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

there in front of my brothers, staring at our mom, scared to move. She sat looking up through the skylights, bloated and waxy and near death with preeclampsia, though we didn’t know it yet.

Not the most careful of drivers anyway, Nana sped inland toward our little brown house to reach her daughter-in-law, who I suspected she loved more than her son sometimes. Away from the beachfront villas of her neighbors. Down Highway 17. Through miles of pine trees. Turn down Highway 544. Over the turn-bridge and past the showboat that rested underneath. Then single trailers started to dot the side of the road. Locks of blond-white hair blowing with icy air-conditioning drafts. In her haste, she did not even bother to knot a scarf over her hair to keep it beauty-parlor perfect. She finally swished past the pampas grass that lined the streets of our neighborhood and pulled into the driveway.

The only other mother in the house, she got to work. She soaked a washcloth with cold water for Mom’s forehead and told my father to get her to the hospital—again. Something is wrong, wrong, wrong. Often my dad and his brothers rolled their eyes at the advice of their mother. Though they protected her fiercely, Granddaddy’s words had effected their damage, they had been conditioned slowly by their father’s harshness to think of her as a woman with no sense. I watched as slowly, leaving our early childhood, my brothers and cousins talked down to Nana and clung more to one another, and excluded me from their games and business. We walked across King’s Highway to splash around the pools and waves less and less, and they wandered in a pack of boys to convenience stores, to loiter in the parking lots of strip clubs in strip malls, like the Doll House right next to the Food Lion.

Together, Mom and Dad made their way to the white minivan that replaced the crumpled station wagon at a pace my mother’s weakening state and expanded frame would allow for, wheels screeching with urgency as they pulled out of the driveway. A thud of bumper on concrete, and they were gone, just as they had been when they went to Nashville before the wreck. The house was quiet and unusually clean. My parents had not yet erected a crib or even decided where to put their fourth child, who was about to be born three months too soon.

Nana took us to her house, where she would have been expected, emergencies notwithstanding, to prepare a supper for Granddaddy, even if he didn’t show up, and to watch over Chris and Brian. She often cooked something to try to ease our minds, which achieved the desired effect not with comforting and delicious food, but with our giggling at how badly she cooked. Her one want as a grandmother. Overcooked spaghetti topped only with Country Crock margarine. Cold hot dogs wrapped in a slice of Wonder Bread. Collards and butter beans that made the whole house stink like feet for days. The meanness of our glee did not occur to us, though we had surely picked it up from watching her husband and sons belittle her minor quirks so often they were verbally transformed into complete ineptitude. But the predictability of this routine was palliative. She would ask us what we wanted to eat, not if we were hungry.

Mom’s condition should have correctly been diagnosed as preeclampsia when she went to the doctor that morning. She had to be airlifted to a town an hour and a half away and maybe there they could save her and the baby, but saving each or both was not a given. Florence, South Carolina, had been a minor hub in the regional railroad, and had transformed since its closing into a small town where there was a small highway junction and was thus full of truckers and the businesses that catered to them. Strangely, there was also a state-of-theart neonatal hospital smack alongside the XXX video stores, the Burger Kings, and the road signs pointing you farther on to either the NASCAR racetrack in Darlington or the tourist strips of Myrtle Beach. My third brother was born at McCloud Regional Medical Center, which gleamed like a mirage, a miracle, in the middle of nowhere.

The calmest of my brothers was born the most violently almost three months early, and his middle name means “gift from God.” Jared was born in emergency surgery, Mom sedated and nobody in the room to coo and cry over him. The doctors were more than half-surprised that he lived. For Dad, who trembled between gentleness and anger on normal days since the wreck, what could he have been thinking when the doctors could only say, “It’s too soon to tell.” He waited for days alongside his wife and his third son, the one who would look most like him, most like me. Jared weighed two pounds. He fit into the palm of an adult’s hand and had not yet grown eyelashes and his skin that had yet to feel the light of day looked sunburned. Needles and IVs streamed from his tiny limbs and attached to a dozen machines that pumped him full of medicine and oxygen. A tube taped to his mouth ended in his lungs to breathe for him. His fingers and toes were translucent, the colors of Dad’s scar when he first came home. I do not think I imagined watching the blood moving through his veins, the shadows of his organs.

For the weeks my mom was in the hospital, extending into the rest of the summer, my brothers and I stayed at Nana’s house with our cousins. Nana’s house was as good as home and where we stayed the last time there was an emergency with our parents, but then it was Dad who was hurt and Mom who came home. With our cousins, we splashed in the green slime of the pool, lit fires in the treehouse, or looked