by Pamela Morsi
“Could I speak to you for a moment?”
Just from the tone of her voice I knew something terrible was wrong. My heart in my throat, the faces of my family flashed before my eyes.
“What’s happened?” I asked immediately as the door closed behind me.
“Somebody has bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City,” she said. “It’s…it’s terrible.”
Her description had been far from adequate. Our school was locked down for the rest of the day. We tried to shelter the students from what was going on. But we couldn’t hide behind our doors forever.
The next few weeks were a complete blur of angry tears, horrifying revelations and grief. The town, the community, the whole state was mobilized to do something to help.
We went to the Red Cross to give blood. Nate lied about being sixteen and he was tall enough that they didn’t card him. We cleaned out the pharmacy of extra supplies and donated them.
The Lumkee firefighters were part of the rescue. The local guardsmen were all called up to help. We wanted to help, too. Our budget was too close to the edge to make much of a donation. But at the next family meeting it was unanimous that we tighten our belts to help as much as possible.
The terrible tragedy, so close to home, affected us all. But none more deeply than my Lauren. The images somehow burned into her brain: the senior citizens visiting the social security office, the tellers working at the credit union, the children, the sweet young children, in the day-care center and their mothers and fathers throughout the building. And the injustice of it galled her innocent soul.
I suppose it was the first time that Lauren had come face-to-face with the senseless evil that could be done in the name of honor or patriotism or religion. Like any parent, I had wanted to shelter my children from that.
Now it was on Lauren’s radar scope, front and center. My bubbly, outgoing cheerleader was suddenly infused with deeper, more profound needs and the empathy that inspires.
“Mom, I want to start going to Gram’s church again,” she told me.
For the last several years she and I had been attending Sunday service with my parents at the Methodist Church.
“Okay,” I said. “I think that would be okay.”
“I want Daddy and Nate to come, too,” she insisted.
I shook my head. “I don’t know about that, Lauren. Your father doesn’t like to go,” I told her. “It makes him miss Gram too much. And you know Nate, he’ll only do what he wants to do. Nobody can really make him do anything.”
She nodded thoughtfully and I thought that ended the discussion, but she brought it up again during our Wednesday tamale session.
“I want our family to go to church together,” she announced. “I want us to go together to Gram’s church.”
Sam glanced up at her, momentarily surprised.
“No way,” Nate stated flatly.
Sam shook his head. “Sugar, I haven’t darkened the door in years,” he said.
“Please, Daddy,” she begged him. “Would you do it for me?”
Sam was clearly taken aback by her entreaty. Lauren was our easy child. She never asked for anything and stayed as far away from conflict and trouble as any teenager could.
“Is this really important to you?” he asked her.
She nodded. “I want our family to go together,” she said. “I want our family to be together and sit together. It’s very important to me. I want us to be safe, Daddy.”
Safe.
Sam looked at her strangely and then glanced over at me. The world had become a very scary place. We couldn’t make it less so. But if our daughter thought she could feel safe one morning a week in the Ninety and Nine Baptist church, it didn’t seem like that much of a sacrifice.
“Okay, Lauren,” he said. “If it will make you feel better, we’ll all go.”
“Not me,” Nate said.
Lauren turned to him. Her tone was not pleading, but matter-of-fact. “I’ll do all your house chores from now on if you’ll come,” she said.
Sam’s jaw dropped open and I’m sure I must have looked just as shocked.
“Praise the Lord, my prayers are answered!” Nate shouted blasphemously. “You’ve got a deal, sis.”
So began the family’s commitment to the congregation that I will always think of as Gram’s church.
We were not the only lost sheep or new lambs who had come into the fold. Attendance was way up there, and at the other religious services in town. The tragedy had made a lot of us look more deeply at our spiritual values.
As time passed, we were less stalwart. Nate found numerous excuses to miss. And Sam and I occasionally groaned in dread as the alarm went off early on Sunday morning, but Lauren never wavered. In fact, quite the opposite. As she began her senior year in high school, her concern about her social clique and own popularity waned as she began to choose youth discipleship meetings over pep rallies. It was unexpected, but we couldn’t regard it as negative.
Things began to change at the drugstore, as well. The Thursday tamales became so popular that people were showing up as soon as the doors opened to make sure they got their share. Because they were there, anyway, they bought merchandise and had their prescriptions filled. By the time my father was back to working part-time, the drugstore was beginning to show a profit again.
“So the business is going well,” I said to Sam.
He nodded, but was still concerned.
“The pharmacy can only improve so much,” he told me. “Most of the big insurers and HMOs have contracts with the big chain drugstores. Only the people who pay out of pocket or are uninsured can afford to patronize us these days.”
“Well, that’s not fair,” I said.
Sam playfully pinched my nose. “Since when did somebody promise you that life was going to be fair?”
I could hardly argue with that.
“Things are going great for us, Corrie,” he said. “We’re both healthy and working, our kids are doing fine. Your parents are hanging in there. We’ve got it so good, it would be greedy to even wish for more.”
