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

that first year after the wreck, and Mom began painting and wallpapering the homes of Nana’s country-club friends for extra money. My parents did not hide their fighting from us, perhaps because it did not occur to them that we could hear their shouts. They considered us too young still to understand the implications of what they fought over, or maybe they considered us props in their own story, not yet writing our own. There was never enough money, and suggestions of selling the little brown house grew and grew. It was filled less and less with the love I knew.

8

_________

Four of a Kind

IT WAS NOT THE RIGHT TIME FOR A NEW BABY, and so it was time for Mom to fall pregnant again. While Dad dreamed of country-music stardom, Mom had always wanted about a dozen kids, and Dad says now that he always felt the more, the merrier. Periodically, she’d ask me if I’d want a baby sister. Despite his assertions now, Jason claims that Dad was angry about the baby, before he came around. Mom was elated at first. She loved being pregnant, she says, but this time was different. The constant fighting, the anxiety over money and marriage, three children already, only a year apart each. In her fourth pregnancy, she did not swell with the ease and delight she expected. My memories of this pregnancy do not include Jason’s, but are of Dad, without health insurance and back to waiting tables part-time, his leg not able to support his weight for long, limping with the gel-and-Velcro splint through Nana’s house to collect us after work, and of Mom looking tired and holding her belly when she came one day to talk with my new teacher at the public school. My grades were always marked down for writing in lovely smooth cursive. “The other children haven’t learned it yet” was the teacher’s explanation.

Watching Westerns, Dad made lists of baby names on his legal pads from the blue paperback with the top-hatted storks on the cover. Shane or Luke. Mom wanted something starting with the letter J and thought it would be a girl, as she’d been sure I was going to be a boy. Summer air holds on to electricity, and maybe we were waiting on a crack of thunder that day at the end of July. My brothers and I were playing baseball in the front. Dad played guitar from the couch, and his whiskey-smoothed voice hovered over the bases. Mom had driven herself to the emergency room, but insisted that it was not an emergency. “You stay here and watch the kids,” she urged Dad. And then to me, “Nicole, you stay here and watch over your dad.” She’s always doing that, begging us not to make a fuss over her, as if it’s not habit after a lifetime. Recently she was bitten by a copperhead on the heel of her left foot, and it took her two days to get to a doctor. “It didn’t seem so bad until it turned black,” she said. I’ve had the thought to plant a ring of blackberry bushes around her house now, to attract black snakes that might eat the poisonous ones. What is the difference between that and Nana’s hanging up that picture of Jesus with the Veronica Lake hair, or women who pour circles of salt around their homes as an act of protection? By the time she went to the hospital, it was too late for antivenom. Her foot remained a sight worth the pictures she sent for another two weeks until returning to its usual size and shape.

In the privacy of the emergency room of a Conway hospital—Lord knows what would have happened if she’d gone up to Myrtle Beach Hospital, a hospital where more than one Jones has gone for minor pains and been carried out dead—she relayed her symptoms. This man told her not to worry. Take some antibiotics, he scoffed, and he ignored the bulge of baby and her breath short from pain. He assumed she was sweating from the heat and not her already sky-high blood pressure. “Hot out today,” he may have said, offering her a handkerchief. Then he wrote her a prescription to clear up an infection she didn’t have. No big deal, really. Be gone by supper-time. I can hear his smugness, can feel his eagerness to be out of the room. So she came home still in pain and carrying a bag of fried chicken for my dad from Oliver’s, just down the road from the hospital.

Her complexion hung gray against the blue, cloudless sky like the moon sometimes did during the daytime. We stopped playing and approached her, giving one another looks of worry. Dad heard the car door thump and came outside, a smile and cigarette hanging from his lips. I could tell just by the way he sucked in the air with his cigarette on the side. Mom’s own lightness was vanishing, and when he saw, Dad strode forward with a purpose I rarely saw him possess. In his white tennis shorts and Drunken Jack’s T-shirt, he looked just like my brother Justin, except for the shiny purple scar that crawled out of the splint from his ankle to his knee.

Dad moved the guitar from the couch and laid it on the coffee table, and it gonged as wood hit wood. The sound bounced around the room, not very loud, but silencing us all for a few seconds. Normally, he was so careful with the instrument and handled it more gingerly than he did his children. I heard it as an alarm, more than even the look of pain and worry on my mother’s face. Dad called Nana from the rotary phone on the kitchen wall, the rubber of his shoes flapping on the parquet, a sound so normal and incongruous with the feeling in the air that I wished I hadn’t heard it. I stood