by Rayne Lacko
Carter wasn’t the musician he once was, not by a long shot, but he’d retained a fair bit and could even read music. He tried a few chords. The mellow vibration in the tight space shook Carter with astonishment. He tried to lengthen the chords, draw out each note. He remembered his dad telling him, “There are about a million ways to play a quarter note.” As though his daddy were there with him, as if no time had passed, he recalled his words. “You have to tease it out, sometimes thick, other times swinging soft and low. I like it with a quick grind at the tail.” His dad had told him to repeat one ordinary word, over and over. Anything— motorbike or chopper, it didn’t matter. Just repeat a word enough times and it starts to bend and warp, it loses meaning. Quarter notes can be handled the same way, he’d explained.
Rhythm and timing: those were his mom’s secrets to sanding and polishing a piece of wood to perfection. After Dad sold the Martin and moved out west, she said, “You’ve got good eye-hand coordination. You were born to work with your hands.” Then they got wind that Eddie had married another woman with not one but two potential “wonder kids,” and it was clear that he was never coming back. Carter gave up believing he was born to make music.
An ache pounded in his stomach; longing raked at his ribs. I’m just hungry, he thought, but it hurt him enough to put the guitar away. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. Stealing from his mama was plain stupid, and look where it got him. The best thing he could do was take the guitar back to Tommy in the morning and get his mother’s money back. He’d pretend he never took it or spent it. They were going to need the money now anyway, to find another place to live.
SOMEHOW sleep found him. He didn’t know it until he was startled awake by the sound of sirens. He listened, his body sore and cramped. A voice called out to a more distant voice on megaphones. For a moment he was lost, wondering why he was sleeping in a damp, dark basement with baby blankets around his hands.
“Mama!” He sat up quickly. Squeezing out from his rubble heap, his guitar case in hand, Carter stepped carefully through the wreckage. A new sweat broke out on the back of his neck.
Out front, emergency service crews were scattered where houses once stood. A man in a reflective jacket with a Red Cross emblem and a megaphone spotted him immediately, Carter’s movements visible in the bleak stillness.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” the man called out to him. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” Carter replied, still disoriented from his fitful sleep. “I’m waiting for my mom, Sandra Bermejo. Have you seen her?”
Crewmembers glanced at one another with concern. The man quickly ushered Carter to an ambulance, draping a thermal blanket around his shoulders.
“I’m Will,” the man introduced himself. “What’s your name?”
“Carter Danforth. I live here.” Carter turned and pointed at what was left of his house, then choked back a cough. No one in their right mind could live there anymore. “Do you know where my mom is?” he repeated.
“There was an outbreak of tornadoes, son. The governor of Oklahoma declared this county a state of emergency. We’re here to help.”
A rescue volunteer in the ambulance held out a cup of steaming chicken noodle soup, and Carter accepted it hungrily. “We’ll find her,” Will assured him, nodding with the solemnity one offers at a funeral. Carter didn’t like the man’s tone. Hope was all he had, and he needed everyone else to hold on to hope, too. “Jamison! Let’s put some calls in to the temp shelters and hospitals. What’d you say your mother’s name was?”
“Her name is Sandra Bermejo, sir,” Carter politely corrected Will’s use of was.
Carter waited on a gurney in the ambulance for nearly three hours before anyone gave him information. At last, Will appeared at his side. They’d located a woman by the name of Bermejo at Felicitas Hospital, being treated for multiple fractures and cerebral contusions. “Come on, Carter.” He motioned him up off the gurney. “Let’s go see your mother.”
Carter grabbed his guitar and followed. Worry and relief circled him like two white-tailed bucks with their antlers in a tangle. There was no reason to lock up. He reckoned his house was empty of everything that ever mattered.
Chapter Five
CARTER HESITATED BEFORE ENTERING HIS MOTHER’S room at the hospital. What were contusions anyway? How badly was she injured? He asked if he might tuck his guitar behind the counter at the nurses’ station while he visited with his mom, and the on-duty nurse took pity on him.