But that didn’t stop me from wishing.
Nate decided over the summer that we should enlarge the house. He drew up some rough plans for a new addition with a family room, a third bedroom and a bath. He even added a little deck area and sketched out the location of where he’d eventually like to put a swimming pool.
When he presented his little booklet of efforts Sam and I were stunned. He’d even costed out the plumbing and electrical work.
“This is so totally cool,” Lauren told him, excited. “I can’t believe my baby brother actually put this together. Can you really do all this yourself?”
“Well, not everything,” Nate admitted modestly. “But I can do most of it myself. If Dad can help me with some of the two-man work, I think I can manage. We really need the room.”
Sam looked it all over carefully.
“This is really impressive, Nate,” he told him. “It’s well thought out. The materials list and the codes included. I don’t think we could hire a remodeler who could have presented a clearer, more thorough estimate. I wish we could do it. But, you know we don’t have eight thousand dollars.”
Nate was immediately on the defensive.
“It would easily cost you thirty if I wasn’t doing the work myself,” he pointed out.
“I’m not denying that,” Sam told him. “It’s a good deal and if we could afford it, I’d jump at the chance in a New York minute.”
“Can’t you get some kind of home improvement loan?” Nate asked.
“Maybe,” Sam answered. “We’ve still got the bankruptcy on our record. I don’t know how keen they’d be about it. But even if we could, we can’t. I don’t think we should go into debt right now. Our first priority has to be you kids. You’ll both be heading off to college in the next couple of years. Just paying for that is going to be the biggest financial challenge your mom and I have ever faced.”
Nate shrugged
away the idea. “Lauren will get some kind of scholarship,” he said. “And me, I’m not going to any college.”
His response was so adamant, I was startled.
“Of course you are,” I told him, too quickly.
“I’m not,” he confirmed flatly. “I’m not wasting four more years. I’m getting a job and getting on with my life.”
“Maybe you’ll feel differently when the time comes,” Sam said, giving me a warning glance. We both knew that if I started insisting on something, Nate would dig his feet in even more deeply. “Or there might be a vocational course you’d want to take. If you’re thinking to work in construction, maybe you could get certified in one of the trades.”
Nate shrugged. “What will teach me more than any class is actually doing this work on the house myself,” he said. “Let’s take the money you’re willing to waste on me at some state university and put it into something that will actually help me and provide payback for you, too. It will give me something to do this summer.” He hesitated a moment. “Otherwise, I’ll have to come up with some other plan for my free time.”
It was a threat, plain and simple. We’d known Nate long enough to know that rarely was a warning from him solely idle chatter.
Ultimately, Sam came up with a solution. He always does.
Sam
1995
Nate’s idea of expanding the house was terrific. I really wanted to do it. But I’d already learned my lesson about debt. Maybe I was gun-shy, but I didn’t want to take a second mortgage on Gram’s house. I’d become too attached to the place to be willing to lose it.
At the same time, the house was an investment. Adding on to it would not only make it more livable, it would make it more valuable. And there would never be a better opportunity for getting it done inexpensively than having Nate devote his entire summer to it. Having something purposeful for Nate to do was a big consideration, as well. A kid like Nate with time on his hands and disappointment too—there was no telling what he might come up with as an alternative activity. I just couldn’t bring myself to borrow money.
I thought about getting a second job. Of course, it wouldn’t be a second job, it would be a third. Although Doc was back to work, I was still putting in a lot of time at the drugstore. There was no way I could work sixteen to eighteen hours a day and still help with the remodel.
I could ask Lauren to get a job. She’d agree if I suggested it. She was a good worker at the drugstore. I’m sure she would have been able to find a full-time summer position that would pay enough to help us out. But I also knew that she’d made other plans for her summer. She was going to work in an educational enrichment program for the children of migrant workers. She was going to travel with the pickers, ostensibly to do day care and summer learning programs. But the organization’s main goal was really to help insure that the little ones didn’t work in the fields.
Corrie wasn’t teaching this summer. She’d signed up for a couple of classes. However, I knew that she’d be willing to work somewhere instead. I didn’t want to ask her. She had pulled the full load for our family for so many years, I wanted her to take the time off. I wanted this not to be her problem. I guess I just wanted to figure it out myself.
The truth is, I didn’t come up with the solution myself. Cherry Dale actually did. She was in the drugstore, picking up a prescription, looking good and young, as always these days. Things were going well for her. She was opening up a big new gym closer to the city. The new place would have a lap pool, racket ball courts, sauna, whirlpool—the works.
“I guess with you working in the city, we won’t see you as much,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m staying right here in Lumkee. Harlan is managing the new place.”
Harlan was Cherry Dale’s oldest, now in his early twenties. He was a troubled young man. Both her boys seemed to have their share of problems. I couldn’t imagine that she was trusting either of them with her biggest, riskiest venture. But as the father of a troubled kid myself, I admired her courage.
“Do you have any tamales?” she asked me.
