Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“As for the boy who testified, he happened to be the one who had caused the trauma that led to the police believing she’d been raped. Apparently, the two liked things a little rough. And the neighbors who said they saw the father with low hands, lingering kisses and hugs, were actually mad at him for a fence he was putting in, which they said was too far over on their property line.”

Dad pulled his head back from the window, leaving a smear on the glass from his sweat.

“I wanted to apologize to the man, but that damn daughter, she had come forward too late. Prison can be a tough place for a man accused of raping his own. Three years into his sentence, a sentence that up to that point had been filled with numerous trips to the prison’s infirmary, the man had been fatally attacked in the laundry room.”

Dad rubbed the scar on his forehead as he mumbled something to himself before squinting to the bright light outside.

“I had been so certain of his guilt. If I could be so certain and yet so wrong, how many times had I been wrong before? I started to wonder. I looked back on my cases and saw cracks, not victories. I was no hero. I had failed in handling the filter entrusted to me.”

Dad was standing, but he looked like he was kneeling. His trousers dirtying at the knee before my eyes. His hands coming together, at his sides, but coming together in front. My father was praying.

“It got me thinking about all the things we are so certain about. Like the devil. I put that invitation in the newspaper, and I thought the devil will show and he will have a pitchfork and horns and be red all over. He’ll be mean and cruel and evil. I was so certain of that, and then you came, Sal. Not with a pitchfork but with a heart. I—”

Dad was cut off by the ringing doorbell. He wiped his eyes as Mom answered the door and a moment later showed Fedelia in, wearing a heavy black coat — velvet, of all things — that swept the floor and which she held tightly closed by the collar.

I stared at the sweat glistening above her bare lip. It was the first time I’d seen her face naked. The makeup washed off. Little red marks on her cheeks from scrubbing. White film at her hair line left by the soap.

She rather forcefully pushed me out of the way to get to Sal standing behind me. “Well, you little devil, you’ve put me in quite a state since last I saw you.”

“I have?”

“Every time I look in a mirror now, I see the infinity I have built.” She gestured up to her hair. “It is time to be rid of it.”

“Oh, Auntie,” Mom gasped.

Fedelia nodded as she reached into the pocket of her coat to pull out a pair of hair shears, offering them toward Sal. “Won’t you do the honors?”

To avoid a mess of cut hair in the house, we went to the back porch, where Mom brought out a stool. The dark of the evening had laid its way, so she made sure to set the stool beneath the porch bulbs, the lights already preaching to dozens of moths, beetles, and little night flies.

As Fedelia sat down on the stool and checked its wobble, she kept that coat closed tight, her squeeze straining the veins in the backs of her hands. She was quickly tapping her toes. In the tapping, the bottom of the coat slightly fell down across her leg and I caught a glimpse of sequins. She grabbed the coat back and frowned at me as if it’d been my fault.

Sal stood behind her, watching the insects fly the light above, giving him a halo of gnats and moths as he asked Fedelia if she was ready.

“I am ready. Set me free.”

As the shears made their initial approach, Fedelia closed her eyes. She winced as the blades cut and the first ribbon fell in that slow-motion elegance of falling things.

I thought she was going to stop him, say she’d changed her mind, but as the tear slid down her cheek, she opened her eyes, and as if all the light were shining there in her irises, the amber shade became diluted by glow to a yellow that took hold of us all.

Each ribbon and clump of hair that fell, she sat a little taller, a little straighter. A drip from her forehead. A drip from her eyes. Her nose. Her cheeks. Drip, drip, drip . All sweat and tears, and yet wasn’t it the anger melting away before us?

I watched the ribbons fall, their curling and swirling like retiring snakes given the send-off by a woman letting go of the anger that had nearly cannibalized her.

Sal cut so close to her head, all that remained were her white roots. Once he finished, she stood and stepped away from the pile of orange hair and ribbons on the floor. She lowered her head and felt the short rise left.

“Auntie?” Mom reached toward Fedelia. “You all right?”

“All the weight of that hair. You get so used to carryin’ it around, you forget how heavy it is.” Fedelia raised her head and smiled. “I am so happy it is finally gone.”

She threw off the black coat, revealing the glistening chestnut and gold gown beneath. It was cut low in the front and back, fitting to a waist and hips I didn’t know she had. No more bags for her. Sequins and fit the rest of the way.

“Just name me Paradise.” She struck a pose that called to mind a certain duck in flight.

“You look so beautiful, Fedelia.” Mom smiled and lightly clapped her hands under her chin.

Fedelia lowered her arms. “I haven’t heard anyone call me beautiful in forty years.”

Dad held her wet cheek in his hand. “Then that was our fault, not yours.”

He didn’t stop staring at her as he said, “Fielding, tell your aunt how beautiful she is.”

“You’re beautiful, Aunt Fedelia.”

She grabbed Dad’s hand and squeezed it before kneeling down in front of me. “I haven’t been very nice to you, have I, Fielding?”

“You haven’t been nice to any of us.”

That was the first time I’d ever heard her laugh.

She thanked Sal and was about to say something more to him, but the loud knocking on the front door distracted us all.

We went to see who it was, Mom complimenting Fedelia the whole way while Fedelia nodded like she’d never been who she was before.

Through the windows around the front door, we could see Otis pacing the porch, pumping his shoulders and cracking his neck.

Dad stepped over to the door, but Fedelia warned him about opening it.

“He’s mighty boiled up ’bout somethin’. Might scald us all if ya let ’im in.”

Dad quietly slid the end of the chain into the locking track on the door. “We’ll just see what he wants. Isn’t the man owed that? Isn’t he still our friend?”

We weren’t so sure as Dad slowly turned the knob. Over his pacing, Otis heard the quiet opening of the door. The whole house shook as he clutched onto the frame to stop himself from overshooting the door in his mad dash for it.

His face was so damp, it looked as if it’d been attached to a water hose. He was squeezing his head in between the door and the frame, his nose pressing against the top of the chain.

“Did you get our card and vine? You and Dovey have our prayers at this most dreadful time.” Dad shook his head in that give of sympathy.

“Where is he?” Otis tried reaching his arm through the opening, but his muscles were too wide for the narrow way.

“Who?”

“You know who, Autopsy.” Otis leaned into the door Dad was trying to close.

“He’s not here.” Dad waved for Mom to yank Sal out of sight.

Otis roared with his muscles ready. This was what he had lifted all those barbells for. Why he had done all those squats with a bar digging into his shoulders. The running, the protein shakes, they had not been worthless after all. Him being lost in a gym, escaping the world but only in preparation for it. Preparing for this one moment he would be asked to defend his fallen son. He would be asked to bring the grieving mother a revenge she could read in his fists.