Suburban Renewal Read Free

wouldn’t be college if Corrie couldn’t pledge a sorority, make new friends and date new boys. We’d talked it over for weeks. Corrie argued with her mother and I’d argued with Corrie. Finally we agreed to do what her mother wanted. Corrie always had to do what her mother wanted.
    I still loved her, wanted her. When she turned away from my kiss at the Burger Barn, I was hurt.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, babe?” I asked her.
    â€œWe’ve got to talk,” she replied.
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œGet in,” she said, indicating the car.
    I glanced at the interior of the baby-blue Lincoln. “I’ll get it dirty,” I pointed out. My Sunray DX coveralls had smears of the thick black engine grease that was the daily experience of petroleum production. “And you know how your mother hates the smell of the oil patch in her car.”
    Corrie shrugged, unconcerned. “It doesn’t matter.”
    I knew that it did matter, but I wasn’t willing to argue the point.
    I opened the driver’s side door. Corrie got in and slid all the way across to the passenger’s side. I was never allowed to drive her mother’s Lincoln. And when we went in my grandmother’s car (a blue ’53 Bel Air), Corrie always sat in the middle. Something was wrong. Something was really wrong. And I wasn’t all that eager to find out what.
    I got behind the steering wheel and gazed over the vast expanse of hood between me and the front bumper. The ignition turned over easy and the powerful roar of the 460 V8 was muted in the plush interior. I loved that car. Normally I would have given my eyeteeth for a chance to drive it. But with Corrie so obviously distracted, I couldn’t even enjoy it.
    I put the automatic transmission in reverse, backed out of the parking spot and headed for the highway.
    â€œLet’s drive up to the river bluff,” she suggested.
    The little hill in the bend of the river was an infamous teen hangout and Lover’s Lane. This time of day it would most likely be deserted and it would offer a great view of the sunset.
    â€œI can’t,” I told her. “I’ve got to go home and get cleaned up. And Gram will have my dinner on the table. She’ll worry if I don’t show.”
    That last was undoubtedly true, though it was the kind of thing that I never spent a lot of time worrying about. The truth was, I didn’t want to go up to the river bluff at sunset with Corrie. It seemed exactly the kind of site that she would choose to break bad news. She had met someone else. I was sure of it. Terrified of it. We were already broken up. I could bear that, because it was her parents standing between us. If she decided that she no longer loved me…well, I wasn’t sure I could stand to hear it.
    â€œI really need to talk to you,” she insisted.
    â€œWe’ll talk,” I said. “But I need to get cleaned up first.”
    I drove us into town. I was so distracted that I actually went straight up Main Street, not even having the presence of mind to avoid being seen from the front of her father’s drugstore. I went around the city park and turned left on West Hickory and drove the five black-topped blocks to my grandmother’s little two-bedroom bungalow.
    I had lived with Gram since I was four. That was the year that my mom died and my dad went away. That was the way that I always said it, “My mom died and my dad went away.” That was the truth, but as they said at Daddy’s trial it wasn’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth. My father shot and killed my mother in the middle of an argument on a hot summer night as I lay sleeping in my bed. He said it was an accident. The police said it was murder. The one thing everyone agreed was that my father, Floyd Braydon, was very drunk at the time. From what I’ve gathered, that wasn’t all that unusual.
    My father got twenty-five to life. I got Gram.