1982
I
f it hadn't been for my brother, Mike, I'm not sure that Sam and I would ever have gotten around to buying our own house. Dear old Mrs. Neider passed away on an exceptionally warm afternoon in February. She'd been sitting on the porch playing with Lauren and Nate. Nate was still shy and reserved with everyone except me, but she and Lauren were good friends. There were always having tea parties or playing mail delivery or grocery store.
I was washing up the lunch dishes. I had Mrs. Neider's harvest-gold kitchen wall phone pulled as far as its coiled cord would allow so that I could talk to Mom on the phone. It was an emergency meeting of the Maynard women. Mike had invited Cherry Dale Larson, the former Cherry Dale Pepper, ex-cheerleader and notorious local divorcée with two small children, to the Chamber of Commerce Citizens Banquet.
Mom was certain that they must be having a secret affair, which would explain why Mike did not seem to be particularly interested in dating any of the younger, more eligible women of Lumkee.
I was trying to both ease her fears and raise her level of tolerance.
“Mom, just because he's escorting her around town doesn't mean he's sleeping with her,” I pointed out.
“I can't imagine any other reason he'd be willing to be seen with her, the little tramp,” Mom responded.
“They have known each other since high school,” I said. “And from what I've heard she's trying to get her new gym classes off the ground. Mike probably invited her as a prospective member of the Chamber.”
“Oh, for heaven's sake, Corrie.” Mom's voice was exasperated. “An empty dance floor with mirrors on the wall is not a gym. And she's not even providing classes for children. She says it's for women only.”
I never really liked Cherry Dale, but at this point felt called upon to defend her. She'd rented the old Hay Biscuit Dance Hall and was opening a place right on the highway. The sign read Cherry Dale's Pepxercise.
“Mom, it is a business,” I told her. “These fitness centers are springing up everywhere. They have them in Tulsa.”
Mom made a haughty, derisive remark.
“I can't imagine that any woman in her right mind would want to waste her time going to some smelly gym, when she can get just as much exercise shopping on Main Street.”
“Mommy.”
Lauren walked into the kitchen and tugged on my shirt, distracting me from my conversation.
“Mommy, I have to show you something.”
“Just a second,” I told my mother. “Lauren, I've told you a dozen times, when I'm on the phone it is the same as if I were speaking to someone in the room. Interrupting is very bad manners. When you see that I'm on the phone, you should wait until I'm finished and
then you can politely tell me anything you have to tell me.”
“But Mommy⦔
“You do understand what I'm saying?”
“Yes, Mommy, but⦔
“I know that it's hard and that you're impatient, but you have to learn to wait your turn.”
She stood then, waiting, though not so patiently, standing on one foot and then the other. I deliberately stalled her for about a minute. “Excuse me, Mom,” I said into the receiver. “Lauren wants to tell me something.”
I smiled at her proudly. She was very bright, and growing up to be so sweet and well behaved.
“What do you want to tell me, Lauren?” I asked.
“I think Mrs. Neider's dead, Mommy,” she said. “She's still sitting in her chair, but she looks really dead.”
I hung up on my mother without another word. I am certain that Lauren had never seen a dead body in her life, but she knew what she was talking about. Mrs. Neider was sitting in her rocking chair, eyes closed as if she were asleep. She was not asleep.
Nate, for once, had overcome his shyness and was struggling to climb into her lap.
I jerked him away and into my arms and led Lauren back into the kitchen. I picked up the phone and called Dr. Kotsopoulos. I didn't know that doctors don't even make house calls for the dead. The office told me to call her family and the funeral home.
We got through the next few days with only a fair amount of difficulty. Sam took off work the day of the funeral. Our intent was to go to the service to show respect for the dear old lady. The family asked us not to.
“Somebody has to stay here and guard this house,” her daughter, Betty, told us. “Since everybody knows the family will be at the church and the cemetery, no telling who will show up here to try to take something out of the house.”
