Free Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether

Grew-some.” They all fell out laughing, but it was Sonny, staring at me from under half-closed lids, that ran me out of there back up to the front room.
    Elizabeth was sitting on the couch looking wistfully at the door. Daddy had just told her she was as pretty as a black queen of the Nile and it was the truth. Her eyes had gotten brighter and she laughed, showing her dimples. She was the prettiest of all the Caldwell girls and nice with it, too. She glanced at the door again and I knew she was hoping her husband Robert would come home and come over. But even if he came home he wasn’t coming over here, I knew. He didn’t have much to do with any of us, although he talked to Daddy all the time through the dining-room window about the Scottsboro boys and Ethiopia and stuff like that. Robert didn’t seem to like nobody but Daddy, and Elizabeth, too, I guess.
    Mr. Edwards, our sad-faced janitor, perched himself on the arm of our sofa, which was none too steady to begin with, and began talking to Elizabeth who soon had him laughing. I was glad about that because Mr. Edwards didn’t laugh much since he lost his wife last year.
    I guess it’s different to lose somebody you love in death, like when we buried Mr. Caldwell last year. Everybody cried and Mrs. Caldwell held up very well until they threw the dirt on top of the casket at the cemetery. Then she howled like a banshee. But afterward we could talk about Mr. Caldwell and remember his funny West Indian ways and laugh at how he used to lock his children out if they weren’t home at night by the time he told them to be.
    But it wasn’t like that when Mr. Edwards lost his wife. He really didn’t lose her, she lost him, just upped and disappeared one night from their three-room apartment behind the stairs. His cousin Gabriel, who had come up from New Orleans to stay with them until he got settled, was gone, too. Since then everybody kept saying what a sad thing it was ’cause Mr. Edwards was such a decent man and all, although he was twenty years older than Mrs. Edwards and should have known better than to marry a high-yaller hot-blooded Creole from New Orleans. It was like a never-ending funeral with everybody clucking their teeth in sympathy whenever they saw Mr. Edwards, but being careful not to mention his wife’s name, and he had shrunk so much since then that his skin folded about him now like a blanket. I liked Mr. Edwards. Whenever he sent me to the store for him he always gave me a dime. He was nice, so I was glad to see Elizabeth making him laugh for a change.
    Daddy started to play the piano and everybody came in from the kitchen and crowded into the middle of the floor, doing the lindy. Then Daddy played a fox-trot and thegrownups danced. Everybody sure had a good time, even Papa Dan, who had slid down in his corner to a sitting position and was snoring gently.
    After everyone had gone home, Mother and Daddy sat at the dining-room table counting their money. If they counted it once they counted it a hundred times. There was something different about them tonight, some soft way they looked at each other with their eyes and smiled.
    I went to bed and didn’t even bother to pull the couch away from the wall, I was that happy. Let the bedbugs bite. Everybody, even those blood-sucking bugs, had to have something sometime.
    W E were eating high off the hog and it sure was good to get away from that callie ham which you had to soak all night to kill the salt and then save the juice and skin to flavor beans and greens for weeks later. Nobody had to coax me now to eat those delicious pork chops and gravy and roast turkey which Daddy stuffed with his secret Geechee recipe. Daddy was a real mean cook when he had something to work with. That’s what he was during the war, a cook with the navy.
    It was nice, just like old times again. James Junior and Sterling came home every evening for dinner and we all ate around the dining-room