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

to his mother. I would never have predicted that Chris would be the one who wandered up and down the Grand Strand after death.

After Mike was driven back to Nana’s house, Leslie let go. “If I thought that I could get away with it, I’d dump Mike off the end of Myrtle Beach Pier. Good Lord, I think he might outlive us all.” He sat down next to the window that overlooked the parking lot of Myrtle Beach Hospital, where he and Dad waited for their own granddaddy Harvey to die decades before.

“Damn, ain’t it the truth. In that case, I might just throw Mike and his wheelchair in the back of my truck and drop him off at your house on my way out of town,” Dad said.

“You do that and I’m gonna come back and haunt you,” Les returned, and we all laughed, nobody saying but everybody smiling at the strange twist in their story. Mike and Granddaddy would be stuck sharing a roof alone. “It’ll be a ghost town over there without Jackie,” Les continued, trying to fill the silence. Except for the con men and charlatans pitching their latest scheme to Granddaddy, who didn’t realize that he no longer controlled his finances, it will be, I think.

When it felt as if we were in her living room, telling stories with her rocking in her recliner, Nana let go a final ragged breath and her heart stopped for the last time surrounded by the voices and stories of her making. She was eased out of the world on a morphine drip, nearly the same as Chris had been. Mingled with our grief over Nana was renewed anger at Granddaddy. Though Nana tried to give Chris love and stability, with Granddaddy’s strange and sad hatred directed at him, it is no wonder that my cousin chose the muggy, vengeful bliss of one drug and then another until he became a heroin addict. “She deserved better,” Les said finally, before walking down to the parking lot, where my brothers and cousin Ralph Howard waited, not wanting to be in the room. Soon enough everybody else was in their cars. Heads on steering wheels, hands on packs of cigarettes, faces wet. As I am in charge of the story now, I record here for the future to note that none of us returned to the parking lot of Myrtle Beach Hospital ever again. We went back to Nana’s house, where we, like children again, snuck into her old bedroom, and each chose one of the enameled lockets of perfume she collected. Standing in a circle, we held them aloft, my brothers, cousins, and I, and summoned her memory and the memory of the cousin who was missing as the scent of her surrounded us, connecting us not to any cartoon superhero as we had pretended and practiced, but to her spirit.

Nana’s favorite Bible verse was the one about the virtuous wife. Her worth is far above rubies, and her husband shall never want. Just as I wonder sometimes if she finally snapped and pushed Granddaddy down to open up his head those years ago, I wonder if knowing these lines would be read to Granddaddy over her body was a slice of revenge on a husband who was far less virtuous. Only once did she ever express her anger over any part of her marriage in front of her grandchildren. Ralph Howard had driven with Jared and Jason to pick Nana up from her house, so that she could spend a day down in Murrells Inlet with us. They were backing out of her driveway and saw a car narrowly miss a pedestrian when she said, “You know, one day I saw that woman F coming out of the store, while I was waitin’ for a parkin’ space, and I had the urge to hit the gas pedal and run her down,” as my brothers openmouthed and wide-eyed turned to look at each other, as if to cheer her on. “I don’t like to hate anybody, but I sure as the devil hate her.” She let it drop there, perhaps embarrassed at expressing a lifetime of stifled rage. Instead of silence or shock, the boys told her that they would have understood and held her blameless if she had run over her rival. I watched them all fall out of the car in loving laughter, my brothers and cousin lifting her from the car and up to the porch to watch the ocean for what would be the last time in life. It was quite a scene, three young men holding on their shoulders a glamorous blonde in movie-star sunglasses in a wheelchair, as if supporting a gilded palanquin in humble supplication.

She’d been sleeping in the Doll Room for years, kicked out of the marital bed. After the memorial service, I went in wondering if I’d hear her there, as I had unexpectedly heard my grandpa’s voice. The blankets on one side of the bed were pulled back, where she’d stood up from sleep for the last time, and the other was covered with piles of her romance novels, where a lover might have lain. “I know you’re not real girly,” her words came to mind, but I knew they were remembered, not heard. “I don’t know what you’ll do with all these dolls.” The doll collection remains as it ever was, encased in glass and untouched. I still don’t know what to do with them, as she predicted, these emblems of her imagination, tokens of freedom, of other lives she could have lived had she been allowed. What would my voice sound like without her to direct the compass of my drawl? I wasn’t sure, but I knew I wouldn’t hear her voice calling to me as Grandpa’s had. In the only dream I have had of her since she died, she is sitting on her couch in her house, next to her sister, Sue, and across from their