Suburban Renewal

by Pamela Morsi

  I had no idea that Rusty used drugs. That fact was frightening to me. I saw the kid on a fairly regular basis. I knew that he had some problems. Both Cherry Dale’s boys had their issues and I figured my father had had plenty to do with that. I just never thought things were as bad as they were.

  The morning of the funeral I was determined to become more informed. I could hear Nate in his workshop and I went down there. He was making a complicated cherry armoire to be used as an instant office. There was a place for a computer, shelves, files and a pullout desk. The whole thing could be closed up, hiding the entire working space.

  “It’s my own design,” he told me proudly.

  “It’s neat.”

  “The first one is for Mom,” Nate said. “You know, as like a ‘thank you’ for helping me get the business part of the Lumkee Woodcraft off the ground.”

  “That’s nice, Nate,” I said. “I’m sure your mom will be thrilled.”

  He smiled and nodded.

  “There’s something that I need to know,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Do you do drugs?”

  “No,” he answered. It was a quick response that didn’t completely satisfy me.

  “I want the truth, Nate,” I said. “With what happened to Rusty, I just…I just didn’t have a clue. But Rusty’s not my son, you are. I need to have a clue with you.”

  “Rusty’s been doping heavily since high school,” Nate answered. “He drank too much and did pills on top of snort on top of smoke. I’m sorry the guy’s dead. But I’m not surprised.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve smoked some weed, but I had to quit,” he said. “You can’t do that kind of shit and work with power tools. It’s a safety issue, but more than that. You can’t compromise your concentration. Musicians and artists, they think they do better after smoking some dope. Sort of takes the edge off and helps them create. In woodworking, if you take the edge off you’ll make some really stupid mistake and you’ll be lucky just to cut your finger off.”

  I was tremendously relieved. His words sounded like the truth.

  After the funeral, we stopped by Cherry Dale’s double-wide. The poor woman was inconsolable. I understood that. I couldn’t imagine how I would feel if something happened to Lauren or Nate. No matter how careful you were, no matter how closely you watched, life was full of pain and danger. As a parent all you could do was hope that neither would find your child.

  Corrie sat down on the couch next to Cherry Dale. The distraught woman grabbed her hand and did not let it go. The evening wore on. People came, people left. Cherry Dale held on to Corrie and we stayed.

  Lauren and Nate finally left without us. Cherry Dale’s mother went back to her own house. Even Harlan gave his mom a kiss and told her he’d call her the next day.

  We were alone with Cherry Dale.

  “I can’t forgive myself,” she said. “If I had done things differently, if I had made better choices, none of this would have happened.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” Corrie told her. “Rusty was the one who made the bad choices. And he was so young, he really didn’t know any better.”

  “No, it was me,” Cherry Dale insisted. “I brought that man into this house. If it hadn’t been for that, Rusty would have never been like he was. He blamed himself.”

  Corrie glanced over at me, puzzled. I shrugged slightly, equally at a loss.

  “Rusty blamed himself,” Cherry Dale repeated. “He loved that son of a bitch and he blamed himself for what happened.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Floyd,” Cherry Dale answered. “Rusty was like your Nate. When Floyd treated him special, he felt like he was on top of the world. Rusty would do anything to please that man.”

  Corrie looked concerned.

  “He was a charming man,” she admitted.

  “That night,” Cherry Dale continued. “That last night when he was beating me…he would have killed me. I think he was going to kill me. If Rusty and Nate hadn’t pulled him off me, I’d be dead now.”

  “Nate?”

  Corrie and I spoke the name in unison.

  “Nate was here?” Corrie asked.

  Cherry Dale nodded. “He was over with Rusty, they were playing some game on the computer. He left after the fight…or in the morning. I’m not sure. I was pretty groggy. I had a concussion.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Corrie said.

  “They pulled him off me,” Cherry Dale continued. “And Rusty hit Floyd. He hit him really hard. He’d never fought the man, never defended me. But that night he hit him really hard.”

  “He deserved it,” Corrie said.

  Cherry Dale nodded. “But Rusty wasn’t able to forget that. He thinks that he killed Floyd. He thinks that one blow to the side of that old bastard’s head was what killed him. I told him it wasn’t. I must have told him a hundred times, but he never believed me. I know what killed Floyd. It wasn’t Rusty.”

  Cherry Dale dissolved into tears and over the top of her head, I caught Corrie’s glance.

  Later that night as we drove home in the quiet darkness inside the car, Corrie spoke.

  “I hope you are wrong about Cherry Dale killing Floyd,” she said. “If she did, how will she live knowing her son destroyed his life because of it?”

  “I hope I’m wrong, too,” I told her. “But that pill bottle. How could it have gotten there if Mike didn’t give it to her? Cherry Dale fed him dinner just before he went to sleep on the couch. She must have ground them up into the food. That’s how it had to happen.”

  Beside me, Corrie sighed. It was such a sad sound.

  “Did you know that Nate was there that evening?” I asked her.

  “No,” she told him. “He never said a word about it. I knew that sometimes he was over there when he was supposed to be someplace else, but I didn’t know he was there.”

