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  For my husband, Christopher

  I’ve got gaps, you’ve got gaps, together we fill gaps

  Rural Alabama,

  1972

  The Lump

  Last month Mama caught me rubbing my neck. Even though I told her what I guessed was wrong, she snatched me over to Dr. Landry, Daddy’s tumor doctor before he died, who said there wasn’t a thing the matter with me. When I told him what I thought the problem was, he gave me a funny look and told Mama maybe I should “go see a different kind of doctor.”

  Next Mama took me to Dr. Temple, who I’d been going to my whole life for checkups. He was Daddy’s and Uncle Luke’s doctor when they were young and said maybe it was that awful Adam’s apple of the Putter boys, gurgling around before it got ready to spring itself on the world during puberty. “Putter boys might end up small,” he told me, “but they’ve got overzealous larynxes to make up for it.” Then he snatched my drawing pad away and said I needed to get outside more.

  Then Mama took me to Dr. Bartelle, a head doctor who goes to our church, who said with a whole bunch of head nodding and chin stroking that my neck rubbing was a cry for help. “You’re too quiet for an eleven-year-old boy, living in your head too much. You better work through whatever feelings are rattling around up there or you’re liable to go crazy like my sister Bernice did over her no-good boyfriends.” Then he told me that I wouldn’t be able to let Daddy go until I’d had a good cry about it.

  “Yes, sir,” I’d answered. I didn’t have the heart to tell Dr. Bartelle that when it came to Daddy, it was like me holding a golf club. I’d never really gotten the grip down, and it was hard to know the proper way of letting go of something when you were never holding it right in the first place.

  After the appointments, I didn’t tell a soul about the lump in my neck, even though I knew by then exactly what it was. Nobody would have believed me anyway. In the month after Daddy passed, everyone except Mama seemed to be going about their business, sucking down the sky like it was a glass of strained lemonade. Nice big lump-free gulps. Sure, every now and then I’d get a pat on the head and someone saying “You poor, poor thing” or “You poor, poor boy,” but that wasn’t gonna help a thing. Plus, it didn’t seem too nice to rub in the fact that Daddy never made much money and any extra he had mostly went toward hitting balls at the driving range and walking rounds of eighteen holes.

  So I didn’t say another word about the lump, but there was no doubt in my mind that I had a golf ball trapped in my throat. Maybe it didn’t show up on any X-ray, but I knew it was in there. Hiding inside me like it was waiting for something.

  And you know what?

  I was right.

  ROUND ONE

  HOLE 1

  Honey Air and Lightning

  Alabama’s heat started waking up and stretching around the same time Daddy died, and by the first full week of April it’d gotten good and dressed. Overdressed, I’d say, with the golf club thermometer stuck to the hog shed filled up just past the ninety line. A record high, the radio had declared, the afternoon announcer saying that if he were still a boy, he’d have ditched school for the pool on this steaming pot roast of a Tuesday, and thank goodness a battalion of storm clouds was heading our way to cool things down. Between the heat and the thunder grumbling and the lightning flashing on the horizon, it wasn’t the best of evenings for running away, if a person was thinking about doing that sort of thing. Which maybe I was.

  With a heave, I hauled open the iron lid of the backyard smoker and caught a blast of fiery air and sizzling pork scent. Eyes stinging, I turned and shook my left arm’s day-old burn, trying to ignore the way the raw spot flared and shouted Hey, you! Watch it this time! when it neared the burning coals. Grabbing the metal grabbers, I loaded up our double-deep pan with good hunks of pig and waded down the side yard through air thick as honey, careful so I’d spill nothing more than a little of the juice. House rent was on that tray—might as well have been bundles of money instead of meat.

  Even though our barbecue didn’t compare to when Daddy manned the big pit, and even though we had to set up business in the front yard when we were short on a café payment after he died, we still got a steady set of regulars and word-of-mouthers right at our house between noon and seven or so at night. The bank may have taken back the café property, but it couldn’t take away our barbecue. Sauce and sympathy were keeping us afloat.

  I plopped the pan on the wooden saucing table tucked off the front porch near the side hose, where we’d taken to finishing the meat before putting it in the public eye, and swiped my arm across my forehead. Salty sweat got into my burn, but I held off hollering. Mama was already worried that she left me alone with the smoker too much, and she was close by on the porch, cutting pieces of sheet cake while she minded the cash box and her long table of side dishes.

  “Benjamin, you hurry up now and slather those good!”

  “Yes, Mama.” Dipping a paintbrush into a bucket of ketchup, chili powder, vinegar, paprika, crushed mustard seed, little bit of cayenne, chicory, and brown sugar, I slathered those ribs up and down like I was painting a fence, which was the only kind of art Daddy ever approved of. He was a golf and barbecue man through and through. Both took plenty of time and focus, he said.

  “Get ’em nice and red,” someone called from one of the four picnic tables set up in the front yard. “Sure is fine, your mama’s sauce.”

  “Sauce was Daddy’s,” I muttered to the ribs, even though they knew it already. We were almost through his supply and he’d never bothered to write down his exact recipe, so the Putter flavor was bound to change. I dipped two more brushfuls and took my time making the color nice and even.

