Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

go on one of their scouting missions, but my presence seemed urgent, our separation not an option. And the anxiety must have been brewing for a while, or else Mom was feeling alarmingly sentimental, because she had a parting gift at the ready. A bunny with a purple ribbon tied around her neck. I kept that rabbit for so many years, the plastic heart glued to its fur eventually fell off. That lavender ribbon is still probably between Nana’s couch cushions. Maybe in her drawer of hair clips, with the real tortoise-shell combs. Violet was a shade she complained of never being able to wear. She didn’t think it necessary to tell us exactly what had happened to our parents when they failed to return on time.

Mom was in the passenger seat on the way back from Nashville to Myrtle Beach, with a pillow over her knees. Dad in his Drunken Jack’s baseball cap and aviators. A Camel cigarette unspooling between the fingers of his left hand, the side where he keeps the nails clipped for fretting. He prefers to grow his fingernails as guitar picks on the other hand, though I’m sure the floorboards of the car were speckled with his plastic picks. Tuned into that lull that descends on the return leg of all road trips. That truck had done the drive so many times, it could practically steer itself. The junctions of I-40 around Knoxville remain jumbled. Too many lanes, too much concrete all at a crook in winding roads. Knoxville is a trucking hub where tractor-trailers enter the highway in a steady flow of commerce. For years, I assumed the driver must have been drunk, the wreck the deadly consequence of carelessness or the karma of alcohol. And he was. Drunk enough to fall asleep at the wheel. Mom noticed the guy first. An eighteen-wheeler flying between lanes and cars like a pinball. “We were coming down a hill, and he was swerving all over the place. I remember saying, ‘He’s liable to hit somebody,’ and then he hit everybody.”

As my parents descended in their eastbound lane, the eighteen-wheeler zigzagged through the westbound lane of traffic, heading straight for the station wagon that I knew from dance recitals, trips to Grandpa’s house, and backseat sing-alongs. Straight for my parents. He hit car after car, killing somebody on his side of the divide before busting through the concrete barrier. Between my parents and this behemoth was a teal Chevy Monte Carlo. My mother watched this car get sucked underneath the body of the truck, between the front and back wheels. She says, and I will never forget, she saw the couple duck just before the roof of the car was sheared straight off.

And that’s when the engine of the truck, that terrifying face you always see riding your tail in the rearview mirror, hit my parents. It plowed into the driver’s side, right into my dad, and pushed that station wagon, a Subaru that Mom credits with saving their lives, off the side of the road before coming to a halt. Again, my memory swerves sharply from reality, and I am in the back seat of the car with them just before the crash, where I almost remember begging to be, and then I am suddenly skipping into the future. I’ve cartwheeled across our timeline as if it weren’t anything at all to time-travel—and when you’re seven, I guess it’s not. What I still don’t know could fill the roads between South Carolina and Tennessee.

Back at the scene: cicadas clanging like church bells, ringing in the heat, and the ambulance sirens are heralding the end of Dad’s ambitions, which never had the chance to really get going at all. Looking back, this was the dividing point, the separation between hope and resignation for all of us. No, maybe not resignation. That sounds too quiet to my ears, and what followed was not quiet. Anything but. The wreck, as it came to be known, lit the fuse on a spectacular detonation of giving up in both my parents. This was the showstopper, literally, or for a good long while, though life gave them a couple of disastrous encores. Cut to movie montage. Reels of flashing lights and broken glass. Hospital gowns. Beeping heart monitors. Who knew we’d end up hearing more than our share of heart-monitor dings in the coming years.

Nana did not tell us about the accident, but I remember the whispering. While doing headstands against the wall, reading from her book of ghost stories, playing with my brothers, all as she and her sister whispered, worried, and picked up the phone. Whispers, worry, phone. The clang of phone receiver finding its place atop the beige rotary. A kid can sense secrecy, even if she can’t tell what’s important. Jason claims that Uncle Leslie sat us down and said there had been an accident.

I have this early memory of frying chicken with Mom, and it starts with the sounds. Sizzles and pops. There’s the smell of flour and grease, and I am hungry. I can feel the wall of heat from the stove. I see my legs, next to my brother Justin’s, dangle off the kitchen counter, thin and white, wiggling like fishing bait. The edge of the counter cuts into the back of my thighs. It must be summer, always summer, because we are both in our underwear and nothing else, and the chemical scent of chlorine lingers in my damp hair, which has turned green the few strands of almost-blond. Always summer.

It is my turn. It is exciting. I can’t see her, but I know Mom is in the background. I pick up a raw chicken leg, almost the color of my legs, except for patches of pink and purple. But there are pricks in the wet, cold skin, and the flesh does not yield quite as easily to pokes. I do not recognize these dots as plucked feathers, but I feel them beneath my