Page 21 of August Lane
Emma:
But you miss the food.
Jojo:
I do. All the dishes have numbers and most people use those. But us regulars didn’t even have to use them because the servers already knew what we wanted. I used to hate it when I was young. Too claustrophobic. I wanted to be a stranger somewhere because that seemed more sophisticated. But now I appreciate being known that way. The intimacy of it. I would love to walk into a dining room and have the server say Sundown, instead of asking for my order. That was my dish. A breakfast platter with over-easy eggs. The eggs are face down—well, you get it. That meal has always tasted like home to me. So I wrote a song about it—how much I missed that feeling of being known so well. But it came out sad because it made me feel lonely. And then critics decided it was about lynching and that was it. I stopped singing it.
CHAPTER FOUR
2009
Luke woke to a note in his mother’s loopy handwriting that told him she’d be home to make dinner for her boys. The wordboyswas framed with hearts. She was always overly affectionate after a rough night. Instead of apologizing for her bad behavior, she’d pretend it never happened, daring her sons to mention it. If one of them did, she’d cry and yell, call them every foul version of ungrateful. Ava’s shout had the force of an earthquake. She’d scream until the whole house shook.
Luke eyed the bruises along his forearm, and the previous night rushed back. Ava had been drunk when he got home. She’d gone out with friends after work and had an argument with one of the other bank tellers about whether her drawer had been short all week.
“She called me a thief. Can you believe that?”
Luke wasn’t paying close enough attention. He didn’t notice the gleam in her eyes that signaled she was too far gone for an honest answer. “I don’t think that’s what she meant,” he said absently. He was thinking about August and how risky it was to hold on to her journal. He’d been plotting ways to return it without her noticing while the real threat was brewing in front of him.
Ava said, “You asshole.” Then she laughed. That’s when Luke started paying attention. His beautiful mother, with her amber eyes and tawny skin, had transformed into something ugly, her features contorted with the pain she usually smothered with pills. Doctors couldn’t explain her condition. A few accused her of faking. Her prescriptions had run out years ago, so Luke didn’t know where she got the Vicodin she stowed in her purse. A few days ago, she’d said she was quitting and made a big show of flushing a bottle down the toilet in front of him. Luke hadn’tbelieved her, but now he realized she’d been serious. After seventy-two hours of suffering, she was tired of hurting alone.
Ava leaned forward and spit in his face. Luke jerked back, rubbing away her saliva, but she followed him, asking who the fuck he thought he was. Her arms went up, and he grabbed them instinctively, trying to stop whatever came next. But he couldn’t. He never could. He could hold her down, pin her arms to her sides, or walk away and lock himself in his bedroom, but he could never make her calm or remorseful. Rage spread inside her like an infection. The feverish, killing kind.
Once Ava got tired of wailing on him, she left the house. Luke grabbed two six-packs of beer from the fridge and drank them all. When his little brother returned from junior high band practice, Luke was lounging on the couch, surrounded by crushed silver cans.
“I’ll clean this up,” he promised, gathering a few in a tiny heap.
“What did she do?” Ethan asked, retrieving a trash bag.
Luke told him the truth because they didn’t keep secrets from each other. It was their primary survival tactic, trading information about their mother’s moods. The lesson Luke passed on to Ethan, who was thirteen and struggling with hormonal changes that made it increasingly difficult to bite his tongue, was to avoid talking to their mother about work for a while. “She might get fired,” Luke had said. “That’ll make things worse, so be prepared.”
Luke shook off the memory of last night, crumpled Ava’s non-apology note, and made his way to the kitchen. It smelled like bacon left in the pan too long. Ethan was at the stove wearing one of Luke’s old T-shirts. His brother was tall for a thirteen-year-old, with the bony frame of a kid forced to skip meals when his mother forgot to feed him. The fabric billowed around his narrow shoulders while he poked at scrambled eggs.
“This is burning,” Luke said, turning off the heat under the bacon pan. Ethan’s face flushed red. Despite inheriting Ava’s light brown complexion, Ethan had inherited his Irish father’s tendency to turn the color of beets at the slightest provocation.
“I like it crispy,” Ethan protested, ever the perfectionist. He’d been that way since birth. Ava said Ethan had refused to cry, even when the doctor slapped him. “They thought he was dead at first,” she would saywith a laugh. “But knowing Ethan, he probably didn’t want to admit being confused in front of strangers.”
Luke cleared the table, which was covered with crumbled fast-food wrappers and half-empty wineglasses. “Is she with Don?”
Ethan loaded up two plates with bacon and eggs. “He picked her up this morning.”
Don was the latest man Ava had decided would make a good role model for her sons. He was blond and toothy, always grinning even when it made the situation awkward. He worked at a chicken plant and lived in a trailer near the county line, which he thought entitled him to rant about Luke’s poor career prospects, even though he seemed to spend more time praying about lottery tickets at New Life Church than murdering poultry at his day job.
Luke knew that with his poor grades and low ACT scores, a football scholarship was his only path to college. He agreed with Don’s favorite insult (“A snowball’s gonna survive hellfire before you get to the NFL”) but going to LSU wasn’t about playing in the pros. Baton Rouge was his mother’s hometown. If Luke moved there, she might follow him and bring Ethan with her.
“Don told her to kick you out,” Ethan said. “That it would teach you a lesson.”
Luke shoved down more food and tried to look unbothered. It wouldn’t do Ethan any good to see him panic. “She’d never do that.”
“How do you know?”