  “Can you imagine what he felt when he saw his beloved paw-paw beating the crap out of Cherry Dale?” I said.

  “It must have been such a wrenching disillusionment,” Corrie said. “I suppose it’s no wonder that he never spoke about it.”

  “Poor kids,” I whispered. “All of them. Floyd Braydon was just bad. In one way or another, he hurt everyone he touched, including me.”

  The week after Rusty’s death was a busy one for our family. Lauren decided to return to school for the spring semester, but she wanted to transfer to Baylor. She had never mentioned Baylor to us and we had no idea that she was even thinking about attending there. She’d gone through all the motions of getting a permanent job in Tulsa, but college was what we’d always wanted for her. We jumped at the chance. And unlike Living Waters Bible College, we’d actually heard of Baylor.

  Most students don’t try to do a school transfer in three days. But Lauren hardly blinked an eye at all that was required to get her accepted, enrolled and moved in.

  Corrie drove her down to Waco, the car packed to overflowing with her clothes and books and furniture.

  I volunteered to go as well, but Corrie urged me to stay at home. I think she wanted to try to find out what was going on in Lauren’s head.

  She stayed overnight, getting Lauren settled in, and then called me from the road on her cell phone just a little before noon.

  “You’ll never guess what prompted Baylor.”

  From her near giggling tone I assumed it wasn’t something scary, like they’d agreed to send her to a leper colony for spring break.

  “I can’t guess,” I admitted. “Just tell me.”

  “It’s a guy.”

  Lauren, easily being the prettiest girl in her high school, had never shown any interest in the opposite sex. She rarely dated in college and, by her own unwelcome admission, was “saving herself for marriage.”

  “A guy?”

  “Yeah, you know,” Corrie teased. “One of those tall, muscular, good-looking humans.”

  “I hope you don’t mean the ones with a penis.”
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  “I think this guy’s got one,” Corrie said. “But I don’t think he’s shown it to Lauren yet. He’s just cute as a button.”

  “As a button,” I repeated. “Sounds macho to me.”

  “She apparently met him when she was in Mexico,” Corrie said. “He seems very taken with her.”

  “Is he planning to be a missionary?”

  “Oh, this is the best news, the very best news,” Corrie said as a buildup.

  “What already?”

  “He’s in premed.”

  “Okay.”

  “My son-in-law, the doctor!” Corrie announced. “Our little Lauren could be set up for life.”

  “Doctors don’t make as much as they used to,” I told her. “And be careful what you wish for, he might be dreaming of opening a hospital in Botswana.”

  Corrie laughed. “You’re probably right,” she agreed. “I’m just happy she’s back in school, dating and having a regular twenty-something kind of life again.”

  “Me, too.”

  I was still smiling when I got off the phone. When I got back to the line, the workers were just finishing up the last of the tamales and getting them ready for delivery. Mr. Chai had everything under control. I told him I was headed out for lunch.

  When I stepped outside the bright sunshine and the unseasonable sixty-degree weather inspired me. I left the van and walked home. It was only a half dozen blocks and it felt good to get out into the world. I was whistling by the time I walked through the front gate and up the steps to the porch. I thought Nate would be in his workshop, but when I heard the sound of somebody in the house and saw his bedroom door was closed, I assumed that he was working on his Web page.

  I was headed to the kitchen to fix a sandwich and I thought I’d ask him if he wanted one. I opened the door.

  “Nate, do you want—”

  A woman screamed.

  “Damn!” my son cursed.

  Hurriedly I shut the door.

  I walked into the kitchen. I just stood there, trying to figure out what to do. Was I supposed to be cool with this? Men are men and boys will be boys. Was I supposed to be enraged? No sex as long as you live under my roof. Or was the good father supposed to react somewhere in the middle? I had no idea. I’d never had a good dad. And as from the first day of my children’s lives, I was making it up as I went along.

  I opened the refrigerator and began putting together a sandwich.

  A few minutes later I heard the front door slam. Nate came into the kitchen shortly afterward.

  He stood there. I guess he didn’t know how he was supposed to behave, either.

  “How long have you been sleeping with Jin?” I asked him.

  “Since high school.” He hesitated and then added, “She’s flying out tomorrow.”

  Jin had a scholarship for Syracuse.

  “Do her parents know you’re seeing each other?” I asked.

  “Sheesh! No. She promised them she wouldn’t go out with me. We keep trying to break up,” he said. “Every time she goes back to school we agree to date other people. There are lots of Koreans at Syracuse. She’s trying to find somebody else.”

  “And when she comes home, you two get back together,” I said, trying to understand.

  Nate shrugged. “We’re just good together, Dad. We know it can’t really work, but we see each other and…well, we just…you know.”

  I did know. I’d been nineteen once myself.

  Corrie

  1998

  EducationEnvironments.com was coming along very well. As the technology got better, I was able to look at more classrooms online and make observations. I began doing a weekly column, for want of a better term, on whatever I happened to be thinking about. What a luxury! To be able to just spout out whatever observations I had on teaching and find an immediate outlet for them. Other teachers were responding with their own take on things, and early that year I began a new feature on the site called The Front of the Class: Teachers Speak Out. Initially, I expected it to be about the classroom-design issues, but it quickly broke out of those parameters into a spectrum of opinion on everything from discipline and school violence to teachers who “don’t dress nice.”

