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

piece of curled-up notebook paper with a love song written on its faded lines was excavated alongside a matchbook from Drunken Jack’s in a jewelry box found by accident in a closet at Nana’s house.

13

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Nana’s House

ON THE LIVING-ROOM WALL AT THE LLAMA Farm, Mom has hung Dad’s Grammy nomination on the wall. Best Country Music Song stands in gold next to his name. It’s bigger than you’d think it’d be with the frame and its trimmings. The certificate hangs next to a picture of the two of them on the red carpet, walking into their sacred ceremony dressed in sparkles and satin. Finally they are where they always dreamed of being. Mom’s had her hair shaped in hot-roller curls like how she did mine for pageants, and she’s wearing a glittering beaded gown that brings out her green eyes. She looks as happy as I’ve ever seen her, and Dad looks slightly disbelieving in his tux. He brought a Stetson but left it back in the hotel room, and though he didn’t end up winning the Grammy that night, I know he’s got a scribbled speech in his pocket that starts out, “I’m just a country boy from South Carolina with a sixth-grade education.” I have seen him practice for the next time at the wheel of a new, paid-for pickup truck with a red plastic cup in one hand and conducting his music at full, exuberant volume with the other. His fingers move across what is visible to him, just as they did when he saw Whiskey Jones up on a marquee above King’s Highway.

On Christmas Eve of 2016, a year that seemed to start out so joyfully as my parents walked the red carpet at the awards ceremony, Nana was taken to Myrtle Beach Hospital for a minor something. Do not worry, the doctors and nurses said, and we believed them. If one of us had insisted on staying after visiting hours, would she still have been given the medicine by mistake that slowed down her heart until it stopped beating? The heart is a muscle that remembers just like any other. Hers was shocked back to beating, but my nana’s didn’t come back with its pattern and she lay in a coma from Christmas Day until New Year’s Eve. We tried to wake her, stroking her curves as familiar as the sand dunes across King’s Highway and watching her feet tap to time as if she were in her rocking recliner waiting for the phone to ring or the patio door to open. “Where do you think she is right now? Is she a little girl again?” Dad asked this as we sat on either side of her bed, each holding a hand. Her eyes opened at times, still as bright and serene as the haint blue looking down on the Low Country, as if her eyes were the sky itself. I have come to wonder if the failings of South Carolina medicine was the Lord’s work. After I landed in Myrtle Beach the day after her heart attack, still hoping Nana would wake up, I was waiting on the curb for Ralph Howard and Jason to pick me up, when Jared called. Had I heard yet that our cousin Chris was dead? That, in fact, Nana’s heart had stopped at the same time that Chris had died of a heroin overdose in the last hours of Christmas Day.

We removed the life support after a week, feeling that she had been saved from a life without all of her grandchildren. The designated morning, someone brought Uncle Mike up to the hospital and wheeled him into the room. His face was powdered white with what Granddaddy had called Coca-Cola, and though Leslie had tried to wipe it all off, enough had made it up his nose and into his mouth so that, while relatives shuffled in and out to say their final goodbyes to Nana, he went between crying out, “She’s a saint, my mother, a saint!” and slapping the backsides of nurses and asking for their phone numbers, until some family member drove him home, to the Back House at Nana’s. It was hard to chastise him then. Nobody was in the mood, and he had lost doubly. Before Mike could be notified of Chris’s death a week earlier, someone had posted the news online. Small towns and all that. An EMT or his parole officer knew someone who knew someone who couldn’t keep their mouth shut, and Mom saw the news of her nephew’s death on a social media page. On the way to Myrtle Beach from Nashville, Dad called Mike to see how his older brother was taking the blow, only to find out that nobody had bothered to tell him yet, that he had in fact broken the news, driving several highway exits’ length of confused silence that erupted into his brother’s wailing. Mike began planning an elaborate funeral for his son, to whom he hadn’t spoken in several years, not since Chris had walked into the Back House and stolen the television off the wall. Mike called everyone he knew and those he used to know in Myrtle Beach to invite them to a gaudy and expensive funeral service he arranged. Within just a few hours, he had put out an announcement in the newspaper, ordered thousands of dollars’ of flowers, and had Chris’s body transferred from Florence, where he’d been paroled from jail for the holiday and had been staying with his mother, all without her notice. Chris’s mom called up Uncle Leslie in as calm a state as a grieving mother could manage, wondering what we were doing transferring her son’s body to Myrtle Beach and planning a service without her, filled with people Chris hated in a place that drove him to the needle? And not knowing anything about it, Les could only apologize and call the funeral home to have Chris’s body sent back