We Are All Welcome Here by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online

Both of us had a great interest in Elvis Presley, Suralee for the more common reasons, me for reasons a little less ordinary.
    When my mother was a twenty-year-old student nurse, she had cared for Elvis’s mother, Gladys, when Gladys was admitted to the hospital after becoming ill at the Tupelo garment factory where she worked twelve-hour days as a seamstress. Elvis had visited his mother there, and my mother had met him. Gladys had told her son what a sweet girl Paige Dunn was, how much kinder and more intelligent than the other nurses. My mother said she had been a bit tongue-tied in Elvis’s presence—unheard of for someone as fearlessly outspoken as she. It had not been because of his great fame, which had yet to happen, but because of his looks and his smoldering sensuality, even at that young age. She told me he had been very much taken with her, too. “He’s crazy for black hair,” she’d said, “and he loved mine—he touched it. He himself had blond hair—he dyes it, you know. He couldn’t take his eyes off me. And it was more than my hair he liked, too. I’m sure he’s never forgotten me. I expect I’ll marry him someday.”
    She told me this for the first time when I was seven years old, and I believed her. For a few years after that, I told everyone who would listen that my father was going to be Elvis Presley. Oftentimes in the evening, after supper, I would sit out on the porch steps waiting for a baby-blue Cadillac to pull up. How sorry he would feel about what had befallen my mother, how tender! He would swoop her up in his arms and put her and all her machinery in the front seat of the car, and I would sit in the back. On the way to his house, we would sing his songs together and he would comment on my mother’s and my ability to harmonize. I figured he had enough money that surely he could find a doctor somewhere who could heal her. My bedroom in Elvis’s mansion would have my heart’s desire, a canopied bed, and I would be lying in it when my mother, able to walk again, would come in and kiss me good night. “He took so long to
come,
” I imagined saying, and I imagined my mother answering me, “Never mind. We’re all together, now.” Even after I realized she was kidding about marrying him, I still felt as though my mother—and therefore I—had a special bond with him.
    “Elvis” asked for Band-Aids, and Mrs. Beasley directed him to the proper aisle. Then she leaned over the counter to call after him, “I’m Opal Beasley.”
    “Dell Hansen,” he said, turning around.
    She straightened and stepped back, fingered her top button. “Oh, my goodness, really?
Handsome?
Well, I guess it fits.” She tilted her head and smiled at him. Her glasses were all crooked, as if it weren’t hopeless enough.
    “
Han
sen,” he said gently, and turned down the aisle.
    She rose up on her toes to follow his progress. “Just a bit farther down, on your left-hand side.”
    When Dell came back to the counter, he had a high stack of boxes of various-sized Band-Aids.
    “My goodness, Mr. Handsome, is there a war on?”
    “It’s Hansen,” he said, and I was struck by the mildness with which he told her his name for the third time. My mother grew impatient if she had to repeat something once.
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mrs. Beasley said, and began to laugh. “I’m sorry.”
    “That’s all right; it does a man good to have a lady pay him a compliment. ’Specially one as good-looking as you.” He turned toward Suralee and me and winked.
    Mrs. Beasley pressed her thin lips tightly together, unsuccessfully trying to hold back a smile. “Well, I did have my days,” she said. “I surely did.”
    “These Band-Aids are for the hardware store,” Dell said. “We’re all out.”
    “You work at the hardware store?” Mrs. Beasley asked, for which I was grateful. It was where Suralee and I were headed next, and now it would be infinitely more interesting to go there.
    “Yes, ma’am,” Dell