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Show Go Love/198 Renee and I open doors. This moment never fails to excite some powerful chord. How we raise the blinds and windows so the fresh air and light washes over the lives we've left behind and now come home to. There's Mama with Lara in her lap under the hotel gazebo where our family gathered when we drove through Lonoke last year: Lara waves her right hand-hello or goodbye and Mama's looking at me like I've turned okay, I'm who I should be. Another of Cap and Meg holding surfboards poolside, the little white saint with a bird on his shoulder behind them, and behind that Caps parked cabin cmiser and the beach and the ocean and the whole goddamn shining world. We are three on the fireplace mantle shot, kneeling by the green river over my daughter's first fish-a rainbow Lara refamiliarizes herself with all her stuffed animals while we unpack, calling each by name, telling them they'll be okay when they have to be in caskets, they won't be hungry in there. We mix drinks, fill the washing machine. I set the steaks to marinating Summer Solstice, wish burning at hand. Outside on the patio, we pull out the old charcoal smoker, remove the lid and make ready. The custom, some voodoo thing Renee picked up from hippies, goes like this on Solstice as the sun sets, write wishes on paper, make a fire of them, let the messages rise up in the smoke. Wish for exact things, express these things in very concrete terms, eat and drink-all be joyful After they flew me home when Jimmy got killed in a one car wreck, I remember sitting for an hour in his bedroom with his stuff on the dresser and night stand, his clothes fragrant in the closet, his work boots in the corner, and five or six love letters from those Conway girls who were always calling him up in the middle of the night, the space where Mama's just drowned Out in the living room, the house was filling up with voices saying the most idiotic things, Mama back in her bedroom dying, just dying-I've never ever seen anybody hurt like that. Jimmy'd worked for a |