Suburban Renewal (That Business Between Us Book 3) Page 11

  Relief flooded through me. Sam wasn't leaving. I was amazed at myself for having jumped to such a conclusion. A very inappropriate little chuckle bubbled through to the surface.

  "Oh, is that all," I said.

  "Is that all?" Sam repeated loudly. "Good God, Corrie, is that you talking or those happy pills you take? We've lost it all, everything we've worked for, everything we've wanted for our kids. We're destitute. We haven't got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out. We're going to be out on the street, living under a bridge, trying to raise our children while carting all our worldly goods around in a stolen grocery cart."

  He was so scared, so overwhelmed with it, my heart went out to him. Immediately, I rose to my feet, wrapped my arms around him and pulled him tightly against me.

  "Shh, it's going to be okay," I told him. "Samuel, listen to me. It's going to be okay. Shh, it's going to be okay."

  My comforting seemed to help him. He got a grip on himself and regained his composure, but he continued to hold me. After a long moment he spoke.

  "Did you hear what you called me?"

  "What?"

  "You called me Samuel," he said. "That's what Gram always called me."

  I nodded. "Yeah, I guess she did."

  "Do you know what it means? The name Samuel?"

  "No."

  "Gram said it meant 'a man with a special calling,"' he said. "It made me believe that I might do something special. I'm glad she didn't live to see this. She would have been so disappointed."

  Sam's eyes welled up with tears; he was gritting his teeth to hold them back.

  "That's the stupidest thing you've ever said, Samuel Braydon. And believe me, I've known you long enough to have heard you say plenty of stupid stuff."

  I smoothed his forelock away from his face.

  "Gram was always proud of you and none of it ever had anything to do with money or business or anything we could own," I reminded him. "She was proud of you because you are an honest, hardworking, honorable man. Nothing about that has changed. Nothing about you has changed. We've got each other. We've got two great kids. We've got our health. This business, this house, all the rest of this, it's just stuff. We'll kick the dust off our sandals and move on."

  It was brave talk. I meant it. I meant it that day. And more as the weeks went by.

  Newspapers talk about how stock markets crash. But they talk about families sliding into poverty. Our family's descent into the realms of the unmonied was definitely on the crashing side of slide.

  The day he told me about the loan we were down to less than one hundred dollars in our checking account. Within a week, a stranger had come in the middle of the night to repossess my minivan. Coming to grips with losing the house was made easier when the gas, electricity and water were shut off. We had a huge yard sale, trying to generate as much cash as we could while making our household goods smaller to cart around.

  Fortunately, one of the big advantages of going broke in an economic downturn is that you're not the only one without money. Everybody is in the same boat. The bank foreclosed on our house. But without any conceivable chance to resell it in the near future, they allowed us to stay in it to keep it from sitting empty until it could be liquidated. We were grateful. Without the house, we'd have been forced to move in with Mike or my parents. We didn't want any more upheaval for the children than was necessary. Knowing that their father didn't have a job was undoubtedly scary enough. Now all we had to do was scrape together enough money each month to keep the utilities on.

  Sam was doing his best. He was out job hunting every day. There was no work at all in Lumkee, so he drove to Tulsa to fill out applications, sit for interviews or sometimes just stand at the employment office on Archer Street trying to get picked up for day labor. There was not much luck there. Hundreds of guys waited for the half-dozen pickups that came by to pick up two or three guys with strong backs. Local unemployment had gone from the lowest rate in history— 2.9 percent in 1981 to the current high of 9.7 percent. The whole town was like some strange throwback to the depression era.

  At least that was my impression on the day of my last visit to Dr. Muldrew. With no company there was, of course, no company health insurance, even if we could have afforded to pay the premiums.

  He didn't seem all that surprised. He even suggested that I'd come so far that I really didn't require further therapy, and he put me on a regimen where I slowly decreased the antidepressants until I was off of them completely.

  I thanked him and said goodbye.

  "I hope that we meet up again sometime under different circumstances," I told him.

