Hunny

Chapter 7: Three Days, No Air, and a Toddler Full of Screams

Lisbeth was one and a half, and her lungs were as strong as her mother’s pride—capable of rattling windows, nerves, and the occasional stranger’s sympathy. The Navy had released E.C., honorable and quiet as ever, his duffel bag packed with folded memories and letters from home. He stepped off that bus from the base for the last time, with the same soft-eyed steadiness he’d had since boyhood, the kind that made people trust him without knowing why.

Hunny didn’t cry. Hunny never cried. She rolled her lipstick on in one practiced sweep, snapped the cap shut, and said, “Well, looks like you’re mine again.”

It was the closest she’d ever come to a love poem.

They packed everything they owned into a rust-speckled sedan—no air conditioning, no leg room, no plan beyond “drive east and hope the car holds together.” The backseat was a battlefield of toys, cracker crumbs, and one toddler who could wail louder than a church organ on Easter Sunday.

San Francisco slipped behind them like a dream dissolving in waves. The fog, the hills, the salt in the air—it all faded in the rearview mirror until it felt like something they’d imagined. Ahead lay Arkansas. Home. Or whatever version of it still waited for them after years of distance and duty.

Day One

The first day was merciful. Lisbeth napped through the California border, her curls stuck to her forehead, her thumb tucked in her mouth like a truce offering. She woke somewhere outside Phoenix, blinking at the sun as if it had personally offended her. Then she demanded crackers and cooed off and on-sometimes sweet and sometimes it sounded more like a protest chant.

E.C. smiled at her through the rearview mirror. Hunny rolled her eyes but softened, just a little.

Day Two

By the second day, the heat turned cruel.

The sedan’s vinyl seats clung to Hunny’s legs like she was sitting on sticky tape, not a car seat. Her patience peeled off in layers, each one thinner than the last. Lisbeth cycled through every octave of misery—crying, whining, sobbing, then starting over again like she was practicing scales.

Hunny rattled the last of the ice cubes in a cup that had held real coldness two states ago. Now it was just a memory of relief.

“Lord, child,” Hunny snapped, twisting in her seat, hair sticking to her temples. “You got the whole damn sky to scream into, and you picked this car?”

E.C. didn’t say much. He never did. He drove with one hand on the wheel, the other reaching back now and then to pat Lisbeth’s head—gentle, steady, the human equivalent of a cool cloth on a fevered brow.

“She’s just tired, Hun,” he murmured.

“I am too,” Hunny muttered. “But I ain’t hollerin’ like a banshee.” Hunny had always held everyone, even infants, to her version of appropriate behavior. If it was unacceptable to her, it was unacceptable, period!

Patience was a virtue Hunny lacked and would continue to lack throughout her existence. She had other virtues—loyalty, fire, a spine that refused to bend—but patience was not among them.

They stopped at a gas station outside Albuquerque, where the air shimmered like a mirage. Hunny marched Lisbeth to the restroom sink and splashed water on her face, muttering, “Lord help us both.” Lisbeth blinked, hiccupped, and reached for her mother’s necklace with sticky fingers. Hunny sighed and let her.

It was the closest she came to tenderness that day.

Day Three

By the third day, Lisbeth was wilted and sticky, her curls matted with sweat, her cheeks flushed with cranky grief. She had cried herself into a kind of exhausted trance, staring out the window as if the passing landscape and sweltering heat might become something more bearable.

But Hunny kept her eyes forward.

Her hometown was calling—not sweetly, not gently, but insistently, like an old wound that still itched. She wasn’t ready to face it. But she was done waiting.

Arrival

They pulled into Arkansas just after sunset. E.C. was exhausted from lack of sleep, the heat, the crying, and Hunny's impatience. They couldn't afford a motel, so he had slept in intervals by pulling off the side of the road now and then.

Three days. No air conditioning. A marriage still intact. A toddler asleep with her thumb in her mouth and a streak of peanut butter across her cheek like war paint.

Hunny had known this house. A childhood friend lived there, which seemed like a lifetime ago. The house looked smaller than Hunny remembered. The trees looked taller. The road looked shorter. Funny how everything changes when you’re the one who’s grown.

And it wasn’t even their house, not really. It was a place the Preacher had found for them—a little rental owned by a church member who believed veterans deserved a break. The man had told the Preacher, “If that boy served his country, the least I can do is shave the rent.” And so the deal was struck. A reasonable price, a decent roof, and a chance to start over without drowning in bills before they even unpacked.

Hunny stared at it all through bug-smudged windows and exhaled, a long, tired breath that carried years of grit and stubborn hope.

“Well,” she said, smacking the dashboard. “We made it. Somebody give me a medal.” It always came down to how life affected her. E.C. and Lisbeth went through the same grueling ordeal, but how she experienced it was worse, and she came through, hurray for Hunny!

E.C. carried Lisbeth inside, his arms practiced from years of lifting heavy things—crates, equipment, responsibility. He tucked her into a borrowed crib, smoothing her hair with the same tenderness he used on fragile things.

Hunny sat on the porch with her feet in a basin of cold water, sipping sweet tea like it held salvation. The cicadas hummed their approval. The air smelled like dirt, memory, and honeysuckle.

The journey wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t easy. But it was earned.

And that was the only kind Hunny ever trusted.

Hunny leaned back in the porch chair, letting the basin water cool her ankles, the sweet tea cooling her tongue. For a moment, she let herself believe this was a beginning—clean, simple, manageable. A place where she could reinvent herself without anyone remembering who she’d been.

But Arkansas had a long memory.

As the cicadas droned, a breeze lifted across the yard, carrying the faintest scent of something she hadn’t smelled in years—red clay, woodsmoke, and the metallic tang of old grudges. It was the smell of childhood summers and slammed doors. The smell of people who thought they knew her better than she knew herself.

Hunny stiffened.

E.C. would have missed it entirely. Lisbeth, asleep inside, would never know it was there. But Hunny felt it like a tap on the shoulder.

A reminder.

A warning.

Home wasn’t just a place you returned to. It was a place that waited for you, patient as a spider, ready to test whether you’d really changed or just learned to hide your edges better.

She took another sip of tea, jaw tightening.

“Lord,” she muttered to no one, “don’t let these people start in on me.”

But the truth was, they already had. The moment the car crossed the state line, the past had stirred—old stories, old expectations, old ghosts. And one of them, the one she’d buried deepest, was already rising to meet her.

She didn’t know it yet, but Arkansas wasn’t done with her.

Not by a long shot.