Abel’s Place, by Emma Huang

When I was a kid there was this song that played all the time on the radio. We lived in the South – the real South, not what some folks started calling Illinois these days – and in the evenings after the dinner table was cleared I’d sit on our front door steps with the wooden slabs that would give a little if you pushed on the right spot. Somedays my daddy would be out there with me, pork chops and something sweet still stuck in our gums. Some of those somedays we talked. He’d take his dirty white baseball cap off that my momma always got on his ass for and run his hand through his hair and tell me things about his friends. Real grown-up stories about real grown-up friends.

“Ain’t that funny?” he always ended with.

And that’s how the nights would go, the wind blowing over ash from our neighbor’s firepit, us sitting out there til the firebugs came out to talk too. The radio right between us. When he was done talking for the day (and you’d know when; anyone coulda known) – that’s when it was my turn.

The day I turned fourteen he told me he knew I used to make up some of those stories I told. ‘Course I did. I was just a kid then. Honestly I bet it was some real dumb stuff too, Barbies and dragons and beaches and other things I’d never seen before. I asked him that day why he never said anything about them being fake when he first heard them and he pretended not to hear me but I know he did. He had the best damn hearing outta anyone I’d ever known.

But anyway. Like I said. When I was a kid I would sit on the front porch steps after dinner and sometimes we talked and when the song came on the radio we both knew to stop.

It was one of those slow kind of country sounding songs, all acoustic guitar and a man that sounded like he missed something but didn’t know what. At the time I wasn’t old enough to really get the words and I still don’t know what it was called but the nights went like this: my daddy sitting next to me, the dying blue Kentucky light on our skin, the deep hum of his throat to the music, an old radio between us. The metal on the knobs rubbed clean off. The honeysuckle’s nectar in full bloom. Splinters on the underside of our thighs. It smelled like summer. It was summer.

*

Mary Beth is at Abel’s Place first again. I see her as I’m walking up and she stands and waves when she sees me back. It’s raining – not too hard cause my socks ain’t wet or nothing but enough that I woke to the drain running outside and enough that I can see right through her dress. It’s made of some cheap fabric and it’s this sky blue color with small straps and three buttons down the front. I wave back and try to look at her face.

“Lucy,” she says, bumping her hip with mine and then sitting right back down.

I smile at her real big outta habit and then realize my gums are showing. When I was ten my brother told me I had a scary smile cause the pink parts showed too much at the top and I haven’t forgot it for a single day since.

“How long you been waiting?” I pull my top lip over my teeth but now I’ve been smiling for so long that it’s weird. Forget it.

Mary Beth ain’t looking anyway. “Not too long. Ma told me I needed to be home in twenty though.” She picks at something in the grass while she talks. I’m about to ask her what she’s looking for but then I see the bunch of wildflowers in the lap of her dress.

I’d almost forgotten what week it was. I don’t usually but I been thinking more and more about other things recently. But the point is ever since me and Mary Beth started visiting him she’s made him a crown of something on the first week of every month. The first month she did it it was still deep in summer and she had her pick of any kinda flower she wanted. I told her I didn’t know his favorite one but there was this bush of red daylilies that would bloom near our old house and every year whenever they started showing some color he’d pick me a bunch. My momma always got on him for bringing ants in the house with them. But I knew she didn’t really mind cause she always trimmed the ends for me and put them in some water and vinegar.

So Mary Beth found some daylilies that first month and tied their stems together. The petals sticking out all red and orange and green. We hung it off the headstone right over the name. Abel. Beloved father devoted husband loyal friend. My momma told me he didn’t want his last name on there cause he said that ain’t really him. I asked her what that meant and she thought for a bit before she said something back.

“That’s who he was to people,” she said. “Abel. Not his last name.”

I didn’t tell her then but I was real hurt when she said that. Cause to me he wasn’t ever Abel.

*

I guess I don’t know why I started calling it Abel’s Place then. But anyway. It don’t really matter how it started cause that’s just how it is these days. It’s May now and the wildflowers fill the fields like little bits of salt left over on the table after dinner. Mary Beth’s even sitting in a patch of them.

We sit in silence for a bit as she ties the flowers together. It’s quiet, deft work – she knots the bottom of a stem onto the top of another under the budding part and then keeps going on and on. If you pull the knot too hard it rips but if you don’t pull hard enough then the whole thing’ll fall apart when we put it on the headstone. I’d never been able to do it. Not in grade school and not after he died.

