; a two-story farmhouse; and across the road, two hundred acres of undeveloped land.
Talking with Earthly, Antigone immediately saw the possibilities. One of the vacant storefronts stood right beside the café; Earthly had the connection at the mill to get all the seconds they wanted. Before Earthly left the café, she and Antigone had devised a
Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat