Read Online Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons - Free Book Online Page A

and cry, or what. We went back inside and asked each other for the rest of the day if what had just happened had truly happened. If we had not remembered the laundry outside, all the wet things we’d left to sour in the basket, we would have had nothing to do but sit and wonder. My mother said, “Thank God for laundry.” We rewashed everything left in the basket, so grateful to have something to do with our hands.
    We did not hear anything from my grandmother for three days. Then the phone rang at four o’clock in the morning.
    My grandmother shouted, “Margaret? Margaret?”
    I shouted back, “Where are you?”
    She told me she was at the Sir Walter Hotel, which was the best place in town, and she would be waiting out front for us to come pick her up right away. Then she hung up. I awakened my mother, and she got dressed, and off we went. From five blocks away, we could see my grandmother on the sidewalk. We pulled up beside her and jumped out and rushed at her, asking what was wrong, was she hurt, things of that nature. She said she was not hurt, and without another word she opened the back door and crawled onto the seat.
    As we drove back home, my mother tried again and again to make her tell us what was going on. My grandmother said it was none of our business. When my mother would not stop, she sighed and said, “Well, if it’ll make you be quiet, I’ll tell you.”
    My mother said, “That would be nice.”
    My grandmother opened her black satchel and pulled out a great power of money, a gangster wad actually. She held it up to my mother’s face and said, “You see this? This is your father’s. Or it was his. It’s mine now.”
    My mother shouted, “You mean you rolled him?”
    My grandmother said, “If that means I let him take what he wanted and then I took what I wanted, I suppose I did.”
    I had to know, so I asked my grandmother how much she had there, and she said, “Four-fifty, six, six-fifty, seven...” She licked her finger and counted the last few bills silently and then said, “One thousand three hundred and sixty-five dollars, to be exact.” Then she stuck the wad back into her satchel, snapped the huge clasp, and that was that.
    My mother asked her what she intended to do with it and, more important, what she was going to do when he came after it.
    My grandmother said, “I don’t know and I don’t know. I’m tired. Wake me when we’re home.”
    Later I learned that she donated all this money to the Confederate Ladies’ Home, where three of my mother’s spinster teachers from Miss Nash’s School were spending their last years penniless, playing an endless game of bridge in a dank parlor, wearing cameo chokers and little spots of rouge in the middle of their cheeks. She wrote very specific instructions for the disbursement of the money. It was to be used to buy a seven-tube radio, a new Victrola, magazine subscriptions galore, leather-bound editions of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Hardy, and Dickens. She also included writers of the South, but not Thomas Wolfe, whose style addled her to distraction even though she took his part in the debate over Look Homeward, Angel. Whatever was left was to be used for group trips to Charleston and Savannah. It appeared as though she meant to liven the place up. I wish I knew whether she succeeded. I like to think she did.
    As for my grandfather’s coming after any of this money: He knew better. We never heard from him again.
    My grandmother had run to him so convincingly. Love seemed to be screaming out as she ran, or maybe, since love and revenge grow from the same kernel of want, I was mistaken. She could’ve been hoarding a dream of vengeance for more than twenty years, and that run was part of the plan. Or the run may have been true, and the reality of starting her life over with a stinking, old, untrustworthy man hit her as she watched him gum his food in the best room in town. She may have looked at him sleeping and despised him for leaving her,