A Southern Place by Elaine Drennon Little Page A

full with your sisters, your mother’s people, the funeral arrangements. I didn’t want you to receive the news from strangers, so I waited until I could come here to tell you.”
    “But—she’s been dead, all week, and I didn’t know? You couldn’t call me? Laura and Fran, why didn’t they call me? You let me stay here all week, at this dumb school, going to my stupid classes, going to chapel in the morning and the tutor every afternoon, while I don’t even know that I don’t have a mother any more?” Phil screamed, jumping up from the table.
    “Keep your voice down,” his father reprimanded, pushing him back onto the bench. “Control yourself, you don’t want to cause a scene, nor do you want other boys seeing you cry. You could make it very hard for yourself later.”
    “My mother is dead. I don’t care who hears me, I don’t care!”
    Mr. Foster stood in front of his son, blocking him from any onlookers. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and roughly wiped Phil’s face. “Be a man, son, it’s time to be a man. Your mother’s greatest hope was that you would get your reading straightened out and come back to school in Albany. You can still do that, but you’ll have to work. Think about that, son, think about what your mother would’ve wanted. Can you do it for her?”
    “Then why didn’t I come back to Albany before instead of to this crappy school? Why am I still here?”
    “We didn’t think you were ready—yet.”
    Phil choked on his snot and nodded, agreeing just for show. Phil never wanted to see Albany, Georgia again.
    “Get your grades up, study hard, and maybe we can get you home for Christmas.”
    Phil nodded, thinking why now? Christmas was a dead word. A fairy tale. Like Bible stories.
    Mr. Foster grabbed Phil in a quick and awkward embrace and shook his hand. Then he brushed off his suit, as if touching his son had been contaminating.
    “Time to go back to class, Phillip. I’ve got an important meeting in Atlanta tomorrow, I need to get on the road.”
    Phil walked back towards his classroom building, only to round the corner and disappear into the nearby woods as soon as his father was out of sight. That was the last time they spoke of his mother.
    ❦
    Phil stayed at Darlington throughout high school. With special classes and mandatory tutoring, he put in enough effort to earn a high school diploma, but Phil knew it was a farce. The classes helped him memorize things, and the tutors did a lot of the outside work for him. That’s what his parents had paid for. Phil could still read only the simplest books without stopping and regrouping the words. He’d learned compensatory skills to deal with his disability, but the tools were lengthy to execute. He forgot most material before he finished reading it, and he’d lost the will to even care.
    On graduation day, only his sisters attended. When he asked about their father, they seemed offended. “Good God, Phil. He bought a new building here so they’d let you graduate. What more do you expect?” asked Laura.
    Phil shuffled along the path towards his dorm. Darlington was beautiful, and it looked more like Shakespeare’s England than like a carpet mill town in the South. But Phil wouldn’t miss the place. He wondered what he was supposed to do for the rest of the summer. No one seemed to expect him at home, but he was officially out of high school. Could he stay here? Maybe since my dad bought that building , Phil thought.
    Phil had been accepted at the University of Georgia for the fall semester. He wondered if his father bought a building there, too.
    ❦
    College life at the University of Georgia had been strictly party time for Phil. He joined his father’s fraternity, Sigma Nu, an on-campus social club filled with other spoiled, rich kids, and every day was a blast. He attended a few classes in his first quarter, but by the end of the year he seldom showed up at all. It seemed that he’d finally found a venue where