Suburban Renewal Read Free Page A

She was widowed, almost fifty and still in shock over the loss of her youngest daughter, but she took me in. She drove all by herself down to Odessa, Texas, to pick me up at the child welfare office. I didn’t remember her. I’m not sure that we’d ever met. She walked into the building and she might as well have been a total stranger. But she loved me immediately, unconditionally. A kid couldn’t have asked for a better deal.
    I remember the caseworkers kept talking and talking. They talked about me, but nobody really talked to me. Finally Gram just took my hand.
    â€œLet’s go home,” she said.
    I didn’t realize that she meant her home in Lumkee. But I already trusted her so much that I would have followed her anywhere.
    Corrie and I didn’t say a word to each other as I drove the Lincoln. She just stared out the window with a sad, almost lost look on her face. It was over between us. I was sure of it. And my heart was already breaking.
    I pulled into the two rutted dirt tracks that served as the driveway beside Gram’s little brown shingled house. I raced around the car to open the door for Corrie. I was almost too late, she had one foot on the ground already before I could offer a hand. She gave me a little smile. It was only tiny, but it gave me hope.
    â€œGood manners will get you a long way in the world,” Gram had taught me.
    I hoped it would be enough to keep Corrie beside me.
    I held open the white picket gate as she went through. And then clasped her palm as we walked across the yard and up the front porch steps. The screen wasn’t latched so I opened it and stuck my head in.
    â€œGram!” I called out.
    â€œSamuel Braydon,” she answered from the depths of the kitchen. “Don’t you be tracking through my house in those dirty work clothes!”
    â€œI’m not,” I assured her. “Corrie’s here with me.”
    â€œCorrie?” Gram’s tone changed immediately. A minute later she was walking through the living room wiping her wet hands on the hem of the apron tied around her waist. “Corrie! Get in this house, young’un. I have missed the sight of your pretty face.”
    Gram was delighted. Her eyes virtually disappeared among the wrinkles as she smiled. She was a little tiny woman, not quite five feet tall in sensible-heeled shoes. Her hair, as always, was pulled away from her faceand twisted into a neat little bun at the nape of her neck. Pentecostal Hair, is what Corrie called it. Gram was a Baptist, of course. But her hair, left to grow as long as it would grow and bound up tightly by day, was definitely Pentecostal.
    â€œWhat a wonderful surprise to see you,” she told Corrie. “Now, I’ve only got some nice butter beans with a bit of ham shoulder. It’s plain food, but it’s filling and we’ll dress it up with some chow-chow and some pickled beets. Would you like that? Come on in here and you can help me set an extra place. Samuel, if you don’t get yourself cleaned up, we’ll eat without you.”
    It was an empty threat, of course. But I was very willing to hand off Corrie to my grandmother. The two liked each other a lot. And I thought it might be good to remind Corrie that those guys she met at college might be smarter and richer and more her type, but they didn’t have Gram. Gram came with me. If she dumped me, she’d lose Gram as well.
    I walked back across the porch, down the steps, leaped over the picket pence and trotted around to the backyard. The old washhouse that my grandfather had built in the 1920s was still in use. Gram had her Maytag installed in the little room just off the kitchen, but she still had washtubs and a scrub board for my coveralls. I stepped inside the weathered tin-roofed shack and stripped off my clothes. I washed up with lava soap in a basin of hot water carried down from the house and rinsed in the cold water from the spigot on the