Carolina Moon Read Online Free Page A

forever. Do something bad, and it’ll haunt the hell out of you. Your mother can act like I’m not a part of her life, but every night when she sits in that chair and looks out on that privet hedge, every night when I may or may not be watching her, every night when she’s watching you , then I’m there.”
    It was this memory, the view from the bank building, that is Tom’s last of his father. The only other memory he had was from when he was four, and now he isn’t sure if the memory was real or created. It is true that he was in the grocery store with his mother, and it is true that he saw his father. What he remembers is a tall man stepping from behind a pyramid of apples, green and red and yellow, the old checkered floor littered with pasteboard boxes and crates. He remembers several pieces of fruit rolling and landing in a succession of thuds, as his mother grabbed him by the hand and pulled. “Stay away,” she said through clenched teeth. “Haven’t you done enough by now?”
    “No, no I haven’t,” he followed them up and down the aisles, his dress shoes clicking with each step. “He’s my son, too. I want to make it up to him.”
    “Good,” she said. “Sell your underwater house for what you paid for it and send him to college some day. Buy him some school clothes and that Matt Dillon doll he talks about nonstop!” She stopped suddenly and pulled Tommy to her, smoothed his hair as if to apologize.
    “He’ll go to school.”
    “You’re damned right about that.” She froze and put a hand to her mouth and then let it drop to her chest, mouthed an apology to thewoman in the checkout. Her mouth was quivering and her hands shook as she opened her billfold to pay for their food.
    “Tommy,” his father had whispered then and held out his hand. In the memory or what he believes to be memory, there is a sense of recognition, the hand reaching for him is safe, welcoming. “I love you,” his father said. “I never meant to hurt you.” Tommy doesn’t remember if he reached back. What he remembers is all the times he tried to reconstruct the memory, tried to chisel an image of Cecil Lowe into his mind. Even after the day at the bank, Tom had clung to the earlier memory, the part where his father said, “I never meant to hurt you.”
    And his mother confirmed his memory. Yes, they had seen his father in the store, his father had told Tommy that he loved him, had reached out and tried to get him to move away from his mother’s side. Tom’s mother said, yes, it was true that his father never meant to hurt him at all, and that’s why he chose to stick a gun in his mouth and blow himself away. And who was called to clean up that mess? Who? And all that was in the will was left to Tommy, that’s true. How wonderful. A moth-eaten tuxedo, twenty copies of that godforsaken story, and an underwater lot.
    Now his mother never even mentions Cecil Lowe unless Tom brings him up. Her life is church socials and the civic center, where she hands out programs for whatever ballet, school play, or band recital is held. Now the tide is coming in, the water up and foaming over the outline of the master suite.
    His own home fifteen miles away is nothing more than a flatbed camper on an empty lot. The camper’s two halves open like wings to form beds on either side, a canvas roof zippers down to the little half door. This is the property his mother gave to him, a lot on which she had dreamed of building the perfect house, but for whatever reasondecided to stay where she was. It’s right in the middle of what is becoming the very nicest neighborhood: curbed and guttered, BMWs and Volvos in every drive, antebellum and Williamsburg, Tudor and contemporary; new houses springing from the earth like plants, growing and spreading to fill in every square inch of space with three-car garages and satellite dishes, swimming pools and tennis courts. The earth is scooped to the side and the grass is trucked in and rolled out,