We Are All Welcome Here Read Online Free PDF Page A

believe her attitude was that they both deserved their pleasure, and more. We owed them more than we could ever repay.
    There was a time, for example, when I was in kindergarten and my mother was in the hospital for a bladder infection and I’d awakened fearing she had just died. Peacie was there, sleeping on the sofa with LaRue, and I went to get her, telling her we had to go to the hospital right away, my mother had died. “She didn’t no way die,” Peacie said. “She only got a little infection. She be home in a day or two. Meantime I’m gon’ take my rest. And I advise you do the same.” But I stood insisting that we had to go, weeping, and finally LaRue said he would drive me to the hospital. Peacie said he would do no such thing. LaRue said the child was scared, he would take me to see my mother, it was all right, he didn’t mind. Peacie said I was no child, look in my eyes, I was the devil. LaRue laughed and got up to get dressed; Peacie sighed and got up, too.
    When we arrived at the hospital, I was taken by a supervising nurse to the floor where my mother was. From there, the nurse caring for my mother took me to stand beside her bed, cautioning me not to awaken her. But I did that very thing immediately, woke her and many other patients, calling loudly, “Mama, Mama, are you dead?” My mother asked the nurse to put me up next to her, and she gave me a kiss. Then she told me to go home, which I did unwillingly. She had a TV in that room, bolted right to the wall. There was air-conditioning there.
    When we arrived back home I’d asked Peacie to make me some biscuits. “You want to fall asleep in school tomorrow?” Peacie said. “Go on up to bed and don’t be calling no more. Act like your mouth sewn shut. In the morning, you have your breakfast as usual, but for now you got to sleep. And that’s the final end of this conversation.”
    I looked over at LaRue. “Not this time,” he said, but he gently tucked me in and sang to me, briefly, before he went back downstairs with Peacie. The feel of his big, warm hand on my forehead, pushing back my hair, that was something.
    I threw my mother’s dirty sheets into the laundry basket and shook out the new ones. I always liked doing that, for the way they looked like billowing sails, for the way they suggested going far away.
    After I finished making the bed, I asked my mother what she needed downtown.
    “Milk and cereal,” she said. “And the icebox is broken again—it’s barely keeping things cool. Go over to the hardware store and see if Brooks is working today.”
    Sometimes I wondered why we even had a refrigerator. Most times, it held more clothes than food—Peacie kept her sprinkled ironing there in a plastic bag. But the thing broke all the time and then I’d have to go and get Brooks Robbins to fix it, and I didn’t like him. He made terrible jokes, and he looked at my mother in a way I found disgusting. “Pretty Paige,” he called her, a play on Patti Page. She was still pretty—beautiful, in fact. Her arms were a bit too thin and her hands had a kind of elongated quality now, an eerie unnaturalness that could put you off even if they weren’t resting across the top of a hose that went into the center of a portable ventilator. But Brooks had known her before she got polio—since the day she arrived in Tupelo, in fact—and I thought he still saw her as that lovely young woman who was kind to him but would never take him up on his numerous offers to take her out. He retreated in his outright pursuit of her when she married my father—for one thing, Charlie Dunn was a friend of his—but he always flirted with her. These days, he liked to hang around when my mother was outside sunning herself, her legs revealed, resting long and still shapely on the extended rests of her wheelchair. She didn’t mind people seeing her. “I’m not ashamed,” she would say. “People who think I should be ashamed should be ashamed.”
    Whenever she