As the years went on and she’d return to these places, she would never say, I’m going to Egypt or to the Netherlands or to Vietnam. She’d simply say, I’m going into the attic or walking down the hall or stepping into the breakfast nook for a bit.
And Dad would say, “Don’t forget to turn the lights off when you leave.”
It was us she wanted to leave. Going to all those places. She was trying to get away. That’s why she always went by herself. Why Dad always sat home alone, wondering when she was going to come back to him.
Dad nor Mom spoke to me in regards to my killing of Elohim. Dad didn’t ask how it made me feel. Mom didn’t say I’d done the right thing. I was just the one who had a gun, and Elohim was just the enemy shot. Everything else wasn’t said. I wasn’t charged with murder or put through a trial. It was, dear jury, self-defense. But don’t you worry, I have been in prison ever since.
When they went into Elohim’s house, they found in his cinder block basement a freezer of ice cream and body parts. There were Polaroids of black boys before they’d been butchered, and more gruesome Polaroids of the various stages of being butchered.
Elohim had said he wished someone would’ve stopped Helen’s lover from growing up. Just ate his future away. Elohim, the vegetarian, was eating black boys before they could become black men.
In the collection of Polaroids was a boy identified by his parents as Amos.
And then there was the Polaroid of a boy in a pair of overalls. It was taken near the basement window. The light streaming through was bright and whitened out the boy’s face, which was upturned toward the bars of the window, where birds flew outside.
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.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE SUMMER THAT MELTED EVERYTHING. Copyright © 2016 by Tiffany McDaniel. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Kerri Resnick
Cover photograph: melting paint © Annette Shaff/Shutterstock; typeface © jumpingsack/Shutterstock
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: McDaniel, Tiffany, author.
Title: The summer that melted everything: a novel / Tiffany McDaniel.
Description: New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003510|ISBN 9781250078063 (hardback)|ISBN 9781466890343 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Teenage boys—Fiction.|Families—Fiction.|Small cities—Fiction.|Heat waves (Meteorology)—Fiction.|Suspicion—Fiction.|Ohio—Fiction.|BISAC: FICTION / Literary.|FICTION / Family Life.|GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.C38683 S96 2016|DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003510
e-ISBN 978-1-4668-9034-3
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: July 2016
The Summer That Melted Everything Page 31
