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

I thought of the night she hit a deer with our old station wagon. A memory forgotten on purpose or hiding with the other creatures that came out only at night. We had been driving back from a visit to Grandpa’s house. The boys slept, and I lay awake watching the stars skip over tree branches. The webworms waved and beckoned. Car headlights floated into our den and then flickered gone. Mom hummed or sang softly with the radio. The sounds of the drive rose and fell alongside the chests of my sleeping brothers, between the slow blinks. I was never a good sleeper. Still I hesitate to close eyes in need of rest, reluctant to miss what entity might lurk between imagination and presence. The lurching thud and invisible hands pulling me backward even as I shot forward, like on a roller coaster, and suddenly we are at a gas station. Mom is sobbing under the same sickly gray yellow as the parking-lot lights at the mall, and a gas station attendant, an old skinny man in a dirty uniform, is examining the front of the car where she hit a deer.

Finally, Mom came back out with a small plastic bag. Anger and relief welled up in tangles, and I could say nothing. Jared quieted with her return, a mother’s presence one of the few things I couldn’t give him. Now I see clearly a need for the luxury of five minutes to herself, away from a depressed husband on the edge of addiction, and four kids, one needier than the next. Just to be alone, to breathe without small hands grasping at her legs or breasts. To contemplate something new for herself from all the unused things around her, and then the need to have something to look forward to, an object through which to imagine herself anew. In silence, tears surged and splashed. They fell from her, and they fell from me. Every salty drop connected me to her and her to me like the shining links of filigree that Nana had given to her, that she would one day give to me. Perhaps Jared could sense not just the storm outside, but a temptation flaring, even for just a second, hot and dry in the clammy rain. She could leave us all as her own mother had done and be free of all this, but she just started up the car.

Nana had once attempted to claim her freedom and had tried to get out of Myrtle Beach. She rocked in her recliner and looked at me on the couch when she told me about packing a bag and taking off. Granddaddy’s waitress F had been coming around more and more, and all the boys were grown and out of school. She got in the car and was driving up to Columbia to stay with her friend Joree. When she got to Florence, an hour outside of Myrtle Beach, she saw flashing lights in the rearview window. “Can I help you, Officer? I don’t know what I was doin’ wrong.” She had only been a pretty blonde he’d wanted to talk to until he saw the last name on her driver’s license. The Joneses had the lawmen in their pockets, they bragged.

“What are you doin’ so far from home, Mrs. Jones?”

“Sir, I’m leaving my husband.”

“No, you’re not. You’re going back home.”

Back in the present, her voice unwavering and matter-of-fact, “He followed me all the way back to the driveway too.”

She wanted me to know that she had tried to leave. That she had wanted to. That not everybody gets to move freely in the world. That is what she wanted for me.

9

_________

Whiskey Jones

GRANDDADDY HAD BEEN TELLING DAD TO GIVE up on music for years.

“I just don’t see how on earth you gonna make a living is all,” he said in his office at the Sandcastle. It was a gentle tack for him. “You gotta be thinking about them kids, Mark. You don’t have time for none of this guitar nonsense.”

He meant as well as he ever had. Better, I suppose, as even he could see that Dad was in a bad spot. His leg was holding up better than the rest of him. Granddaddy had a philosophy of not helping anybody but himself, and even in my dad’s broken state, he would never give him a job or lend him a dime. Perhaps unused to compassionate tones from Granddaddy or too tired to imagine anything anymore, Dad decided to open his own restaurant. He’d managed his uncle Herman’s Pancake House in Garden City for years. Another Jones getting into the restaurant business, feeding tourists. It was the way of things.

Love needs something to look forward to, and my parents needed something new that did not come with an outstanding balance in a number-ten envelope. They did not need to look too far. Like anybody who really knows how to make a buck, like Granddaddy and Uncle Jack, their brother Herman seemed willing to overlook irregularities of the financial kind if it meant he could take advantage of collecting later. According to family stories, anyway. Like his brothers, he hit his bottom line and seemed to care little about at whose expense, and he rented to my parents an empty two-story building in an orange stucco finish with white columns out front at the end of a strip mall on King’s Highway, a few blocks down from Captain Hook’s Pirate Adventure Mini-Golf in one direction and Nana’s house in the other. The front door opened onto black-and-white checkered tile that led back to the wide oak bar with a mirror taking up the wall behind it, where I’d watch myself do homework in the afternoon all during middle school. To the right was an open space in front of a real, if small, stage that Dad built. A place to perform his music whenever he wanted to. Ronnie Milsap had opened the Carolina