(AN: Hello guys happy Saturday I hope everyone is having a good day and is staying safe its cold out. I will have a chapter that is not a chapter after todays chaps. I will be a poll anyways enjoy the chaps today.)
July – August 1992 · Medford, Texas
The highway home always looked longer on the return trip, like the road had stretched while I was gone. Dad drove with the window cracked just enough to let in heat and the smell of hay. The radio was low, old country, mostly steel guitar and singers who sounded like they'd worked before they sang. We didn't say much. With Dad, silence wasn't an absence. It was respect for the parts of a day that didn't need commentary.
Telephone poles ticked by at regular intervals. I watched their shadows strobe across the dashboard and let my brain count without meaning to. Dad drummed two fingers on the wheel, the same quiet rhythm he used when he was deciding whether a job needed a wrench or just a better look.
"Classes went all right?" he asked, eyes forward.
"They did," I said. "Finals went… controlled."
He huffed what passed for a laugh. "Controlled's good."
We turned into our street under an afternoon sky so bright it made the houses look like they'd been erased and redrawn. The mailbox still leaned, the oak in the front yard still dropped leaves on a schedule that ignored seasons. Meemaw's porch light hummed even in daylight, like it didn't trust the sun to do its job.
Mom met us at the door with the administrative precision of someone who'd been waiting an hour but would never admit it. "You look thin," she said, pulling me into a hug anyway. "Are you eating? You forget to eat when you're thinking."
"I ate," I said into her shoulder. "I just also thought."
She sniffed, half a laugh, half a sigh, and let me go. Missy slid into view behind her, bare feet, ponytail, smirk already prepared. "Well, well," she said. "If it isn't the prodigy who can't reach the top shelf. Welcome back."
"Hello, Miss," I said.
Georgie appeared from the hallway, tossed me a set of keys I didn't need, and thumped my shoulder. "There he is. College boy. I'll set you up with a proper burger later. You ain't lived till you've had one I flipped."
"Statistically false," Sheldon said from the kitchen table without looking up. "Most human lives do not include a burger prepared by George Cooper Jr., therefore your assertion is logically unsound."
Dad walked past us toward the sink, shook his head, and muttered, "God help me," like a man who knew He was busy.
Meemaw took her time, as if good entrances should be paced. She stepped onto the porch, hands on hips, and smiled at me like she had just solved her own favorite problem. "You been living by clocks again, sugar," she said, pulling me into a hug that smelled like powder and cigarettes and the inside of her car.
"Guilty," I said. "I'm on parole."
"Good," she said into my ear. "Brains like yours burn hot. Best learn to idle."
"I've been practicing."
She let me go and patted my cheek once. "We'll see."
The house fit me like a shirt I'd outgrown in the sleeves but kept wearing anyway. The distances were shorter than I remembered. The air held fewer questions. I put my bag in my room and looked at my old desk, the scratch on the surface from when I was eleven and decided my compass needed to be a real compass. The gouge was still there. So was the inside joke.
The week slid into a rhythm without asking. I woke early and ran the two lane roads before the heat took the day hostage. The sky went from pink to white in ten minutes. Dogs barked at fences, then forgot why. A tractor coughed somewhere past the tree line. When I got back, Mom had coffee and a list, and we both pretended the list happened to be out where I could see it. I did the fixes anyway: porch light that flickered when it shouldn't, a loose cabinet door, the towel rod that surrendered at a glance.
Dad and I replaced a section of fence too, passing tools back and forth without ceremony. He never made instructions into lectures. He let the work explain itself, and I listened. There's a difference between knowing how something functions and knowing how it behaves, and fences, like people, have both.
On the third day, Missy cornered me at the kitchen table with a worksheet and the expression of someone who'd rather be anywhere else doing anything else. The ceiling fan clicked like a slow metronome overhead. Lemonade sweated in two glasses between us, the condensation making rings we'd hear about later.
"Math," she said, as if it were an insult. "Make it stop."
"Making it stop is above my pay grade," I said, pulling the worksheet closer. "But we can make it behave."
She slouched, pencil tapping. "Why does this matter? Sheldon already finished the whole book, and you probably did it before breakfast."
"Different muscles," I said. "He was born with a high IQ, sure." I paused. Words matter, especially between siblings. "But you, you got all the EQ."
She squinted. "Is that some science thing?"
"Emotional intelligence," I said. "The part that tells you what people need before they say it. You've got a real talent for that, Miss. Most of us spend years trying to learn it."
Her pencil stopped tapping. She looked at me in a way that felt older than both of us. "You actually think I'm smart?"
"I think you're brilliant in a way tests can't measure," I said. "You read people like I read equations."
The corner of her mouth curled. "So I'm the better Cooper?"
"Statistically impossible," I said. "But emotionally probable."
She threw the pencil at me. I caught it and set it gently back on the table. The fan clicked. We bent over the worksheet, and I watched her face shift from boredom to concentration to that small, quiet satisfaction that comes from making a thing make sense. It suited her.
Medford's Fourth of July smelled like smoke and grass and food that forgot about subtlety. The fairgrounds were a collage of folding chairs, coolers, kids sticky with popsicles, and men acting like they could predict wind with their foreheads. A brass band worked hard at a Sousa medley that nearly survived the heat.
We found a spot near the pond, where the water could mirror the sky's performance later. Georgie set up near the grill with friends, all of them talking louder than the music like volume improved flavor. Sheldon planted himself with a notebook and started calculating the safest distance from any conceivable trajectory before Mom confiscated both the page and the pen with a look that said not today.
Dr. Sturgis arrived wearing a straw hat and a T shirt that read Physics: It's What Matters. He approached like a man who'd found his natural habitat and it was shaped like a hypothesis. "Evening!" he said. "Ah, Stephen. Perfect timing. We were discussing parabolic trajectories and the path of a shell under the influence of gravity. I've brought a diagram."