“Here.” She drops the finished crown of wildflowers in my lap as she stands. “I gotta go.” She stretches her arms and cracks her back in a way that makes something inside me hurt.

“Tomorrow still alright? Twelve?” She asks this every Saturday and then every Sunday she asks about next Saturday. Sometimes we’re only here for thirty minutes and sometimes we’re here til the sun’s gone. Either way I say yes every time and either way she still asks. 

“’Course.”

Mary Beth nods. And before I can think too hard about it or before I can pull away she leans down to grab my hand and pulls me to my feet. I’m so caught off guard that the wildflowers just fall to the ground and I gotta twist my footing so I don’t step on them when I stand. She just laughs and bends down to pick up them up before pulling me over to his headstone, both our hands sweaty in the damp air.

Abel. Father husband friend. There’re dried flower crowns hung all over the words. Ten total. Mary Beth hands me the newest one and I drape it on the left side, right over an old one made of nothing but grass (December’s). Eleven now. Every month I watch the number go up and every month I’m reminded it ain’t never going back down. 

We stare at it for a few beats before she repeats herself. “I gotta go.” I turn my head to the side and see her looking at me weird. Too damn weird for this early in the day. I know what she’s asking for. I know what she wants to say. We haven’t talked about the night at the lake since it happened and it’s been gettin to her. A month is a real long time and it’s not like I haven’t been thinking about it recently too but the truth is I woke that next morning feeling so sick bout everything and I didn’t know what to do so I just kept saying nothing.

I know she thinks it’s cause she’s a girl. It ain’t though. It’s cause I snuck back home that night and my momma was asleep on the couch and I just took one look at her and knew she’d spent the night crying over my daddy. Her eyelids all red and snot dried out her nose. And it just smacked my smile clean off.

So I just say, “See you tomorrow.” Her lips set into something hard for a second but then she reaches out and flicks a strand of my hair and I think we’re alright. She turns to leave and I watch her as she does: the wet spot on her back where she was sitting on the grass, the thick piece of hair she forgot when she was braiding. I watch and watch til she turns her head a bit over her left shoulder and smiles when our eyes meet. 

“I’ll bring my radio,” she calls, and I know we’re alright.

On my way back I walk by my old house. It’s that kinda day. I don’t go near it or anything, just right by it without stopping. I barely even look at it – like to say I don’t know you, I never knew you, nothing bout you was real enough to miss. That’s all. And then I go home.

*

It went like this: I never told him I loved him. Not those summer porch nights and not ever. Sometimes now I think it’s gotta be my fault that he’s gone, that Abel’s Place even exists, that if I told him I loved him then I coulda saved him. I dunno why I never did. Or what I even had to lose. Cause in the end we don’t live in that house no more and I still don’t know the song and I ask God every day and still there ain’t no world but this one where I’m living without him.

*

The first time anyone saw me naked was ten months after my daddy died. It was April, one of those surprisingly deep warm nights where you walked outside and it felt like the air was wrapping its arms round your lungs and blowing heat into them. Not in a real bad way but in a kind of Kentucky specific way that’s hard to explain if you don’t know what I’m on about. You could look up from anywhere in the whole town and the stars would be there. The sky more purple than black. That kinda late spring night. 

Earlier that day I had told my momma I was sleeping over at Mary Beth’s and she told her momma that she was sleeping over at mine. We were gonna meet up at the field next to the cemetery – this was before I started calling it Abel’s Place ­– and I’d snuck a bottle of something hard outta the house under my shirt. For weeks after that night I prayed my momma wouldn’t notice it missing. (She did.)

But Mary Beth laughed as I held up the whiskey and ran towards her, so really I think it was worth it. She was wearing a big shirt and a pair of jeans that sat low as hell on her hips and she sat on the highest hill in the field. It wasn’t too tall, maybe ten feet, but I still had to climb up the side by sticking my sneakers into little caves of dirt.

“I got it,” I waved the bottle in her face, still trying to catch my breath.

She laughed again. “I see that,” – she grabbed it from me then, popped the top off, took a swig, and made a face ­– “This shit sucks though.”

“Give it back then.”

