Heaven, My Home (Highway 59 #2)

by Attica Locke

“Here,” he called, the sound like a single drop of water on cotton as the Spanish moss ate the words out of his mouth whole, needing the cries of lost souls as sure as it needed the blood of the bald cypress to survive in the swamp.

He tried to remember the boy was nine, again pictured himself at that age, hair pilled between cuttings, buckteeth filmed in some sugary substance, the times he’d acted out at his elementary school—stealing cash and candy from a teacher’s purse in the lounge, pulling fire alarms, calling his phys. ed. teacher a jackass—always asking the school principal to call his uncle William all the way in Huntsville, a whole county away, where he lived with Naomi and his real children (as Darren thought of his uncle’s new family) instead of Clayton. Anything to get William’s attention, to force the man to claim him again, to step in as the father figure he wanted most.