  He gave me a little hug and smiled. It was a knockout smile. Dr. Muldrew was one very handsome guy. "I'll tell you the truth, Corrie," he said. "I'm hoping the exact same thing."

  We shook hands and I left.

  I got into my car and headed home. My mind was on a thousand things. I got turned around and lost. I tried to get my bearings, but it was high noon. North, south, east and west, all looked the same to me. When I came across a street that dead-ended into a tank farm, I knew I was way off the beaten track. I stopped at the QuickTrip on the corner to ask directions. The guy working there was eager to strike up a conversation. He was another out-of-work oilman, lucky to have a job.

  He got me headed in the right direction for the expressway. I was several miles out of my way. Finally, I could see it up ahead of me a couple of blocks away, when I was stopped at a red light.

  The sky was gray and overcast. It wasn't cold, but it looked like it should be. As I sat waiting I watched a group of boisterous children playing on a wood-chip- covered playground behind a wire fence high enough for a prison. The place was called Candy Cane School and the front sign was a converted barber pole. I noticed a woman was taping a piece of paper to it. The light turned green just as I realized what the paper read: Help Wanted.

  Horns blared and drivers cursed at me as I swerved across three lanes of traffic and, having missed the entrance ramp, bounced over the curb to pull into the front parking lot.

  The woman taping up the flimsy homemade sign looked at me, startled, as I got out of my car.

  "What kind of job is it?" I called out to her when I was still a half dozen yards away.

  She waited to answer until I got closer.

  "We need an assistant teacher for the preschool room," she told me. "We only pay minimum wage and you have to be here at five-thirty in the morning."

  "It sounds perfect," I told her, offering my hand. If she'd said they needed a plumber I would have responded in exactly the same way.

  "I'm Corrie Braydon."

  'Trixie Creekmore," she said. "I'm the manager."

  "Are you related to any of the Creekmores in Lumkee?" I asked.

  She grinned at me. She had a gold filling in one of her eye-teeth.

  "Probably my ex was," she said. "But I sure don't claim none of them folks. I just keep the name for my kid's sake."

  I nodded.

  "I'm really interested in the job," I told her. "I don't have a degree, but I did do some college."

  That was stretching my semester ten years earlier at Oklahoma State. But it didn't seem to bother her.

  "We sure don't require college," she said. "Do you have any experience with children?"

  "I have two," I told her. "A girl, nine, and a boy, seven and a half."

  "Who'll get them ready for school while you're working in tire morning?" she asked.

  "My husband's out of work."

  She nodded.

  "Come on inside, we'll talk," she said.

  Within forty minutes I had the job. I felt as if I was walking on air.

  Sam was surprised.

  "Are you sure?" he said, his brow furrowing in concern. "I don't want you to have to work if you don't want to. I'm sure to find something soon."

  "Honestly, I'm excited about it," I told him. "It's right near the expressway and we need the money. The whole thing seems ideal."

  Of
course, it wasn't ideal. I was leaving the house at 4:45 a.m. The only other person out was the newspaper delivery boy. The preschool, in a westside working-class neighborhood, was filled to capacity. It was solely staffed by me and the cook for the first hour. During which time almost all of the shift workers and medical personnel dropped their kids off. It was nerve-racking to be so totally responsible for so many. Once my coworkers showed up, it was better. By the time everybody had breakfast and the requisite morning crisis was resolved, we divided the children by age groups. The layout of the building was basically open. The different class groups had different sections, with the only differentiation being the color of carpet on the floor. In the center of the building were two enclosed rooms. One was the baby room, with its cribs and rockers. The other room was the preschool classroom. The two walls that were exposed to the day care were floor-to-ceiling glass, which gave me the feeling of being forever in a fishbowl.

  That was where the comparison stopped, however. While the day-care areas were replete with cheery rugs and wall hangings in bright primary colors, the preschool was dull and stark. Fourteen little brown desks sat in neat rows upon a tan carpet surrounded by white walls. I had seen more style and energy at the Department of Motor Vehicles. It perfectly reflected the personality of the head teacher of the class, Clarissa Klempner.

