by Ina Williams
THE
HOUSE
WE BUILT
INA WILLIAMS
Copyright © 2016 Ina A Williams.
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ISBN: 978-1-4834-5303-3 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4834-5302-6 (e)
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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 10/26/2016
Contents
Part I
Namesakes
Chapter 1 Molly
Chapter 2 Elijah
Chapter 3 An Understanding
Chapter 4 Bixby’s Bulbs
Chapter 5 I Thought I Knew You
Chapter 6 From the Outside In
Chapter 7 Let Me Go
Chapter 8 The Me You See
Chapter 9 The Storm
Part II
Who We Are
Chapter 10 Closed Window, Open Door
Chapter 11 Breaking Ground
Chapter 12 Everything
Part III
What We Choose
Chapter 13 All We Never Say
Chapter 14 A Buck in the Road
Chapter 15 Movie Night
Chapter 16 Tempest
Dedication
For my mother, who builds me even now.
PART I
Namesakes
CHAPTER 1
Molly
First, you have to understand how difficult it is to be a black woman named Molly Grasen. In a city like Atlanta, a black woman with a name like that causes a lot of confusion—especially in a family full of men named after great black leaders. Molly’s caramel skin and soft black curls only baffled people when she responded to the often asked question about a mix-raced background. She didn’t have one. Both of her parents were black, her mother fair and her father dark. Both beautiful in their own way, and that is how Molly saw the world and each person in it.
Molly’s mother was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1954. Columbus was no Selma, Alabama, but it was not void of a similar racial tension that existed everywhere else in the 50’s. Her mother, ever the nonconformist, never let that stop her from doing exactly as she felt. So in the summer of 1962, while preparing for another year of grade school, she met her best friend Molly Hirsch, granddaughter of German immigrants. The fact that she and Molly were different didn’t matter one bit. She had found something in her new friend so rare, a kindred spirit—the same fight and fire with two entirely different ways of expression. Even at seven they knew how extraordinary their connection was, so when children snickered and pointed or when teachers stared, they ignored them. This defiant love and friendship that spanned boundaries and decades was the inspiration for Molly’s name. The history of their friendship made the taunting of Molly the second much easier to bear.
Molly had been born into love, strength, and audacity. Her parents were world changers. She spent her whole childhood wanting to be just like them. Her father was a community activist and youth advocate. Her older brother, Marshall, once said that their father was what people wished politicians really were. Their mother worked in nonprofit development as an exceptionally skilled fundraiser. They were the perfect match, he would find the cause and she would fund it. When Molly and her brother were very young they had moved around quite a bit, building up the world five blocks at a time. The nature of this nomadic life had lasting effects on her and her brother, even into adulthood. While the constant change in environment made Marshall an overachiever striving to be the best to earn his new friends’ attention, it forced Molly out of her shell, making her a master of the art of fast friendship. She had learned to use any discomfort or awkwardness about being the new kid to her advantage. The more open she was, the more her friends were. With her mother’s charm and her father’s ambition, there were few hearts she couldn’t win over.
When her mother found out she was pregnant with their third child, she and Molly’s father both decided it was time to hang up their suitcases and put down roots. They bought a modest house in Atlanta and worked to build a new community, their family.
Perhaps because of the history of her name, or maybe because of her life as a middle child, Molly was desperate to make everyone she met feel accepted, or at least, not alone. She was sandwiched between two brothers who could not have been more different if they tried. Marshall, the oldest was a dauntless, daring, and competitive sort—always working to be leaps and bounds ahead of everyone, sometimes to his own detriment. Malcolm, on the other hand, was a quiet rebel, always slow to speak but when he did the world sat up to listen. With Molly and Malcolm affection came easy, she filled his silences with wit and fun while he offered much needed perspective when her words ran out. With Marshall, however, closeness was always an issue. As they got older things improved but there was still a certain amount of distance between them, and not just Molly, but everyone in Marshall’s life. It took years for Molly to realize this was not her fault, or anyone else’s. Her mother told her once, “Your brother loves you, but he needs room to grow. Your father was like that. When he’s ready he’ll come to you.” And he did.
After his junior year in college Marshall was home for the summer and Molly had just graduated high school. Marshall asked her to go to the movies with him. Confused, Molly looked to her younger brother Malcolm for some direction. He shrugged, mouthing, “go with it,” so Molly turned to her older brother and nodded in affirmation.
The ride to the movies was quiet, but that was normal. Marshall wasn’t really a talker unless he was talking about changing or taking over the world. She was never fully sure which was his ultimate goal. She reached for the radio, but something told her to pull her hand back. She sat back, looked at her stoic brother, and attempted to make conversation.
“How’s Adrienne?”