When he found the courage to walk through the door, his heart ached. It felt as cramped in the confines of his chest as he’d been in the soggy basement. His mother looked different, weak and small. Her hair, the same dark chestnut as his, was loose, not tied back with one of her bandannas. Her chin, usually held resolute, strong-willed like his, fell slack. The only sound in the room was her shallow breath, assisted by tubes.
When her puffed and swollen eyes fixed on him, they sparked to life.
Rushing to his mom’s side, Carter dropped against her, wrapping his arms around her motionless body buried under crisp white hospital sheets and a scratchy blanket. For several minutes, neither mother nor son spoke. Blinking at her through the blur of his wet lashes, he searched her face and the outline of her body on the hospital bed. It was really her, not some fevered wishful dream. She was alive.
“Mind the patient’s neck brace,” the attending nurse scolded him. Without the need of a word, Sandra shot the woman a look that could’ve hushed a town gossip. She receded to the door and disappeared.
Carter’s relief at finding his mother darkened his feelings of guilt into a raw, agonizing mass. Guilt for not being home when he said he would. Guilt for not telling her he was going to stop at the pawn shop after school. Guilt, for stealing her money.
Carter heaved his body against her, and she held him close with a broken arm clad in a fiberglass cast. She stroked his hair, an IV attached to the back of her hand.
“I thought I lost you,” she said, smiling as much as her bruised face would allow. Her cheeks were wet with her tears. “I prayed you were safe, and I could feel it, Cotton. The tie between us never broke.”
“I felt it, too, Mama,” Carter sniffed, looking into her reddened eyes. “I knew you were alive. I knew it.”
CARTER slept next to his mother at the hospital for the next few days, finishing the meals she couldn’t and reading to her. Her head injury brought on nausea and vomiting. He couldn’t stand seeing her this way, and kept wishing she’d wake up back to her old self.
The hospital staff insisted Carter be referred to a temporary shelter. Felicitas Hospital wasn’t a motel, after all. The doctors said Sandra’s vision and speech were stable, but she couldn’t seem to coordinate her movements. The patient needed treatment and rest.
Sandra remembered what happened to her like she’d woken up from a bad dream. She’d been delivering a dining room sideboard to a client when the rainstorm escalated from a relentless downpour to a blinding wall of water.
Her clients, the Liu family, had insisted Carter’s mother stay, but she was determined to get home to him. She’d pulled on her rain boots at the doormat and tugged the hood of her raincoat overhead. The last thing she remembered was the branches of a tree crashing clear through the front door.
“What day is it?” she asked. Carter scratched his head. He couldn’t say he knew. They were between times, the normal life they’d had only days before, and the great, empty unknown ahead of them. He’d slipped his daddy’s guitar into a supply closet in her room, the receipt tucked in the case. Picturing it in his mind, he recalled it was April 1 when he bought it. Carter clicked on the small TV in his mother’s room, flipping channels until he found a news station. No surprise, a news anchor was covering the damages from the storm. “April fourth, Mama,” Carter read the screen.
He’d been so preoccupied with getting enough money to buy the stupid thing and put an end to the past, and now all he could think about was what they’d do when she g
ot better. The power in her carpenter’s arms had drained. Time in the hospital bed left her delicate and weak. Except for her spirit. Sandra Bermejo thought she knew best on every topic, and by and large, folks listened to what she had to say.
Carter couldn’t stay at the hospital much longer, but Sandra refused to send her son to any victim shelter alone, even the ones offering assistance to unaccompanied minors. They needed to find help. He pulled the hospital room’s phone over to the bed and his mom told Carter to call her friend Lola May Leggitt first.
