Miller's Valley Read Online Free PDF Page B

picture in it was one of Donald.
    “Mimi!” LaRhonda yelled.
    LaRhonda’s father and mother were setting up the big steel dishes they used at the restaurant for wedding receptions and christening parties. LaRhonda’s father let me and LaRhonda light the little candles underneath, that kept the chipped beef and the mashed potatoes warm. “Who eats chipped beef?” LaRhonda said.
    “I like chipped beef,” Donald said, just like I knew he would. He and LaRhonda, oil and water, as my mother liked to say.
    The older men were already digging in, ladling chipped beef on slices of toast. “There’s more where that came from,” Mr. Venti said to each one. Everyone was suspicious of him; he’d blown into town after the Second World War to visit a buddy and just stayed on. “Like he fell from the sky,” Donald’s grandfather liked to say, shaking his head, as though the sky was a bad place to be from. Besides, there weren’t any other Italians in Miller’s Valley. There weren’t really any new immigrants in Miller’s Valley at all. You could tell by their last names that people who lived in the area were originally from Germany or Poland or some of the Slavic countries, but they’d been Americans long enough to have flat vowels and made-up minds. When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller’s Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn’t risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all.
    Maybe that was what annoyed them about LaRhonda’s father, too, that it looked like Mr. Venti had showed up out of nowhere and pulled off that American dream. He’d opened a diner, then a steak house two towns over, then a pizza place in the new shopping center. After ten years living in a cinder-block house behind the dumpster behind the diner, he’d married LaRhonda’s mother, whose name was LaDonna. He was thirty-nine at the time, and she was sixteen. She finished up at the high school and hustled home from classes every day to do the four-to-midnight at the diner, which actually didn’t make her much different from some of her classmates.
    Now, though, she was different from almost everyone in town. The Ventis had saved their money, and expanded their businesses, and done well enough to live in the biggest house in the county. It was the only ranch house I’ve ever seen, to this day, that had columns in front. LaRhonda’s mother didn’t want a house with stairs, but she did want a house with what she called presence. It had a sunken living room and a kitchen with a wall oven and one wing with Mr. and Mrs. Venti’s bedroom and a big bathroom with a round pink tub, and another wing with four bedrooms for the children. But there was only LaRhonda. That was sad to me, because Mrs. Venti seemed like the kind of person who would have liked to have a whole mess of kids. Maybe it would have taken her mind off of Mr. Venti, who liked to make comments about the size of her behind and then, when she started to cry, say that she couldn’t take a joke. My mother said she felt sorry for her. “With that big old house?” Tommy always said.
    “A house doesn’t make a home,” my mother said.
    One of the cooks from the diner took us from the church back to LaRhonda’s house for the night. “What about school?” I said when I heard I wasn’t going home.
    “Oh, honey, there won’t be school for I don’t know how long,” LaRhonda’s mother said as she settled us in the station wagon. “With how bad the flooding is there’s no way for half the kids to get there. They’re going to have to do something about the valley now, after this.”
    “You ready to move out, little lady?” Mr. Venti asked me.
    “We’re never moving,” I said.
    “I meant you ready to get going? That’s military lingo. Move out