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

or snapped in half, but overall there wasn’t the devastation I remembered from Hugo. Homes stood their ground and there was little storm surge, certainly not half a mile inland. All the video-rental shops, grocery stores, and fireworks outlets were shuttered, so it was a surprise to come across a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall with the neon OPEN sign lit up. We pulled in, and the family who ran the place seemed as nonplussed as my dad. They’d kept everything running on their generator after the power went out. We headed back to the house with cartons of Chinese food, delighted at the fun of our unlikely discovery. In the hour that we had been gone, though, a roadblock had been set up across the highway, just before our neighborhood. “No, sir,” said the officer, unmoved. “We ain’t lettin’ nobody back in.” We parked the car at a nearby fireworks outlet and, angry and soaking, lugged our bags of takeout, no longer a treat but a liability, through soaking pine forest, in freezing silence, as if criminals in our own home, and come to think of it, it was probably an offense to cross the barrier that had been set up. We might have been hungry looters, after all.

The wind was waning and summer warmth should have been returning with us, but our house had kept its unseasonable chill. The inconvenience of hauling noodles and stir-fry had dampened the mood, and Mom had already locked herself in her bedroom for the night. This was not what I had in mind, when I’d thought to offer our barroom mermaid to the ocean. I was too young still to understand the relief that came with endings, and kept from me was the gravity of my parents’ money problems. Still saddled with medical debt from the emergency of Mom’s last pregnancy, owing thousands of dollars in rent on the restaurant to Uncle Herman, who was nearly as stingy as Granddaddy, and nearing foreclosure, the only option was to beg for help from Grandpa. As generous as Granddaddy was greedy, he would not give as freely as he might once have. In paying off the little blue house in Little River, he gave the condition that we leave Myrtle Beach for good and move to Charlotte. If he was not a miser with his money, he knew how to make a deal. That was how he got rich in the first place. The strings he tied to his money reflected his own selfishness, moving his favorite child and her family close to him. Though I did not know the details yet, such offers imparted the sense that no matter how bad things got, there would always be a safety net in his outstretched hands, which also held his checkbook.

By the time the storms got up to the Fs, in September of that year, we would be living down at Nana’s house. We sold the blue house to pay off the bank, or rather, my grandpa paid off the bank to stop the foreclosure. F for Fran, for foreclosure, for failing. What little we kept from our house ended up in a storage unit on the Little River side of the swing bridge. Hurricane Fran was forecast to hit Myrtle Beach dead-on as a category four, and for the first time, we evacuated. We packed up the alien-green minivan and drove to the safety of Grandpa’s house, leaving Dad behind at Nana’s house. They could tell Fran would wobble north at the last minute, as it did, and hit North Carolina harder than the Low Country. Fran remains the last strong storm to come ashore in the Carolinas, the last one to be ranked officially devastating, and our storage unit in Little River flooded to the rafters. The tide claimed what little was left of our family life.

From the library at school, I filled out and mailed applications to better-looking schools in Charlotte. I hoped I would learn more than I had been. In my eighth-grade history class, for instance, we spent afternoons learning the words to the county fight song. “It’s ‘Horry’ not ‘Whore-y,’” the chorus counters what must have been a common misconception. We had to pretend to be among the enslaved Africans on a rice plantation after the annual field trip to Brookgreen Gardens. That year was the last for the old school building. A newly constructed one was about to open next door, and on a warm spring day at the very end of the year, the students showed up ready for Field Day, only to be lined up side-by-side in a chain hundreds of kids long. Under open sun, we passed the library books from the old building to the new one. I was not sorry to be leaving.

Since this is the line in the road where I become a tourist in my own hometown, it’s a good time to expand here on Myrtle Beach’s becoming a tourist town to begin with. There is a good chance that you have been there and molded your own sandcastle from a yellow plastic tub as your mother misted you with a greasy spritz of coconut oil, or if you were fairer, slathered you with white SPF thick as shortening. That you have picked sandspurs out of your heels and stuffed yourself to bursting with popcorn shrimp and deep-fried flounder. If you have been there for spring break, well, your secrets are safe with me. I have better things to do than guess how many shots you’ve thrown back on a fake ID, or divine a future from the tan lines left fading across your back. They work truer than the palm, I believe.

Myrtle Beach, you will remember, had been renamed by the richest lady in the county, though by now most of the wax myrtle bushes are long pulled from the sand for motel parking. If you are curious about what the coast looked like then, try the Meher Baba