It made sense; Carter figured Lola May owed his mother a favor. She’d helped Lola break free from her husband, Wayne Leggitt, a no-good troublemaker who’d brought her enough heartache to fill a country song, not to mention dislocating her shoulder once. Lola May was a local celebrity, host of the cable-access home-renovation show Farmhouse Fancy. Lola was no bigger than a bar of soap after a good day’s washing, but Carter reckoned the woman sure could swing a hammer. After what they called the “Wayne ordeal,” Lola May started hanging around all the time, even though her own place was only a couple of miles away, and pretty as any she featured on TV.
Carter dialed her number. “Hey, Lola. It’s me, Carter,” he said, setting the phone on speaker.
“I been worried sick about you,” she squealed. Carter moved the phone away to arm’s length. Lola May’s force of presence took up nearly a square acre. “Is your mama okay? Is she mad at me? She hasn’t returned any of my calls.”
Carter yawned. “Her phone is broken, Lola May. Nobody’s mad at you.” It was always about Lola May. “Mama got hurt real bad in the storm. Our house is totaled.”
“Oh no, Cotton. You too?” Carter hated that she talked to him like kin. “The roof blew clear off my house with me in it, hunkered down in the cellar,” she continued. “Scariest thing ever.”
“No way, you were in your house?”
Sandra took hold of her son’s hand. They weren’t the only ones with problems, and it hit Carter that they came close to losing a lot more than one another.
“What do you mean, ’hurt real bad’? Y’all in hospital?” Lola May asked.
Carter brought the phone under his mother’s chin so she could talk. “Felicitas, but I’m on the mend, Lola May,” Sandra said, doing her best to act normal. “Are you hurt, darlin’?”
“Don’t have a scratch on me, thank the Lord for my husband—”
“Ex-husband,” his mother was quick to correct her.
“—who swooped in out of nowhere and rescued me from a twister like a dern knight in shining armor,” Lola May said.
Sandra rolled her eyes. It was just like Wayne to show up at the last minute and reap all the glory. He was the same useless butt who raised his hand to her, she reminded Lola May. With what little breath she could muster, she begged Lola May to move into the temporary shelter at Bob Bogle High School and keep an eye on Carter.
“You know I love Cotton like my own,” Lola May said. Carter tossed his hair out of eyes and curled his lip at his mom. Lola May was always acting too familiar. “He can stay at Wayne’s place with me until you get sorted, Sandy.”
“Sorry. I’m looking for a safe place for my son,” his mother replied, emphasizing the word “safe.”
Carter could hear Lola May fussing and squabbling on the other end. He pictured her adjusting her bleached-blond updo with those biggity fake nails she always wore, even while turning banister spindles on a wood lathe.
“Lola,” Sandra said, trying to get a word in, “you said you were done with Wayne for good.”
“He’s a changed man.”
“I daresay you’re the one who’s changed,” Sandra said in place of a good-bye, and set her jaw hard. His mother didn’t have the muscle strength to hold a phone to her ear, but she could end a conversation by cutting to the finish line with nothing but the tone of her voice.
Carter tried to hide his relief. Bunking in at the high school gymnasium would be bad enough, but knowing Lola May Leggitt, she’d put a fire under the principal to let her add a screened porch. Wayne was no prize pig; Carter knew he’d made mistakes. But if his father had half a mind to swoop in and help them, he hoped his mom would give him a second chance at their future. Ever since his daddy left, Carter had lost any and all hope of what was supposed to become of him.
CARTER suggested they call the few kids at school he considered friends. Turned out, things were tough all over. Caleb’s family was holed up at their neighbor’s farm, having lost their own home, and Landon’s had high-tailed it to his cousin’s condo in Florida. Sandra and Carter had some family friends a few counties over, but they’d already taken in relatives affected by the tornadoes. Their options dwindling, Carter’s mother held firm.
It was bad enough Carter had neither a bed to sleep in nor a roof over his head. Just when things couldn’t get any worse, he found out he had homework to do, and plenty of it. Because the schools were closed, everyone in ninth grade was expected to hand in an independent research project by April 30th to complete their grade level. Carter’s grades were none too pretty as it was. When a boy didn’t know where he’s headed, he didn’t pay much mind to his studies.