So Sam and I honored Mrs. Neider by sitting in her house while she was eulogized and buried.
“You didn't miss much,” Sam's grandmother assured us later. “It wasn't the best funeral. Her niece, Doris, did the music and it was very gloomy.”
Since Gram had been to more funerals than most, we took her word for it.
Our immediate concern was for a place to live. The family made it eminently clear that we needed to vacate the premises as quickly as possible. In fact, the eldest son, Howard, suggested that we should begin paying rent retroactively. He said it in such a way that it sounded as if he thought we had been living off the kindness of an old woman, completely discounting all that we had done for her in the four years we'd lived in the garage apartment.
His attitude made Sam furious. He was ready to pack up and move into our car rather than spend another night in the little apartment that had been our home for so very long. I insisted that we had to have a place to go before we left.
I spent the next morning looking at rental properties. I didn't see anything that really felt like a home, but there were a couple of possibilities that I could probably bear to live in.
It was a gray day. The weather had turned and the wind blew through my coat. If I was cold, I figured the kids were shivering. We went to the drugstore to warm up. It was not really a good idea to interrupt the work
day at Maynard Drug, so I made sure that we didn't do it often enough to wear out our welcome.
Dad was delighted to see us. He so rarely got to see Lauren and Nate when my mother was not around. He took them to the back, entertaining them while I stepped behind the soda counter to pour myself a cup of coffee. The saucer clanked loudly upon the marble, but it was a familiar sound. The drugstore was as much a part of my childhood as home or school. Every afternoon throughout the elementary grades, I came here to sweep up. By high school I was working two evenings and Saturdays.
The place was like an archeological site turned upside down. Near eye level it was a 1980s pharmacy with all the brightly labeled cold remedies and glossy magazines that represented. A little higher, however, were the sleekly modernistic plastic clocks of the sixties and the pants-down Coppertone advertisement and rock-and-roll motifs of the fifties. Up next to the fifteen-foot ceiling were sepia-toned panoramic photographs of Lumkee as a raw boomtown. There was even a brightly painted Gibson girl sipping a Coca-Cola.
I took my usual behind-the-counter seat on the Dr. Pepper cold box, leaving all eight chrome-and-vinyl bar stools available for paying customers.
A minute later my brother came up and joined me.
“I've always heard it's bad to drink alone,” he said, gesturing toward the coffeepot.
I poured him a cup and set it and the little one-serving cream container in front of him.
“If you'd spent the morning driving around Lumkee with Raylene Wallace, you'd be looking to drown your sorrows as well.”
He feigned abject horror and then laughed.
Mike had a great laugh. He and I looked a lot alike. Everybody said so. But somehow, it looked better on him. With honey-brown hair and green eyes, Mike was six foot two, long and lean, with ruggedly handsome features and a dentist-perfect smile. He'd played all the sports in high school but had settled on swimming by the time he got to college. It kept him fit and tanned. Even in the middle of winter, he drove all the way into Tulsa two or three nights a week to swim at an indoor pool where he had a membership. “So did you find the house of your dreams?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Most of the Lumkee rental market is more like a nightmare,” I told him.
“Well, maybe you should take this opportunity to actually buy a house,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes and gazed at him speculatively. “Are you a lobbyist for Mom these days?” I asked him.
He chuckled.
“No, she already has more influence than could ever be bought or sold,” Mike assured me. “But it does seem like a convenient time to be going after something you want.”
I shook my head. “Sam's business is just getting on its feet. I hate to put any more stress on him.”
Mike was thoughtful for a moment and then he spoke in the soft, gently prodding way that he'd always used to encourage me to study hard and do my best.
“Buying a house isn't about Sam or his business,” he said. “I know this might be a radical concept, sis, but you know you could go out and get a J-O-B.”
He spelled out the last in a whisper, as if it were a subversive idea.
I chuckled and shook my head. “Oh, yeah, Mike,
that's why Mom thinks you're the smart one,” I told him facetiously. “Maybe this has escaped the notice of a carefree bachelor like yourself, but I have two small children.”