  One thing that began to stand out to me was the growing chasm between classroom teachers and school administration. It was as if there was some great paradigm shift that had occurred in American education. School boards and administrators had begun to see teachers and parents as different constituencies and decided that their best interests lay in siding with parents. Teachers were left hanging. They faced the day in their classrooms knowing that if anything went wrong, anything, from Johnny not learning to read to Janey having a potty accident, the teacher was going to be held at fault. And nobody in the principal’s office was going to back her up.

  “It’s hard to concentrate on the correct placement of the science nook,” one participant wrote sarcastically, “when I’ve got to keep my eye on the kid who sharpens his plastic ruler into a stabbing weapon.”

  “These days the schools are run by education executives in business suits,” another complained. “It’s been so long since they’ve been in a classroom, they haven’t a clue what goes on there.”

  “This is a teaching job? I thought my principal hired me as a prison guard!”

  The open forum with its venting and controversy brought more and more teachers to the site. Unfortunately, it also brought administrators and school board members and the lawyers and lobbyists representing every side.

  My first hint that this was not going to be good for me was when the flood of new clients began to drop off. I wasn’t worried. School funding is cyclical and I thought maybe second-semester money was tight. I got my wake-up call when overnight my advertisers dropped me, one even threatening me with a lawsuit if their logo was not taken down from my site immediately.

  “Apparently, I’ve stepped on too many toes,” I told Sam and Nate one morning at the breakfast table.

  My husband was sympathetic.

  “I thought talking things out was supposed to be a good thing,” I complained. “This country was built on free speech. Now the educational establishment is virtually endorsing censorship.”

  “Take ’em to court, Mom,” Nate told me. “That’s what everybody does when they get their rights trampled.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because they really haven’t stopped me from talking,” I explained. “They’ve just stopped me from making money and talking at the same time.”

  Nate just looked at me for a minute and then asked, “What do you need money for, Mom? Aren’t we still selling tamales?”

  “Sure we are,” I answered.

  “Then you don’t need anybody else’s cash,” he said.

  “Well, yes, that’s true,” I admitted. “But everybody wants to be rewarded for what they do.”

  “Monetary rewards are not the only rewards,” Sam pointed out. “Nate’s right. You got into this to help teachers help students. You can still do that.”

  “Yeah, I guess I could.”

  “You’ve got the luxury to do what you want and not have to get a paycheck for it,” he said.

  “But I’ve always made money,” I argued. “And this business should make money. Think of all that venture capital that people have been trying to throw at it.”

  “I’m always a capitalist,” Sam told me as he sliced a banana into his oatmeal. “But sometimes giveaways can be great promotion. Think of all the underfunded school districts that can’t even pay for textbooks, let alone any classroom design, no matter how inexpensive you make it.”

  What he was saying made sense.

  “I’ve been looking at this as a setback and I need to view it as an opportunity,” I said. “I need to retrench, get back to my basics and do what I do best.”

  Sam and Nate looked at each other. Nate raised a hand and Sam slapped it in a high-five salute.

  “What is that
about?”

  “Oh, you’ve been whining around here for a week,” Sam said. “Nate and I just decided that we would give you a little push to get back to the onward-and-upward trail.”

  “You’re so easy, Mom,” Nate told me.

  “You guys were manipulating me?”

  “We’re only pushing you in the direction you want to go,” Sam assured me.

  I playfully stuck my tongue out at him. But a few weeks later I was called upon to do my own share of urging people I loved in the direction I thought they should go.

  I was home on spring break. Following my new mandate, I was voluntarily working up a design for a New Jersey public school. The photos I got of the room looked like the film sets for Blackboard Jungle. I took on both the challenge of making the room “learning positive” and doing it with virtually no money.

  Lauren was still at Baylor. Most of the colleges had scheduled their break for the following week, so I was trying to get my work done, freeing myself for a full week of laughing, shopping and talking with my daughter.

  Nate had started working with some new imported woods and had taken Sam’s truck to a lumberyard in Sapulpa. Sam had, in turn, borrowed my car, so I was going to be blissfully alone in a quiet house all morning.

  My new armoire/desk that Nate had made for me was wonderful. I’d located it in the corner of the family room where it could be closed up and out of sight when I wasn’t working. And it put me in front of the backyard views from the deck windows when I was.

  I was deep into my work when I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up to see Jin Chai walking toward Nate’s workshop. When she saw the place was locked up she turned and walked to the house. I’d just risen to my feet when she reached the back door.

  I expected her to knock and I was ready to walk over, open it and greet her. To my amazement, without even a tap on the glass, she jerked open the French doors. Apparently not seeing me in the family room, she hollered toward the kitchen.

  “Damn it, Nate! Are you in there?”

  I was momentarily taken aback, but having raised two children, I was not unaccustomed to rowdiness and loud voices.