“I have money hidden,” Sandra told him, her breath coming at short intervals. “It’s not much, and I was hoping to save it for something real important, but it’s enough for you to fly out to your aunt’s in Nevada.” Carter adjusted the tubes going into her nostrils the way he saw the nurses do it. She pressed on, explaining she had cash—tens, twenties, and fifties, dozens of them— inside the rattling door panel of her old pickup truck. Carter’s skin prickled. He knew exactly what money she was talking about and where she’d hid it. It was the savings he’d taken to buy the cursed Martin. Only one thing that guitar was good for, he reckoned, bad luck.
Sandra labored with her breath, gathering the strength to say, “I want you to call your Aunt Sylvia in Nevada.”
Carter had every intention of confessing the dumb fool thing he’d done, but just then he decided telling the truth might hurt her more than any good that might come of it. Instead, he stalled, trying to buy some time until they could figure out a plan that didn’t involve buying a plane ticket. “Didn’t you say, ’If brains were leather, Sylvia wouldn’t have enough to saddle a june bug’?”
His mom’s brow twitched like she was fixing to set him straight. He didn’t want to get in trouble, but somehow it pained him to see her unable to give him what he had coming.
“Sylvia is family after all,” she managed to get out, “and we don’t have much of that to count on. It’ll only be a few weeks, just until I’m out of the hospital,” she assured him. “Then we’ll find ourselves a new house. Maybe a piece of property with a real workshop out back; wouldn’t that be something?”
Carter pulled away from his mother, telling her he’d round up some cold drinks. He was afraid if he stayed any longer he might go haywire and admit he’d taken her money and spent it. He was smart enough to figure there’d be medical bills on top of taking out a new mortgage. His mother’s income barely covered the tiny house they’d lost. Carter heard something about insurance, but he knew well enough they don’t move you from a pigeonhole to a palace on account of some bad weather.
Hesitating a moment, Carter strummed a few beats against the hollow metal doorframe with his fingertips. “I hope you get that workshop, Mama.”
“We’ll start fresh, Cotton,” she whispered back. “Just you and me.”
Chapter Six
CARTER WAS IN A BIND. HE COULDN’T FLY TO SYLVIA’S because he didn’t have the money to buy a plane ticket. He couldn’t take the guitar back to Tommy’s because he’d be right back where he started before the storm. Buying that thing, in truth, had saved his life, and he still hadn’t fessed up about it.
Carter couldn’t help thinking that Eddie ought to help. Where’d he been all these years, anyway? He never called on Carter’s birthday, never sent a present. Not even a card. And now his mother was laid up in the
hospital and they had no place to go once she got out. He’d promised Carter a life of music, but before he had a chance to really come into his own, Eddie split. He sold Carter’s guitar and never looked back. Just looking at his mother laying in her hospital bed all weak and bruised made him angry. Somehow, this was Eddie Danforth’s responsibility, and Carter was going to see to it that Eddie helped them out.
“Mama, we need to talk,” he began, leveling his best y’all-listen-up looks on her when they had a moment alone. “We’re going call my father. We haven’t got much in the way of family, like you said. He’s got the means to help us, and far as I’m concerned he owes us both.”
Sandra frowned. She didn’t like the tone he was using with her, or the idea. “Why on earth would you want to stay with—” She winced, the pain in her neck seeming sharp as she leaned toward him. “—Eddie?”
Carter glanced up at her in surprise. He hadn’t heard her speak his name in six years.
“I figure it’s high time I gave the old man a piece of my mind,” Carter told her, squaring his shoulders and standing a bit taller. “Got a few things I’d like to say about the way he left.”
His mother managed half a smile, the dry scab of a cut across her chin pulling.
Carter swallowed hard, clearing his throat, his gaze landing on the supply closet hiding his guitar. The truth was he didn’t have one solitary word for Eddie. Carter wanted to forget his dad was ever there, because then he wouldn’t have to wonder what he might have become with his famous father’s guidance.