  Poking into my eye corners were the orange and yellow from our neighbor’s tulip poplars and white from her magnolia trees that hung over into our yard. Flower colors in Mrs. Grady’s yard were always better and brighter than anything in my art box, but I wasn’t much impressed by flowers lately. Didn’t even care about the ones that smelled like Erin Courtney, who sat in front of me in class and had the nicest hair I’d ever seen.

  No, today those petals and leaves whispered together in the hot wind, saying There’s Ben Putter, he’s got a golf ball right in his throat, see him rubbing at it with his free hand, do you see him, he’s got no friends, no he doesn’t, yes, I see him, how about you, why yes, I see him, too . . .

  “You all hush,” I told those leaves and petals, picking up the pan and walking past the tables to Mama. The ribs were heavy, and I was glad to set them down next to bowls of Mama’s beans and potato salad. I wondered who’d help her with everything if I went running. I rubbed the lump in my throat and wondered who’d help me get back to normal if I didn’t.

  “Lemonade, Benny,” Mama told me, her elbow digging into my side and her head jerking toward the road. “Get a glass for Mr. Talbot and May when you’re done filling at the tables, won’t you?” She pointed to the brown truck coming down our dirt street. “And tell Mr. Talbot that I’ve got a big package of pork made up for his family.” Her eyes drifted to the top of the house. “It was beyond kind of Rudolph to fix that roof leak.”

  When I saw the distant, approaching outline of May Talbot sitting beside her daddy in the passenger seat, I swallowed hard and felt the golf ball lump rotate in my thro
at. I wondered if she’d asked to come along. My chest went tight and the banging inside it sped up, from nerves or hope. Both maybe. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I put your paint pad and drawing book on the kitchen table, in case you were looking, sweetheart,” Mama said, lowering her voice, though the twelve or so customers were out of earshot, scattered among the tables down in the yard, eating and talking and fanning themselves with hats or whatever was handy. “You know you don’t need to hide them in the sofa cushions.” Anymore, she didn’t add, but I still heard it. “And that art teacher of yours called again. Miss Stone, right? You really need to call her back, okay?”

  Clearing her throat, she called out, “I declare, it’s hot as Georgia out here. Who wants more lemonade? Quarter a cup with a refill, good and fresh, coming right up.” She waved and smiled at Mr. Talbot as he drove up our long driveway that circled around back to the hog shed, hauling the pig we’d ordered. A few customers turned toward the vehicle, and I watched their faces, saw eyes narrow or drift back to plates, saw lips get tight while they stared or looked away fast, saw within moments what kind of difference, if any, it made to them that the Talbots were colored.

  By the time I looked at the truck, my hand ready to jump up in a careful wave, May’s eyes were aimed straight ahead. They’d been aimed straight ahead for the last four months. I didn’t know what I could do to get my friend back. I just knew that things weren’t the same, and a glass of lemonade wasn’t gonna change that.

  After I’d mixed two new batches, I walked the picnic tables and tipped the lemonade pitcher for two men I knew from town and four dusty-clothed workers who looked to be from the railroad yard. Hobo workers, Grandma Clay had called them, back when she was alive, though Mama always hushed her and said traveling railroad hobos died out long ago.

  “Hey, son.”

  “You sure are looking like your daddy.”

  “Thank you, kindly, boy.”

  People knew I hadn’t said much at all since Daddy passed, so I felt fine letting one nod do for answering all their chatter. All those men loved him. He’d always been there at the end of their work days, handing them good food to make the body aches fade, listening to their talk and then cracking enough jokes to make their troubles disappear just a little.

  My eyes wandered around the side yard to see Mr. Talbot heaving the pig off his truck bed, then I refilled the paper cups of two men, a woman with tired eyes, and a dirty-looking kid who didn’t appear to be with anyone in particular. Maybe she was one of the railmen’s daughters.

  The girl was around my age, maybe a little younger. She looked up at me with sauce all over and big mean eyes like I’d spit in her drink. I refilled it anyway.

  Pouring two fresh cups, I kept my feet moving, my gaze grazing the fence that separated our front yard from Mrs. Grady’s. The same kind of fences were just about everywhere in Hilltop, lining the roads and splitting yards, but they weren’t proper barriers. They were nothing more than a post every twelve feet with two lengths of raw wood between and didn’t keep a thing in or out.

  The Talbots were both waiting outside the shed. Looking in the open doors, I saw the hog had been placed on the three-foot-high cutting station that had catch drains all around it. “Thanks, Mr. Talbot.” I handed him the lemonade.

  He took the cup and squinted sweat out of his eyes. “You’re welcome. You need help cutting him up?”

  It was the same question he’d asked since Daddy died. “No, thank you. Mama has a package of pork for you.” I looked at May’s shining shoes and passed her the second cup, feeling her fingers brush against mine as she took it and thanked me. It was a polite but faraway kind of thank-you—the kind I’d heard her use with the teachers at school who’d made it clear they didn’t want her there.

  “That’s fine. You and May catch up for a minute.”

