Jim and Louella's Homemade Heart-Fix Remedy by Bertice Berry

Author:Bertice Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-385-50843-8
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2002-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Peace and Blessings

Now, I am not one for all them new gadgets, but my children insisted on getting me an answering machine and one of the caller ID boxes. I think them boxes are for crazy folks who need to go on Oprah when Dr. Phil’s there. Anybody who like to trace down where all they phone calls are coming from is a little on the paranoid side. But my son convinced me of it, since he calls from all over the place and sometimes forgets to leave the phone number where he’s staying. Anyway, when we got back from church, we had fifteen calls on our machine. Folks all took they turn at telling us that we was low to bring somebody like Mae into the Lord’s house. One woman said God was not pleased and that he would see to it that we were properly taken care of. I know her voice even without looking at the number. It was Mae’s old running buddy, Lucy. I wondered how she ever had the gall to use the word “proper,” since wasn’t nothing about her that way. The calls were all saying the same thing, and I was getting right tired of hearing it. I was about to hang up when I heard my son, Neal, or Naim as he called himself, on the machine.

“Hello, Queen Mother, this is your son, Naim. I have finished the writing of my dissertation and have some time before my defense. I’ll be home in a few days to rest in the comfort of my first teachers. I surely hope my father has not taken it upon himself to alter my living quarters in any way. Peace and blessings,” he say before the machine started yelling at us again.

Jim walked into the room just long enough to hear the part about not altering the living quarters. He laughed one of his real good, belly laughs.

“Louella,” Jim say, “your child is crazy.”

The children always belonged to me when they did something ridiculous. But still I could tell that Jim was glad to be able to see one of his children. Jim Johnson was the kind of man who grew into himself as his children did. He was at the birth of every one of them kids, and he did more that his share of raising them. I hardly ever had to get up out of bed in the night when they was still babies, screaming for my milk. Jim would walk over to our makeshift bassinet, which was really a dresser drawer, and hold that child in his arms ’til the baby calmed down. He said his mama told him that it was not good for a baby to be too upset when they was eating. She told him it was bad for the mama and the baby. By the time that child was nursing, they was as calm as the storm that Jesus spoke to. When they was still growing up, Jim took

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