Over and Under Read Online Free PDF

eat supper here?” I asked.
    “Nah. I’m eating with my dad on the picket line—they’re cooking burgers.”
    “Cool.” I was insanely jealous. “Hey,” I asked, always eager to be part of the strike conversation. “What’s a ‘scab’ anyway? Are they the guys that beat everybody up?”
    “Nah,” said Tom, “those are the thugs. The scabs are the guys that steal everybody’s jobs.”
    With that, Tom walked off, occasionally reaching back to hike up my slightly too-large jeans.
    As I walked into our house through the basement door, I heard that the vacuuming had stopped. My parents were in the kitchen arguing in tense low voices. They fought so seldom that I could tell they weren’t very good at it—their rhythm was off, inexperienced as they were in disagreeing with each other on any matter of substance. It was far more common, if I came home unexpectedly early, to find them blushing on the couch and straightening their clothes.
    “I don’t want you turning our home into some kind of headquarters,” my mother whispered. My ears perked up at this. I imagined midnight gatherings, code words, and trench coats: a speaking role finally in the strike drama. My father laughed in a way that let both my mother and me know we were being ridiculous.
    “Cricket, he wants to talk to me here. What was I supposed to tell him? He’s been over here a thousand times.”
    “Tell him he can come over for supper any time he likes, but to keep work at the plant. Where it belongs.”
    My father muttered something that sounded like a muted capitulation as I reached the top of the stairs. Despite the strike, Dad was in his work clothes: a short-sleeved white dress shirt; a striped, wide tie hanging loosely around his neck; and some kind of eyepiece on a lanyard, a device that measured the degree of gloss on finished caskets. Stacks of folders and envelopes embossed with the Borden Casket Company logo were on the kitchen table in front of him. Mom turned away from both of us and began noisily stacking clean glasses in the cupboard.
    My mother was from Kentucky, but other than that her childhood was almost a complete mystery to me. Not only had I never met a single blood relative of my mother’s, I’d never even seen a family photograph. I didn’t know how many siblings she had, what her father did for a living, or what town she’d called home. Once in a great while Mom would drop some tiny clue about her past: a story about a brother in a bloody fistfight, a family legend about a relative’s coffin washed away in a flood, a sad memory of charity packages at Christmastime. I grabbed each fragment as it came my way, hoping someday to assemble them into a full mosaic that would tell me her story, which was, after all, half of my story. I was entitled to it.
    Not all the gaps in my mother’s story took place in the murky past. She was an ardent admirer of Sheriff Kohl’s, had worked on his campaign, and Sheriff Kohl had thehonor of being the only nonfemale candidate for office to ever have a sign in our front yard. The sheriff admired my mother as well, singling her out at campaign events for praise and long, laughter-filled conversations. Mom periodically took calls from him in the middle of the night, quick calls that resulted in her hurriedly leaving us, sometimes until the next morning when she would come home frazzled and exhausted. I tried and tried, but could never think of a single good explanation for Mom’s behavior. And I knew from Dad’s example that I was not to ask about her secrets, no matter how much they bothered me.
    Because she was not from Borden, my mother was also a mystery to our neighbors. Without their ancestors knowing her ancestors, they could only make vague guesses about her true nature, about whether she might be prone to cancer, drinking, or dishonesty. Her self-taught feminism kept the neighbors off-balance as well—she went to meetings and rallies in Louisville, she liked to loan books by