come through the month with less money than that lots of times.
The cell phone rang in the kitchen, while I was walking down the hall noticing that the light fixture there was old and pretty, but it was hanging out of the ceiling a couple inches, like the bolts were coming loose. The wires above it looked dusty and ragged. While I passed by, the mind-Mama pointed out that it’d probably burn the house down.
When I got to the kitchen and picked up the phone, my brother’s number was on the screen. Jace never called out of the blue. He was probably doing recon for Mama. I had the weird feeling I used to get back in high school when I was someplace I wasn’t supposed to be, and she’d ring my cell, and I knew I’d gotten caught. My friends always thought I did something to give away all our secret plans, but they didn’t know my mama. She raised Jace and me by herself after my daddy took off, and at the same time, she finished up her nursing degree and moved all the way up in the hospital until she was a shift supervisor. My mama was like Superwoman, complete with X-ray vision, radar ears, and a nose that was into everything, all the time.
I set the phone to one side and let the call roll to voice mail. Later on, after the stuff was unpacked in the kitchen, and Cody was home from the academy, and we’d finished a nice first meal in our new house, I’d give Mama a call.
Or maybe tomorrow.
Or next week . . .
Maybe I’d just e-mail her and Jace and tell them that Cody was taking the phone to work with him every day. That way, we wouldn’t need to actually have a conversation.
“You’re so lame,” I muttered to myself, but then I went to the back door and stood looking out into the yard, and I felt better. This place was just right for us, and if we would of waited two weeks or two months to look for a house, this one would of been gone. Like the guy from Householders said, deals as good as this didn’t come along every day, especially with no money down and no closing costs. I’d never get Mama to see that, of course. She’d just say we shouldn’t’ve gotten ourselves any deeper in debt.
I went back to the kitchen and started on the boxes. Cody’d plugged in an old radio he found stuffed in the back of the hall closet, and I turned it on and let the music fill the kitchen and spill through the doors into the dining room and the utility room on the back end and the living room in the front. Even that felt like a serious victory. In the apartment, the walls were paper thin, and I couldn’t put the boys down for a nap without my noise or someone else’s waking them up. But here on Red Bird Lane, it was quiet, and I could dance in the kitchen without bothering somebody.
I danced all through the house while I was unpacking the boxes, just because I could. I caught a case of what we folks in the Reid family call the flappy happys. I felt so good, every once in a while I just had to stop and flap my hands in the air and squeal.
The phone rang again, and it was my fave long-distance girlfriend, Dell, so I picked up. “Guess what I’m doing?” I said.
“Ummm . . .” was the only answer she came up with. Dell knew that with me, Guess what I’m doing usually had an answer that would scare most people. “I don’t have a clue . . . what?”
“Guess.” Dell was such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes. She was, like, the most serious-minded person I knew. I liked her, but in the three years we’d been friends, I’d never, ever seen her do one single thing that was the least bit spontaneous. I guess I could of learned something from that. Dell was in music school at Juilliard, and I was . . . well, pregnant again.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start guessing,” she said.
“You are so not fun,” I complained, and then it seemed like I’d hurt her feelings, so I went ahead and spilled the beans. “I just picked up a big stack of boxes, and I’m carrying them . . .” I stretched out the sentence,
The cell phone rang in the kitchen, while I was walking down the hall noticing that the light fixture there was old and pretty, but it was hanging out of the ceiling a couple inches, like the bolts were coming loose. The wires above it looked dusty and ragged. While I passed by, the mind-Mama pointed out that it’d probably burn the house down.
When I got to the kitchen and picked up the phone, my brother’s number was on the screen. Jace never called out of the blue. He was probably doing recon for Mama. I had the weird feeling I used to get back in high school when I was someplace I wasn’t supposed to be, and she’d ring my cell, and I knew I’d gotten caught. My friends always thought I did something to give away all our secret plans, but they didn’t know my mama. She raised Jace and me by herself after my daddy took off, and at the same time, she finished up her nursing degree and moved all the way up in the hospital until she was a shift supervisor. My mama was like Superwoman, complete with X-ray vision, radar ears, and a nose that was into everything, all the time.
I set the phone to one side and let the call roll to voice mail. Later on, after the stuff was unpacked in the kitchen, and Cody was home from the academy, and we’d finished a nice first meal in our new house, I’d give Mama a call.
Or maybe tomorrow.
Or next week . . .
Maybe I’d just e-mail her and Jace and tell them that Cody was taking the phone to work with him every day. That way, we wouldn’t need to actually have a conversation.
“You’re so lame,” I muttered to myself, but then I went to the back door and stood looking out into the yard, and I felt better. This place was just right for us, and if we would of waited two weeks or two months to look for a house, this one would of been gone. Like the guy from Householders said, deals as good as this didn’t come along every day, especially with no money down and no closing costs. I’d never get Mama to see that, of course. She’d just say we shouldn’t’ve gotten ourselves any deeper in debt.
I went back to the kitchen and started on the boxes. Cody’d plugged in an old radio he found stuffed in the back of the hall closet, and I turned it on and let the music fill the kitchen and spill through the doors into the dining room and the utility room on the back end and the living room in the front. Even that felt like a serious victory. In the apartment, the walls were paper thin, and I couldn’t put the boys down for a nap without my noise or someone else’s waking them up. But here on Red Bird Lane, it was quiet, and I could dance in the kitchen without bothering somebody.
I danced all through the house while I was unpacking the boxes, just because I could. I caught a case of what we folks in the Reid family call the flappy happys. I felt so good, every once in a while I just had to stop and flap my hands in the air and squeal.
The phone rang again, and it was my fave long-distance girlfriend, Dell, so I picked up. “Guess what I’m doing?” I said.
“Ummm . . .” was the only answer she came up with. Dell knew that with me, Guess what I’m doing usually had an answer that would scare most people. “I don’t have a clue . . . what?”
“Guess.” Dell was such a stick-in-the-mud sometimes. She was, like, the most serious-minded person I knew. I liked her, but in the three years we’d been friends, I’d never, ever seen her do one single thing that was the least bit spontaneous. I guess I could of learned something from that. Dell was in music school at Juilliard, and I was . . . well, pregnant again.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start guessing,” she said.
“You are so not fun,” I complained, and then it seemed like I’d hurt her feelings, so I went ahead and spilled the beans. “I just picked up a big stack of boxes, and I’m carrying them . . .” I stretched out the sentence,
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