  Miss Clarissa was a real teacher. She was a graduate of Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa and held a state teaching certificate. But when she'd arrived in the real environment of public elementary education, the seven-year-olds that she was hired to teach were far too frightening for her timid soul. Miss Clarissa walked through the world on a path of endless eggshells.

  After her scary experience with second grade, she'd retreated to the relatively insulated surroundings of Candy Cane School. She'd been teaching this class for five years.

  And she wasn't terrible. She had empathy, a huge capacity for love and endless patience. The class was extremely well behaved. Perhaps because they somehow realized how upsetting boisterous behavior would be to her.

  I liked Clarissa. I liked the class. In fact, I liked almost everything about my job. Getting up in the quiet darkness of my house, waking my husband with a kiss as I left, driving through the frosty mornings into the lights of the city. I loved that. It made me feel a part of things. All over the world people were getting up and going to work. And I was one of them. And I loved bringing home a paycheck.

  Sam hadn't even got a nibble on a job. He was going door to door as a fix-it man for the old folks in town. On a good day he might bring home ten dollars. Half the time he was too ashamed to accept the money from the poor old widows he worked for. But I could walk through the door with bags of groceries and change in my pocket. It was a totally victorious feeling.

  But naturally, there would have to be a fly in the ointment. That came in the person of Candy Cane's owner, Fern Davis. I met Mrs. Davis after I'd been employed at the school about two weeks.

  We were finishing up our classroom day. Miss Clarissa took the class to recess. They would play until the after-school program began when they would join up with the older kids. I was not a part of this. Coming in at 5:30 a.m. meant that I went home at two.

  Trixie opened our door and handed a note to Clarissa. She read it and then came over to me.

  "Mrs. Davis is here," she said. "She wants to meet you."

  "Okay, as soon as I finish with Kaitlyn."

  "I'll take care of Kaitlyn," Clarissa said. "Go ahead. Be sure to clock out before you go in to talk to her. And watch your back." This last was spoken in a warning whisper.

  I shrugged off the advice as just more evidence of Clarissa's chicken heart.

  But I did clock out before going into the front office. That was fortunate, because it was the first thing she asked me.

  "I hate having my staff sitting around jabbering with me paying for it," Mrs. Davis said.

  I could have pointed out that usually when people are off the clock they are allowed to go home, not obliged to sit and talk with the employer, but I thought perhaps our discussion was meant to be only a friendly, after-work chat.

  However, it didn't really have that feel. In fact, the tone was more suggestive of a spotlight and rubber hose. She wanted to know, in fine detail, who I was, who I knew and what I thought. After a lifetime of similar interrogations from my mother, I handled myself very well. Maybe too well. When the questions stopped and her subject matter turned to other employees, I relaxed.

  She complained bitterly about the woman I was replacing. She had taken a big chance on Misty, given her a wonderful opportunity. She'd thrown it away to follow her out-of-work husband to his new job.

  That didn't seem so terrible to me, but I had the good sense not to say so. Instead I tried to change the subject.

  "Where did they go?" I asked her.

  "Someplace up north," Mrs. Davis said.

  "Oh," I said, nodding. "Like New England? Michigan? Minnesota?"

  "No, one of those states with North in the name."

  "North Dakota?"

  "No, not there. North Carolina, that's it."

  I thought she was making a joke. I laughed.

  "What's funny?"

  "You're kidding, right?"

  I should have known that a woman like Mrs. Davis probably didn't have that much of a sense of humor.

  "Kidding about what?"

  "About North Carolina being north."

  "It is north," she said adamantly. "Otherwise they wouldn't call it North Carolina."

  I didn't say anything.

  "I'm right," she insisted. "Admit that."

  I should have.

  "It's certainly north of Florida and Georgia and South Carolina," I told her. "But it's east of here, almost due east. And it's considered a southern state."

