Chapter 1 - The Weight of Clay and Kin
The porch light of the house on Glenwood Avenue did not cast a warm glow; it hummed with a low, parasitic frequency, attracting dead moths that accumulated in the cracked amber plastic casing. The air in that part of Columbus always tasted of coal dust from the old Norfolk Southern lines three blocks south and the flat, humid rot of the Scioto River when the summer pressure stayed low over the valley. It was a Tuesday evening in late June, the kind of night where the heat didn't dissipate after sundown but settled into the asphalt like grease into a rag.
I stood on the bottom step of the concrete porch, my fingers lightly touching the fabric of my light blue dress. It was a cotton shirt-dress with a crisp linen collar, something I had bought with my second paycheck from the regional library cataloging department. It felt too clean for the street. It smelled of lavender water and the steam iron I had used at five o'clock in my own small apartment across town—the apartment Wyatt and I had rented because the windows faced away from the city and the landlord didn't ask about our history.
Wyatt’s hand was a steady, heavy warmth against the small of my back. He was thirty-two, his palms rough from twelve years of dragging steel rebar and clearing foundation trenches before the regional development board bought out Campbell Infrastructure for seven million dollars in clean treasury notes. He still smelled of the yellow cedar shaving soap he used to clear the grime from his neck, and his dark hair was combed back with a water-based pomade that had begun to melt under the collar of his linen shirt.
"We don't have to stay for the dessert, Sadie," he murmured, his breath brushing the edge of my ear. His fingers shifted, his thumb hooking into the leather strap of my purse as if he were already preparing the weight for the walk back to the truck. "Your father’s already three highballs deep, and the way your sister’s looking at the corporate tax filing I left on the dashboard isn't doing my stomach any favors."
"Ten minutes more, Wyatt," I said, my voice kept flat, balanced on that narrow wire of domestic discipline I had spent twenty-four years constructing. "If we leave before the roast is off the table, Brenda will spend three weeks calling the branch manager at the library to ask if my payroll signature matches the registry. Let them have the announcement. Then we go."
The door didn't click; its wood had warped from forty years of Ohio winters, and it cleared the frame with a dry, splintering shriek.
My father, Gregory Davis, stood on the threshold. He wasn't wearing his evening flannel; he was in his old grey undershirt, the one with the yellowish grease stains around the armpits from the years he spent repairing hydraulic jacks at the state farm pool. His skin had that specific, thin crimson color that came from three decades of blended whiskey and a liver that had begun to shrink away from his lower ribs. In his right hand, he wasn't holding his glass. He was holding a piece of paving brick he had pried from the edge of the drainage gully by the driveway—a heavy, red clay block with two jagged corners where the frost had split the aggregate.
"You're not going back to the apartment, Sadie," he said. His voice wasn't loud. It had the mechanical, indifferent rhythm of a man reading a parts list from a greasy catalog. "The truck’s stayed in the driveway too long. The neighbors are looking through their screens."
"Gregory," my mother's voice came from the darkness behind him. Brenda Davis didn't step into the amber light; she remained in the narrow shadow of the coat rack, her silhouette thin and hooked like an old wire hanger. "She’s got that blue dress on. The one she bought with the county money. She thinks she’s a clerk now."
"We're leaving, Mr. Davis," Wyatt said. He didn't take his hand off my back; he moved his weight forward, his shoulder crossing in front of my left arm like a timber wedge. "The dinner’s done. The date’s set for October twelfth. If you want the registry papers, I’ll have the firm mail them to the legal address on Monday."
The brick didn't whistle through the air. It was too heavy for a clean swing. My father didn't throw it from his shoulder like a ball; he lunged with his whole torso, his arm coming around in a short, thick arc that caught the light of the amber bulb for a fraction of a second before the clay met my face.
The impact wasn't a sound. It was an absolute white density that filled my skull from the bridge of my nose to the base of my cerebellum.
There was no crack of bone in my ears—not yet—only the heavy, dead thud of a solid object meeting wet soil. My left eyebrow didn't sting; it went completely numb, followed instantly by a thick, oily warmth that broke over my eyelashes and ran down the side of my nose into my mouth. It tasted of old iron and the vinegar from the salad we had eaten twenty minutes before.