We went back and forth like this for a few minutes, sitting in silence and passing the bottle and both of us trying real hard not to throw up from the taste. Eventually I felt her looking at the side of my face. Staring really.

“What?” I grabbed the bottle back from her but not before poking the wet splotch on the knee of her jeans where she spilled a bit of liquor.

She smiled. No gums in sight. “You seen the lake round here, right?”

“The one over there?” – I reached my arm over her chest and pointed to the left of us – “Or the one over by the grade school?”

“There.”

“I seen it. I ain’t been there though.”

Mary Beth didn’t say anything for a minute after that so I took another mouthful and winced as it went down. I held the bottle out for her without looking but when she didn’t take it I cut my eyes toward her and saw her smiling down at her lap.

“Cmon.”

*

When we got to the lake – it was really more of a big watering hole, with a splintered little dock and a bunch of big oak trees circling the far side of it – I turned away for one second to set the bottle on a rock and when I turned back round Mary Beth didn’t have a damn shirt on.

“The fuck?” I held my hand up in front of my eyes and she started laughing so hard I had to hit her on her back so she didn’t choke right in front of me. Whole time she’s naked as hell.

“You ever been skinny dipping?” she asked when she finally caught her breath.

Before waiting for me to answer she stepped out of her jeans and left them in the grass with her sandals. She walked backwards towards the water, still facing me, everything out, hands behind her head like she was being put to jail: “You next,” she said before she reached the edge of the dock and jumped in.

But anyway. I was drunk enough then that I didn’t even really think before going out on the dock and taking my own pants and shoes off. The whiskey was making everything warm anyway but the second the air hit my legs it dropped twenty something degrees. I heard Mary Beth yelp at something before swimming farther out in the lake.  

Then I closed my eyes and pulled my shirt off. I dropped it where I knew my other clothes were and heard the soft thud when it hit the rotten wooden planks. The air felt colder than I’d ever known a Kentucky night to be – it didn’t even feel like I was there anymore but I knew I was: the stars burned real bright above me. The sky still more purple than black. I opened my eyes and looked out over the water, the cicadas sayin something I couldn’t understand, the dark shape of Mary Beth’s head bobbing up and down. I thought I saw her nod. Honestly I still don’t know if she really did or if it was the alcohol or if it was just the way she was floating. But I thought she did so I lined up the edge of my toes to the edge of the dock and waved out at her.

“You’re cold, aren’t you?” she yelled.

I shook my head and gave her the finger. And then I jumped: air, air, air, then water. Even underneath the surface I could hear her laughing at my nipples giving away the real answer. 

*

There’s this Monday morning that comes back to me so hard sometimes that I think I can close my eyes and live it again. In it me and my daddy are sitting at the kitchen table – it’s early, real early, and my momma’s still asleep. God knows where my brother is. I’ve got this steaming hot cup of tea in front of me and I’m spooning globs of honey into it. It’s June. I’m ten days from being eighteen.

“Ease up, Luce,” my daddy says, “You want some tea with your honey?” He says this same dumb thing every morning and I fake a glare at him when he holds out his cup for me to add some to his. The sun streams through the window above the sink and if I had the time I could count every speck of dust in its path. His white baseball cap hanging right off the back off his chair. The bottoms of our cups burning circles in the kitchen table wood. We never remembered to use coasters no matter how much my momma reminded us. 

“What time you gotta work til today?” I know the answer but I ask anyway.

He knows I know the answer but he answers anyway by holding up seven fingers. And that’s all we gotta say. The window’s propped open. Someone somewhere’s mowing their grass. The radio stopped working a year ago and we never got round to getting it fixed but for some reason we still ain’t taken it off the kitchen table so it sits between us like a little wall.

We sit there in silence and drink our tea. He reads the newspaper and I watch the clock on the wall. Just like every morning. At five til eight he puts on his boots – these heavy chunky things that I used to stand in when I was a kid and clomp around the house pretending to be him. He straps on his belt and clips his helmet to it.

“I gotta go, girl,” he says when he stands, “I love ya.” I nod and let him kiss me on top of my head. Then I watch as he leaves, helmet bouncing against his hip. The kitchen screen slams behind him and then the door does too.

