Court of the Myrtles Read Online Free PDF

then limped by us in his dirty sneakers, leaving a trail of unwashed odor as he passed by. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have a chance to be afraid, and besides, I was busy shuffling my bags of deli meats and ginger ale from one arm to the other.
    â€œAnd never show fear. Ever. Stay in control,” said my mother, exhaling and regaining her schoolteacher tone. “Good girl. Now, what were we saying?”
    After dark the “combat zone” was off limits to anybody with an ounce of brains in their head—unless, of course, you were my mother, who
did
have an ounce of brains, but also a pound of guts to go with it. She worked in an old brick building on Washington Streetduring the day, though a thin stream of sunlight only made it through the casement windows from 10 a.m. until 10:45. I know this precisely because Mom would tow me in on the school holidays, sit me down next to her on a metal chair, and instruct me to quietly color my books. It was fine, because I loved being with her, and I loved coloring, even though my crayons were mostly broken and I was always missing a yellow.
    In that dingy room with stained walls that matched the lone, grey file cabinet, my mom was tutored in hotline crisis, safe-home rules, court advocacy and childcare supervision. This was long before women’s shelters existed anywhere else. It took seventy hours of training before she was considered for a temporary position at the local halfway house called No Place to Go in the Back Bay. Here she helped to empower the victims of unwanted pregnancies and domestic abuse. She taught the women to move forward and be “free to be.” After only three days, the shelter’s coordinator saw my mom’s passion for her job and offered her a full-time position. A position with benefits, ones that she stashed inside a blue shoe box where a pair of stilettos also lived—leopard black ones that never saw an evening’s dinner and dancing in their lives. It was supposed to be a secret, but of course I knew. Yet the one secret spot I most wanted to know about was that Peter Rabbit tin now above the refrigerator at the back of a small cupboard. It seemed impossible for me—or her—to reach even with a ladder. I often wondered how she got it up there in the first place. Besides, even if I
could
reach it, if
I
could get up there, she’d secured it shut with a simple satin ribbon in a French bow that might be easy to remove, but impossible for a child to re-tie. What made the tin so special? Wouldn’t the candy on the inside be old and stale? Shouldn’t we just
eat
it already?
    We didn’t have much in that studio apartment, but we had love, records, martinis and each other. We were “free to be!” as she would scream over the sounds of the neighbors fighting through our paper-thin walls, drowning them out with the help of Diana Ross’s “Baby Love.”
    One day I finally asked, “Free to be
what
?”
    â€œAnything you want,” she said, mussing up my hair.
    It had been a few years since Alice tossed the keys back at the Laundromat owner and said, “Thanks for the memories, but I need to get some
sleep
.” And sleep she did, until her career took a new direction via a bus route—hers, as it happened—driving the elementary kids to class.
    Alice loved her new position as a driver because she finally got to sit down on the job while also seeing Joy off to school. Of course her daughter would have preferred a mother who stood up, one preferably
at
the bus stop, like the other mothers. Poor Joy: the yellow bus pulls up to the curb, the doors peel wide
and
… there was her mom with her wild, cropped red hair, sitting in the driver’s seat, right hand on the clutch and a big smile on her face. “Morning, Sunshines! Hop aboard!”
    â€œIs
that
your
mother
?” asked the little girl with perfectly coifed pigtails in satin white ribbons.