The Jew Store by Stella Suberman

Author:Stella Suberman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

A HOUSE AND NEIGHBORS

What with Bronson’s Low-Priced Store fast becoming a fixture in Concordia—and what with the Rastows having a house—all at once my father was agitating for a house of our own. He put it to my mother. “We ain’t poor, so why should we live like we are?”

My mother sent up a wail. “Leave Miss Brookie?”

One thing my mother kept hold of: There was to be no buying, only renting. “It ain’t as if we’re here forever,” she said to my father.

Places to rent in Concordia were scarce. Houses in the “good” section of town were passed down through families, or, if not, were bought, not rented.

Carrie MacAllister took my mother to see a house that was on the rental market. It had been built six years earlier by two men who had come from Memphis to open an antiques shop. Before they moved into it, they had lived at Miss Brookie’s. Miss Brookie had enjoyed them and admired their artistic bent. When the men gave up their shop and left Concordia after about two years, the house had stayed empty.

The house was more than unusual. It was one story (the men had no doubt been caught up in that period’s craze for bungalows) and had yellow stucco exterior walls. Over an open, concrete-floored porch were several brown wooden beams, one of which supported a chain-hung swing. In Mexico it would have fit right in, but not in Concordia.

Mrs. MacAllister was keen to share what she knew about the house. First of all, the men were not “interesting,” as Miss Brookie would have said, but “plain peculiar.” Though they were friendly to one and all, they never dated any of the local girls. Carrie summed them up as “the flat-out oddest people you’d ever meet.”

Like the Bronsons, my mother thought. Still, she agreed with my father that we should take the house.

When my father came home from the lease signing, I was sitting on the front porch swing, across from Miss Brookie. She wanted to know how it went.

“There wasn’t nothing to it,” my father told us. “Herman Tucker directed his teeth at me, said ‘But, but’ a few times, not too loud, and that was that.” He eased into the seat next to me and looked across at her. “Seems those teeth of his are chewing on butter and honey with me lately. Must think I’m making money.”

The late-afternoon sun was in Miss Brookie’s eyes, and she shielded them with her hand to look at my father, exactly as she did in that snapshot of mine. “No doubt,” she said to him.

“So it’s all set.”

Miss Brookie said, “I sure hate it that y’all are going. Still, I know you got to.”

“That’s right, we do.”

Miss Brookie thought my mother needed to make some friends other than “an old maid and a Nigra servant and the Daily Clarion,” meaning Carrie MacAllister. “Anyway,” she said to my father, “y’all aren’t going to Mars.”

I knew we weren’t going to Mars, we were going two blocks away.

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