The boy good at escaping.
Or was it?
No one knew if it was in fact Sal or not. Sometimes I’d look at the picture and think the overalls were different. Too much grass stain, not enough dirt. Was the boy in the picture shorter than Sal? He was shorter than the shovel leaning against the wall behind him, and I remembered Sal always being taller. Maybe it was just the camera angle. Maybe it was that light that blocked out his face.
I’d look at that light, squint into its brightness, and think I saw Sal’s eyes looking up at those birds just as he always had. After all, that’s how I knew Sal was no devil. Because of the way he looked at the birds. Not as an angel who once flew, but as a boy who so wished he could.
We buried what was left of Sal on Reflection Hill, next to Grand. Grand’s effigy saw him carved in his baseball uniform. A ball in his pitching hand. A glove on his left. Sal was carved in overalls. A weed daisy in one hand, nothing in the other. Two stone sculptures that did not represent the boys lying beneath them, but rather our own pure ignorance of who they were. For all the ways we knew them, we knew them not at all. They were deep water, and all we could cling to were the baseball uniform and the overalls floating on the surface.
Fedelia took over the shoe factory from Mom. I sure as shit didn’t want it. It would be sold before Fedelia died. Fedelia who had stayed in Breathed for the rest of her life. Eventually remarrying. Happily. Ever. After.
We didn’t go to her wedding. None of us ever returned to Breathed again. Maybe it was the same problem that faced Adam and Eve when they lost their Garden of Eden. Breathed was a paradise lost to us.
It was the summer that melted everything, and as Dad, Mom, and I drove out of Breathed for the last time, the puddles splashed beneath us. These puddles were from the rain, but to me, well, I’ve always thought they were the puddles of everything that had melted.
There were the puddles for all the tangible things like chocolate and ice cream. Then there were the puddles for all those things that lived inside us. Auntie’s anger. Mom’s fear. Dad’s faith. Grand’s life.
There was a puddle for Dresden. A puddle for Granny. And one for the boy who would change us all. Sal. A puddle that never would’ve been if not for the puddle of the town’s common sense.
As for that last puddle, the one that splashed the most. That was the puddle of my innocence, the splashes still falling in the past as they are still falling now, as they will continue to fall for that eternal always, in a pooling water, ferrying me back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TIFFANY MCDANIEL is an Ohio native whose writing is inspired by the rolling hills and buckeye woods of the land she knows. The Summer That Melted Everything is her debut novel. Visit her Web site at www.tiffanymcdaniel.com. Or sign up for email updates here.