Read Online Waiting for Augusta by Jessica Lawson - Free Book Online

Walter Hagen, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, and Ben Hogan. I didn’t hear my name come up when they were drinking to things. That’s around the time I started noticing that something was stuck in my throat, though I didn’t realize that it was a golf ball until after Daddy died.
    â€œHey, Daddy? How come you haven’t said anything about Uncle Luke? He’s in Georgia. Maybe he could help.” The last day Uncle Luke was with us, he and Daddy had a terrible fight. Woke me up in the middle of the night with the yelling and pounding and breaking of things. The next morning Mama drove Uncle Luke to the bus station, and I hadn’t heard his name mentioned since. But it didn’t make much sense to hold a grudge in purgatory.
    â€œHe’s right in Augusta. You know that. And we’re not getting help from him. You hear me? You stay away from Luke.”
    â€œYes, sir.” I knew that voice. That was his shut-down voice. It had an edge and a warning in it not to push him. I wondered where he’d gotten that voice from and if I’d inherit that from him along with his looks.
    â€œHey, don’t you get quiet on me, son,” Daddy said. “I know that tone in your voice. That’s your ‘I’m giving up on you’ voice. You’ve got more fight in you than that, don’t you? Don’t go getting upset when people talk hard to you, your father included. You curl up like a flower at night the second you get told something you don’t want to hear, boy.”
    He’s right , said a crow flying overhead. That’s just what you do .
    â€œWhy don’t you tell me something about yourself,” Daddy said. “It takes an awful lot out of me to talk.”
    I stopped walking. The golf ball in my throat got real heavy. Who has a father who says something like “Tell me about yourself,” like they were strangers instead of part of each other? Then again, I couldn’t recall my daddy ever asking me to tell him anything other than what he’d already taught me.
    â€œOkay.”
    My childhood was flooded with names of golfer people I didn’t give a flip about, so I figured I’d do him a favor and skip over names. I didn’t think he’d want to hear about nice Miss Stone and mean Mr. Underwood and pretty Erin Courtney. I didn’t tell him how my best friend was MayTalbot, or at least she had been, or how there was an unofficial Negro lunch table at our school, or how May had spoken little since she started coming to Hilltop Primary and even less since Mr. Talbot’s barbecue business burned to the ground around the time Bobby Jones died last December. I didn’t tell him that I’d been mourning someone important, too, or how part of me knew it was my fault that I’d lost her.
    I didn’t think he’d noticed that I never hung around with Bill Sweeney or Davey Burr or John Conner anymore, since they were all at the private school now. Their parents didn’t want them mixing with me anymore. I stopped by to play when I saw them all over at Davey’s house one day, but Bill shook his head and pointed at me to go home. I might have colored germs on me from staying at the integrated school, he’d said.
    And I knew for a fact Daddy wouldn’t want to know the names I’d been called for talking to myself and drawing pictures of trees outside school windows.
    So I told him about how some boy had brought a salamander to school and put it right on a teacher’s head, and the teacher didn’t even notice because she had so much hairspray on. I told him how the halls and classrooms were less crowded this year, how the girls’ bathroom toilet overflowed one day and flooded the hallway, and how the principal, Mr. Bottom, had come in one day to find his office covered in toilet paper.
    He chuckled a few times and didn’t once interrupt to tell me how the legendary golfer Bobby Jones had said that some