Adrienne was his girlfriend, they’d been dating since his freshmen year and Molly had never seen her brother’s face as bright as it was when he was looking at her. Yet he’d tensed at the question. He was silent, but he wasn’t ignoring her. It looked like he was steadying himself to say something.
“We broke up,” he said after the long silence.
Now it was she who couldn’t speak. Suddenly she felt trapped in the car. He was obviously sad about it but Molly wasn’t used to seeing her brother like this, so human. All of a sudden it occurred to her that maybe her brother not only felt things, but maybe he felt them more than most. After all he didn’t have a great deal of practice when it came to social interaction. Her heart began to swell at the thought of her big brother in pain. She saw his hand resting on the gear shift of his BMW, which used to belong to their father, and she gently placed her hand on his. He didn’t look at her, he didn’t move, he just let her hand rest there until they got to the movies. Every Friday for the rest of the summer they went out, sometimes to the movies, sometimes to dinner. They never talked much in the car, but every w
ord her brother shared was a treasure to Molly.
She had grown to associate this quietness with an inner strength and depth that required patience to explore. She was already predisposed to optimism but her brothers taught her to hope for the best—in life and in others.
It became her mantra, her raison d’etre optimiste. All through college she found this resolve to find the best in others tested. By the end of her sophomore year in college she discovered there were several people who assumed her thoughtfulness was a weakness that could easily be exploited. Friends and boyfriends thought they’d just lucked out in the sucker Olympics and she was sure to medal. Even a couple of professors believed that the color of her skin somehow lowered her IQ.
But Molly had the intelligence of her father and the tenacity of her mother. What others saw as unscalable walls, Molly saw merely as hurdles, trifles she could easily mount with a little momentum. Every challenge she met gave her a quiet satisfaction and confidence that if she could just stay the course and forge ahead, there was little she couldn’t accomplish.
So it was with this heart full of hope that she found herself, several years, a degree, and one great job later, in a quaint little town in Georgia. The stereotypes about Georgia being one big rural cotton field had changed greatly with a booming movie industry and all the trendy new living spaces. Molly knew there was much more to Georgia than that, and she intended to find out just how much more there was.
Her new neighborhood was about an hour outside of the city, but then so was everything in Atlanta. Molly’s smile had never been as bright as when the realtor handed her the keys to her new home, a white house with black shutters and a sweet little freestanding garage that she couldn’t bear to park her car in.
Buyer’s remorse is pretty common among new homeowners, especially those who swoon at words like “potential” when buying a house on a budget. Molly wasn’t finicky, but learned quickly that working appliances were much more of a necessity than a luxury. Alas, her boundless optimism would not fail her and Molly began to see signs of light in this house. Her faith had made her romantic that way. Between her naturally optimistic nature, her faith in Christ, and her feminine affinity for lost causes, it was possible that she would live in this dilapidated house for months before admitting one thing was wrong with it.
She was, however, beginning to dread waking up in the morning to cold showers. The rain, which was now so consistent she could set her watch by it, was seeping through the ceiling in the kitchen and the living room. She congratulated herself on her lack of furniture—less to get water damage, glass half full she thought to herself. As if the water works were not enough, nature decided to completely encroach by sending a family of possums to live in the garage and keep her up at night. And then there was the woodpecker whom she had lovingly named Havoc. He woke her each morning about an hour before her alarm clock. Even in this she found sweetness. Her new friends, annoying as they may be, made her feel less alone in her new foreign wood. Love them as she did, her work was beginning to suffer and with her new forty-minute commute (an hour with traffic, and there is always traffic) to and from work, sleep and warm showers were essential. So, when Havoc started his morning ritual of a hundred and eighty pecks for the third week in a row, Molly rose from her sleep, livid and determined to take back her mornings. She was sure there was a pest company that could catch Havoc and release him into a bird utopia, with lots of trees he could pound far, far away from her house.
Molly had only ever lived on someone else’s property—at home with her parents, dorm rooms, then a string of apartments. The optimist in her savored the eventful milestone of calling an exterminator for her very own property and her smile was wide as a mile when Harry from Sunshine Pest Control pulled up in her driveway.
“Hi, I’m Molly.”
She walked towards him with her hand extended. When she was close enough to touch him he looked up from the clipboard and took her in before lowering his eyes back down.
“Harry Mumford.”
She smiled to herself. Racism in the new millennium always seemed a little too redundant to be taken seriously. She understood the dangers, you couldn’t live in the South and ignore them, but she also knew the difference between an ignorant person and a hateful person. She had learned to ignore the former and avoid the latter.