My daddy died eight hours after that. And after that day I never saw him again. Not at his funeral and not in his casket. They told us there wasn’t any way in hell they could recover his body. And I guess I never blamed them for that cause it ain’t no one’s fault but when I’m missing him real bad I think of this morning: the minutes before he started leaving for work, us still drinking honey with our tea. Cause right then nobody but God knew anything would ever happen to him. The sun was still picking up the dust in the air. Someone was still mowing their grass. Cause right then he hadn’t told me goodbye yet, or that he loved me. Right then I hadn’t said nothin back.

*

When I came up for air Mary Beth swam closer to me and splashed me in the face. I splashed her right back so both of us got a mouthful of that nasty lake water and got to worry later about getting worms. I told her this and then she grabbed my ankle when I wasn’t looking and I screamed and laughed and held her head underwater.

When we finally climbed out we didn’t have towels or nothing so we put our clothes right back on. The alcohol was wearing off, maybe from the cold, and we sat down in the grass by the lake and just watched the moon. When I looked over at Mary Beth I could see how half her face was covered in blue light. She was staring right ahead. She had this bump on her nose right at the bridge that she never stopped talking about and I remember thinking in that moment that she was dumb as hell for hating it.

“Hey,” I said. And now I wanna say I don’t know why I did it cause ain’t that what everyone says – but I do. Even now I do. Cause when she turned towards me – dirty jeans, clean face, damp hair  – I just kissed her full on, lips right on hers and pressing firm as I could. It didn’t last that long and most of what I remember about it is that when I pulled away my mouth made this real embarrassing sound. Like the sound your mouth makes when you pucker it and then accidentally let it go before you mean to. The kiss was wet too. Probably from the lake. Honestly it’s a real wonder we didn’t both get worms that night.

What I really remember is that afterwards I couldn’t look her in the eye. We both turned back to the water. I don’t think I expected her to be real talkative or anything but at a certain point I felt her just looking at me without saying nothing.

“What?” I said.

I ain’t dumb. I know enough to know what it means. Just like I know the preacher would never marry us – not that I’m thinkin about marrying her but you know what I mean. But when she looked back at me smiling and reached out to flick my wet hair I knew this too: I can kiss her over a stolen eighth of whiskey and swim with her in the April moon and if that ain’t something then God ain’t real. And I know he is cause I used to live with him.

*

The first memory I’ve got is of my daddy. It ain’t real clear but when I think about it I remember the same few things: him holding me up to a window and both us looking out, something smellin like saltwater. We must be high up somewhere cause all we can see is the tops of trees but there’s this red roof out in the distance.

“Ain’t that something?” he asks.

And that’s it. I don’t know where we’re at. I don’t know how old I am or how old he is or what my momma’s doing and if my brother’s even alive yet. But for some reason this is the kinda thing I been holding onto hard as hell recently. When I think about him I think about who was living under the red roof and sometimes I make up stories about them. Sometimes they’re from California and don’t know how they ended up here. Sometimes they got a kid and a dog. Sometimes they don’t want either. Sometimes they miss home real bad and wish they could move back but there ain’t nothing for them there no more. Sometimes they got blue skin. The point is. It’s real different every time.

But not him. Somehow he don’t ever change.

*

On Sunday I get to Abel’s Place before Mary Beth but I’m only there for a few minutes before I see her walking up. Radio tucked under her arm just like she said she would. I stand and wave at her like she did to me yesterday and bump her hip when she walks up.

“You brought it!” I reach for the radio.

“’Course I did. I told you I would.”

I mess with the knobs for a bit til we find something good. It’s a country channel and while I don’t listen to country really anymore I know Mary Beth likes it. The music covers the cemetery in something real sad, all slow acoustic guitar and sometimes a piano. We sit by my daddy’s grave – Abel, father husband friend – with the radio between us and we don’t really talk except to comment on the songs. Sometimes Mary Beth says she loves this song. Sometimes I tell her I’d never heard this song before and she gapes real hard at me til I reach over and close her mouth and say the flies are lookin for her. Some of those sometimes we just sit in the quiet of some man singing about something he’s missing.

It goes like this: when I was a kid there was this song that played all the time on the radio. I never really got the words and I still don’t know what it’s called. The radio stations don’t play it no more.

