“But Eden—” Colleen starts to argue, but I cut her off.
“For fuck’s sake, Colleen. I’ve worked my ass off for fourteen years with hardly any time off. It’s been really hard accepting the fact my fiancé cheated on me, I was publicly humiliated, and I’m being made to look like the bad person for it. A little empathy would go a long way here.”
As I turn into the driveway, which to my surprise has been paved since my grandmother’s funeral, I hear Colleen backpedaling. “All right, Eden. Of course, take some time off. Relax. I know it’s been stressful. And when you come back we’ll figure out how to make it work to suit you. Fuck Brad, okay?”
“Okay,” I say on a soft laugh. For all of her blustering and pushy ways, Colleen has always had my back. Before I disconnect, I say, “Talk later.”
Tossing my phone into my purse, I bring my car to a stop and stare down the long driveway. It’s lined with massive oaks dating from before the Civil War. Their long, thick branches extend and form a shaded canopy so dense the sunlight can hardly breach it. And at the end of the driveway, I can see Goodnight House. I have a love-hate relationship with it, but as I take in its magnificence and grandeur, I decide to love it for a little bit.
In fact, I’ll love it the entire time I’m here.
The home is a Greek Revival, built in 1860, just before the Civil War started. It was the centerpiece of a massive cotton plantation built with the blood and sweat of slaves. I’m not sure who owned it then, but after slavery was abolished, the owners couldn’t make ends meet with the new sharecropping arrangements they had to make with their former slaves and they went into bankruptcy. The house passed through another set of hands before my great-grandfather Court Goodnight bought it. He was on the lookout for a nice home for his family, as he’d just opened up the South’s largest textile mill a mere seven miles outside of Newberry, and the Goodnights always lived in the best homes.
Yes, my family is wealthy. Textiles was the game and it did well for us. Still does, for that matter.
I lived my entire childhood in Goodnight House, and it was the stuff girls’ dreams are made of, if she has a romantic bone in her body. The house is what every princess dreams of. It’s done in white stucco that’s been restored and stands three stories high. There’s a wide sweeping staircase to the main landing, with wrought-iron balustrades across the long front porch. There are matching full-length balconies on the second and third floors, also bordered with iron. White pilasters extend from the ornate molding at the roofline down to the first-floor porch, and set back on either side of the main area are two rounded wings with balconies on the first, second, and third floors. When my great-grandfather bought the home, he’d had the right side circular wing converted into a two-story master chamber, with the third floor housing a plush library and sitting area to relax.
It was a monstrous house occupied by four people. Me, my mom, my dad, and my grandmother, Valeria Goodnight, although she wasn’t around much. As a perennial globe-trotter, she was gone far more often than she was at home. Valeria Goodnight loved spending her money on extravagant travels, wild adventures, and looking for that next perfect husband. Well, that is until my parents died in a sailboating accident and she was forced to return to Goodnight House to take care of me when I was fifteen. That was a hard three years living with an emotionally distant woman who didn’t like her wanderlust being tampered with. It is, after all, how she met her best husbands.
Coming under my grandmother’s rule was an extremely difficult transition, especially since I was so lovingly close with my parents. They were the type of parents who gave me enough freedom to let me spread my wings, and did so because they believed I had a good head on my shoulders. They trusted me, and I didn’t abuse it. On top of that, my parents were just cool as hell, and funny and warm and everything you’d want a parent to be. I always wanted to be around them. I desperately missed my mom’s southern cooking and the times when my dad and I went fishing. Going from a secure, inclusive, and interactive family environment to a sterile sort of relationship didn’t make for the best years of my life. It’s the main reason I never returned to Newberry after I left except for her funeral.
Stepping on the gas, I start the quarter-mile drive to the house, which grows bigger and bigger the closer I get. The line of oaks ends about a hundred yards from the front of the house, with an expansive green lawn spreading out to the left and right, encompassing about five acres. The entire property is only about forty acres, as much of the land had been sold off, since the Goodnight family didn’t need it for anything other than privacy. Past the lawn area is thick, dense forest that has grown wild, since the land isn’t farmed anymore. There’s a small trail that my father had cleared out that leads down to a bubbling stream, which is an offshoot of the Satilla River that leads out into the Atlantic Ocean about twenty miles east of us.
It’s hard to take my eyes off the house as I turn into the circular driveway that will bring me right to the front steps. The house is so big it’s always made me feel like a little girl, and yet at the same time there’s a level of comfort there that I haven’t felt in a long time. That was the hate part of my relationship with the house…it didn’t feel like home once my parents were gone and my grandmother ruled it.
I remember our first Thanksgiving after she’d come to live with me. My mom had always gone all out with the turkey and many different side dishes, plus three different types of pies. I wanted to re-create it, hold that specialness close to me.
“I was thinking if you give me your credit card, I can run to the grocery store tomorrow and get everything we need for Thanksgiving dinner. I can make all of Mom’s favorite recipes,” I’d told my grandmother one day as she drank her morning coffee and I was eating toast and some of my mom’s homemade strawberry preserves.
“I won’t be here,” my grandmother said tersely. “I’m going to fly to New York City for a few days.”
I just stared at her openmouthed. How could she not want to spend Thanksgiving with her granddaughter, who had just lost her parents three months prior?
But I didn’t argue with her, because she was never around, and I didn’t know her all that well. I’d spent that Thanksgiving eating some macaroni and cheese from a box while watching TV in my bedroom.
It was the first of many trips she would take, leaving me home by myself quite a lot. I didn’t mind, though, because she provided me nothing of value. She had no interest in my school activities, and outside of making sure I had money for food, she didn’t think she owed me anything else. She’s quite possibly the coldest person I’ve ever known, and it boggles me how my father could be so loving with her as his mother.