Free Making Waves by Cassandra King Page B

boy. I’m so glad you’ve come home to me,” she said as she squeezed me tight with her last bit of energy. “God is too good to me.”
    With that, she went on into her bedroom and closed the door after her. I knew she’d go right to bed and to sleep, as soon as she said her prayers. She always prayed for about an hour every night, then she slept like a baby. No booze or sleeping pills for her.
    After cleaning the kitchen and unpacking my car, I finally made it to my old room, the front bedroom with the bay window on the side, across from the First Baptist Church. I pushed the door open and stood there for a minute before going in, as though I were a toddler and expected monsters to be lurking in the shadows.
    Like the town of Clarksville, my room had stayed the same. It was huge, of course the best room in the house; Aunt Della insisted that I have it as soon as I was old enough. An elegant room with tall ceilings, massive oak furniture and heavy dark drapes. Like a cave or a tomb, it had always been dark and cool, even with no air-conditioning in the house.
    I don’t think any of the old folks in Clarksville had central air; some of them had window units and closed off different rooms, as Daddy Clark did, but most of the houses were built long before air-conditioning. They were big open houses with breezy, wide porches, dark rooms, and high ceilings with ancient, slow-turning fans. So everybody stayed fairly cool except in the dead of summer when no breeze stirred the searing heat. The dog days of August.
    I piled all my stuff on the extra bed—Aunt Della had twin beds added just for me when I was a kid, evidently expecting lots of stay-over buddies, which I never had. Then I collapsed in the big leather recliner, tired as hell, fishing around in my jeans pocket for a cigarette. However, I was suddenly so exhausted that I decided to do as I’d ordered Aunt Della and go straight to bed instead of delaying as I smoked. Stripping down to my briefs, I turned off the lamp then yanked back the heavy quilt on my bed and did a nosedive into it, sinking into the feathery softness, sighing deeply. I was so exhausted I should be asleep in no time.
    Shit. I’d never sleep in here without the overhead fan on to stir the stifling air, and without opening up the windows. Reluctantly I dragged myself out of bed and switched on the wheezy fan. Then, I went around the dark room, lugging on the creaky old windows. When I pulled open the last window, I was overpowered by the scent that was Clarksville to me. The smell of honeysuckle. It grew like a jungle on the side fence, mixed in with Aunt Della’s wild red roses like some mad florist’s bouquet.
    I sank into the bay window seat and breathed deeply of the heavy sweetness of honeysuckle, and I wanted to cry. My throat closed up as I looked out of that dark room into the greater darkness of the night, smelling honeysuckle and listening to the cicadas and crickets in symphony. I knelt by the open window and laid my head down in my arms, feeling an overwhelming loneliness that I hadn’t felt in years. Oh, God. Why had I come back here?
    I stumbled back to bed and climbed in again, knowing that sleep would not come easily. I wished to God that I had a beer, but I’d left them in the car, and I wasn’t about to go back out there. If I did, I might just drive off into the night, wearing nothing but my undershorts. I settled for a cigarette, fumbling around where I’d tossed them when I flung my clothes off. Propping myself up on my pillows, I looked out into the dark, starlit night as I inhaled.
    God, how I’d missed this crazy old town. No one would have believed that, no one. Not a soul understood how I felt about this place—old Charlotte the harlot snorted when I tried to tell her once. None of the family or friends who lived here understood it either; they just assumed I hated it as bad as Cat did. They mistook my interest