Sunlight-Colored Roses

It was so hot that I felt like my skin would catch fire. I hadn’t felt so hot in a long time. This choking, wet heat of Louisiana cannot be found anywhere as far north as Oklahoma.

Cicadas rasped around us so loudly I could not hear myself think. It was an otherworldly feeling, trampling the underbrush with Josette in heavy boots and tied skirts, baskets full of sickly-sweet gardenias clutched under our arms, blossoms pulled from the fences of an old cemetery.

I knelt where she knelt, peering through the low limbs at an expanse of bare ground in the distance.

She said nothing, gazing at a great white plantation across the shorn field. Her eyes, intense blue in her face, were gentle and unreadable, like a doe’s eyes. I never knew anyone else who bore Josette’s graceful ways or cryptic expression.

“My father grew up on that property,” she said, as a light, hot rain started to fall around us. We drew closer to the shelter of the bushes. I parted the branches the peer at the old plantation.

“Mother told me about it when Father was out of the house. He hates and fears that place. The Navarres live there. His father was a Navarre.”