  My mother had warned me since childhood that being a know-it-all gets you liked by no one.

  Mrs. Davis wouldn't give it up. She insisted that we consult a map, and then she couldn't find the state in the area where she thought it should be, up around Ohio and Indiana. When I showed her where it was, it was as if she didn't believe me or the map. She called in Trixie, who reluctantly verified that, indeed, North Carolina was exactly where the map said it was.

  I left feeling queasy and nervous, but Trixie reassured me the next day.

  "Mrs. Davis hardly ever comes in here," she said. "They live in one of those big old mansions near Swan Lake. Most days the farthest she ventures out is to shop at Miss Jackson's in Utica Square. Just stay out of her way. She may never forgive you or forget it, but she'll not bother to do anything about it."

  I hoped Trixie was right, and, as the weeks passed, I got back into my routine and forgot all about my brush with the owner.

  One afternoon, when I was feeling especially creative, I broached the subject of the preschool classroom's boring decor with Clarissa.

  "I don't understand why all the group areas in day care are so bright and colorful and we have to work in the big, drab void."

  Clarissa glanced up, surprised.

  "It's my fault," she said, very quietly, defensively. "The teachers are responsible for the decoration of their area. I just...well, I couldn't decide what to do and I'm not very...well, artistic. So, I just never got around to doing anything."

  "Would you let me decorate it?" I asked her.

  She sighed with relief. "Oh, would you!" she said.

  "I've been so afraid that somebody was going to say something. I kept thinking I should do something, because you can see right in here and it looks so...so unfinished. But I thought if I did something, somebody might not like it."

  "Don't worry about it anymore," I told her. "I'll come up with something. Something that we'll both like perfectly."

  My plans for the room didn't come together that day or even that week. I let my ideas simmer in the back of my mind. I wanted more than just some paint and pictures on the wall. I wanted a theme that would inspire the students, enliven us as
teachers and yet fit into the class image that we had already formulated for ourselves.

  I was lying in bed with Sam, who was watching Jay Leno, his favorite comedian, guest host for Johnny Carson. I'm not sure if it was something Leno said, or just that all my musing finally came together. But it suddenly hit me.

  "Fishbowl!"

  "What?" Sam looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

  "That classroom is a fishbowl," I told him. "So that's how I'm going to decorate it."

  Having no money proved to be as much a help as a hindrance. I went through leftover paint cans at my house and at my mom's. I even had Clarissa show up with hers. We had about four different kinds of blue. I thought about mixing them and then decided that the best was just to go from light to dark, as if we were in the ocean. The floor was perfect. Its tan carpet was the exact color of sand. I scrounged through Lauren's stuffed animal collection for sea creatures. I looked through books on the oceans and painted the lower walls with undersea flora and fauna. I dabbed our bookshelves with wood putty and painted them as pink as a coral reef. Driving home one afternoon, I'd seen a huge pile of pallets used for hauling cement to well sites left as scrap. I loaded up the trunk and used the lumber to make shell-like fronts for the desks. The students, with the help of Clarissa and I, made fish of every kind and color, which I suspended from the ceiling, at a height unreachable by even a student standing on a desk. I even drew a snorkeler on the top of the water above us, peering down through his swim goggles at us.

  The kids loved it. Clarissa loved it. The parents were delighted. The other teachers got excited about their own areas and began brainstorming with me about how they could liven things up. Trixie even showed up one morning with a colorful decoupaged sign for the door that read: Preschool Fish Bowl.

  Two short weeks after completion, Mrs. Davis showed up. Took one look at my handiwork and fired me on the spot.

  "You've vandalized my building," she told me. "It will cost me hundreds of dollars to have that monstrosity cleaned off the walls and the furniture. I'm taking that out of the pay that I owe you."

  I begged and pleaded, I cried. Finally, she agreed that if I would spend the weekend repainting the wall white at my expense and cart out every piece of fishbowl decoration that we had made, then I could leave with my paycheck intact and two weeks' severance.