A Southern Place Read Online Free PDF

of it these days, but your mama’s made you some pretty dresses you could never of afforded from the store. You don’t wanna learn to sew?”
    “Sort of,” I admitted. “Mama helped me make a skirt one time, and she was gonna show me how to put in a zipper so I could make a dress, but I guess we forgot or got too busy. And her sewing machine don’t work too good anymore. That’s how Mama learned to sew?”
    “Yes ma’am. You tell her bring that machine by here—no sense taking it somewhere that’ll charge you an arm and a leg—” He stopped, looking at his hook.
    My eyes stung, and I knew crying would make him feel worse, so I did the only thing I knew to do: I gave it right back to him. “No use lettin’ somebody charge an arm and a leg when you already gave up an arm, Captain Hook. Arrrrr!”
    My uncle laughed and shook his head. Reaching underneath the papers, he pulled out the picture frame. “This here’s your Mama and me, right ’fore she graduated. She made that dress for the Junior-Senior Prom, got mad at the boy she was supposed to go with, and took me instead. Now ain’t I a sight for sore eyes?”
    The frame had been metallic gold once but had rusted with age. The color picture was faded, but the two familiar faces were brighter than I’d ever seen them. Uncle Cal wore a white coat, white shirt, black bow tie and black pants with pinstripes. Even his shiny shoes were black and white, and there was a yellow flower in the pocket of his jacket. His curly brown hair was combed back, and he was grinning, his arm around Mama. He had two good arms, then.
    Mama looked like a princess in a floor length, off-the-shoulder dress of baby blue dotted-swiss. It was perfectly fitted through the bust and her tiny waist, which was belted with a long white ribbon and a corsage of daisies in its center. The skirt flared out in big, perfect ripples like waves of whipped cream around a layer cake. Her hair was curled and put up tall, weird by the standards I was used to, but perfectly elegant with the dress in the picture. Her lips were painted pink and smiling—bigger than I could ever remember her smiling. Her basic features still looked the same, but not really. The excitement in my mother’s face made her a different person altogether.
    “Why does she look so—so happy?” I asked.
    “She was a fine-looking girl, in a new dress she made herself, going to the biggest event she’d ever been to. Her life was just starting to get to the good parts—graduation was a few days away. She was happy to be alive, I guess.”
    “But she graduated, and then she went to work at the panty factory. She was looking forward to that?”
    My uncle’s face clouded over, his eyebrows pulling tight against his skull as he sucked in air. “She wasn’t planning to go the factory, not at first,” he said, bothering about for his cigarettes. “She got a little scholarship, not much, but enough to send her to the vocational school if she worked part-time and watched her spending.” He tried striking a match but the pack must have been wet, and he threw them on the floor. “She was real good at typing and shorthand, wanted to take some more courses, and some bookkeeping.”
    “Why didn’t she?” This was more information than I’d ever gotten about Mama’s life before me.
    “We had some hard luck, Delores and me. Mama died.” Cal leaned over and grabbed another pack of matches from the windowsill. “And the little house we lived in wasn’t really ours, it was mortgaged to the hilt.” He stuck a bent Lucky in his mouth. “We thought if we both worked like crazy we could hold on.” He opened the book of matches. There was only one match left. “I was working fulltime for Oakland, and Delores worked two jobs that summer, then for the next year, too, thinking she’d be able to drop one of ’em and go to school the next fall.”
    He sighed and struck the match. The flame burst out and caught the end of his cigarette.