The Rich People Have Gone Away by Regina Porter

Author:Regina Porter [Porter, Regina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2024-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Irvin’s grandmother looked after him, his late sister, and approximately nine other neighbors’ kids who couldn’t afford daycare or were struggling like she had back in the day.

Mama could have brought in some nice change from foster care.

Irvin hears himself mutter, though he knows it’s far better to let her vent and get shit off her chest and live in her blitz of pain, “Grandma didn’t believe in taking people’s children away from them. Hasn’t that been done to us enough?”

She’s lucky none of those hood rats never sued her.

Irvin slips the cell phone into the pocket of his blazer and picks up a dozen pre-ordered glazed donuts from 7th Avenue Donuts. If Nadine were around, she would get on her husband for stress eating. That was something she had noticed about Irvin early on. We stress eat down south ’cause we don’t have fancy private country clubs to go to or lake houses. Or at least we didn’t used to. Maybe so, but sometimes Irvin just wanted a glazed donut, even if it couldn’t hold up to down-south Krispy Kreme. And speaking of crispy. Popeyes chicken, breast and wing, spicy, would hit the spot right now. He could feel the heat coming from his cell phone and hear his mother prattling on. Irvin could also see his grandmother sitting out with him and the kids in the bungalow on her front porch with the bluegrass on the side. She hadn’t gone past high school herself and had worked in the misses department at JCPenney. She would have the oldest teach the youngest, so that there was a kind of informal study hall in the screened-in back porch in the summer when the days were too hot. And she would let them pick figs from the tree and sort the good ones from the bad ones, reminding them to watch out for garter snakes and ignoring suggestions that she should cut a perfectly fine fig tree down because some folks claimed figs—not apples—were the cause of original sin. Wasn’t that quince? She would tell the children as she picked through the figs for the good ones, I’m not so sure about this Adam and Eve business, anyway. Maybe Adam was the one who ate the fig and Eve suffered the burden. Even in the winter when the temperature was cold, his grandmother had the children sit on the porch for a spell, better always to do a portion of their work outside and by daylight. In this way, she also carved out quiet time for herself.

You know she could have remarried after my father died. She could have married a nice man, but she held out and some of the other kids with mamas and daddies, well, a two-parent household will always be the gold standard. I missed out on my gold standard so she could feed the multitudes. And look at you, neglecting yours and following in her footsteps. Charity begins at home.

And that is when Irvin loses it. “You brittle gray-haired old hussie heffa.

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