The brass bell on the wall behind Daddy's recliner jingled. He jumped up so fast I was sure he didn't remember his TV tray stood in front him. He'd been sitting there all morning cleaning and re-cleaning his guns. When he jumped up his big old legs hit that tray and sent gun parts flying. Those steel gray pieces clunked when they hit the floor. A spring rolled toward me. He twisted around and looked at the little bell then turned and stared at the black curtain covering the front window. I sat under Momma's piano and pulled at the dead strings that once held her braided rug together, but I never took my eyes off him. He hummed a few notes then chewed at the loose skin on his bottom lip. That's when I knew this wasn't a drill. This wasn't part of the plan.
"Shit." Daddy rarely swore in front of me.
In nothing more than a pair of boxers and a ratty old t-shirt, he held onto a small can of gun oil. I don't think he knew it was upside down. If he did, he would've turned it upright and capped it real quick. He always said, "A wasted drop of anything is a lost opportunity."
Daddy's eyes grew big and scared, which was strange since he wasn't afraid of anything. His shoulders looked different too, they were all hunched, like he was hurting all over. I don't think he was really ready for what we knew was coming.
"Shit, shit, shit." Daddy said that word again.
He jumped into his pants, not bothering to buckle his belt then paced across the living room floor. He stopped in front of Momma's bay window, the one he special-ordered two years ago, and drew back the black curtain. Sunlight flooded my space. Specks of dust floated in the air and passed through the tunnel of light connecting me to the outside world. I knew if he didn't close that curtain soon I'd suffocate just like Papaw who ended up breathing through tubes for the last ten days of his life.
"I'd rather be shot than dying in this hospital bed hooked up to some damn machine," Papaw had said through his coughing.
His see-you-later words rasped in my ear when I hugged him for the last time. Him dying was the reason we moved back to the foothills of Kentucky.
Momma said after fifty-five years of hard living, the coalmine finally claimed her pa. Now, my momma and her pa were buried side by side down river in Whispering Hills. The family cemetery up on Wicked Peak overlooked the whole valley, all its creeks and ponds and rows of one-bedroom shacks made especially for the mining families.
Whispering Hills was where Momma grew up. Daddy'd laugh and say she was from the wrong side of the tracks even though he spent the first fifteen years of his life living next door to her.
I was sure the dust in our house was the same kind that killed Papaw, and this was the beginning of the end for me. I was done for. I'd end up in a hospital bed with cracked lips and skin so thin it'd float away.
* * *
"Blue." That's what Daddy called me. "Blue, get out of here."