Then Came You Read Free Page A

with what the Realtor called “outbuildings” that had once been chicken coops and stalls for horses, along with a working outhouse that stood just off the back porch with the door now stuccoed shut.
    Frank and I had grown up in the Great Northeast, in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia. I’d lived in a ranch house with my sister and my parents; Frank and his mother and father had a duplex a mile away. Both of us loved the idea of a big place to spread out in and raise our own family: a garden to grow vegetables and flowers, a yard for children to run in, a big country kitchen with two ovens and a six-burner stove where our families could gather and I could cook. When the farm came up for sale, we scraped together enough money for a down payment and convinced a bank that we could afford it. I had a little money I’d inherited from my grandmother, Frank had some help from his parents, and in those days, not so long ago, the banks gave out mortgages like they hand out lollipops, to pretty much anyone who asked.
    We’d been so excited about what the farmhouse had—hardwood floors, wood-burning fireplaces, that big, sunny kitchen with whitewashed walls, the thicket of raspberry bushes at the edge of the yard—that we’d barely noticed the things it was lacking: working toilets, reliable appliances, closet space. We hadn’t thought about the high cost of heating and maintaining such a big home, or the time it would take to mow the lawn in the summer and how much it would cost to get the drivewayplowed in the winter. Frank had a job working security at the Philadelphia airport, but that wasn’t a permanent thing. He was going to school to be an airplane mechanic; we’d planned on his getting raises and promotions, but of course, we had no way of knowing that the economy would crash and the airlines would end up in trouble. But now, I thought, I’d found a solution, a way to get ourselves out of the hole we’d fallen into and move up a few rungs on the ladder, the way my sister had.
    “Frank Junior, you go first,” I said, pointing my oldest son toward the toilet.
    He frowned at me, eyebrows drawn, lower lip pouting. “Privacy,” he said. Frank Junior looked just like his father, tall for his age, lean and wiry, with nut-brown skin and tightly curled hair and full lips. Spencer looked more like me: lighter skin, straighter hair, a round face and a sweet, plump belly I’d kiss every time I changed his diaper. People who saw the three of us together, without Frank, didn’t always realize that I was their mom. I took a secret pleasure from that moment, when they’d look from the dark-skinned boys to the white lady taking care of them and try to figure out the deal—was I the sitter? The nanny to a famous rapper’s kids? Some do-gooder who’d done an Angelina and adopted a poor black child from Africa?
    I changed Spencer’s diaper, made both boys wash their hands, inspected them to make sure their zippers were zipped, their buttons were buttoned, and their shoes were Velcro’d shut, then bundled their warm little-boy bodies into their coats—it was April, but chilly—and loaded them into the car. My parents were still in Somerton, the neighborhood where I’d grown up, but they’d moved to a condominium that my sister, Nancy, had helped them buy after she and her husband decided that “the house was getting to be too much for them.”
    I knew I should have been grateful to my big sister. She’d been right about the house. Three years ago, my father had had aheart attack—a mild one, but still—and my mother was always forgetting about things like having the furnace filters changed and the gutters cleaned and the paper delivery stopped when the two of them went on their bus trips. Still there was something that bothered me about the way Nancy had done it, as if the doctor husband and the degree from Penn State meant that she was smarter than the rest of us, that she was the one who knew best.
    But