Call the Canaries Home: A Novel

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Text copyright © 2023 by Laura Barrow All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle www.apub.com Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates. ISBN-13: 9781662510267 (paperback) ISBN-13: 9781662510250 (digital) Front cover design by Sarah Horgan Back cover design by Adrienne Krogh Cover image: ©Wizemark / Stocksy United; ©pixssa / Shutterstock; ©MANSILIYA YURY / Shutterstock; ©Midstream / Shutterstock; ©Elina Li / Shutterstock For my daughters and my sisters. Every girl needs a sister. CONTENTS PROLOGUE SAVANNAH CHAPTER 1 MEEMAW CHAPTER 2 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 3 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 4 RAYANNE CHAPTER 5 MEEMAW CHAPTER 6 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 7 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 8 RAYANNE CHAPTER 9 MEEMAW CHAPTER 10 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 11 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 12 RAYANNE CHAPTER 13 MEEMAW CHAPTER 14 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 15 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 16 RAYANNE CHAPTER 17 MEEMAW CHAPTER 18 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 19 RAYANNE CHAPTER 20 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 21 MEEMAW CHAPTER 22 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 23 RAYANNE CHAPTER 24 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 25 MEEMAW CHAPTER 26 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 27 RAYANNE CHAPTER 28 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 29 MEEMAW CHAPTER 30 RAYANNE CHAPTER 31 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 32 SAVANNAH CHAPTER 33 MEEMAW CHAPTER 34 RAYANNE CHAPTER 35 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 36 MEEMAW CHAPTER 37 RAYANNE CHAPTER 38 EVANGELINE CHAPTER 39 MEEMAW CHAPTER 40 SUE ELLEN CHAPTER 41 RAYANNE EPILOGUE SAVANNAH ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE AUTHOR PROLOGUE SAVANNAH Muscadine, Louisiana February 1997 I scraped clumsily at the stubborn, sleet-covered earth with Daddy’s shovel. Apart from us, it was one of the few things he’d left behind, discarded against the old tin shed as if he had just stopped to take a break for a moment and would drift into view any second, hollering at us to let his things alone. It clink clink clinked against the chain-link fence as I worked unsuccessfully to steady the weight of it beneath my knobby frame. Orbs of afternoon sunlight glinted off its worn handle, the blade so dull and encrusted with dried mud that it was barely functional, nearly as useless as my scrawny arms. Though she wasn’t that much bigger than me—all freckles and crowded teeth—Sue Ellen fixed a hand to her cocked hip with all the sass of an angsty teenager. “Let me do it. You might as well be digging with a stick at the rate you’re going.” “Fine,” I said, one frozen hand shading my eyes against the sun while the other thrust the handle in her direction. “If you think you can do any better.” It landed with a metallic thud at her dirty tennis shoes, and she snatched it up, grumbling to herself. Normally I would have shot back with a petty insult, but I had the good sense to hold it inside, because we needed this. It was proof we had once existed here, that we’d breathed in this air, made memories in this place where we had become a family. Before everyone began to leave us. Rayanne and I watched Sue Ellen take her turn at stabbing the dirt, unimpressed. “You’re not doing it right. Put your weight into it,” Rayanne said. “It’s too hard.” Sue Ellen tossed the shovel aside and smeared a dirty hand down her cheek, her brown hair fluttering like ribbons in the wind, her button nose the color of cranberries. “No way we can dig a hole deep enough for all this junk.” Sue Ellen may have believed our memories were junk, but I treasured them each like precious artifacts, stored the ones I still had left tight inside me like the peaches and pickles we faithfully canned every summer with Meemaw. I held on to them for all of us because someone had to. If it weren’t for my pestering, all of it would vanish one day like dandelions lost on the wind. Not ready to give up yet, I called out toward Meemaw in the driveway, where she stood slumped against the old tan Buick, the exhaust sending plumes of gray smoke into the winter air. Bundled up in her pink goose-down overcoat, she took one last drag from her cigarette and stomped it out before trudging over through the gate. She’d been in a hurry all morning to put more than a few football fields between us and the sad little house as soon as possible, but she grunted and puffed and shoveled anyway, until soon there was a respectably sized hole where we could lay our treasure down deep. After she left us to finish our work, we took turns scooping dirt over the little plastic cooler, patting and shaping the earth until it heaped into a tidy little mound. “Come on, girls. Time to go!” Meemaw’s raspy voice called out from the sputtering car, where she sat blowing streams of cigarette smoke out the window. Rayanne and Sue Ellen turned, breaking into a run to meet her, but I yelled after them. “Wait! We have to promise to come back in a hundred years.” Arching an eyebrow, Sue Ellen whipped around midstride and looked at me as if I’d just grown a second head. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. In a hundred years, we’re all gonna be lying in the ground with it.” My shoulders deflated, but I picked them right back up and jutted out my chin, doing my best to keep it steady. “Fine then. One year.” Would another year be long enough for Georgia to find her way back to us? How much longer would we have to wait? “Are you stupid? I’m not coming back here in a year