Carolina Moon Read Online Free

haunted his childhood as he tried to imagine the house that had once stood. That house was his father’s world, a pirate’s cove, a treasure chest, golden words and a .38 revolver, while fifteen miles away his mother paced the small hallway from her dark bedroom to the front window. His parents’ romance was a story everybody in town knew because it was one Cecil Lowe told so often, his wooing and loving of one Betty Jean Kirkland, a shy sweet girl who was known all over town as the girl whose mother sewed wedding gowns in a fancy shop downtown. Her mother’s mannequin, Betty Jean often stood on a stool up in the window of the store, all dressed up in white shiny cloth while her mother knelt and tucked and pinned the fabric. She was pretty and slight, like a lovely silver moth , Cecil once wrote in a poem. The day he arrived in Fulton on his way from the bus station to the only hotel in town, he spotted her there in the window. He walked straight into the store and in perfect tune and pitch, asked the woman at the desk, “How much is that girlie in the window?”
    Tom’s mother’s stories were either good or bad. There was no gray area at all. His father was first handsome and brilliant and courtly and devoted and then despicable and hateful, selfish and cruel. He had been courtly and devoted on that October afternoon he and Tommy kicked through the leaves and entered the brand-new bank building. Everything still smelled of paint and plaster and the rubber backing of the new tan carpet in the offices. They rode the elevator in silence as Tom’s father talked about real skyscrapers and the way they are built to sway, built to give in to nature just enough that they can survive. “Not a bad code to adopt,” he said as the doors slid open andthey stepped into the empty, glassed-in space. From here Tom could see the steeples of all the area churches, and he could see the Confederate statue in front of the courthouse. He stared at the cuffs of his father’s pants, still damp from their walk on the beach.
    “I’m taking you to all of my favorite spots today,” his father said. “Good view, huh?” His hands were deep in his pockets, and he jingled keys and change as he paced from one end of the room to the other. “Right over there is where I first saw your mother”; he leaned his forehead onto the glass and it was difficult for Tom to discern if he was staring down at Main Street or back into his own eyes. “She was quite the belle of the ball.” He pulled a lighter from his pants and then reached into his shirt pocket for the pack of Lucky Strikes there. “But all did not go as planned.” He walked to the other end of the room and lit his cigarette, his hand cupping the flame as if he were standing in a windstorm. “I come up here and I see before and after. I look at where I first met your mother—the beginning—and I come over here and I see how it all turned”—he breathed in and blew a thin stream of smoke into the glass—“or rather didn’t turn out.” Tom walked over and followed his father’s pointed finger, looking through the glass, beyond the parking lot of the First Baptist Church, and right into the side corner of his own house, just one window visible, the rest safely concealed by the privet hedge and the large oak tree.
    “You just can’t get away,” he whispered. “You see?”
    Now he leaned against the glass, his hands cupped like blinders while the cigarette in his right hand burned dangerously low.
    “I’ve been up here at night before and watched your mother sitting there in the window. It’s where she always sat at night and where she still does. I planted that privet hedge. I dug a trench and filled it with water.”
    Without turning away, he crushed the cigarette into the windowsill and pointed his finger, squinted his eye as if lining up a scope.
    “No sir, Tommy. You will always be accountable for every second of your life. Do something good, and you can use it