The Whole Town Forgot My Sister Overnight, So I Made Them Look at Her novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bride Sits Alone
At the engagement party Callie pulls Haley into the old camera's frame, vanishes from Haley's couch at midnight, and by morning nobody remembers her, while the Sunday paper shows Price engaged to another woman wearing Callie's ring.
My little sister sat for the Rountree camera on a Saturday night.
By Sunday morning I was the only person in Bell Shoals who remembered her.
The engagement party was at the Rountree house on the hill.
Half the town stood in the parlor holding sweet tea in real glass.
Callie had on a green dress she'd bought with two months of diner tips, and she kept tugging at the hem.
"Do I look like a bank?" she asked me.
"You look like you work at one."
"Good. I'm marrying into one."
Price came through the crowd with his jacket off and his tie loose, and he kissed her on the side of the head.
He was twenty-eight and ran the family bank's branch on Main.
He looked at my sister.
Then his mother tapped her glass with a silver spoon.
Miss Eugenia Rountree was sixty-one, with a silver bob, pearls, and a voice so soft people leaned in to hear it.
"Price has always brought home strays," she said. "And we've always found them good homes."
A few people laughed before they understood her.
Callie's smile stayed exactly where it was.
"To Callie," Miss Eugenia said. "From the Riverside Diner."
She raised her glass, and the whole parlor had to raise theirs.
I was a wedding photographer, and I'd shot forty toasts that year.
I had never heard one like that.
My mother stood by the front door with her purse already on her arm.
She was fifty-six and small, and she had never once in my life let anybody take her picture.
Miss Eugenia found her anyway.
"Bonnie, we've never had a picture of you, have we?"
"I don't photograph," Mom said.
Then two men carried the old camera in from the hall.
It was a box of cherry wood on a wooden tripod, with a brass lens and a black cloth hanging off the back.
Miss Eugenia's great-grandfather had built it in 1889, and every Rountree bride since had sat for it.
Everybody in Bell Shoals knew that.
They set a velvet chair in front of the fireplace.
"Callie, baby," Mom said. "You don't have to sit for that."
Callie laughed. "Mama, it's tradition. I'll sit up straight."
Mom looked at Miss Eugenia for a long second.
Then she walked out the front door without a word to anybody.
Callie sat down in the velvet chair.
I stood at her elbow, because I photograph people for a living and I wanted to see how the old thing worked.
Miss Eugenia put the black cloth over her head.
"The bride sits alone," she said from under it. "Still, please, for a count of eight."
The whole parlor counted out loud with her.
On seven, Callie reached out without turning her head and grabbed my left hand.
She pulled it into the frame and squeezed it three times.
That was ours, from Mom, in church when we were little: three squeezes meant I love you.
On eight, Miss Eugenia put the brass cap back over the lens.
She came out from under the cloth and looked at my hand, still in my sister's.
"The bride sits alone," she said again, very softly.
Nobody else heard it.
Callie didn't go home with Price that night.
She came back to my apartment over the hardware store on Main and lay on my couch in the green dress.
"Strays," she told my ceiling.
"She's a snob."
"She's going to be my mother-in-law for forty years."
"Then you'll outlive her."
She laughed and kicked her shoes off onto my floor, one and then the other.
I put a blanket over her and went to bed.
At midnight I heard her say my name.
"Haley?"
It was the voice she'd used at six years old, waking up from a bad dream.
I was in the living room in an instant.
The blanket was on the floor, and the cushion was still warm.
My sister was gone, and so were her shoes.
I ran down the outside stairs barefoot to Main Street.
It was empty under the streetlights.
I called her phone, and a recording said the number was not in service.
I called Price, and it went to voicemail.
I sat on my couch with my hand on the warm spot until it went cold.
In the morning there was one toothbrush in my bathroom.
I opened the pictures from the party on my phone.
There was the velvet chair in front of the fireplace, with nobody in it.
There was my arm, reaching toward the chair.
At the wrist it stopped.
I looked at my real left hand.
It was cold, and I could barely feel my own fingers.
I drove to my parents' house for Sunday breakfast, the way we had every Sunday of our lives.
Mom was at the cabinet.
She took down four plates, looked at them, and put one back.
She set three places at the table.
"Where's Callie's?" I said.
Mom kept laying out forks.
My father came in from the porch with the paper, humming a hymn off-key.
"Daddy, where's Callie?"
He kissed the top of my head. "Who's Callie, sugar?"
I went down the hall to her room.
It was a sewing room, with a machine on a card table and a dress form wearing nothing.
Nobody in my family sewed.
I walked back into the kitchen.
"My sister's name is Callie Coker," I said. "She's twenty-five, she works at the Riverside Diner, and she's getting married in three weeks."
Daddy looked at Mom.
Mom looked at the eggs.
"Honey," Daddy said, "you don't have a sister."
I took the fourth plate down from the cabinet myself and set it at Callie's chair.
Mom's hands stopped on the forks.
"Put that back, Haley," she said.
"No, ma'am."
Daddy went out to the phone in the hall, and I heard him say the word doctor.
I sat down in front of the fourth plate and pulled the paper toward me.
The engagement announcement was on the front of the Living section, the one Callie had made me proofread three times.
It was the same picture, on the same dock at the lake, with the same date: October 17.
The woman in Price's arms was his mother's goddaughter.
She was wearing my sister's ring.
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