When I’m nineteen I hear it again. I’m sitting there with a girl I’ve known since I was nine and she fell off the monkey bars at recess. She was the first one there when my daddy died. She visits his grave with me every weekend. She lets me call the cemetery Abel’s Place even though her brother is buried here too. And when the song comes on we both go quiet – me from shock and her from I don’t know what ­– til I hear her laugh real soft.

“I ain’t heard this song in forever,” she says.

“You know this song?”

“Yeah, who don’t?”

“Where’d you hear it from?”

She thinks for a bit before she shakes her head. “I dunno. Why?”

“Just reminds me.”

“Of what?”

I don’t answer but instead nudge her shoe with mine. She makes a noise in the back of her throat and then we’re quiet. The radio’s static as hell but I can still hear the words alright. Something about moving out of the South and finding it big in the city. The song plays out and I wanna close my eyes: it’s almost the time of year where the honeysuckles start blooming and if you try real hard you can smell their nectar in the air. The daylilies are gonna start coming soon too. The other day I saw one with the tiniest opening at its tip and you just know something real red is growing beneath.

But then the song ends and before the next one starts Mary Beth stands and pulls down her shirt. The ground’s still damp from the rain yesterday and it’s left a wet spot on her pants.

“Next Saturday still alright?”

I nod and she nods back. She swings her braid over her shoulder and turns to leave but only gets a few feet away before she comes walking right back: “Listen,” she says in one big breath, “My ma’s gonna be out after dinner tonight. Do you maybe wanna come over?”

I look up at her. My daddy sits next to us.

Maybe, I say in my head. Then I say it out loud too.

*

After Mary Beth leaves it takes me a few minutes to realize that she’s forgotten her radio. The music’s still playin and I wrap my arms around my legs and pull my knees to my chest. The cicadas started talking a bit ago.

And then – I’m thinking of him. Not about how he died and not about how yellow the tape wrapped around the mine entrance looked and not about what it might feel like to get crushed by the most rock you’ve ever seen in your life. Not about how my momma didn’t talk for a week after. And not about how my brother moved out to Louisville last month without really saying bye to either of us. But I’m thinking of him, of my daddy before all that: the lines by his eyes when he smiled and how he always had coal stuck in them no matter how much he washed his face and the deodorant he wore that I used to say made him smell like the beach.

“How you know what the beach smell like?” he always asked. And I’d say I don’t and he’d ruffle up my hair and tell me he was gonna take us all one day. One time he told me a story about his friend who got swept out by the ocean and only found his way back after six months cause a dolphin helped him. I remember asking him to draw a picture of the dolphin for me. That was the most God-awful thing I’d ever seen.

And then – I’m thinking of Mary Beth. I know I been putting her off for too long now. And honestly she’s better than me cause I’d be mad as hell if someone kissed me and didn’t say jack about it for the next month. I been meaning to talk to her. I have. But feeling alright for the first time after your daddy dies almost feels like forgettin him.

Recently though I been seeing my momma get up more. Last week I came home and she was out shopping but there were muffins on the table. I don’t think she made them but they were sitting on this big red ceramic plate that I ain’t seen in almost a year. He got it for her the first month they were married and honestly it’s ugly as all hell but I know she really loves it.

Later that night I asked her if she still missed him.

“’Course,” she said. “Never won’t.” Then she paused and picked at a loose stitch in the couch. “But you don’t gotta feel guilty bout being happy.”

“Don’t you though?”

“Oh yeah. Every time.” She laughed. “But he ain’t gonna know.”

So anyway. It goes like this. I still feel him in the weeds behind my house and the firebugs in the summer and when the birds come round to sing in the mornings. I know his prayers have saved me more times than I can count. But missing him ain’t been easy and living on that’s even harder. She’s right. He ain’t gonna know either way. I stand and face west to the dying blue Kentucky light and I squint at the sky so hard I can’t see no more. I know you used to make up some of those stories you told me, I wanna say. ‘Course you did. I was just a kid then. The sun keeps going down but I know he can hear me. He had the best damn hearing outta anyone I’d ever known. Then I grab the radio and start walking. 

–

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Emma Huang is an undergraduate student at Duke University studying biology, English, and creative writing. She is applying to medical school this upcoming summer, and believes intensely in the intersection between medicine and humanities — that is, if they were a Venn diagram, it would be a circle. She also has a third degree black belt in taekwondo and another in judo.

© 2024, Emma Huang