Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

When he brought his hand up to his mouth to bite his nail, I saw the blood on the inside of his wrist.

He saw me staring and lowered his hand. “It got on there from when I was checking for her pulse.”

“I don’t want another dog.” I wiped my nose hard on my arm.

“I never said anything.”

“Folks always say that. ‘We’ll get ya another.’ I don’t want another one.”

“All right.”

For a long time, the only sound made was that of me finding my way back to breathing through my nose.

“Sal?” I took a deep breath. “Not doin’ somethin’, am I a god-in-trainin’, like ya said?”

He squinted, and I thought how like Dad he looked when he did that.

“No. You’re just a boy. A boy holds a gun but cannot fire it, even when he knows it is the right thing to do. A god would never hold the gun in the first place. So you’re a man-in-training. And on the day you are asked to hold the gun once more, you will have to decide whether to stay the child … or finally become the man.”

WHEN I THINK of her as a grandmother, as old as I was young, with gray hair and a shawl around her frail shoulders to keep out the chill, what happened in those woods becomes something much harder to bear. Granny was my first loss, my first emptying. She was the something that matters for eternity.

I haven’t had a dog since, though the neighbor boy has his mutt. The other day, I watched the two of them together. The dog did his best to catch the ball the boy threw. I tried to teach the boy to throw better, the way Grand taught me.

I didn’t show the boy I framed his photograph, but he saw it just the same and smiled a little too much. I even told him so. He asked if I wanted to drop by his trailer for dinner. He said his mom was making her famous meat loaf and she always made too much of it, he said. I got to thinking about my place at their table.

“Say, kid, I never see your old man around. Where’s he at?”

I knew it wasn’t going to be a clean answer, the way he slowly dragged his finger across the dirt on my kitchen counter.

“Mom says he’s in the jungle, findin’ the cure for cancer.” He kept his eyes on the counter. “Even though he died of it six years ago.”

“Jesus.”

He looked up at me. “So you comin’ to dinner?”

How the hell could I refuse after that? Besides, it was meat loaf, and I haven’t had meat loaf since my mother’s, but when I got to their yellow trailer across the road from mine, it was too damn nice. The smell of dinner. The young mother in a dress. The table set and the boy and his dog just smiling away. To tell you the truth, I was a little scared. I don’t know how to be in that world anymore. That world of dinner and niceness. So I ran away as fast as I could. I sat there in the dark of my trailer while the light of theirs shined a yellow glow.

A while later the boy came over, carrying a plate of food. I didn’t go to the door when he knocked, so he placed it on the milk crate and headed back home. I opened the door before he got too far away.

“Why you like me so much, kid?”

I didn’t say it loud, and for a moment I thought he didn’t hear me, but then he stopped and stood there. He was looking across the road at his own trailer, at his mother there in the window doing the dishes in the warmth of the light.

“I remember one Halloween my dad dressed up like an old bum.” He softly smiled. “He looked like you.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he walked across the road and into his trailer.

I sat down in the doorway of my own and stared into that clear shot of their kitchen, where I could see the boy give his mom a kiss on the cheek. He stayed there by her side, helping her wash the dishes, sharing suds between their fingers.

The mutt, left outside, came smelling the meat loaf. I removed the foil and set the plate on the ground, letting him have the meal that was too nice for me. Once full, he yawned and lay down on his side. I had to look away because it was how we had laid Granny in her grave. I believe that dirt from burying her is still under my fingernails.

We used some loose pieces of sandstone to break up the dry dirt. It was evening by the time we left the woods. We forgot the sheriff wanted to see Sal. When we got home, we told Dad Granny had been hit by a car. If we’d told him about the poison, then we would’ve had to tell him about the gun, after which we would’ve been punished for having the gun in the first place.

When he asked to see Granny’s body, we said we had already buried her in the woods by the tree house in a small funeral. We showed our fingernails as evidence.

Sal had grown agitated the whole time we were digging the hole, laying her body down in it. He wouldn’t even look at the gunshot wound. I knew what he had done was rubbing at him like little grains of sand scraping his bone. As I sat grieving by her grave, he said something that surprised me. I had to ask him to repeat it.

“You heard me. You make me sick. You didn’t even have to do it. I did. So shut up your crying.”

We didn’t speak the rest of the way home. I was relieved when Dad took him away to the sheriff’s. I went up to my room, sat on the edge of my bed, feeling on the edge myself. The sadness like a motor, idling inside me. Idling still. Sometimes vroom, vroom. But never off.

“What’s wrong, little man?”

Grand stood in my doorway, his dark brow trying to figure out on its own what was making his little brother cry on the edge.

“Granny, she’s…” I didn’t say hit by a car. I told him the truth as he came in and sat beside me. I told him about the poison, the gun, the bang , the pile of dirt in the woods.

He put his arms around me and pulled me into him. For seventy-one years I’ve been trying to find that feeling of being held by my brother. The other day I bought a bunch of those plastic-wrapped bread loafs. Unsliced. Wheat brown like the Midwest. I put them in the oven to warm, and when I took them out, I carried them to my bed and lay down with them, feeling their warmth. Holding that very thing and begging it to hold me back.

Please, Grand, won’t you hold me back?

“You know, little man, Sal did the right thing. When somethin’s dyin’ like that, you gotta end it. If I was sufferin’, dyin’ a slow death, I’d wanna end it early. Wouldn’t you?”

I was quiet. He said that was all right. He asked where Sal was. I told him he was at the sheriff’s.

“You let ’im go alone?”

I nodded.

“That’s not the Fielding I know. The boy who tiptoes behind. Listenin’ to and watchin’ all the things we try to hide. You are a тень. A shadow. I know this ’bout you, Fielding. That’s why I spray my cologne on your clothes. So I can smell you comin’. Smell you out.”

He tousled my hair. “You need a haircut.”

“No way. The girls like it. They think I’m a rock star.”

He laughed as he ran his fingers through his own short hair. “Okay, rock star. Hey, you been puttin’ that sunscreen on I gotcha? The sun’s a bastard this summer, Fielding, and you gotta be careful with all them moles of yours. I read in the paper about somethin’ called mela—”

“Mom’s got moles and you never got her sunscreen.”

“She’s never outside, little man. Don’t be a smart-ass.” He lightly punched my arm before saying I should go to the sheriff’s to listen in. “Just make sure you’re not seen. Dad’ll be angry if he finds you sneakin’ ’round.”