Read Online A Place We Knew Well by Susan Carol McCarthy - Free Book Online Page B

red-and-white striped tent. Beside it, one large poster proclaimed, MEET THE ATOMIC HONEYMOONERS! with a picture of the smiling Mininsons and diagonal red letters: CANCELED DUE TO HURRICANE . A second poster asked, GRANDMA’S PANTRY WAS READY: IS YOUR “PANTRY” READY IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY? and announced, CIVIL DEFENSE FOR HOMEMAKERS, PRESENTATIONS ON THE HOUR, EVERY HOUR.
    Inside the tent, rows of empty folding chairs faced a stage whose metal shelves were filled with the supplies from their shelter. Near the wooden podium, Sarah stood talking earnestly to an imposing woman in a fire-engine-red suit, white pearls, and a royal-blue pillbox hat. The infamous Edith, Avery guessed.
    “Hey, Mom!” Charlotte called.
    The two women turned. As he and Charlotte came down the center aisle, Edith cast a withering glance in Avery’s direction.
    “Edith, this is my daughter, Charlotte…,” Sarah was saying.
    “And your husband, Judas Iscariot, I take it. With friends like you, Mr. Avery, who needs enemies?” Abruptly, the older woman stomped off the stage and out the side exit.
    “What the Sam Hill?” Avery asked, dumbfounded.
    Sarah took a labored breath. “Oh, Wes, didn’t you see the paper?”
    “What paper?”
    “This morning’s
Sentinel
?” She walked to the podium, picked up and handed down the day’s Society Section. It was his custom to separate the morning paper into his and hers portions: News, Financial, and Sports for him; Society, usually sheathed in weekend sales circulars, for her. So, of course, he hadn’t seen the section’s cover photo of Sarah, taken inside their shelter.
    “Nice picture,” he said.
    “Read the last paragraph, Wes.”
    He scanned the column, under the byline of reporter Joseph A. Riley, to its end:
When asked to comment on local Civil Defense efforts, Mrs. Avery’s husband, an incendiary expert who participated in the bombing of Japan, shrugged. “The only real defense against nuclear warfare is to make certain it never starts,” Avery said.
    “You
shrugged
?” Sarah asked in a tired voice.
    “Let me see.” Charlotte was peering at the paper.
    “That’s not at all what I—”
    “ ‘
Incendiary
expert,’ Dad?”
    Behind them, three women strolled into the tent chatting and took their seats midway up the aisle.
    Still on stage, Sarah smiled and called, “Welcome! We’ll be starting in”—she checked her watch—“another six minutes.”
    She bent down to tell Avery and Charlotte, “Lunch is out, I guess. I’m stuck with back-to-back presentations for the rest of the afternoon.” When her eyes slid from Charlotte to Avery, she gave him a searching, lifted-eyebrow look, clearly asking,
You talk to her yet?
    His quick head shake told her,
No, not yet.
    Walking out with Charlotte, he was seething at the reporter’s failure to credit Omar Bradley with his own quote, and at that battle-ax Edith for accusing him of some sort of betrayal.
    Betrayal!
Wasn’t the real betrayal the whole idea behind this event? That the local Civil Defense plan—eleven designated buildings, mostly downtown, at a considerable distance from the suburbs where everybody lived—could save more than a handful of city bureaucrats? That the President’s campaign suggesting people build their own private shelter was anything more than political eyewash, part of the Democrats’ run-up to midterm elections?
    Avery looked around, bewildered by the size of the crowd and the number of families trailing small children. Why were they here? Was it plain old curiosity or did they actually intend to buy this crap? He’d seen the options available, the obvious hucksters, the bloated price tags attached to the ridiculous shelters
. Shelter!
The very word was a joke. Do-it-yourself
tomb
was more like it.
    “Can we eat?” Charlotte asked, tugging on his sleeve. “I’m starving!”
    He stood in line for a couple of hot dogs while she found an open bench just inside the exit. They sat and ate