A Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg Read Free Book Online

have longevity in your family?”
    Not having any information about his real family, but considering his own current condition, he said, “I sincerely doubt it.”
     
    After breakfast, Oswald went back to his room and finished unpacking, and a few minutes later he heard Betty call up the stairs, “Yoo-hoo! Mr. Campbell! You have a visitor!”
    When he came out, a pretty woman in a white blouse and a blue skirt looked up and said, “Good morning!” He recognized the voice at once and went downstairs to meet Frances Cleverdon. Although her hair was white, he was surprised to see that up close she had a youthful-looking face, with blue eyes and a lovely smile. She handed him a large welcome basket filled with pecans, a cranberry cream-cheese coffee cake, little satsuma oranges, and several jars of something. “I hope you like jelly,” she said. “I made you some green pepper and scuppernong jelly.”
    “I do,” he said, wondering what in hell a scuppernong was.
    “Well, I won’t stay, I know you must be busy. I just wanted to run in for a second and say hello, but as soon as you get settled in and feel like it, I want you to come over for dinner.”
    “Well, thank you, Mrs. Cleverdon, I will,” he said.
    As she got to the door, she turned and asked if he had been down to the store and met Roy yet. “Not yet,” he said.
    “No?” She smiled as if she knew a secret. “You need to go and see what’s down there. I think you’re in for a treat.”
    After she left, Oswald guessed he should take a walk and at least see the place, and he asked Betty how to find the store. She instructed him to go out the front door, take a left, and it was four houses past the post office at the end of the street.
    When he opened the door and walked out onto the porch, the temperature was the same outside as it was inside. He still could not believe how warm it was. Just two days ago he was in an overcoat and icy rain, and today the sun was shining and he was in a short-sleeve shirt. He went out, took a left, and saw what he had not been able to see last night.
    The street was lined on both sides by fat oak trees, with long gray Spanish moss hanging from each one. The limbs of the oaks were so large that they met in the middle and formed a canopy of shade in each direction for as far as he could see. The houses he passed on both sides of the street were neat little well-kept bungalows, and in every yard the bushes were full of large red flowers that looked like roses. As he walked along toward the store, the fattest squirrels he had ever seen ran up and down the trees. He could hear birds chirping and rustling around in the bushes, but the undergrowth of shrubs and palms was so thick he couldn’t see them. He soon passed a white house with two front doors and an orange cat sitting on the steps. One side of the house had POST OFFICE written above the door.
    As he went by, the door opened and a thin willowy woman with stick-straight bangs came out and waved at him. “Hello, Mr. Campbell. Glad you’re here!”
    He waved back, although he had no idea who she was or how she knew his name. When he got to the end of the street he saw a redbrick grocery store building with two gas pumps in front and went in. A clean-cut man with brown hair, wearing khaki pants and a plaid shirt, was at the cash register.
    “Are you Roy?” Oswald asked.
    “Yes, sir,” the man said, “and you must be Mr. Campbell. How do you do.” He reached over and shook his hand.
    “How did you know who I was?”
    Roy chuckled. “From the ladies, Mr. Campbell. They’ve all been waiting on you. You don’t know how happy I am you are here.”
    “Really?”
    “Oh, yeah, now they have another single man to pester to get married besides me.”
    Oswald put his hands up. “Oh, Lord, they don’t want me.”
    “Don’t kid yourself, Mr. Campbell. If you’re still breathing they want you.”
    “Well”—Oswald laughed—“I’m still breathing, at least for the