Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  It seemed to me that he could have walked back into the bedroom, picked up the phone and told them that himself. But reluctantly, I snaked my arm out from under the covers into the cold of the bedroom and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello.”

  “Corrie? This is Lurlene Bledsoe.”

  I was immediately puzzled. I hardly knew Lurlene. I probably hadn’t spoken to her five times in my whole life. She lived next door to Gram. But I couldn’t imagine why she was calling.

  “The front room light has been on in Sam’s grandmother’s house all night,” she said. “I called over there, but there was no answer.”

  It was as bad as she had feared. Gram had passed away the previous evening as she sat in her favorite chair reading her Bible.

  The sense of loss I felt was like a huge emptiness inside of me. I don’t think I had realized before that moment how much Gram meant to me, and how much I counted on her to be there.

  The children were shaken as well. Lauren was sad, quiet, thoughtful. Nate’s curiosity was almost morbid. And though he quickly went on playing, he was acting out and hard to control for weeks.

  Only Sam appeared completely unfazed by her death. He took care of the funeral arrangements calmly and efficiently. He was stoic, yet sincere and dignified.

  I did notice at the service that he seemed to talk about oil prices more than he talked about Gram.

  But I didn’t realize the level of his disconnect until two weeks after the funeral. Reverend Turpin, the pastor of Gram’s church, called me.

  “I hate to ask you this,” the reverend said uneasily. “But I talked with Mr. Braydon about your mother-in-law’s hymnal collection. She had indicated to me that she intended to donate them to the church. But Mr. Braydon is asking for three hundred dollars, and truly, we just don’t have it.”

  The whole question surprised me completely.

  “Sam told you he wanted three hundred dollars for Gram’s hymnals?”

  “No, not Mr. Sam Braydon,” he said. “Mr. Floyd Braydon. He’s the one handling the estate sale, right?”

  “Estate sale?”

  “Yes, they’re having her estate sale this weekend.”

  Immediately I called Sam at work.

  “Do you know anything about an estate sale?”

  “No, well, yes, I guess I do,” he answered. “Dad said he was going to get rid of the stuff he didn’t want.”

  “What?”

  “I gave Dad the house,” he told me. “He said he was going to keep some of the furniture, but he didn’t want all of it. I think it’s more of a garage sale than an estate sale.”

  “What do you mean you gave your dad the house?”

  “Well, we don’t want it,” he said. “We’d never live there. Dad’s been paying rent. He was glad to get it.”

  “It’s Gram’s house,” I insisted. “It’s full of Gram’s things.”

  “She didn’t have anything valuable,” Sam replied. “Old dishes, songbooks, knickknacks. If you want something, go over there and ask Dad. I’m sure he’d give it to you.”

  I went over there, all right. I couldn’t bear the thought of Gram’s house, Gram’s things, being handled and bartered by the man she hated. The man who’d stolen her daughter’s love and then taken her daughter’s life.

  It was as bad as I’d feared.

  He’d gone through everything in the house, emptying closets and drawers, stacking everything in piles like so much flotsam. I was standing next to a box that was labeled WWII Mementos. Inside it were patches, insignias, medals and stacks of letters tied with ribbon.

  “Well, if it isn’t Ms. Corrie?” Floyd said, suddenly appearing at my side. “You come to supervise, honey?”

  “Did you ask Sam’s uncles about this military stuff?” I asked him. “These are their medals, their letters.”

  Floyd shrugged. “Collectors pay top dollar for that crap,” he said. “The old lady left it all to Sam. If the uncles wanted it, they should have carried it off years ago.”

  I thought about explaining to him that in real families, people don’t come into their mother’s house and “carry off” things. But I knew he wouldn’t understand, he couldn’t understand. He was incapable of any emotions beyond anger, selfishness and greed.

  “There are some things that I want,” I told him firmly.

  He smiled. “I hope you brought your checkbook.”

