My Summer With George Read Online Free PDF Page A

Helen, and father five children, but he never really recovered his health, and after many years of illness, he died. Mother was left with five of us, ranging from twelve to two. I was the youngest. Father’s illness and the Depression had depleted their small savings, and they had had to borrow against his life insurance and mortgage the house. Mother was in a pickle. We were too young to be left alone, so she felt she couldn’t go out to work, and besides, she had no particular skills. She believed the only thing she was really good at was baking, so she started baking layer cakes and pies and other confections, and selling them for fifty cents apiece.
    That was a fair amount of money during the Depression, when a pound of hamburger cost fifteen cents, but she was an excellent baker and used only the best ingredients—unbleached flour, four score butter, heavy cream, eggs, Swiss chocolate—all the things no one eats anymore. She was a mild woman who unexpectedly exploded on one or two subjects. Baking was one of them: her mouth would curl with contempt at the mere mention of bakers who used lard or Crisco. Mother’s pies were as buttery as shortbread but lighter; her apple, pumpkin, lemon meringue (my favorite), and pecan pies were famous in the neighborhood. She was less imaginative with layer cakes, making only two varieties—a chocolate one with white icing and a vanilla one with chocolate icing—but she made a wonderful cheesecake and a luscious strawberry shortcake and the best cookies I have ever tasted. All our neighbors had enjoyed her baking, sampled at kaffeeklatsches or as gifts offered during illnesses or funerals; the neighbors spread her fame, and her business grew. She began to bake bread and rolls, turning the glassed-in front porch of our house into a full-fledged bakeshop. She made a counter by shirring a long piece of cloth and tacking it onto the front of an old table. At the beginning, we didn’t have glass cabinets like real bakeries: the cakes and pies sat on the table on glass-covered pedestal dishes.
    Our big old Victorian house had come down to Mother from her Scots grandmother. It stood on the main street of Millington, a little Massachusetts town whose sole reason for existence, a textile mill, had long since vanished. Mother worked all day and into the night in the big old kitchen at the back of our house, baking, kneading, making dough. Jerry was twelve, and she taught him to chop up fruits and nuts, to knead dough and make frosting—a job she hated. She put my older sisters to work selling. At first, Susan, who was nine, and Merry, who was seven, were very self-important, and Tina and I complained to Mother that they acted as if they were the bosses of us. But soon enough the job became a burden to them, partly because the porch was freezing cold. Mother had storm windows made for the wide glass window panels; she put an electric heater behind the counter and moved our dining room rug to the porch floor. But the porch remained chilly. Susan’s and Merry’s hands and feet were always blue in the winter.
    We all missed Father. Well, maybe not Father himself: “Father” was how we referred to our old life, what we called it. I have no memory at all of my father. But once in a while, when Mom went to bed early, we kids would sit around the dinner table putting off doing the dishes, and Susan and Jerry would reminisce about how it was when Daddy was there. They remembered Mom sitting at the kitchen table talking to them while they ate cookies and milk after school; and they remembered going outside to play every single day except when it rained. They had even gone to the beach. When I was five, that awed me: I’d never seen a beach. Jerry and Susan and Merry remembered Daddy walking down the long street from the bus stop after work. He repaired watches in a jewelry shop, but he wasn’t working by the time I was born. In those earlier days, they said, Mom would have dinner on the table