  Mr. Talbot’s tall form walked around the side of the house, and May and I were alone. She was dressed real nice, like she always was, and I was suddenly shy of my ash-stained clothes. Don’t know why I felt that way. She’d seen me like that about a million times. “Hot today,” I said.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “You draw anything lately?”

  “Maybe,” she said, tugging at one ear.

  May was good at art. The first time we’d met was when we were both five years old and Mr. Talbot had brought a hog over to the café. I was around back, trying to make watercolors from a load of Popsicles that hadn’t made it to our freezer in time and were too melted to sell. She sat right beside me, and I handed her a stick brush and a piece of paper. She took them, and that was that.

  Since then, we’d seen each other at least twice a month during deliveries. As her daddy and my daddy had gotten to know each other, the deliveries had turned into short visits, and May and I had worked our way up from making Popsicle paintings to taking walks and tossing rocks in the nearby streambed. We even made plans to meet at a spot at the creek on some Saturdays.

  We’d sit and draw. We’d talk or not talk. Sometimes she’d write words beside her sketches and paintings, cross some out, leaving just a few to make the picture into a story. Water, rock, hand, splash. Pecans, trees, basket, pie. Crane, frog, dive, dinner. She was the best friend I had in the world, and the day I told her that, she’d said I was hers, too.

  But all that had changed over the last year. I wished there was a way of going back to before.

  “I’m thinking about running away for a time,” I told her, the words spilling out before I could remind them that May and me weren’t the same anymore.

  A hint of light hit her eyes, and they flashed. “What problems could you have to run away from?” Her tight mouth burst open and formed a delicate O. One of her hands lifted to cover it. “I mean . . . well, other than your daddy passing. Never mind. I’m sorry about your daddy.”

  I shrugged. The truth was, I felt squeezed. Hilltop felt a whole lot smaller with Daddy gone. Seems like some space should’ve cleared up with one less person, but I felt tight all over. That darn lump needed to bust outta my throat, darn toes wanted to bust outta my shoes. Seemed like my whole self wanted to bust out of my insides altogether. I didn’t want to run away forever. Just for now. Something had been pulling on me since Daddy died, and whatever it was, it wasn’t in Hilltop.

  She frowned at my neck. “Why do you keep scratching at your throat like that?”

  I dropped my hand as Mr. Talbot came around the house corner. We had maybe a few more seconds when it was just us. Sweat was dripping down my forehead and back, and whatever pressure was bubbling inside me couldn’t hold back any longer. It had to come out somehow, and it came out with—

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. It’s like everything’s changing and I . . . I just don’t know what to do.” The ground was a comfortable place to look, so I shoved what felt like my whole self in that direction. I raised my head a couple of feet to meet the answer halfway.

  “Well,” she said, arms wrapping around her waist as her father approached. “Maybe you changed, too.”

  My ears got hot first, then my cheeks and neck.

  Mr. Talbot’s hand squeezed my shoulder on the way to his truck. “ ’Bye, now, Ben. May, let’s go, honey.”

  She stared me in the eyes while Mr. Talbot opened the driver’s door and motioned her around the other side. Then she walked away.

  I lifted my chin and blinked at the gray-whites and dark blues smeared rough across the sky like brushstrokes being blown straight into Hilltop. Straight into me.

  “ ’Bye,” I finally said, staring at the side of May’s face as the truck passed by me. She turned in her seat and watched me, her brown eyes soft and wanting, mad and sad and disappointed, and I think that maybe she looked through my body and saw my insides as the Talbots drove away. She was the only one who’d always seen me, and she was leaving.

  I decided right then, for certain, that it was time for me to leave, too.

  HOLE 2

  A Familiar V
oice

  The rib pan was half-empty by the time I got back to the porch. Mama wiped her hands on her apron and tilted her head toward the side yard. “Ben, you go inside. Take a break and do your schoolwork, all right, honey? I believe I’ll finish with these three coming down the road.” She looked bone-tired, but was holding on. Her crying time wouldn’t come until everyone’d left.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I walked to the side door next to the hose and dinged the café sign with my foot. Mama refused to put the sign up, but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to throw it away either. She’d always hated the name “Putter’s Pork Heaven” and the slogan Daddy came up with when he’d taken over the Clay family business: Where the Best Pigs Come to Pass.

  It was humid inside our house. Everything looked and felt sweaty. Daddy’s seven iron was getting a little grimy, leaning against the wall next to the pantry. He kept the old club in the house “in case of intruders,” but mostly used it to take practice swings in the living room and to scratch his back. It hadn’t moved from its spot since the night he went to the hospital for the last time. I touched the grip and jerked my hand away when it shocked me with a sharp stab of static electricity.

  I let out a Daddy word while jitters traveled up my arm and lingered. I felt buzzy all over, like even my eyebrow hair was reaching for the ceiling. Shaking out the tingles, I poured a glass of water and settled at the kitchen table to think more about running away.

  I stared at nothing for a good half minute before my hands took over and reached for my thick watercolor paper, brush, and paint pad. I started with the paints, but a minute later, ditched the brush and picked up a pencil, scrawling five letters underneath the mess of color I’d painted. I stared at the greens and blues and light brown and purple and the lone word.

  where