I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year. My job as a soft-handed professor has done nothing to prepare me for the chores she has written out for me, all of them outside. On my second afternoon, after setting fire to a pile of brush (so it can get hotter), I seek refuge in running errands, but the air-conditioning in mom’s old Civic is too weak—low on freon?—to cool my deep-fried nerves. I feel a terrible certainty that I will behave badly toward the first person who gives me the tiniest pretense. My barbed tongue is eager to offer a lashing; my middle finger itches to be unholstered. I’m not well.
It’s five months before the election, and all the Trump signs along the road make me hotter. So does the parade of tractor trailers rushing dead pine trees down Highway 341 toward the paper mill while empty trucks return to the woods for more. An army of smaller trucks surrounds me, piloted like weapons, hungry for space, many pulling trailers packed with tools and equipment and bearing MAGA bumper stickers. I grew up here, and I wonder yet again: What’s wrong with my people that they believe a self-serving billionaire would care anything about them? Can we talk about this?
My wife is in Wisconsin, taking care of our animals and our house. I’m glad she’s not here suffering the heat and the traffic and my bad mood. We’ve been talking for many years about whether we could retire here. Right now my answer feels easy: No.
My first stop is AutoZone, because Mom says her wiper blades need replacing. I park beneath the only sliver of shade and go inside, where a stuttering twenty-something clerk recommends wipers with built-in Rain-X for sixty-nine dollars. Mom will protest the price, but I say fine. The clerk’s stutter endears him to me. We’re kindred spirits, fellow outcasts, out of place where we should feel at home. This makes me less embarrassed to ask for help installing them. I wish I could handle such a task. Most men learn these things from their fathers, but mine was a salesman Mom divorced when I was two. I’m a hopeless handyman. I once hung a bathroom cabinet upside down, towel rack toward the ceiling, then couldn’t get it down.
“You want me to show you how to put them on?” he says, before I can ask.
“Sure,” I reply, though I have no intention of taking notes.
We go outside. I apologize for making him come out in the heat. He claims it’s not a problem and seems to mean it. His jeans and full beard make me hot just looking at him. I’m wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, wallet and phone tucked in the front pockets. He unsnaps the old wiper blades and snaps on the new, narrating instructions as he goes. Then he tells me to try them. They work well. If only there were rain.
“Is there a quick way to test my freon?” I ask.
“A freon-tester,” he answers. I see in his eyes the look of an overworked teacher dealing with a failing student.
“Right. Do you have one?”
“I could sell you one.”
I’d have to ask him to use it for me, and I fear our friendship is over. I decline and speed away, headed to Home Depot to buy my mother a new lightweight garden hose and nozzle, the type my wife and I use. Mom has asked for neither, but yesterday she nearly tripped over the heavy hose she keeps curled on the ground, and I thought of my ninety-year-old father-in-law, who fell and broke his hip and landed in a nursing home. My mother has lived alone a long time. Her eighty-year-old sister lives next door, in the house they grew up in. Her sister’s husband, a mechanic retired from the county, has health issues and can provide little help beyond calling 911. If my wife and I retired here, we could assist them all in their final years. Isn’t that what good folks would do?
On the New Jesup Highway I pass the Winn-Dixie where, in high school, I bagged groceries, stocked shelves, and unloaded produce trucks at 5:30 AM. The produce manager once gave me pot so strong I got lost driving through my own town. I pass a house with a row of Trump banners strung on a wooden fence and more banners on the porch. I pass a landscaping business owned by an old high school classmate. I’m not tempted to stop and chat. I’m a grumpy, nostalgia-hating city slicker who’s lost touch with the natives. If my wife and I did retire here, would we have any friends?
Home Depot’s unshaded parking lot might as well be hell’s living room. I walk through the exhaust fumes of running trucks and think I smell my skin burning. In the garden section I find the hose and nozzle, then rush to the rear of a long line that IS. NOT. MOVING. Two women ahead of me lean on their full carts of flowers and swap banalities about the beautiful plants they bought and what else they need. I sigh too loudly. I’m not a good man.
When at last I get to the register, I feel for my wallet and come up empty.
I check the other pocket. Phone, yes; wallet, no.
I set the hose and nozzle down and walk/run back through the blazing parking lot to Mom’s car. Surely I will find my wallet between the seats or on the floorboard or in the middle console. No, no, no. I retrace my steps through the garden section. Nothing. On my way out, I stop at the register, where there is suddenly no line, and ask the clerk if anyone has turned in a wallet.
“Might check lost and found,” she says.
I’m thinking AutoZone is the better bet. I must have left it on the counter after paying for the wiper blades.
Sitting in Mom’s car, I call the store. I feel sure some nice woman will answer and say, It’s right here where you left it, honey, and we’ll share a laugh about our capacity for absentmindedness and our appreciation for happy endings.
A tired-sounding woman says, “Hold on.”
AutoZone offers no hold music. The silence is unsettling. My windows are up, engine off. The heat is penance for my foolishness. My wallet holds two credit cards, thirty dollars in cash, my Hmong’s Golden Eggrolls punch card, my library card, and—most important—my driver’s license. Isn’t that required for me to board my flight home? Will I be stranded in Georgia for as long as it takes to get a replacement? I fear telling my wife the news.
The AutoZone woman returns: “No. Nobody’s seen it.”
I want to ask her to look again, but I decide to go search myself.
Such traffic. Where did all these people come from? Since I grew up here, Glynn County’s population has grown from sixty thousand to eighty-five thousand, and I think most of them are now crawling between Home Depot and AutoZone. I feel weirdly naked and untethered without my license. When I ran these roads in high school, I lost my license for getting too many speeding tickets. Then I got caught driving with a suspended license, and my hardworking single mom drove me to Waycross for a special driver’s-ed program I resented having to attend. I was a grumpy young man too.
