We Are All Welcome Here Read Online Free PDF Page B

real mix of things suggested here, a kind of battle inside, between opposite ways of being. But the two warring parts have to come together for some inner resolution, first. It’s a time of bold admission for him. And a time to gather the courage required to start this journey.”
    “But will he be safe if he does it?” Peacie asked.
    “Turn the next card,” my mother said, and then there was a long silence while she studied it. Finally she said, “I can’t really say.”
    “Oh, my sweet Jesus,” Peacie said, and began to cry. “I don’t know why he got to do this.” She turned her head to wipe at her face with her apron, saw me, and jerked erect. “How long you been there?” she said. “Sneaky as a alley cat!”
    “I just
got
here,” I said.
“What.”
    She knew I was lying. I wished her out of my house, out of my life. And though I knew very well its uselessness, I wished again that my mother had never gotten the disease that so unrelentingly dictated the life we led.

    T hey’d been going to have a picnic, my parents. My mother had awakened that Saturday morning feeling more uncomfortable than usual with her advanced pregnancy. In addition to that, it was a blisteringly hot July morning with high humidity. She wanted to get in the car so that she could feel a good breeze—the fans, she said, were like panting dogs. My father laid plastic and then towels on my mother’s side of the seat, just in case her water broke. The car, though not new, was new to them, and they both took great pride in it. It was a 1948 Studebaker, banged up a bit on one side, but my parents didn’t mind.
    They headed out northwest on Highway 78 for the open countryside, and drove for many miles, past Sherman, past New Albany, into the Holly Springs National Forest. My mother loved traveling, loved going away, but not on any planned trip. She liked to just spontaneously take off. As a child, adopted at age six from an orphanage in Oxford, she used to pack her cardboard suitcase with underpants and red licorice and then disappear into the fields behind her farmhouse. Or she would take off walking down the highway her family lived next to, driving her parents to distraction. At fifteen, she began running off with boys, returning at all hours of the night. Finally, at sixteen, her exasperated parents threw her out of the house. They believed that this rash act would make her come to her senses. Instead, she cut off all contact with them, found a job in a Tupelo motel where she ended up living, and two years later married my father. When she became pregnant with me, she found that she wanted to reestablish contact with her mother. But her parents had moved, and she never found them again.
    On that July day, my mother pointed to a grassy bank under cottonwood trees next to a running stream just outside Independence. My father parked the car, and my parents took off their shoes and waded in the cold, clear water until their feet were numb. Then they began eating the lunch my mother had packed. But before she was halfway through, my mother began feeling much sicker—her sore throat, nausea, and weakness were worse, and her eyes began to burn. “I believe you’re in labor,” my father said, and my mother said no, it was the flu, and she really was feeling very bad, could they go home? My father helped her to her feet and she fell against him, telling him she felt dizzy. “Paige, the baby’s coming!” my father said, and at this point my mother, who was, remember, a nurse, grew angry. “I’m not in labor!” she told him. Then her anger gave way to fear, and she said, “It’s not the flu, either. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sick, I’m so sick. You’d better take me to the hospital.”
    “Oh, baby, are you sure?” my father asked. They had no insurance, and they’d intended to have a home birth. Over and over he asked her if she was sure she needed to go to the hospital. She did not answer him. She lay in the