Chapter 9: Heat Wave

The thermometer on the barn read one hundred and one at four in the afternoon.

By midnight it still said ninety-four.

The farmhouse had no air conditioning, only box fans and my mother's belief that suffering built character.

She went to bed at ten with three fans pointed at her face.

Abram and Dessa had come over after dark because the Hendry place was an oven.

Dessa slept on a cot on the porch with a wet washcloth on her forehead and the goose guarding her feet.

Abram and I sat on the porch swing with a pitcher of ice water between us, sweating in the dark.

The cicadas screamed in the trees.

Out in the orchard, the fireflies hung over the grass in slow green clouds.

"I used to think this was the best part of summer," I said. "The nights you can't sleep."

"Why?"

"Because nothing happens. Nobody needs you. You just sit there and hear the trees."

He took a long drink from his glass.

"Can you hear them?"

"The old ones tick. When the heat leaves, the wood cracks a little."

He listened.

After a while he said, "I can hear it."

"Told you."

"You don't hear anything like that in a hospital."

"What did you hear?"

"Machines, and a woman down the hall who sang the same four lines every night at three."

"I sang them in the kitchen for a week after I left."

"What were they?"

He hummed them, low and a little flat.

It was a hymn I knew from my grandmother's church.

I hummed the next line.

He turned his head and looked at me.

The porch light was off, and only the moon lit his face.

He looked tired and full of tenderness, and I felt something in my chest give way with a soft click.

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