The news on NPR is about the decline of affirmative action in college admissions and the elimination of government DEI programs in many states, a whitewashing effort led by MAGA legislators who believe inequity is entirely self-made, never institutional. Voters in Glynn County went 61 percent for Trump in 2020. Our more rural neighbor to the west, Brantley County, voted 90 percent for Trump, including my aunt and uncle, devout Christians and kind people whose congregation would have asserted that Trump was the godliest choice.
It wasn’t until I left Georgia for the University of Oregon’s MFA program that I learned I had a Southern accent, which meant certain preconceptions greeted me after I said hello, and which is why I’m still defensive about stereotypes that associate Southern accents with ignorance. I was happy to have left home at first, but then I missed Georgia. I missed the beauty of the marshes and rivers I saw from my kayak, the woods I biked through, the diverse and playful voices of real-life characters, the food. Then I went a while without missing it. Then I returned home after grad school and worked a year as a bartender before landing the teaching job that took me to North Carolina and eventually led to a tenured gig in Wisconsin, where I’ve lived for eighteen years and where people still ask, “Where are you from?” I don’t mind. I’ll ask them too, and then we’re off and running, talking about the weather and families and ideas.
I admire my cousin in rural North Carolina for how he engages with people who hold radically different ideas than him. At the height of COVID, during a school-board meeting crowded with Fauci-hating mask opponents, he asked the crowd, “What would Andy Griffith do? Wouldn’t Andy want us to look after each other? Wouldn’t he bless us to do as we please in our private homes, then ask that we be courteous when sharing public air?” In the parking lot after the meeting, my cousin approached his loudest foe and invited him for coffee. They met, talked peacefully, rehashed their favorite Andy Griffith episodes, and traded phone numbers.
This same cousin tells me of a guy he knows who’s designing recreational spaces where political opponents can come together. One such space is a building where wrestling matches occur on one side and poetry readings on the other. In the middle is a bar where people meet. A couple of weeks after it opened, my cousin swears, a wrestler asked the manager if he could read his own poetry. He did and received the requisite finger snaps and felt like a champion. Did a poet wrestle? I hope so. I hope he delivered a poetry body slam.
I told this story to an English-professor friend, who said, “Every time I attend a poetry reading now, I’m going to imagine who could be on the other side.”
I’ve already imagined the villain who stole my wallet. He looks very much like the man I see now in the AutoZone lot, his truck and trailer parked across four spaces, one of which was occupied by my mom’s Civic a half hour ago. The man has his head beneath the truck’s hood, replacing or removing an engine part. I park in a space that’s not a space, get out, and scan the ground around the truck. No wallet. The man beneath the hood clearly would’ve seen it had it been lying on the ground. It’s in his pocket, is what I’m thinking. I stand there, picturing his stone-faced denial, feeling powerless to dispute it. He must see me, hands on my hips, emitting despair like black exhaust from a tailpipe.
Without looking up, his hands still working, he speaks: “You looking for your wallet? I carried it inside. They’ve got it in the safe in there.”
I want to hug him. I thank him instead.
Inside, my stuttering friend recognizes me, hands me my wallet with a smile, and returns to his customer. I don’t even check the contents. I trust the man who returned it. Outside, I thank him again and make some inane comment about my being lucky he came along when he did.
“Glad you got it back,” he says, still not looking at me, as if to say, No big deal.
Instead of returning to Home Depot, I go home and tell my mother the wallet story, including the failed trip to get her a new hose but leaving out the parts about my intolerance and hot temper and thoughts about how this place has changed over the forty years I’ve been coming and going and losing and finding my way as I try and fail and try again to be a better man.
“You paid sixty-nine dollars for wipers?” she says.
“With built-in Rain-X.”
“I don’t like those hoses,” she says. “They’re too cheap.”
I ask if she heard the part about losing and finding my wallet.
“Yep. That’s a miracle.”
Miracle might be a stretch, but I agree.
On my last night in Georgia I sit with Mom on her back porch, facing the river at dusk—my favorite time of day, when the air turns soft and the oak trees whisper their secrets. My uncle sees us there and drives over on his mule, a camo-colored ATV with a small truck bed. He was busy on it earlier, using his grabber to pick up pecan limbs and downed Spanish moss, so he and I didn’t speak when I walked over to say goodbye to my beloved aunt, another in a collection of women my wife says I’m lucky to have grown up around.
“I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye earlier,” my uncle says now, staying in his ATV while he talks. He brags that he’s feeling good and hasn’t needed his oxygen tank for three days. Then he lights a cigarette. He talks of the first-ever garden his grandson has planted out back; my uncle helps him with it from the comfort of his mule in the mornings and at dusk—the heat and humidity in between make him fight to breathe.
“I know what you mean,” I say.
Yesterday morning he commented to me about the mess the world is in and how it will stay that way until Trump can turn things around again. I didn’t respond. There was no question in his voice to invite a conversation. Then at lunch in his dining room—my grandmother’s old dining room, which I know so well—while we ate fried shrimp and grits, I noticed the chair between us held a pistol, close enough for him to reach it. His safe is packed with other guns.
We pause a moment now. Look toward the river.
“Matthew?” he says.
Hearing my full name delivered so gently—as my grandmother always spoke it—softens me. I’m ready to hear whatever question he’s about to fire my way.
“Is it this quiet where you live?”
I pause to consider. “It’s quiet,” I say. “But not this quiet.”
“They’s some people can’t live with this kind of quiet.”
Neither Mom nor I offer any words that would intrude upon the silence.
After a while my good uncle says, “Guess I’d better get to the house before dark.” But he doesn’t move. He’s in no hurry.