| OCR Text |
Show Go Love/111 When Jimmy died, the house filled with a fried chickens and hams, sweet potatoes, baked beans and banana pudding and doughnuts, Danish rolls and pork cooked three ways death food, I remember. "There'll be food. A shit load," I say. She's got the radio on KHOG-the blues already "Ready?" Renee says. "I mean Are you ready?" She's got this Rockerson way of looking at you, sweet as pie. "This doesn't seem real yet." She shakes her head side to side and I remember the first moment I saw here, framed in my doorway-are you him? she'd said, and it had all been unreal, how she'd appeared out of the blue in Fayetteville springtime when dogwood and daffodils, forsythia and redbud were just bloomed Lara's in my lap. She smells like the Peonie Princess shampoo Meg gave her in Florida a lifetime ago. My daughter's warm and tan. I say, "You ready to see gampa, sweetie?" She says, "Is Mama's dog dead, too. Is he there?" I say, "We'll see." "Well I don't like 'we'll see' daddy." We begin the last of it-past Town Center, over the railroad tracks past Main and Vine We pass the new P.O , with its brick memorial commemorating the postal clerks who'd perished in the great tornado Lonoke's one stoplight gets us just up from Simmon's Slaughter, where Deputy Biggs Self once felled a white Charolais bull with a .44 magnum. Boom, boom, the gun went, me and Trace driving back from Tastee Freeze with a sackful of double cheeseburgers. Morning Glory climbs Bernice Holt's well house trellis. When I was thirteen, I listened on our party-line telephone as Mrs. Holt told somebody named Werner that she wanted to put his thing in her mouth right that second. I heard it late one night while O W. slept in his living room |
