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

was walkin’ between my sister Sue’s and my houses. We only lived a street away from each other, until finally we took the kids—your daddy wasn’t born yet—and we went down to the church to wait. He said, ‘It’s a sad thing when it takes a hurricane to get you in church.’ We’d all gone to the church basement that night.” She could have told the story about her neighbor’s call to warn her of Hazel’s approach, and their flight door-to-door to warn as many people as they could. It was a story she told every time we drove past Thirty-third Avenue, no matter the season. Never had she connected the stories, and what was lost for my not noticing until now?

“The day Mama got back two weeks later, he had died in his sleep at about five o’clock that morning.” Still I sat silently, not knowing how to acknowledge the weight of her loss. She said to me, as she often did, “I bet you’re tired of hearing me talk.”

“Nana, that’s why I ask, to listen to you talk,” I said.

A lifetime of Granddaddy telling her to shut her mouth, telling us how stupid she was, had left her self-conscious of her stories. I grew hungrier to hear her voice as I got farther away from her. I regret to say that medical care for women in the South has little improved since May Ella was treated as insane for aging.

Walking back to the car to head home, a gust of wind swept up just as I blew a large pink bubble in my gum, and I got to the house with a gob of it tangled in my hair. The first task of hunkering down for Bertha was Mom having to knead peanut butter into my scalp, pulling the bits of sticky, chewed gum from strands of my hair as the local news aired from the living room, hoping to get done before the lights went out. Bertha was expected to come ashore as a category two, which did not seem like too much to worry about. “Go upstairs and wash your hair again and then fill the bathtub with water. You remember what happened during Hugo,” Mom reminded us about the tap water. Not so bad, considering the catastrophes of others. We lost power but not so much as a tree.

The sky was gray with Bertha when I woke up the next morning. This seemed like just the right kind of hurricane. Strong enough to be interesting, but too weak to do much damage. Maybe he just wanted something to think about besides his failing marriage, but Dad seemed happier than he had been. After breakfast, he set up a card table next to the front door with a view of the window, with a battery-powered radio and a deck of cards ready to shuffle. It had been a long time since we’d played gin. The rain started to fall. The wind became steady, blowing harder and harder throughout the day. By lunchtime, the rain had turned sideways and we were all out on the porch watching leaves and limbs tugged through the air, caught on something we couldn’t see. Mom brought blankets to wrap around us. The sustained winds made the wet July day feel winter-cold. We watched a group of seagulls try to fly against the wind. They were stuck at a fixed point in the sky, flapping without moving forward and looking slightly ridiculous as gusts fanned out their feathers and butted their heads.

Inspired, my dad got up from his rocking chair, stepped off the front porch, and walked out into the gale. He looked up at the sky, apparently satisfied, and yelled for me and my brothers to join him. “Come on!” We looked at one another and bounded off the porch, leaving the blankets slumped on the rocking chairs and running into the rain. The wind pushed against us, and the drops of rain bore into my skin. “This is a game I played with my brothers,” he said, and explained the rules. You have to face the wind head-on, and the last person standing after everyone else has been blown down wins. I could barely hear my own laughter over the roar of the wind.

When my brothers got back to their feet, our dad had reappeared with a kite from the garage. My mom looked down from the porch, wrapped in blankets and with Jared on her hip, and my dad released the green diamond-shaped kite. “Mark, be careful! Watch out for lightning!” she had to scream, her voice cracking. She looked like she was crying, though it was impossible to tell with the rain. But the sound of my mother’s heart breaking was louder than the freight-train sounds of the storm. Even now I hate the sound of my own voice cracking when I cry, when the tears come like the torrents of rain that fall for hours or days until the winds fizzle and the sky clears blue again and what’s left is only a tropical storm the next state over and fallen trees in the backyard, if you’re lucky. Because it sounds just like hers that day on the porch watching the kite buck and whirl in the sky. The pop of green flew through the gray sky, past the seagulls, who were still struggling. It was the same green as the stone on my mother’s engagement ring, which she was not wearing anymore, and the kite blew away, disappearing into the sea or the sky or the past forever.

Late in the afternoon, the kite long gone and the rain just drizzle, Dad grew restless. “I’m gonna go see what the neighborhood looks like,” he announced, and I volunteered to go too. We got in the little silver sedan and drove along empty neighborhood streets and then turned onto the highway, also empty, taking in the damage. Some billboards had blown over and pine trees were either bending