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

Opry, Dolly Parton had a new dinner theater on Restaurant Row, the Dixie Stampede, an extravaganza of incorrect history on horseback. Nashville might come to him. He saw himself as part old-fashioned bartender, part sheriff, like in the Westerns he grew up with. The type of bar owner who could shoot the breeze with the regulars and just plain shoot the troublemakers. Who could entertain a crowd. Who wore shiny vests and bolo ties and sleeve garters. Maybe a costume would have improved some decisions. If you dress up to perform, maybe it is easier to remember who you are once you take it off. We’d have teased him for it, anyway, so it is probably best he kept to T-shirts and ball caps.

Dad’s initial excitement for anything new was infectious, and Mom kept right along, handing Jared, now toddling around off the oxygen tank, over to me to watch while she cleaned the whole place from top to bottom, picking out silverware and painting the walls. “What should we call the place?” Dad asked this of us on every car ride home once we started fixing the place up. My brothers and I would shout out names all at once, silly ones like the names given to the vacation beach houses on Ocean Boulevard. The Saloon. Dad’s Place. The Hurricane Hole. The Jukebox. The game shortened the car ride home, an hour or more up to Cherry Grove, inching along Restaurant Row in summertime traffic, passing more of Uncle Herman’s Calabash restaurants, like the one with the giant crab erected around its front door.

Whispers from the muses, ancestors dead and gone, or else buried psychology. “Whiskey Jones,” Dad said one day in the parking lot. He said it louder once again and smiled, unaware of a moment I look back on as fore-shadowing, though I’d still wear the T-shirt. The logo really was something. Not quite Drunken Jack’s, but a man who could have passed for a brother in a panama hat, linen suit, and glasses. The sign has long been locked up in a storage unit of Uncle Herman’s, taken as collateral for rent unpaid, so I cannot confirm the monocle, but let’s throw it in for fun.

For a minute, it was the hottest place in Myrtle Beach, but it’s hard to keep up the effort of service when your heart’s not in it. It’s hard to break even when you’re giving the drinks away, and it gets harder still to notice you’re short-changing yourself when you’re knocking back your own drinks. Having accepted his fate as any other Jones of Myrtle Beach, just one more son of sons in the restaurant business, resignation filled up the cups but not the bank. As if that wasn’t enough, they’d found one bank that loaned them a down payment for a new house in Little River, just inland from Cherry Grove, over a different swing bridge that we had to cross every day to get to school. We were often late, when the bridge, with limbs like a daddy longlegs, twisted away from the main road, looking as if it were dangling the spidery legs over the Intracoastal Waterway, so that tall fishing boats and barges could float through the narrow passage. Our new house, a big blue one, was too perfect-looking for us and our perilous finances, which still included a mountain of medical debt from keeping Jared and Mom alive, two years after he came home from the hospital. There are priceless things, but life has never been one of them. Their medical debt came to hundreds of thousands. The big blue house in Little River had a wraparound porch, but it would never be the little brown house in Conway.

We drove up and down King’s Highway in Mom’s new minivan, a Christmas gift from Grandpa the year we were living at the beach house. It seemed like a modern marvel, with sliding doors on both sides and painted a deep galactic green. Like our big blue house, it felt like it didn’t match our family’s state. Beaten down by one bad break after another, surviving as always due to the generosity of family until it was too much effort to imagine escaping. My strongest memory of the alien green minivan is that we could not afford to fix the things that went wrong with it. The windshield stayed cracked. The sliding doors stopped opening. The wipers broke and had to stay that way for weeks. On the drive to Nana’s house for Christmas one year, rain and sleet fell in obscuring coats across the windshield already black with night. All the restaurant lights and signs for seafood were unlit for the holiday. Mom pulled over on some roadside grass before getting to the swing bridge, tears of anger falling down her cheeks in flat lines through the shimmer of her face powder. She twisted around from the driver’s seat in total silence, the only true tell of her mood, and pulled a large dinosaur toy from Jared’s hands. Rolling down her window, she curled her arm around the front so she could wedge the long plastic tail on the Tyrannosaurus rex into the closer wiper blade, and moving the dinosaur, gripped by the neck, up and down with the window wide open to the freezing rain, that is how we traveled the hour to Nana’s house. Soaked but safe. How sore her arm must have been. For a while during these years, I became more afraid of space aliens than of ghosts, and made Mom sit on the edge of the bathroom sink while I showered. Sometimes, after pushing back the shower curtain with a clanging of rusty hooks, I’d emerge to find she had quietly left me there alone, and the heartbeat of panic recalled the night in the mall parking lot when I thought she might leave, when I realized that she could.

Most afternoons during the school year, we were ferried down to Whiskey Jones