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

ashram, as it is an officially designated wildlife sanctuary where humans may apply for brief refuge among the migratory herons of blue or white and nesting loggerhead sea turtles. I have long wished to glimpse them, these hatchlings like beating hearts in suits of armor who, on fluttering wings, emerge from where they were buried at the edge of life to shuffle over sand to the ocean that scoops them up and out to sea. What I have seen are the lines tracing their first moments left across moonlit sand toward the hem of high tide.

Toward the end of that hurricane summer in 1996, Dad drove past motels with names like Windsurfer, Windjammer, Sea Gypsy and Sea Mist, the Captain’s Quarters and Paradise Resort, Camelot by the Sea and the Caravelle, past the Tropical Seas, and then the Mermaid Inn to move up to Emerald Isle, a sleepy family vacation town on the Outer Banks where he worked in Uncle Leslie’s construction company. Working was better than rehab, which we could not have afforded, anyway, and Mom was expected in Charlotte. We would finish the school year living at Nana’s house, and Mom was going to be Grandpa’s secretary at Carolina Time, enlisted into the family business of clockmaking. Once the construction job was over, Grandpa planned for Dad to manage a long-term parking lot next to the Charlotte airport that Grandpa owned, parking the cars of people on their way to see the world. We were all to live with him and his house ghost, Harvey.

I took the prospect of leaving Myrtle Beach with more grace than my parents or brothers, though as naivety suffers more for its eagerness, I would be no different in my desire to return. Calls began coming in for Mom at Nana’s house. Schools with fancy names, Country Days and Latin Days and Christian Days, left messages requesting our summer schedule. My eyes widened with the guilty conscience of a kid just busted for secret schemes, but even more in disbelief that I was not going to be trapped after all. Education I had always known was my way out of town.

Beating all the kids who pulled my hair and pushed me in hallways, who emptied my book bag and kicked over my desks, in test scores and G.P.A. felt pretty good, though. In a science class my senior year, we had to construct a rocket with a parachute, and the team whose model took the longest to float down won. After seeing my assigned partner’s terrible calculus, I politely told him, as I imagined Nana might do, that he had not to worry about one thing. I would do it all. As all women learn, just doing the work yourself saves you the trouble of arguing with men who know less than you. Watching my rocket float down as lazy as an angel, and seeing the face of a regular bully crinkle in with sour petulance, well, it is a memory that buoys me still.

When I was sent home for wearing my best overalls to this fancy private school, I cried waiting for Grandpa to pick me up. He took me home and told me of the insults thrown at him for never having shoes at school. I knew that he understood without pandering to my tears. He recognized an outsider like himself. The shared wonder of education connected us further, and I suppose it was that day that I knew he would be my only friend in high school. I had wanted out of Myrtle Beach, but the confidence to cross a highway and own a lazy river was left back in the tangled limbs of marshside oaks. Dad left Charlotte for Nashville, as soon as he could, and we didn’t hear from him for a long time. Months without calls turned into years without seeing him. On his way out of town, leaving his family behind, Dad stopped by Lebo’s Country Western Store and bought a new cowboy hat and boots that he still has today. A dream can resurrect as easily as a memory, like a ghost you thought you’d gotten rid of, and for a while he was a ghost to us, as we were a memory for him. Untangling yourself from someone else’s dreams takes all the liquor and lyrics you’ve got, and he left knowing that Grandpa would take care of us better than he could at the time.

“You ever hear from Mark?” Grandpa would ask tentatively but regularly through my years of high school and into college, and I would only shake my head no. I trusted him, but also wanted to impress him. Didn’t want Dad to suffer in the eyes of a man I knew he admired, too.

“Nana, why can’t he just call?” I could ask her over the phone without fear, and let her see I also knew that my parents were still stuck in their rhythms of fighting and making up and trying to hide it, even though they were divorced by then.

“I don’t know, baby. He’s always had the devil in him,” she said. “Every night, it takes me two hours to say my prayers for my boys. And most of that time is spent on your daddy.”

A decade or so later, Dad called me up at two a.m. He sounded surprised I picked up, and I could tell he was drunk and in tears. My heart, in daylight angry and embittered at his absence, under moonlight cracked open under the transmission of his pain. “Was I a good father?” he whispered, not bothering to hide his weeping. It was not the moment then to say that he was, back when I knew him. It had been so long since I had known him as a young man with the sunshine of youth who would mend childhood scrapes with stories and card games.

As I longed to do then but could not, I will skip over the rest of high school. The