Read Online Love Me Tender by Audrey Couloumbis - Free Book Online

one corner. I had never felt so close to her before.

Chapter 11
    “SO YOU had this clairvoyant experience and you just upped and hauled your children over here, lickety-split.”
    Mel dug into her pocket for the car keys and tossed them to me. “Pull it up closer to the house,” she said.
    The grandmother arched an eyebrow. “She drives?”
    “It's the driveway, Momma, not the interstate.” Kerrie took on an alert expression, hearing Mel come so close to telling her mother a lie. She didn't say a word.
    “That car must take a lot of gas,” the grandmother said.
    “We hardly ever use it,” Mel said. “It's more of an investment.”
    “Risky,” the grandmother said. “Investing in a business you could lose over a fender bender.”
    “You can replace a window, Momma, and I can replace a fender.” Mel looked at me. “Elvira, would you move that car?”
    I hated to go, but I figured Kerrie wouldn't miss much and would be happy to tell me anything worth knowing. It wasn't only that I worried I'd miss something, I felt a little left out, the way the grandmother talked like I wasn't really there. She hardly looked at me.
    I moved the car, even though there was this old fellow—Daddy says don't say “old man,” it sounds mean— standing across the street, watching me do it. He had a white paper sack in one hand, and when I got out of the car, he waved to me and started to come over.
    Uh-oh, I thought, because he looked a little strange. At first I thought it was because he wore the standard golf pro outfit—yellow plaid pants, sparkling white shirt, sunburn. Then I saw the only really strange thing about him was his eyebrows; they were unusually sparse and crinkled, so his face looked strangely bare. But he had a friendly twinkle in his eyes, even if it was just a reflection from his shirt.
    He said, “Are you offering a car-parking service in the neighborhood?”
    “I'm visiting my grandmother,” I said.
    “I have this package for her, if you wouldn't mind delivering it.” He offered me the paper sack.
    I took it.
    We told each other thank you a little awkwardly, and I went back inside.
    I didn't knock. Going down the hall as quietly as possible, I heard the grandmother say, “He's still in that landscaping business?”
    “He's doing very well, and you'd know it, Momma, if you bothered to read my letters.”
    I didn't know Mel wrote to her mother.
    It got me thinking. If Daddy offered to drive Mel to see her mother now and again, he thought it was important. If Mel wrote letters, she must've hoped the grandmother would write back.
    “He ought to have come with you,” the grandmother was saying. “It's a hard trip for a woman in your condition to make.”
    The grandmother had put Mel on the spot, but Kerrie said, “We stopped at a motel with a pool.”
    “Oh, you don't let them get into a heated pool?” the grandmother said, letting the subject of what Daddy ought to do slide. “Those are just swarming with bacteria. They could pick up I don't know what!”
    Mel smiled as I slid onto the chair. “Beats me, Momma, if you didn't sound like an old grandmomma right then.”
    The grandmother ignored her. “You girls want your scrambled eggs on the toast or next to it?”
    “Next to it, please,” Kerrie said. She had pulled the coloring books out and spread her markers in front of her.
    “This paper sack, and whatever's in it, is for you,” I said. The grandmother looked over her shoulder, a tad flustered for a moment, but then said, “Sesame-seed bagels. We can eat them instead of toast, if you like them.”
    “Bagels, Momma? After all those years of insisting we eat whole wheat bread?”
    “It's good for you,” the grandmother said. “That doesn't mean I can't eat anything else.”
    “True,” Mel said. “Where do you get these?”
    “A neighbor has them mailed in from New York,” the grandmother said. “He has relatives up there.”
    Mel glanced at me. “Is he cute?”
    The grandmother