Free Shem Creek by Dorothea Benton Frank

thought I was gonna start crying or something when I looked at some of the pictures of us.”
    I was having none of that. No indulging in mood swings. “Lindsey. Over the next few days, your hands and my hands are going to touch every memory we have.” Then I sang a little in my fake opera voice, “ Ya gotta be strong, ya gotta be tough . . . isn’t that how the song goes?”
    “Mom?”
    “What? Off-key?”
    “No, I’m just glad you didn’t decide to become a lounge singer, that’s all.”
    “Very funny, missy. I’ll have you know I have Tina Turner’s legs, okay?”
    “Yeah. Sure. Um, your legs are white?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “Well, all I can tell you is that it’s a good thing Gracie didn’t come. This house would be like the war in Iraq. She really doesn’t want to live in South Carolina, you know.”
    “Yeah, well, that may be true, but she needs to live in South Carolina! After all the nonsense she’s pulled? You think your daddy would put up with that?”
    “No. And, you’re right. Gracie needs to bring it down a little. And, forget Patti. She takes shit from no one.”
    “Um?” I hated hearing vulgar slang come from the lips of my children, although I used slang myself, and for good reason too, but that was entirely another matter.
    “Sorry, but really! You should have seen Patti last Thanksgiving when we were trying to stake out our territory.” Lindsey giggled.
    “Well, I won’t miss having to deal with her all the time or Fred; that’s for sure. And, while we’re on the subject of Patti and your dad, you never told me exactly what happened, except that he announced over dinner about them getting married, which is proof of her Swiss cheese judgment about men. So, tell me what Gracie did. . . .”
    “Uh, it wasn’t Gracie. It was me. And, it wasn’t pretty. No, it wasn’t pretty at all.”
    I sank to the couch and put my feet on the coffee table, waiting for Lindsey to tell, hoping against hope that she had wrecked Fred’s holiday to a fare-thee-well and that Patti had received an undiluted lesson on the teeth-grinding frustrations of raising teenagers. These thoughts made me feel only one-half an ounce of guilt.
    “Gee, I hope you girls weren’t rude to them,” I lied.
    Lindsey giggled again and made a two-year-old face, the kind you made when you got caught playing in your mom’s makeup. “Linda? We were baaaaad girls.”
    “Don’t call me Linda or I’ll spank your bottom!” I patted the cushion next to me. “Sit! Linda doesn’t have all day!”
    Lindsey plopped herself on the sofa, and as usual she twisted her hair while looking out the window, gathering her thoughts, deciding where to begin.
    “Okay,” she said, “Gracie and I got to Dad’s new house and in two seconds realized he had moved Patti in and they had redecorated like, I don’t know, like some television program was going to do a big story on them. At first, we were furious—Gracie, especially. She takes one look at Patti and walks out of the house. Daddy started yelling how dare she walk out like this and then the next thing I know, Patti is defending Gracie because she realizes Dad didn’t tell either one of us that they were living together.”
    “Poor Patti,” I said. “She should’ve interviewed me before she moved in with Fred. I could have told her a thing or two. But then, like my momma used to say, one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure, right?”
    “Yeah, I guess,” she said. “So then I went outside to talk Gracie into coming back into the house. You see, we were formulating a last-minute plan to get back at Dad for being such a creep to us but Gracie was so pissed off at the world, I couldn’t get her to move.
    “We saw that he was so involved with Patti that he didn’t give a damn about us and so we both got pissed off in advance of him proving it.
    “I remember that Gracie said, Does Mom know about this? And I distinctly remember that I said, I don’t