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

girl.”
    “Like a girl, you say,” the colored man said, then laughed, a wheezy sound.
    I started for the aisle I’d seen Suralee go down and saw her standing at the end of it. She was talking to Dell, her hands loose at her sides, relaxed as if she’d known him forever. “Here she is,” she said when she saw me. Then, when I reached them, “Mr. Dell Hansen, I’d like you to meet Miss Diana Dunn.”
    “…Hello,” I said dully, studying the floor. I wanted to look into his eyes and say, “Hi!” brightly, but I couldn’t. The only time I wasn’t shy was when I was in front of an audience. Last year I had run for secretary of the seventh-grade class and had to give a speech in front of the entire student body. I did all right with that but couldn’t handle the one-on-one conversations the candidates were supposed to have in the cafeteria during lunch hour. For two weeks before the election, card tables were set up at the front of the room for the people running for office, and everyone but me chatted easily with kids who’d come up to talk or to ask questions. I’d stared into my lap, afraid to eat lunch or talk, and I lost the election, along with a fair amount of weight. “What’s the matter with you?” Peacie had scolded one morning at breakfast. “Way you suck up food, you ought to be busting out of your clothes, not drowning in them.” Of course, as Suralee not unkindly pointed out, I wouldn’t have had a chance to win anyway. She said no one in our school had the vision to see the noses on their face, much less the kind of qualities a good leader needed to possess.
    Dell leaned forward to shake my hand. “Diana Dunn. Sounds like a movie star!”
    Suralee gasped. “That is
exactly
what I tell her
all the time
!”
    Suralee had indeed told me this, though only once. But I had to agree. Sometimes I lay in my bed at night whispering, “And now,
The Ed Sullivan Show
is proud to present…Miss Diana Dunn!!” And then I would say to the audience, “Thank you.
Thank
you! Oh, aren’t you nice, thank you all!”
    “Suralee just invited me to your play,” Dell said.
    I looked quickly at Suralee. “You know, the one tomorrow night, in your backyard,” she said smoothly.
    “It costs fifty cents,” I said, avoiding eye contact with Suralee.
    “Okay if I bring a date?” Dell asked.
    “Yes!” we said together. A dollar!
    This was it. Things were starting to happen. This was a sign. There was so much for Suralee and me to talk about—most particularly what we were going to do for a play. We always had a few ideas on hand—the latest featured Suralee playing my mother in a garbage-can iron lung—but nothing was ready to present.
    “We’d better go,” I told Suralee. There were roles to be decided on, costumes to be designed. Refreshments to be begged from my mother and Peacie. Especially from Peacie. We had a watermelon we might be able to use, but then we would have to follow Peacie’s rules: Eat the flesh, but! save the juice in a bottle to drink; bake the seeds in lard and salt; use the white rind for preserves; keep the green skin for her to feed to her chickens. She loved her chickens, and she named them, every one. She said they could cure things. If you got a wart, you were supposed to prick it with a needle, rub the blood on a kernel of corn, and then feed the corn to one of her “children”—your wart would disappear. She swore by it. Also she swore by placing slices of raw potato on your forehead and securing them with a blue bandanna to get rid of a headache. “Come
on,
” I told Suralee, pulling her arm.
    “I’m coming!” Over her shoulder, she told Dell, “So don’t forget. Eight o’clock, tomorrow night. Green Street, about nine blocks from here, the white house with the ramp.”
    Dell followed us to the door as we were leaving, and when he saw Shooter lying outside, he said, “Is that y’all’s dog?”
    “He’s mine,” Suralee said.
    “He wouldn’t have