Mr. Mumford was not the first man to attempt subtle insults. In fact, Molly had noticed there were several approaches, but the sentiment was always the same. Her high school French teacher, for example, a plump southern woman in her early fifties, masked her bigotry as polite concern. While others, like her astronomy professor, Mr. Warshaw, wore their malice like a badge of honor. He had never forgiven her for giving the correct answers during his pop quiz on the first day of class. He had hoped to make her look like an idiot, or worse, to let other people believe she was so he wouldn’t look like one.
Truth be told, this happened a lot. People spoke to her over the phone and heard her accent, or lack thereof, learned her name, and simply assumed they were speaking to a white woman. White or black she found that the more clearly she spoke and pleasant she sounded the more uneasy it seemed to make everyone. For a while she had been very aware and sometimes self-conscious of her speech, but by the age of eighteen she stopped caring. The people who were most important to her would love her for what she had to say, not the way she said it. Everyone else didn’t seem to matter that much. The best remedy for Harry’s haughty eyes and lack of understanding would be grace and some good old fashioned Southern charm.
“What seems to be the problem ma’am?” Ma’am huh? Well that’s a good start. She thought to herself.
“Well Harry, I have a family of possums keeping me up at night and a woodpecker waking me up in the morning.”
Harry’s eyes hadn’t left the clipboard, “A woodpecker huh?”
“Yes, I named him Havoc.” Harry couldn’t help but smile. Signs of light.
“Hey Harry, before we get started would you like some lemonade? I just made a fresh pitcher.”
He finally looked up, “I would. Thank you.”
Hook, line, and sinker.
CHAPTER 2
Elijah
Elijah had been his mother’s favorite prophet in the Bible. His mother was not a religious person, consequently neither was he, but the story of Elijah was one that had always stuck out to his mother during her intense and completely forced religious education as a child. It was for this reason, he was certain, that his family barely ever set foot in a church when he was growing up. For Elijah, church was about bitter goodbyes. He had attended more funerals than he cared to remember, the very first was for his grandfather who had been a pastor. He was five years old and it was the first and last time Elijah remembered seeing his mother’s family. Their disappointment in her brazen ways was palpable in the stale summer air. The mood was so solemn that Elijah remembered being afraid to breathe too deeply. But it wasn’t grief stretched across the pale sweaty faces of the people around him—it was pride. Of course, he wouldn’t come to find that out for many years when his own ego forced its way onto his face.
Elijah had inherited his iron will from his mother. At eighteen, hers led her to break the cardinal rule of her father’s house—she stood up to him. She had fallen in love and wanted to get married. Elijah’s grandfather never really had any valid complaints against his daughter’s boyfriend. The kid was a good boy, not in church as often as he would have liked but he had a steady job in the service and he took care of his ailing sister who was the only family he had left. However, this boy was only good enough for his baby girl until someone better came along to distract her. But Elijah’s father had no intention of waiting for her to be distracted. He wanted to marry her right then. She wasn’t pregnant and, although he was enlisted, he wasn’t headed out to war. He simply loved her. He was all of twenty years old and felt the urgency of his feelings as only the young can. He
needed to marry her. But Elijah’s grandfather refused to give his blessing. He had plans for his daughter that didn’t include the nomadic life of an army wife, especially now that his own wife was gone. Refusing to give his blessing was the same as soaking an ember in gasoline, so when Elijah’s father tossed stones at her bedroom window, she climbed down the trellis and never looked back, until the day of the funeral.
It was almost seven years later when she stood at the front of the church to say goodbye to her father. When she turned around to find the disapproving faces of her family glaring back at her, she grabbed Elijah by the hand making her way down the aisle and outside to her battle-scarred Honda.
With her husband at war and her father buried, she drove the three hours back home to the base trying unsuccessfully to hide her tears from Elijah. He found an electric bill on the backseat, folded it into a paper airplane and handed it to her.
“Thank you baby,” she said as she pressed it to her heart.
For the many dark days he had experienced in churches there were at least a few bright ones. To start, there was the wedding of his younger sister, but she made everything brighter, a fact that had won her the nickname Rae. From the moment she was born, Rae forced every dark thing away, beginning with the departure of their violent and troubled step-father. Their own father had been killed in Saudi Arabia and the loss had changed his mother deeply. Elijah was too young to remember, but there was a lightness in her that left when his father died. She was stronger, but her heart was heavier for it.
When Elijah’s mother met Andy, a Gulf War vet himself, they bonded over loss. She was already pregnant with Rae when they met, so Andy waited until she was born to marry their mother.
With Elijah’s father the marriage had been easy. They didn’t have much, but what they had in each other was more than enough. With Andy she had found something much graver. They needed each other. They loved each other yes, but both were grieving a life they had before loss. They were broken and trying to make sense of a life together. Still, Andy struggled to feel at home with them. There was a war inside his heart and he need somewhere fight it.