Meemaw swatted his arm. "No diagrams, John. People are trying to relax."
He looked genuinely wounded for a second, then rallied. "Well, then, I could simply point out the aesthetic of entropy rendered in magnesium."
"Or you could sit," Meemaw said, patting the folding chair next to her.
I watched them, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that some equations really did look like joy when you gave them permission to burn.
Paige came up in conversation without effort. Meemaw poured lemonade and asked, casual as weather, "Anyone special at that big university of yours?"
"Define special," I said.
She raised her eyebrows. "You tell me."
"Paige," I said. "We study well together."
"Mm hmm," she said, as she gave me a slight smirk.
The first burst went up at full dark, a white sphere that cracked open and fell as silver rain. The pond caught it and made it twice as bright. The crowd made the sound people make when spectacle starts, a collective oh that comes from the part of the brain that doesn't care about context.
The show built itself the way good proofs do, each line justifying the next. Red chrysanthemums, gold willows, blues that looked chemically suspicious. Dr. Sturgis narrated until Meemaw put a finger to his lips without looking, and he nodded, chastened and happy to be chastened.
Between blasts, Meemaw leaned toward me. "Pretty things burn quick," she said. "That's what makes 'em worth looking at."
I thought about Austin and how it burned in my head. Long nights and short sleep, the library's fluorescent lungs, lectures that sparked and faded and left afterimages. I thought about Paige leaning over a problem like it was daring her to stop.
"Even explosions have purpose if they light the right sky," I said.
She bumped her shoulder into mine. "You always did talk pretty for a kid."
The finale hit like a door opening and closing fast. The crowd clapped because clapping is what you do when you feel too many things to measure any of them. The smoke hung low, heavy enough to taste, and people folded chairs and argued about traffic as if the sky hadn't just tried to teach them about impermanence.
The drive home after the fireworks was quiet except for Sheldon counting the number of shells launched versus visible returns. When we pulled into the driveway, the air was still warm, and the smell of smoke followed us in.
Dinner had been early, but Mom reheated leftovers anyway because that's what she does when she needs something to organize. Dad sat at the table, elbow propped, staring into a glass of iced tea like it might hand him instructions. Georgie came in last, slower than usual, face set in that way people wear when they've already decided the truth costs more than silence.
"I need to say something," he started.
Mom looked up first. "What's wrong?"
He swallowed hard. "Mandy's pregnant."
The words landed like dropped silverware.
For a second, all I could hear was the refrigerator motor clicking on. Missy's fork stopped
midair. Sheldon blinked twice.
"Don't," I said, and he stopped.
Mom's hand went to her throat, and Dad leaned back slow, the way you do when you're bracing for a punch you can't dodge.
"How far?" Dad asked quietly.
"Just found out," Georgie said. "About a month, maybe less."
Mom closed her eyes. "Lord, give me patience," she whispered, and stood. She walked to the sink, turned on the water, and let it run without using it.
Meemaw set her glass down. "All right," she said. "World ain't ended yet. You two'll need to talk, and you'll both need to listen. Probably in that order."
Nobody shouted. That almost made it worse.
After a minute, Dad said, "We'll figure it out."
When Georgie left the kitchen, he didn't look at anyone, but I caught the tremor in his hands. I wanted to fix something, but there wasn't a system for this. Only time and choices.
The days after the Fourth slowed into the kind of time that doesn't ask you to prove you deserve it. I ran in the mornings and came back to sweat cooling into salt maps on my shirt. I fixed what was broken without narrating why. Dad and I changed the oil in the truck and didn't need to say much while we did.
In the late afternoons, I read on Meemaw's porch swing while cicadas synced up in the live oaks like background code. The swing's chain squeaked in a repeating pattern. Sometimes Meemaw joined me with a deck of cards and a glass of something that pretended to be iced tea. We played gin and cheated in the same predictable ways.
One evening, the heat loosened its grip enough that the air felt cooperative. Meemaw came out and sat beside me.
"You're quieter than last summer," she said.
"Trying it out," I said.
"Good. Still water sees more."
We watched a kid on a bike ride past without hands. A neighbor's dog barked at a butterfly and then apologized by wagging too hard.
"You think too much," she said softly. "Ain't saying stop. Just don't forget to let the thinking sit for a bit. Like biscuits."
"Let the thoughts rise?" I asked.
"And don't overwork 'em," she said. "You knead too long, you get rocks."
She nudged me. "That girl at school. The one you study with. She a good one?"
"She is," I said.
"Just make sure you can breathe around it."
"I can," I said, and realized I meant it.
She told me about a clock that only kept time when tilted. "Dead level, it ran fast. Crooked, it told the truth."
"Imperfection as calibration," I said.
"You'll find your tilt," she said. "World don't need you straight. World needs you steady."
The porch light clicked on. The swing squeaked. I didn't try to solve anything.
The night before we drove back to Austin, I packed my bag and unpacked it and packed it again. My room looked the way memory wants rooms to look. I sat at the old desk and opened my notebook.
I wrote:
Home is a boundary condition,
not what changes, but what defines the change.
Then, smaller:
Even stillness is a kind of motion.
I closed the notebook and listened to the house settle. The fan carved the air into manageable pieces. I lay down without counting anything at all.
Tomorrow, motion would resume. Tonight, I let equilibrium do the work.
Thanks for reading, feel free to write a comment, leave a review, and Power Stones are always appreciated.
recently I've been working on some other projects two originals and two fanfictions they are all in the early stages gathering all the info the two others that I was working on are still in the works I want to get about 100 chaps before I release here even if they are unliked, I like them so...