The Company We Keep by Mary Monroe Read Free Book Online Page B

working for the post office, and the fact that they had made some good investments over the years, they were more than comfortable. But Teri had a six-figure income, a first in her family. She had everything she wanted or needed. With no children or siblings to shower with affection and gifts, she did more than she needed to do for her grandparents, whether they wanted it or not. Last year, she almost had to hog-tie them and have them carried onto the cruise ship where she’d booked them a seven-day cruise to the Mexican Riviera as a surprise for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They’d come home wearing sombreros, smelling like tequila, and grinning like teenagers.
    “Oh? Who me? What am I smiling about? Oh, I was just thinking about what Reverend Upshaw said about Lot’s wife…” Teri told her grandmother.
    “Wasn’t that a wonderful holiday sermon? I swear to God,whenever Reverend Upshaw gets loose in that pulpit, I feel Jesus go through me to the bone. Don’t you?”
    “I sure enough do. Uh, let’s get in the house and get comfortable,” Teri insisted, escorting her grandmother into the house with her arm around her shoulder.
    The Stewarts’ furniture was old but sturdy and well-cared for. A maroon couch, a matching love seat, and a La-Z-Boy dominated the cozy living room. Doilies that Grandma Stewart had made and shaped with starch and beer bottles covered the dark oak coffee table and the end tables and lined the windowsills. High-back chairs faced the big-screen TV in the room that was also a dining room where meals were served on a long, low wooden table covered with a crocheted white tablecloth. Brocade draperies covered the windows in every room except the kitchen and bathroom. Everything in the house could easily last another twenty years before it fell apart. Grandpa Stewart had built this house that Teri loved so much many years ago with the help of some of his church members. And just like it was with Teri, this house also felt like home to a lot of the church members, too.
    This was a typical late-afternoon dinner gathering, served buffet style so it was every man, woman, and child for himself. It didn’t take long for every single person to have a plate in hand. Old, stout Maybelle Hawthorne, wearing a white floor-length frock that looked like a bathrobe, had a plate in each hand. Both contained generous mounds of food threatening to spill onto the freshly waxed linoleum floors. Some folks stood in groups of three or four, talking as they ate. Others sat or meandered throughout the house.
    The destination for most of the males was the room with the big-screen TV where a previously recorded Lakers game was on, featuring Dwight Davis. There was almost as much emotion displayed in the living room as there had been during Reverend Upshaw’s fiery sermon. This was the “down-home” atmosphere that kept Teri focused and balanced. This was where her character had been formed. This lifestyle had made her the caring, hardworking, no-nonsense person she was today. No matter what happened in her future personal life, this was what she would always measure her sense of values against.
    Grandma Stewart had spent most of the day and half of the night before “cooking up a storm,” as she had declared. In addition to a deep-fried turkey, five Crock-Pots full of collard greens, four platters of corn bread muffins, six mac and cheese casseroles, and enough yams to feed a small army, there were six huge pots of black-eyed peas—more than enough for every person present to have several helpings. Grandma Stewart didn’t care how much everybody ate. And she made it clear that she didn’t want anybody to leave without eating some black-eyed peas.
    “Everybody knows that if you want a New Year to start off right, you got to start it off with some black-eyed peas,” Grandma Stewart announced, spooning peas onto a huge plate for herself. Black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day had been a family and cultural