Chapter 2
My father was allowed to grieve in peace for a year, but soon after, relatives and neighbors started mentioning single women they said were nice.
The general feeling was that he needed help with me and Bobby, and that plenty of women would want to apply for the job.
My father, not yet thirty-five, was considered good-looking, and though he’d left school in sixth grade, he had a natural intelligence when it came to machinery, a trait that had kept him employed during even the worst years of the Depression.
He had good table manners as well as good hygiene, and he didn’t gamble or drink to excess.
In other words, even with two children in tow, he was very much considered a catch.
By the time he was ready to be introduced to some of these women, I was thirteen, old enough to babysit my brother and even make dinner for us both.
My specialty was macaroni and cheese with little pieces of hot dog stirred in.
Bobby liked this dish as much as I did, and he and I spent many Saturday nights enjoying several servings while listening to The Shadow or Inner Sanctum Mysteries.
But then our father would come home, looking deflated and smelling of cigarettes, though he himself didn’t smoke.
If one of us asked if he’d had an okay time, he’d usually shrug.
Some nights he actually rolled his eyes.
Once, after he’d had a beer, he called the woman he’d been out with a floozy, which was strong language from him.
“I just miss your mother,” he told us, which Bobby and I understood.
We didn’t want him to be alone and lonely, but it was hard to imagine him having anyone else for a wife.
Our parents had been well suited to one another.
He didn’t share her religious convictions, but he respected her for her contentment with simple clothes and a simple life, and for her devotion to our family.
Her good sense, as he put it. Before she died, and after, he said he mistrusted women who wore perfume, or dyed their hair, or smiled at everything he said just because he said it.
But then one Saturday evening, he came home with a dumbstruck look on his face, and so late that Bobby had already fallen asleep on the couch.
He told me that he’d had a lovely evening conversing with a war widow named Mae.
I pictured a skinny old woman draped in black, frowning in a rocker.
But Mae, who would become our stepmother, turned out to be twenty-six, stout and pretty, with bright red hair that she pinned up in a floral clip.
And she had a daughter, Janet, who was three.
The first time I met Mae, she told me she’d just put Janet’s crib together when she found out her first husband wasn’t coming back.
“I wanted to die as well,” she told me, and I liked this, how right away she spoke to me as if I would understand things a child wouldn’t.
“There was the sorrow for myself, and a greater sorrow for Janet. We’ve done okay together, the two of us.
But I’d love for her to have a daddy who can hug her and help her.
” Here she paused, flashing her bright smile.
“And maybe a brother and a sister as part of the deal.”
She could afford to speak with confidence. My father, I found out later, had already proposed, telling her to take all the time she needed. He’d wait.
As much as I liked Mae, I was surprised to see my father so taken with her, as she was, in many ways, the opposite of my mother, despite the fact they’d both grown up on farms—my mother in Missouri, and Mae in Arkansas.
In girlhood, they’d both been repeatedly assured that the meek would inherit the earth.
But while this promise consoled my mother, my stepmother, who was about as meek as the color of her hair, took the promise to mean she would inherit nothing, and would therefore need to reach for all she wanted herself.
She didn’t nag at my father or argue with him, at least not in front of us.
He wouldn’t have tolerated that. But not long after the wedding, Mae was the one who came up with the idea that we should all move to Florida, though she’d never been there herself.
She had a friend who’d been in St. Petersburg during the war, and this friend had gone on about the city’s wonders, saying it was up-and-coming, with so much opportunity, not to mention you could leave your snow shovel and boots behind.
A few weeks later, after my father told us we were moving to St. Pete, Mae got out a map and tapped a red fingernail halfway up Florida’s western edge.
“See?” she asked. “Right on the water. They call it Sunshine City. Because it’s a real city, not a Podunk town. Mark my words, you kids will love it.” She leaned close to me and lowered her voice. “Nora, honey. I bet you will, too.”
—
She was right. We arrived in the summer of 1947, when St. Pete had only around a hundred thousand people.
But it was growing fast, and to us, coming from Rolla, a ten-story building was a skyscraper.
The first time we saw an escalator, Bobby and Janet wanted to keep riding it up and down.
As the eldest, I felt I had to encourage restraint, but really, I was just as excited.
And none of us had ever seen the ocean, or run a hand down the latticework grooves of a palm tree’s trunk.
We moved into a flat-roofed rental painted turquoise.
Back in Missouri, a house that color would have been embarrassing and strange.
But in Florida, just on our block, there was a lime-green house, and two other houses painted shades of pink.
Mae planted yellow roses outside the front door, and because the windows were almost always open, I could sometimes smell them from inside.
We lived in the Kenwood neighborhood, not by the water, but the streets were flat and good for biking, and Bobby and I would sometimes take the bus to the long pier on Tampa Bay, where we’d spend our allowance on saltwater taffy or cotton candy or once, a necklace made of sea glass we presented to Mae for her birthday.
I was a little nervous about starting ninth grade in the fall, and not knowing anyone my age.
But I was hardly alone. On the first day, the teacher asked who’d just moved in from out of state, and maybe a third of the class raised a hand.
I made fast friends with Roberta, who’d just arrived from Illinois, and then Irene, new from Pennsylvania.
Roberta and Irene had no love for our new home’s humidity.
But I even liked that. Florida felt lush on my skin.
People say you can’t run away from your problems, but the move to St. Pete eased my grief for my mother, though of course that grief didn’t go away.
In contrast, I think my brother, under his often brash exterior, remained startled that we’d somehow gone on without her.
He was eleven when we moved to St. Pete, and once, when just he and I were with our father, standing at the dock of a city park, a manatee with a pale scar on its back swam up, watching us from under the surface with its dark, sad-looking eyes.
From above, the scar looked like the raised stitching on a football, and our father said that the manatee had perhaps survived a bad run-in with a motorboat.
He strolled away from me and Bobby then, humming, his hands in his pockets.
“I feel her with us here,” Bobby said. He’d spoken quietly. “She’s still with us.”
I was unsure what to say, for I didn’t feel any such thing. I felt our mother’s absence, and I felt sorry for her. The last thing she’d done was go outside on a freezing day and hang wet clothes on the line. Her big dream was to have a window over the kitchen sink, and she never even got that.
“If you’re right,” I said, “she’s probably mad we didn’t move here sooner.”
Bobby laughed with a quick exhale, nodding, and I knew he understood what I meant.
At first, our quiet mother would have been bewildered by our turquoise house and the bustle of Central Avenue, and her kids biking by themselves past big hotels to the city pool or a movie theater, and grown women going out bare legged because of the heat.
But I think eventually she would have come to love our new home as we did, with all the freedom and promise it offered, the sandy beaches and bright skies, the pelicans and shaggy-headed palms, and oranges so plentiful and cheap you could eat one every morning, with everything around us growing, thriving in the warmth and light.
—
Looking back, I now realize St. Pete in 1947 wasn’t paradise for everyone.
On sidewalks, anyone who wasn’t white had to walk close to the street.
“Giving whites the wall,” it was called, and even with the tourists and the postcard shops and everyone smiling, I never saw anyone dare do otherwise.
Separate schools. Separate beaches. Separate exits and entrances for movie theaters.
Downtown, you had to be white to try on clothes in a store.
I know younger people, or people of any age who’ve never lived in the South, find all this unfathomable.
But coming from Missouri, it was all I’d known.
I have to be honest and say I didn’t really think about it, at least not until I met Leonard, or really, Leonard’s mother.