  I began loading up the car. I was like a crazy person. Everything was an heirloom to me. It all said love, family, stability. The pillowcases embroidered with bright jonquils and the rolling pin woodburned with the prayer Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread, I needed to save it all.

  Gram’s worn Bible sat discarded on a footstool. A strip of masking tape had been slapped on the front with the price, seventy-five cents. It was too much. I grabbed the tattered leather volume up in my arms and began to cry. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. People were staring at me. I didn’t care. I didn’t bargain. I didn’t haggle. I didn’t say anything to anyone. I was gathering up Gram’s things and adding their price to my running total. I was, at times, almost zombielike, hardly cognizant of my actions. Then I’d be sobbing again, uncontrollably.

  Having filled the Volvo’s trunk and back seat, I was trying to wedge some metal TV trays into the passenger side when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Corrie? What are you doing?”

  I looked up into the eyes of my brother, Mike.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “One of those damned gossips couldn’t get Mom on the phone so she called the drugstore,” he said. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  I fell into his arms, pouring out the whole horrible story, all the anger and loss and aloneness I felt.

  “Come on, sis,” he urged. “Get a grip, it can’t be as bad as all that.”

  “It is, Mike,” I assured him. “It’s a battle between good and evil. And evil is winning. He’s winning without Sam even putting up a fight.”

  He held me tightly, just as he had when I was a little girl and had skinned my knee. Eventually, I managed a grasp on my composure. I was still shaking a little, but Mike held me at arm’s length and looked me in the eye.

  “You’re going to be okay now,” he said to me firmly, as if he could make it so.

  I nodded.

  “Wait here.”

  I watched him walk through the gate, across Gram’s yard, up the steps to her porch and through her front door. From the corner of my eye I spied a covey of strangers watching me as if I were a sideshow. My tears were gone now. Letting them go made me feel freer, stronger, ready to take on anything that I had to.

  Determinedly, with head high, I followed the path my brother had taken. I went around the picket fence to the gate and into the house. I couldn’t find him there.

  “I think they went out the back,” Ernie Wingate told me. He was sorting through a box of Gram’s hymnals.

  “Those are not for sale,” I told him. “They’ve already been donated to the church.”

  I didn’t wait for him to respond. I walked on through the house and out the back door. I stopped on the back step. I didn’t see anyone. I almost turned around and then I heard voices, raised voices, coming from the direction of the wash house.

  I hurried in that direction.

  I was still a few feet away when I heard Floyd Braydon’s voice clearly.

  “You sniveling faggot, you don’t give orders to me.”

  “This time I do,” I heard my brother answer. “Because believe it, Braydon, this is one sniveling faggot who would like nothing better than to kick your skinny balls so high they’ll be choking you at the back of your throat.”

  I stood rooted to the spot.

  I could hear movement as if one of them was walking around.

  “Yeah, come at me, Braydon,” Mike said. “Come at me. I’d love the excuse to beat you to a bloody pulp.”

  “Oh, yeah, you talk tough to an old guy,” Floyd complained. “You’v
e got twenty years on me.”

  “I do,” Mike admitted. “And I’d like to use every day of it to smash your skull till there’s nothing left but a greasy spot.”

  There was a moment. A long moment that was dangerous, pivotal, consequential. I held my breath.

  Then Mike spoke.

  “Come on, Braydon,” he said. “Take the money. It’s what this is about, anyway. Getting your greedy hands on everything you can. Take the money and get the hell out of my sight.”

  A second later, the door burst open. Floyd Braydon hesitated at the sight of me. Inexplicably he raised his arm as if he were going to strike me. I was so surprised, I made no attempt to defend myself. Then he uttered a gender-defined expletive and swept past me.

  Then Mike was there.

  “What…what is going on?”

  “I bought the household goods from him,” Mike said. “I’ll go take that estate sale sign out the front yard and you clear everybody out of the house. It’s all yours, Corrie. To take care of it as you see fit.”

  I was still incredulous. “You were going to fight him?”

