“I love you, too,” I whisper back with my lips already pressed into hers. She tastes like SpaghettiOs and the cigar we stole from her dad’s portable humidor. Her lips are chapped and her hair dirty with salt water from our midnight swim just a few short hours ago. I feel her dissolving into a memory already.
TWO
I leave Grace’s house and ride past the trailer park, where my dad and Hattie are asleep. My days always start like this—before everyone else’s, in the moments when the only thing lighting Eulogy is the casino on the waterfront. Today, I’m a little earlier than usual, so I take the time to ride straight down to the water. Carefully, I lay my bike down on the sidewalk and kick my flip-flops off before walking down the rickety wooden steps to the beach.
My Mississippi beach is very rarely love at first sight, but an endearing, prodding kind of affection. Despite her lack of natural beauty, there are many like me who love this place more than she deserves. It’s the kind of place people on a budget choose for vacation. Thanks to the line of sandbars trimming the shore and our proximity to the Mississippi River, our water is brown and murky. Nothing like Florida’s blue-green waves. But a family like Grace’s can get a lot of vacation for their buck if they’re willing to overlook the imperfections.
Sand kicks up around my ankles until I reach the water’s edge. I press my toes deep into the sand as the cool water rinses over them briefly before pulling back. The moon hangs in the sky, chasing the horizon, as the sun whispers along the waterfront.
Water has always been my siren song. Any kind of water—oceans, lakes, pools. There’s something about being weightless that makes me think anything is possible. My whole body exhales in a way that it can’t when I’m standing on land.
The brightening horizon reminds me that I have somewhere to be. Shaking sand from my feet, I run back up to the sidewalk and slide my flip-flops back on.
A continuous stream of tears rushes down my cheeks as I direct my handlebars around the corner and down the hill to where Charlie waits in his truck. I hate crying. I mean, most everyone does. But some people, like Hattie, feel better after a good cry. When Hattie cries, it’s like watching a snake shed its skin. Tears somehow let her regenerate, whereas crying only makes me angry I cared so much to begin with.
“You’re late,” Charlie calls. He wears his usual uniform of coffee-stained undershirt and twenty-year-old jeans. With his shaggy thinning hair, he looks like an old white guy who either traps little kids in his van or grows weed in his backyard. Thankfully it’s the latter.
I squeeze the brake on my handlebars and push the tears back into my eyes with my other fist. “Overslept.”
I don’t have a history of being late, so Charlie shrugs it off. Maybe a five a.m. start time is earlier than most teenagers could commit to, but I treasure all my little jobs. My paper route, busing tables at Boucher’s, and working whatever under-the-table cash gigs I can find. I guess, growing up, most kids wonder what they will do for a living. But for me, there was never any worry over what the job would be, just how soon I could start.
Charlie loads the basket on the front of my bike with papers for the second half of my route, while I fill my messenger bag. Charlie is the kind of man who will always look like a boy, and the uneven whiskers lining his upper lip don’t do anything to help the matter.
“Going for the mustache look?” I ask.
He strokes what little facial hair he has. “Wanted a change. You like?”
“Change is good,” I tell him as I swing my leg over my bike and wave good-bye.
I weave up and down the streets on my route, letting my memory guide me until almost every house has a paper waiting in its yard. The routine of it keeps the thought of Grace at bay, at least for a little while.
At the corner of John Street and Mayfield, I pass Eulogy Baptist, a bright-white building with perfectly manicured lawns and flower boxes under each windowsill. Dim light from the back office bleeds into the street, and I wonder if Reverend Don is getting in or leaving.
I turn the corner down Clayton Avenue, pedaling as I lean back in my seat and gently tap the brake while I careento the bottom of the hill. It’s in this moment when I always feel like I’m flying. But then the bottom of the hill brings me back to reality.
Standing in front of my last house, which was recently added to my route, is a black woman in an unzipped terry-cloth cover-up with a bright-yellow bathing suit underneath, watering her flower bed. I always love morning people. They feel solid and reliable. Not like my mom, who sleeps past noon if no one wakes her up. Grace wasn’t a morning person either. It was a small detail that always bothered me for some reason.
Grace. Grace, who I might not ever see again. I feel the tears begin to threaten.
“Mornin’,” says the woman as the paper hits her lawn.
“Mornin’,” I call back, pedaling past.
“Hey!” she shouts. Something hits me square in the shoulders, knocking the wind out of me.
“What the hell?” I mutter to myself as I loop back around to find I’ve been hit with one of my own papers.
As I reach down to pick it up, the woman’s voice says, “Ramona Blue! Get back here!”
Her voice. I know it. And that nickname. Ramona Blue is what my dad called me when I was a little girl, because he could never get me out of the water. It’s a name not many people know.
The woman walks to the edge of her yard and as she does, I see past the ten years of wrinkles. Dropping one foot to the ground, I stop my bike from rolling any farther as memories trickle back. “Agnes?”
“You get your heinie over here and gimme a hug!”
I drop my bike right there on the curb and fall into an embrace.
Agnes used to come down every summer from Baton Rouge with her husband and their grandson, Freddie, who they were raising. She was as much a part of my childhood memories as my own grandmother until the summer I turned nine and they just stopped coming. That was the first time I’d really understood that even if it feels like summer lasts forever here in Eulogy, Mississippi, it doesn’t.