I shook my head apologetically. “Sorry, I got rid of the last dozen before ten o’clock,” I told her.
She sighed with disappointment. “You do know that you could sell three times as many of these as you do,” she said.
“I know, but they require a lot of time and work. Why would we want to do more?”
“Well, a businessperson like me would tell you you should be reimbursed for your time and work,” she said. “Raise your prices to compensate yourself with a little profit. That will be just the incentive you need to pump up your production.”
I thought about it and realized that she was right.
I called a special family meeting to bring it up for discussion.
“If we raised the price to a profit margin,” I explained, “we could use the money we make toward the addition on the house.”
Nate’s interest was immediately piqued.
“It would involve more planning for you,” I told him. “You’d have to do the work as money came in. You’d never have a big chunk of cash to work with. You’ll have to divide the whole addition into a connecting series of smaller projects with their total cost requirements. You’ll be working on one while we’re trying to make enough money to afford the next.”
Interrelating projects was a lot more difficult than just meshing them together. That was as tough as any professional building contractor’s job. Most of us would have found it intimidating. Nate was young enough and cocky enough to rise to the challenge fearlessly.
“I can do that, Dad,” he assured me. “It’ll take me some time, but what else will I have to do while we’re raising the money?”
“Finishing your classes would be a good idea,” Corrie suggested. “And studying for finals.”
Nate rolled his eyes.
“Your mother is right about that,” I told him. “You can’t just blow off the rest of the semester. It would really put a crimp in the plan if you have to take summer school.”
That he at least took seriously.
“I’ll talk to Doc,” I said. “I think we can sell our food on his premises utilizing his business license, but he’ll have to agree to that. And it would be completely reasonable and proper if he asked us to pay a monthly fee or a share of our profit.”
“Grandpa won’t ask for that,” Lauren said, with complete certainty. “It would be like asking Grandma to fork over half of the rent.”
The kids laughed aloud at that. I shared a wink with Corrie.
“We’re going to have to price our tamales exactly right,” I said. “I think we should start at three dollars. That gives us a dollar profit per dozen.”
Corrie shook her head. “That’s not enough, Sam,” she told me. “If we only make a dollar per dozen we’ll have to sell nearly 100,000 tamales. Our arms will fall off. I think we should charge five dollars a dozen. That makes a lot more sense.”
I shook my head, unsure. “That’s more than twice what they cost to make.”
“Labor is always the most expensive cost,” she said.
“And people think stuff is more valuable when you charge more for it,” Lauren added. “I’d bet we’ll get more people buying at five dollars a dozen than we ever did at two.”
She was right. A week later Lauren and Corrie made a very bright, eye-catching sign that read Okie Tamales $5 Per Dozen. I set it atop the cooler. Within an hour they were all gone.
The next Friday night, when I got home from work, I could smell tamales cooking. Corrie, Lauren and Nate were in the kitchen.
“We decided not to limit ourselves to Thursday for tamales,” Corrie told me. “There is an entirely different crowd on Main Street on the weekends. We want them to start buying as well.”
The next day the Okie Tamales sign was in the front window. We sold out before noon.
By the time summer was in full swing the tamale business was booming. They were cooking on t
he stove almost constantly. Also ongoing was the house addition. Nate was up at dawn and worked until bedtime.
He ran into plenty of snags in the process. There had been other add-ons over the years and some had better construction than others. All had to be supported in such a way that they could naturally hang together.
The pier and beam of the original house would not converge easily with the cheaper, easier slab foundation that Nate had hoped to use. The wiring was far too old to be added on to and we had to hire an electrician to do complete rewiring. And the plumbing with its original lead pipes and gravity flow would have been a challenge for an experienced engineer.
Nate, who had never impressed me with having virtues like patience or tenacity, didn’t get mad, throw stuff around and curse when things went wrong. Or at least, I never saw him doing any of that. He’d take a break, stand back for a few minutes and try to work it out in his head.
The experience of dividing the addition into financially manageable projects had given him a component vision of the entire remodel. On days when it was raining and he couldn’t work outside, he’d pick up the next task that could be worked on indoors. When he ran out of materials or if something didn’t show up on time, he easily made use of his time in another way.
The addition wasn’t finished by the end of summer. But the new bathroom was usable, if not yet painted and cabineted. And Corrie and I moved into our new bedroom.
The sunporch was a sunporch again, for about a week, before it was turned into the business office for Okie Tamales. Making money meant paying taxes, filing reports, completing forms. We were buying our ingredients in bulk, including importing new easier handling Mexican enconchada (conch shaped) corn husks for our hojas. We gave up our three pressure cookers, with every burner on the stove going at once, to embrace a new steam oven that was as big as our old refrigerator. The new commercial refrigerator now sat in Gram’s dining room, where we were able to get more space for production.
Cooking in bigger batches added some problems. We began squeezing lime into the masa flour to make it pliable for longer periods. We ground our own meat. We laid out washed cornshucks to dry on every flat space in the house.