  Mike shrugged. “He’s a bully. I’ve known since first grade there’s only one way to handle that. Don’t look so shocked. There wasn’t much chance of a fight. The man’s a coward, as well. And if he wasn’t…” Mike grinned with unconcern. “I can bench-press three hundred pounds, sis. I could snap that creep’s neck like it’s a chicken leg.”

  Mike called the moving company and made arrangements to have everything in the house packed up and delivered to my garage. I was grateful but still stunned by what had happened.

  My husband had carelessly given away everything that Gram had valued to the one person in the world she had most reason to hate. My father-in-law was openly flexing his influence over Sam. And my sweet, unassuming brother had gotten what I wanted by threatening violence.

  It was as if my world didn’t make sense anymore. The loneliness I’d felt since the children had started school suddenly intensified.

  I tried to get back to my exercise regime, to get those dopamines flowing again, to feel good about myself once more. But when I heard the rumor that Cherry Dale had struck up a relationship with Floyd, I couldn’t believe it. I confronted her.

  “He’s a bad man, Cherry,” I told her. “Even if he wasn’t, he’s way too old and far less than you deserve. He’s a bad man.”

  “He’s made mistakes in his life,” Cherry responded. “Who hasn’t? That doesn’t make him bad, it just makes him human.”

  Her response left me almost speechless.

  “Cherry, you’ve got to quit seeing him,” I said. “Trust me on this.”

  She waved away my words and shook her head. “He warned me that you’d have nothing good to say about him,” she said. “You see him as some kind of competition for the attention of your husband and son. That’s totally crazy, Corrie.”

  Her spiral-permed blond curls bounced as she shook her head sadly and eyed me with pity.

  “You’ve got to get a grip,” she told me. “Floyd thinks it might be some hormonal imbalance or something, but whatever, you’re losing touch with reality. The whole town heard about that fit you threw at the estate sale. You really need help. You should see somebody.”

  After that confrontation, I couldn’t show my face at her place of business. I decided I’d just exercise at home, but I soon gave it up. I didn’t want to exercise. It no longer offered any salve for the pain and disappointment I felt in my life.

  More and more I found myself avoiding the chic, perfectly appointed rooms of my new home, to sit in Gram’s rocker within the darkness of the garage. Surrounded by boxes and boxes of the relics of a woman’s life, a life I hardly knew or shared. I would sit and cry for hours in the bleak shadows of inexplicable despair.

  On January 31, I was eating cereal in front of the television and saw the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.

  Within twenty minutes, Lauren called me from school. She was sick and throwing up. I had to go get her. The entire school had been watching, the kids were inconsolable. Lauren cried more for Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher she’d never met, than she had for Gram.

  As for myself, I identified completely with the victims. I felt as if I, too, were encapsulated in my own coffin, helplessly dropping to earth at accelerating speed.

  Sam

  1986

  It’s amazing how one guy, getting up every day and going to work in Lumkee, Oklahoma, doing what he knows he should and playing by the rules, can suddenly have the whole world knocked out from beneath him from millions of miles away and by folks who don’t even know that he exists.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen. Oil prices have always been controlled. In the nineteenth century, they were controlled by the robber barons. In the first half of the twentieth century, by the Texas Railroad Commission. Then OPEC was in charge. Things got scary for a while, but then they settled down. Or rather, they settled up. The price of domestic crude rose to $31.75 in November 1985, the highest price ever recorded. Then something happened. It was crazy and unexpected. Except maybe someone should have expected it. I wish I had.

  In the mid 1980s OPEC slowed production to keep the supply of oil low and the price per barrel high. They did not, however, take into account two developing new production areas that were just taking off, Mexico and the North Sea. Neither of these new, abundant oil fields were members of OPEC.

  Saudi Arabia, the Goliath of the OPEC nations, began to realize that their limited production policy was being eroded as they were losing market share. Their response was to turn on the spigot. Oil began to flow like water. And for about the same price.

