Chapter 10
Red threw open the door to the mobile home.
“Grandma! The house. I found it!”
“What are you going on about?” Grandma looked up from the sink.
“I found the house.”
She thrust her phone under Grandma’s nose. “Remember? The house where Mom and I picked berries.”
“Let me dry my hands off. Hand me my readers.”
Red snatched them off the end table next to Grandma’s recliner and waited impatiently for her to unfold them and slip them on. Behind the lenses’ magnification, Grandma’s hazy, cornflower eyes grew huge.
“Only your mother would haul you out in the middle of God’s green acre.”
“And here,” Red dangled a bag under her nose, “strawberries. The old patch is still there, among the weeds.”
Grandma picked out a berry that wasn’t too smooshed and ate it.
Red waited for her approval.
“Not like the ones you get nowadays from the supermarket.”
“I can’t tell if anyone lives there or not. There was a pickup parked there, but nobody came to the door.”
“You knocked?”
“I was dying to see inside. I looked through the windows. It’s mostly original, with a few modern appliances. Not much in the way of furniture. I’m hoping whoever owns this place might want to sell it. By the looks of things it’s an older person who doesn’t have the means or the energy to keep it up.”
“Seems like an awful lot for a single girl to take on all by herself. How far away’d you say it was?”
“About twenty miles.”
“You want to live all the way out there in the country like that?”
“It’s nothing! Lots of people commute farther than that. You’ll love living there. Wait till you see it. We’ll revive the old strawberry patch. Maybe even start selling them again. It’s so peaceful there you can hear the whoosh of birds’ wings.”
“Me? What makes you think I’m going anywhere?”
“You’re coming with me, of course. You don’t think I’d leave you here, do you?”
She shook her head and returned to her sink full of dishes. “You won’t get me out there in the sticks where I got to drive forever to get a quart of milk.”
“You won’t have to,” said Red, trailing her to the sink. “I’ll take care of you. I’ll see that you have everything you need.”
“You heard me. I’ll come visit—that is, when the roads are clear, and only when it’s light out. I don’t like driving in the dark any more than I have to.”
“Grandma. You have to come. You’re my family. The only family that counts.” She tipped her head, forcing Grandma to meet her eyes. “I always wanted to live in a real house. But if you won’t come…”
Grandma slid a dripping plate into a slot in the dish drainer. “Someday you will live in a real house. You, of all people. But not me.”
All Red’s excitement fell flat.
Grandma inched her way back to her kitchen chair.
“Don’t pout. Come over here, sugar,” she said, patting her lap.
“Grandma.” Red rolled her eyes. “I’m too old for that. And”—she assessed Grandma’s fragile frame—“too big.”
“You’re never too old to sit on your grandma’s lap. Now, get over here.”
Reluctantly, Red circled around the table. Grandma was so slender, she made Red’s arms register as legs. “You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
Gingerly, she began lowering her weight.
Grandma gasped. “Ugh. Good God, Sophia, you’re enormous.”
Red jumped up and spun around, red-faced. “I told you.”
“Now you listen. It’s not the house that’s important. I’m thankful for growing up the way I did, in that house. All six of us kids were. We had a lot of good times. But things weren’t always peaches and cream. The girls at school were jealous of me, with my matching accessories. You know how girls that age can be. My mother threw me a sweet sixteen birthday party and nobody came.”
Red lowered her eyes. No matter how many times Grandma repeated that story, the image of her all dressed up in a room hung with twisted crepe paper and a cake in the center of the table, waiting for her schoolmates to arrive, eventually realizing they weren’t going to come always made her heart squeeze.
“Thursday and Friday nights when the stores stayed open late Pap didn’t come home till after nine. Lots of other nights, too, when he started going to his Rotary and the Masons and every other group in town. Mam was worn out from raising us kids by herself. No such thing as microwaves or dishwashers back then. She made every meal from scratch. I remember nights when she would sit at the dining room table and cry, suspecting that he was stepping out on her. I didn’t ask about the particulars. What could I have done about it? It was something that, even though you may not like it, that’s just the way things were.
“A house doesn’t buy happiness. It’s who you share it with. Always remember that.”
But things will be different for me, thought Red. Her great-grandmother had gotten pregnant at seventeen and never finished high school. Red was highly educated, earned her own living and lived in a time when women had almost complete control over the number of children they decided to have—or not have.
She was sure that, once she had her dream house, everything else would fall neatly into place around her.