My knees didn't bend; they simply dissolved into the concrete of the step.
"Sadie! Sadie, look at me!" Wyatt's voice was down in the ground with me, his arms coming under my armpits with a frantic, uncoordinated strength that tore the linen collar of my dress. He was dragging me backward into the dry dirt of the flowerbed where my mother’s hostas had turned yellow from the drought. "Keep your eye open! Don't look at the light, Sadie!"
I tried to pull my left eyelid up. The muscle moved, but the world on that side was a solid, black velvet curtain that smelled of copper. With my right eye, through a smear of red grease that turned the amber porch light into a jagged star, I saw my mother step onto the concrete planks.
She wasn't holding her apron. Her hands were tucked into the pockets of her cardigan, her thin lips curved upward in that dry, rhythmic chuckle she used whenever the kitchen cat caught its leg in the cellar grate.
"Let's see if Wyatt still loves you with that face," she said. She didn't look at the blood on the hostas; she looked at the blue dress, which was now turning a heavy, dark purple where my chin touched the cloth. "Let's see if he takes you to the country club with your nose sitting behind your ear."
My father didn't look down at me. He dropped the broken half of the brick onto the grass by the garden hose. His fingers were covered in red clay dust, and he wiped them against the thigh of his trousers with three long, deliberate strokes.
"I warned you," he muttered, looking out toward the dark line of the railyard. "The Campbell boy belongs on the other side of the porch. We told you that before the papers were drawn."
The screen door rattled again, lighter this time. Melanie stepped out. She was nineteen, her hair bleached to the color of wet straw and pinned back with two plastic rhinestone clips that caught the star-burst light from the porch bulb. She was wearing her good green wrap-dress, the one she had made Wyatt pay for by telling him she needed an outfit for her secretarial entry exam. Her nails were a bright, artificial pink, freshly cured under the UV lamp she kept on her vanity table.
"I told you she wouldn't move," Melanie said, her voice small and tight with an irritation that had nothing to do with my face and everything to do with the fact that the grease from the road was coming through her thin-soled shoes. "She always stays until the ice melts."
"We tried talking to her nicely, Mel," my mother said, sighing as she adjusted the collar of her cardigan. "We told her the family name has to stay on the main line. She’s too stubborn for her own good."
Wyatt stood up. His linen shirt was ruined, the front of it covered in my blood where he had held my head against his ribs. His face was the color of skimmed milk, his jaw locked so tight the muscle below his ear looked like a walnut under the skin.
"You're all sick," he whispered. He didn't look at my father; he looked at Melanie, his hand reaching into his pocket for his cellular phone. "You're going to prison, Gregory. Every single one of you."
My father didn't run. He took two steps down the concrete path, his old work boots heavy against the cement. "No," he said, pointing a thick, scarred thumb at Melanie’s shoulder. "You're just engaged to the wrong daughter, boy. Melanie should have been the one you chose. Sadie’s been taking the cream off this house since she was twelve years old."
"She’s selfish," my mother added from the top step. "She always has been."
Melanie looked down at me where I lay among the yellow hosta leaves. Her pink nails twisted her green skirt into a tight knot. "And you still chose her," she murmured, her voice dropping into that low, flat whine she used when she didn't get the larger piece of the cobbler. "Even after I went down to the office with the coffee. Even after I sat on the fender of your truck for two hours in the rain."
Wyatt brought the phone to his face, his thumb hitting the glass. Before his finger could find the emergency sequence, my father’s boot came off the grass. It wasn't a high kick; it was a short, heavy jab with the steel toe of his work shoe that caught Wyatt’s wrist from below.
The phone left his hand with a sharp, plastic whistle, striking the third concrete step before the screen exploded into a web of white silver.
May you like
"No one's calling anybody," my father growled.
Wyatt didn't yell. He lunged forward, his weight driving my father back into the old rose bushes that grew along the foundation wall. The thorny branches snapped with a series of dry, hollow cracks as the two men hit the siding of the house. Neither my mother nor Melanie moved their hands from their pockets. They stood on the concrete like two women waiting for a bus, their faces entirely unblinking in the amber light as the blood from my eyebrow began to pool in the hollow of my collarbone.
