Beautiful Darkness Read Free Page B

her fingers tightened around it.
    Two months later, and I still couldn’t look at a bird without hearing the sound of the sky ripping open.

4.17
Burnt Waffles
    F our eggs, four strips of bacon, a basket of scratch biscuits (which by Amma’s standard meant a spoon had never touched the
     batter), three kinds of freezer jam, and a slab of butter drizzled with honey. And from the smell of it, across the counter
     buttermilk batter was separating into squares, turning crisp in the old waffle iron. For the last two months, Amma had been
     cooking night and day. The counter was piled high with Pyrex dishes—cheese grits, green bean casserole, fried chicken, and
     of course, Bing cherry salad, which was really a fancy name for a Jell-O mold with cherries, pineapple, and Coca-Cola in it.
     Past that, I could make out a coconut cake, orange rolls, and what looked like bourbon bread pudding, but I knew there was
     more. Since Macon died and my dad left, Amma kept cooking and baking and stacking, as if she could cook her sadness away.
     We both knew she couldn’t.
    Amma hadn’t gone this dark since my mom died. She’d known Macon Ravenwood a lifetime longer than I had, even longer than Lena.
     No matter how unlikely or unpredictable their relationship was, it had meant something to both of them. They were friends,
     though I wasn’t sure either of them would’ve admitted it. But I knew the truth. Amma was wearing it all over her face and
     stacking it all over our kitchen.
    “Got a call from Dr. Summers.” My dad’s psychiatrist. Amma didn’t look up from the waffle iron, and I didn’t point out that
     you didn’t actually need to stare at a waffle iron for it to cook the waffles.
    “What’d he say?” I studied her back from my seat at the old oak table, her apron strings tied in the middle. I remembered
     how many times I had tried to sneak up on her and untie those strings. Amma was so short they hung down almost as long as
     the apron itself, and I thought about that for as long as I could. Anything was better than thinking about my father.
    “He thinks your daddy’s about ready to come home.”
    I held up my empty glass and stared through it, where things looked as distorted as they really were. My dad had been at Blue
     Horizons, in Columbia, for two months. After Amma found out about the nonexistent book he was pretending to write all year,
     and the “incident,” which is how she referred to my dad nearly jumping off a balcony, she called my Aunt Caroline. My aunt
     drove him to Blue Horizons that same day—she called it a spa. The kind of spa you sent your crazy relatives to if they needed
     what folks in Gatlin referred to as “individual attention,” or what everyone outside of the South would call therapy.
    “Great.”
    Great.
I couldn’t see my dad coming home to Gatlin, walking around town in his duck pajamas. There was enough crazy around here
     already between Amma and me, wedged in between the cream-of-grief casseroles I’d be dropping off at First Methodist around
     dinnertime, as I did almost every night. I wasn’t an expert on feelings, but Amma’s were all stirred up in cake batter, and
     she wasn’t about to share them. She’d rather give away the cake.
    I tried to talk to her about it once, the day after the funeral, but she had shut down the conversation before it even started.
     “Done is done. Gone is gone. Where Macon Ravenwood is now, not likely we’ll ever see him again, not in this world or the Other.”
     She sounded like she’d made her peace with it, but here I was, two months later, still delivering cakes and casseroles. She
     had lost the two men in her life the same night—my father and Macon. My dad wasn’t dead, but our kitchen didn’t make those
     kinds of distinctions. Like Amma said, gone was gone.
    “I’m makin’ waffles. Hope you’re hungry.”
    That was probably all I’d hear from her this morning. I picked up the carton of chocolate milk next to my