Free Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons

occasionally, say at Christmas or Easter, for the entire student
     body. I never tired of them: house shining and smelling of flowers and furniture polish and wonderful things cooking in the
     kitchen, the dining room spread with beautiful things, iced and decorated and parslied, the big Rose Medallion punch bowl
     that my grandmother Wentworth had given Mother ringed with camellias and smellingfaintly of bourbon or gin and clinking with icebergs of tiny cubes, and most of all my mother, in something floor sweeping
     and bare shouldered, eclipsing every other woman in her house.
    Except perhaps when my grandmother and grandfather Wentworth came, as they sometimes did. My grandmother Caroline drew eyes
     like a living flame. She always dressed simply, though her pearly shoulders might be bare—I think now that she tried never
     to outshine her daughter-in-law—and her copper hair, only slightly darker than mine, was always piled on top of her small
     head. She frequently wore a pair of dangling amber earrings that I coveted with all my heart. They matched her eyes perfectly.
     They were usually her only jewelry, but they gave her the appearance of being clad in a queen’s ransom of precious stones.
     My mother would sometimes tighten her mouth at the sight of her, and I once heard my mother whisper to my father, “Those earrings
     are barbaric. How she dares, at a little party for a boys’ school—”
    “And yours, my dear, are brushing your shoulders.” He smiled at her. He must have been aware by then that his wife was searingly
     resentful of the mother who did not ensconce her son and his family in the heart of Buckhead, but I truly don’t believe it
     ever bothered him. He could have done little about it, anyway.
    I liked first and second grades, I remember, though it seemed strange to me that there could be another school besides Hamilton,
     the one that so dominated our world. My father went there every day and often on weekends. My mother’s very life was circumscribed
     by it. My sister, whoat fifteen could have stepped out of the pages of
Seventeen
magazine—that was her bible—drew virtually all her suitors from it. And I was in and out of it almost every day because I
     would regularly break my mother’s rule and escape Lavonda and dart across the front lawn and around the road’s curve into
     the sweet, chalky dimness of Hamilton. It was, to me, simply another and larger part of our house. Invariably a long-suffering
     teacher would corral me and lead me by the hand to my father’s office, or even home, and I would get the Hamilton-is-out-of-bounds
     lecture again. It made no sense to me and I never remembered it. Hamilton Academy was where my father was. Therefore, so would
     I be.
    He died when I was nine years old and just beginning fourth grade. His father died with him. It was a brilliant iron-blue
     October day and my father and grandfather had driven up into the edge of the mountains above Atlanta, not far up Burnt Mountain
     from Burnt Cove, where my parents had spent their honeymoon, to look at the summer camp Edgewood, on the flank of the mountain,
     where many Atlantans had sent their children for generations. My father had summered there and thought that it might make
     a good summer adjunct for the school. I don’t know what they decided. On the trip home my grandfather’s stately old Bentley
     missed the hairpin curve at the first scenic overlook and soared up and out into the blue air and into the valley below, where
     the suburbs of Atlanta began. Whatever their decision, Edgewood never became a part of the Hamilton school. I suppose it would
     have been impossible, after the accident.
    It happened while I was at school, and they told me when Icame clattering into the house with an armful of pastel drawings. We had been reading
Tom Sawyer,
and my drawings were full of a chalky, heroic Tom, whom I liked, and a stunted and squinting Becky, whom I did not. I was
     already yelling and