Little Reef and Other Stories by Michael Carroll

Author:Michael Carroll [Carroll, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

I could have killed him,” my mother had said a couple weeks back, on the line in Memphis. Jeff and I were born there, but I had no memories of then. I was eight months old when we left, Jeff a couple of years old. Our parents couldn’t wait to leave. They were raised Baptists and had grown up told never to drink or dance, and as soon as my father had graduated from college he’d looked for a job to take him away. Bumper sticker from back then:

IF THE VAN IS ROCKIN’

DON’T BOTHER KNOCKIN’

And our folks had had parties. I don’t know of any sexual tom-foolery going on between them, I’d be surprised—but maybe the children are always the last to know. They’d played their CCR and Linda Ronstadt, and I remember seeing that bumper sticker out on the highway and my father and mother laughing and calling into the back seat, “What do y’all think that means?”

We’d had some laughs, but somewhere in there I’d learned to keep secrets, the family spy and double agent, not so much out of mistrust but maybe amusement. I wanted to write early on.

“I got a sad-ass card from her,” my mother was saying, “and it just tore my G.d. heart up.”

Yes, Mom was upset that Jeff had broken up with Terri, but she’d had a lot of shit going on recently. Dad was two years into his recovery, and they said that if it came back the window was two to five years, which sounds like a prison sentence—and for her it was. They’d sucked his right middle lobe out, and then had begun the hell for them both of his chemo and radiation. When he had survived the first year, Jeff and I had flown “home” to Memphis for Dad’s surprise seventieth birthday party. We’d grown up in Jacksonville, but we all knew what was meant by “going home.” It was hard not to be proud of Jacksonville, Florida, even though it was so very horrible and wrong. And it was where we’d left Jeff behind. And where we went to high school and where Jeff was working at Albertsons grocery store when he’d met Deanne, the woman my mother had nearly lost her mind over. Deanne was five years older than Jeff, who was a bag boy while she was a checkout girl ringing up groceries. Messed up with Deanne, and now with Terri.

“I could’ve kicked his ass all over town, if only I’d been there to do it when he told me.”

Mom had a stream-of-consciousness style of talking, another Southernism. You interrupt yourself when you were saying something else. You begin to narrate a story and another thought occurs to you suddenly, and then your listener is a little confused and gets a little exhausted. The telephone. You can’t read gestural irony, but if I’d been there as Mom’s interlocutor I could have looked around and gathered context clues. The cigarette, the freshly mixed wine spritzer of Diet 7UP and her horribly sweet California muscat, the dinner she was stirring on the stove.

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