  All over the country consumers were jumping for joy. America was back where it should be, living large with gas-guzzling cars and a stock market headed for the stratosphere or what seemed more like the statusphere.

  Every day the spot market price of crude was lower. Pumping domestic wells became less and less cost effective. At thirty dollars a barrel people had been getting rich, at fifteen dollars they were getting by. At ten dollars they were getting out. The multinationals were moving their production overseas where wages, regulations and ecodamage were less costly.

  The small companies, the ones who were my clients, found their backs were up against a wall. First unable to expand, then unable to keep up their commitments, unable to pay their bills and finally declaring bankruptcy. Over and over my company’s name showed up on creditors’ list filings.

  As quickly as the money had appeared, it was gone. Producing wells were suddenly not cost effective and were shut down. And oil equipment surpluses stood rusting in the countryside. There was so much of it for sale, it didn’t pay to even crate it up and transport it to town.

  People who owed me money avoided my phone calls. Those who were paid up had no new jobs to offer.

  At first I refused to believe it was happening. I would go into work every day expecting things to be better. Then I’d walk the floor all night, fearing that they were only getting worse.

  Even with businesses I knew going belly-up all around me, I convinced myself that it couldn’t, it wouldn’t happen to me. Many of the independents were run by wild guys, firecrackers, young men who’d stashed their profits in fast cars, expensive boats and fancy mansions. Compared to those guys, I was Joseph P. Suit. I’d kept the operating costs to a minimum, my salary modest, and had plowed all the profits back into the business. I had paid two small dividends to Corrie’s brother, but nothing I’d done could have been characterized as lavish or risky.

  Still, day by day, the situation worsened. I cut back on everything. I left my car in the garage and walked to work. I tried to schedule my paperwork for the afternoon, so that I didn’t need to use the lights in the office. I cut down on toilet paper. I knew I was kidding myself when I yelled at Lauren for putting “more peanut butter than she needed” on her sandwich. It made her cry. And it forced me to admit that the crisis was too big to be solved with
some thrifty belt-tightening. If I was going to operate on less money, I’d have to cut down on payroll. I hated to lay off my crews, but I reasoned that the sooner they got out there looking for new jobs, the better chance they might have of finding some. Overnight, every company within two hundred miles had more help than they needed. And the line at the unemployment office got longer and longer.

  I couldn’t let everybody go. If I got work orders, I had to have a crew to help me fill them. So I kept Dad and three of the older guys. I figured they’d have the least chance to find anything else. And I went out and beat the bushes from morning until night trying to find paying clients who needed something we could do. Nothing was too small or too far away for me to bid on.

  I barely met payroll. I cut wages. It made very little difference.

  During all of this, I was so alone. I think it was the first time in my life that I ever really felt that way. I hadn’t been the most popular guy in town, but I’d always had a few buddies. All my friends were now in the oil business. Even those who weren’t my clients or my competitors couldn’t be expected to listen to my fears. And I think they must have felt the same way. All over town, it was like a conspiracy of silence. Guys might talk about the world market or the price of crude, but nobody talked about the stripper wells that were shutting down and the drilling contracts that were canceled.

  I was as bad as the rest of them. When I got a question about how Well Service was holding out, I responded with what I knew about operations at Haliburton and Schlumber. I was far too proud, or too scared, to admit aloud that I’d taken a second mortgage on my house and was in negotiations with the IRS.

  I was not, of course, accustomed to airing details of my business in public. Corrie had always been my confidant. It was Corrie who had offered her two cents in every plan, brainstormed with me on every new development and listened to every detail of our growth from the miraculous to the mundane.

  These days, however, Corrie was not available to me.

  Her life had somehow veered off in a different direction. I’m not really sure if she was even aware of how dire things had become. She’d taken Gram’s death very hard. I know they had grown close over the last few years, when she and Lauren were seeing that she got to church. But Corrie’s grief was pretty intense. And it had gotten mixed up with her dislike of my dad. Which somehow made the whole thing worse.