The smell of honeysuckle was not overwhelming, at 11 am, but stronger than you would think given its proximity to the street and the residual exhaust fumes and the glare of the Texas sun. Honeysuckle is a plant of the evening, of the morning, of gentle breezes through quiet backyards or of stifling southern humidity, but as the man walked by in the near heat of almost noon, the smell made him mentally catalogue the pungent yellow-orange of the overly ripened flowers and the white-yellow of the newly opened, each with their own scent that he could not describe but remembered intimately, like the position of his boots by the bed in the morning or the pull of his belt as he fastened it at the third notch.
He was a man of the south, raised in the suburbs that were slowly turning everywhere into anywhere but hadn't yet, couldn't ever fully, I think; and so the honeysuckle, and the crawdads in standing water in his front yard during week-long summer rains, and the hint of an accent that he still carried as he reached his front door, unlocked the deadbolt and entered the house.
"Martha," a question without a question mark, a sound to reassure the speaker as much as the audience, answered from several rooms away with, "I'm in here, sweetie, what is it?"
The tone of the answering voice was as complex as the honeysuckle scent, with notes of fear and hope rising slightly above a pervasive musk of fatigue and despair. Martha emerged from the spare bedroom with several towels on one shoulder, dried and awaiting folding, her eyebrows pulled slightly together into a universal sign of concentrated attention.
"They called me at work, on my cell phone, and left a message saying how to call up this number and get the results, but I..." Derek's voice trailed off as he fished his cell phone from the pocket of his work khakis and held it out in an open hand, an electronic oracle that he couldn't bring himself to consult.
"Well jesus christ, Derek, give it here and let me call...what's your voicemail password?"
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