“And?”
“And it would cost more to put them in day care than the pay scale at Burger Barn currently allows.”
“Then you should mark Burger Barn off your list of job prospects,” he countered. “I hate to be the one to point this out, but you've been the one putting the roof over your family's head since you got married.”
I waved off this observation.
“I just helped out Mrs. Neider,” I told him. “I could do that on a flexible schedule and without leaving the kids.”
“Then I'd suggest that you find a position that offers flexible work schedules and allows you to bring the kids along.”
“What kind of job would that be?”
“You're asking me?” Mike replied. “Weren't you the girl who was valedictorian of Lumkee High.”
“So were you,” I pointed out.
“And look at me,” he said. “What a success I am, still working at the drugstore for Dad.”
I laughed and shook my head.
“Seriously, sis,” Mike continued. “Get a house, get a job. Get some things that you want out of life. Sam will be behind you one hundred percent. The guy is crazy about you, you know.”
I nodded.
“If Cherry Dale, who can't even string two coherent sentences together, can come up with a business plan that allows her to make money with her kids underfoot, I'm sure my brilliant sister can do even better.”
“And speaking of Cherry Dale,” I said. “What's the deal there? Are you two having secret rendezvous, planning summer nuptials or just trying to see if you can push the local gossips into busy-signal overdrive and shut down telephone service in the entire region.”
Mike grinned. “Don't try to distract me,” he said. “Cherry Dale and I are just two happily single people trapped in a community of Stepford wives who won't be happy until everyone is
till-death-do-us-part-ing.
”
“Marriage is wonderful, Mike,” I told him. “I can highly recommend it.”
“And I can highly recommend working for a living and buying your own house,” he countered.
I shrugged, feeling wistful. “Even if I could,” I pointed out, “it would take me a year to save up the down payment. We have no choice but to rent again.”
“Dad would loan you the money,” he noted.
“And Sam would cut my tongue out before he'd let me ask for help,” I said. “I'd cut my own tongue out before I'd mention it. If I even suggested it he'd sell one of the trucks or mortgage more of the equipment. He'd work himself to death to try to give me whatever I want, Mike, and I can't let him do that.”
My brother nodded solemnly and I thought that was the end of it. But I should have known Mike better. He had that same bulldoggedness as my mother. Unexpectedly he stopped by the apartment that night when the ten o'clock news was on.
“What's wrong?” I asked immediately when I opened the door.
“Nothing,” he assured me.
“Why are you here so late?”
He chuckled. “I've got to get here late if I want to talk to Sam.”
“You want to talk to Sam?”
My question was skeptical.
“Hey, Mike, come on in,” my husband said from behind me. “What's going on?”
“I wanted to talk to you about something,” Mike said. “I want to talk to you both.”
“Sure, come on in.”
My brother's arrival awakened Lauren, who escaped from her bed and sleepily crawled up in Uncle Mike's lap, where she lay her tousled blond head upon his chest and returned to her dreams.
“That looks good on you, Mike,” I told him. “You'd make some lucky little boy or girl a wonderful father.”
He looked down at Lauren and gently smoothed a stray lock of hair from her cheek.
“I'm already making a couple of lucky kids a wonderful uncle,” he told me. “I figure I should quit while I'm ahead.”
I frowned at him and he grinned back.
“So what's up?” Sam asked.
“Well, I've got some money in the bank that's not making all that much interest and I was hoping you would give me some advice about investing it,” Mike said.
I was immediately alert.
Sam was puzzled.
“I think you've come to talk to the wrong guy,” he said. “I don't know anything about investment.”
“You know about the oil business,” Mike said.
Sam nodded. “Well, this might be a good time to buy some Big Four stock,” he admitted. “The price of crude this week is down to thirty and a half a barrel. That's the lowest we've seen it in years. It's hard to imagine that OPEC is going to let it slide any further.”