Read Online We Are All Welcome Here by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online

would.
    “Painting nails,” I said. “‘Slightly Peach.’”
    “Oh, that’s a nice one,” she said. “I just bought her that. I like it so much I might use it myself sometime.”
    “Do you want to come to our play tomorrow night?” I asked. “It’s only twenty-five cents.” Suralee stiffened, but I didn’t care. I was going to invite everyone. The more people, the more money. I would invite Riley Coombs and LaRue. Peacie, of course, I had to invite Peacie, and if I had to invite Peacie, Suralee had to invite her mother.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Noreen said. She turned her head away, scratched at the base of her neck, then moved her fingers up to the top of her scalp, scratching mightily. She did this often, attended to herself as a monkey might, oblivious to whoever was before her. Once, I’d seen her sniff under her arms. She picked at her toes when she watched TV.
    “A new man will be there,” Suralee said in a singsong voice. “And he’s handsome as all get-out. He looks like Elvis.”
    I knew Suralee’s attempt to persuade her mother to come was her natural contrariness—if her mother had said she wanted to come, Suralee would have tried to talk her out of it. But I hoped Noreen would come. I had a certain compassion for Suralee’s mother, the way she did for mine. If Noreen came, she could feast her eyes on a real man, rather than the sad specimens she sometimes went out with: bald or fat or poorly complexioned men who honked for her at the curb and took her to cheap places for dinner and then somewhere to have sex, according to Suralee. “Your mother told you that?” I’d asked, horrified, when Suralee had shared this information, and she had looked pityingly at me.
    “Do you do the laundry in your house?” she’d asked, and I’d said no, Peacie did. “Well,” Suralee said. “I do it in this house. And if you do the laundry, you know.”
    “Know what?” I’d asked. “What do you mean?”
    She’d said never mind, another time.
    “What new man are you talking about?” Noreen asked, and Suralee looked coyly down at my pinky, where she was carefully applying a second coat of nail polish. It looked good.
    “If you come, you’ll see,” Suralee said.
    Her mother laughed. “All right, I’ll come. What’s the play about?”
    “It’s a secret,” Suralee said, and told her mother to get out and shut the door behind her, we had work to do. Then, while I waved my hands in the air for my nails to dry, Suralee changed the record and we talked about possibilities for characters until we finally had two we both liked. “Will LaRue come?” Suralee asked.
    I said I thought he would.
    “Do you think he’d be willing to read a few lines, just a few, at the very end?” she asked.
    I told her yes.
    “Good,” she said. “I have an idea for him. Okay, that’s the cast. Now we need to finalize the plot, and get our lines memorized.” She handed me a tablet and a pencil. “I’ll act the whole play out; you write everything down.”
    I held the pencil just so, and felt inside myself the swell of pride I enjoyed only with Suralee.
    At five-thirty, Noreen, wearing a stained pink silk robe, brought us in bean-and-bacon soup, peanut-butter crackers, and cut-up apples on a TV tray. Folded paper napkins, I noticed, decorated with pink roses. Wasteful. “Why don’t you call home and tell your people you’ll be eating here?” Noreen asked. It was odd, how she referred to Peacie and my mother that way. She didn’t approve of either of them for reasons I felt but did not understand.
    “Would
you
?” Suralee asked her. “We’re busy.”
    “I don’t think I should,” Noreen said.
    Suralee looked up at her. “Mom. We’re
busy
in here.”
    Her mother gently closed the door. “She’ll do it,” Suralee said, and she was so confident I believed her.
     
    When I arrived home at nine-thirty, my mother was furious.
    “Where were you?” she asked, her voice even lower than usual. She was