Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

managed to fling a gust that remains the strongest wind ever recorded in New York City, 113 miles per hour. Was it during this hurricane, as tornados plucked pines from sandy flat earth and the ocean moved whole city blocks from one side of Ocean Boulevard to the other, as the town congregated by candlelight to pray in creaking pews surrounded by their spouses surely, that Nana first found comfort in words she’d spend the next half a century spelling out in needlepoint and hanging on her walls? God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .

About twenty years ago and forty years on from Hazel, the remaining Jones brothers bought cemetery plots for themselves and their wives. In addition to the one-night stands, they all kept a serious mistress on the side, as their father had, and bought them condos and costume jewelry. There are certain words, like the name of F, with which I do not wish to burden my nana, even in these pages. Mom says she first caught sight of F on the side of Calhoun Road, clearly either on the way to or having left my nana’s house. She had a flat tire that I can only rightfully judge as a small act of a god. Nana, who’d spent most of her life suffering blows from Granddaddy, considered his infidelity the most injurious, and like the beatings, just another hurt she had to deal with, a philosophy I found more and more incredulous. What would happen if she let herself get truly angry with him? It was Herman’s wife, my great-aunt Francis, who called her up one day and said, “Jackie, you ought to worry about this one. She’s a waitress.”

If they had gone in together on a mausoleum just for their mistresses, bedecked and bedazzled with busty come-hither angels, it would not have surprised me. Whatever they planned to do with the mistresses, it is unimportant in the scheme of things, as mistresses are. All of the Jones brothers bought husband-and-wife plots—except for Granddaddy, who bought a twin bed of dirt only for himself alongside that of his family and told Nana she could get herself buried down on the south end of Highway 17 next to where her mama and sister lay. It would be Hurricane Hazel all over again. “Even after they’re both gone, they won’t rest in peace. Jackie’s ghost is gonna be walkin’ up and down King’s Highway lookin’ for Ralph, who won’t care to see her for eternity,” Uncle Leslie has more than once said of his mother’s unwavering devotion to a man who hated her more and more for that very thing as the years kept on. She has always simply said to suggestions that she can do better, “He’s my husband.”

4

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Golden Gloves

EARLY ON, WHEN DAD WAS TRYING TO GET MOM to come around to his advances, he called up Nana at the new house on Calhoun Road for some advice. The timber wolf was gone, after all, a promising step toward courtship. “Mama, I wanna send a hundred white roses to this girl I been seeing.”

“Well, I reckon you better call up Lazelle’s.” She directed him to the one-room florist shop, extending the syllables in Lazelle’s as she coiled the phone cord around a finger tipped in sherbet-peach polish and gazing at the wisteria vines that wrapped around the awning of her patio. Nana told this story from the same rocking recliner in her living room where she would’ve taken this call decades before. She opened her memory to this chapter as easily as turning to a bookmarked page in one of her library of romance paperbacks that she kept hidden in cupboards and closets around the house. Each of my brothers has had avalanches of bodice rippers fall upon his head when opening forgotten doors. They tumble out of cabinets in cascades of dog-eared longing.

Rocking with one bare foot nestled in the teal shag carpet and the other crossed over her knee, Nana would sway up and down in her rocking chair anticipating the end of her own story. “Son, that many roses is liable to cost a couple hundred dollars.” There is coffee percolating in the background and butter beans or cabbage boiling on the stove, which mixes with the moss and roses of perfume. A bouquet of Estée Lauder glass bottles flowers from her bathroom counter. It’s in everything, these green and heavy scents, and so much is folded within them too. The carpet’s since been pulled up and replaced with cold white tile, but Nana would smile her practiced punch line no matter what was underfoot. Every vowel was a wink when she told stories. “He sent her a dozen white roses instead,” she’d say, leaning forward and sliding her bare feet across the carpet or tile, “but I reckon it was enough.” Before we were old enough to chase down pirate treasure, Nana was our good fortune and we hers. “When your mama was pregnant with you, I told all my friends, Alverta and Tommy and Ruby Isaac, that I was gonna make my grandchildren love me better than anything. ‘Well, how are you gonna do that, Jackie?’ they sassed me. I said, ‘I’m just gonna love them that way.’ And I did.” Children pick up on character as clearly as the weather.

The house on Calhoun Road has always been known to us as “Nana’s house,” and here I will take what credit is mine, as the first grandkid to use the name that everybody uses just the same as if a painted oar with the words were over the front door like on the vacation homes on Ocean Boulevard. A flick of premonition doled out so innocently by kids, or something said so often it had to come true. Granddaddy sold the little house on Thirty-third Avenue that had weathered Hurricane Hazel and a thousand storms inside. I might venture