Chapter 2
July 1631
“Mrs. Reed, the Refugee Center asked me to talk to you. They never expected this many families, or orphans, when it started. Almost everyone except Jimmy Dick and Mrs. Flannery has agreed to have people live with them. Do you think you could talk to Mrs. Flannery and get her to agree to have a family live with her? In her garage, if nowhere else? Everyone says no-one but you could convince her to wear a raincoat in a hurricane but that she listens to you sometimes. They would really appreciate it.”
Grannie B laughed. “No one else was willing to beard the lioness in her den, eh? Fair enough. I’ll take her on, but you have to drive us there and back. I’m not going into town without my Eli.”
The next morning, the Reeds were dropped off at St. Vincent’s where Irene would be cleaning, just as she had for decades. “Irene McClanahan Flannery, what is this I hear about you not letting any of these poor refugees live in your house?” Grannie B cornered her in the choir loft.
“It’s my house, Barbara Ann Reed, and I don’t have to let anyone live in it. This is still America and I have my rights.”
“Is it, really, Irene? Your house, just Irene’s house? And all these years you’ve said it’s yours—and Patrick’s.” Hearing Grannie B’s subtle emphasis on her dead husband’s name, Irene Flannery stiffened, sensing she wouldn’t like what was coming next. “What would Patrick think about you making women and children live in tents while you have those empty rooms in your house?” Barbara and Irene knew exactly what buttons to push on each other.
“Don’t you talk about my Patrick like that,” Mrs. Flannery hissed, furious because it was true. Her Patrick would have been one of the first to open their home to refugees, especially orphans. “I’ll have you know I was going to go over this afternoon to see if they have any good Catholic widows or children who need a room. None of those whore camp-followers are welcome in my home, but my Patrick would’ve agreed with helping good Catholics and that’s what I’m going to do.” With that, she turned her back on Grannie B and went back to cleaning.
“Glad to know I heard wrong, Irene. If I can help you with the new family, just let me know.” Satisfied she had done her good deed for the week, Grannie B made her way carefully down the steps to Eli.
“I’ve never seen the streets this quiet. Do you remember when you were courting me? There were hardly any cars back then but there were plenty of horse-drawn vehicles and just plain horses. This quiet is nice. It feels safe.” They spent a few minutes lost in thought as their feet carried them toward their old home and up onto the porch. Since Grannie B and Grandpa Eli lived in assisted living, Krystal and Sam’s Uncle Raymond and Aunt Bethel were helping around the house, including getting the new refugee family settled in. As a result, Grannie B and Grandpa Eli hadn’t met the new family living in their old house yet, so they sat down on the swing and had a nice, if slightly uncomfortable, nap, while they waited. It wasn’t much, but the income from the refugees living there helped make up for their tenants being left behind, especially with Krystal and Sam there to keep an eye on things. Assisted living isn’t cheap in any century.
As they started waking up, Krystal turned into the driveway on her bicycle. “You were supposed to call for a ride home! They were so worried about you that someone called me at work and asked me to come see if you were here. Now I’m supposed to take you back unless you want to spend the night here? I’ll call them if you do.”
“Where would we sleep? We aren’t going to put anyone out of their bed.”
Krystal was torn up inside. She missed her parents but didn’t want to be a big baby. Other people had lost more. But Grantville wasn’t her home, and this house wasn’t her home. Even Mr. Bigshot from Pittsburgh still had his wife and son with him. “You can sleep in your old bedroom. I don’t want other people sleeping there when my parents show up and need a room. You’ll only be here for one night, so that’s okay.”
Grannie B and Grandpa Eli both gave her small, sad looks, then conferred in hushed tones. “We will spend a night here so we can get to know this fine family you have living with you, but we have to go back first thing in the morning so we can get our medicine. They still have a few things we need to take, you know.”
After everyone else was in bed, Grannie B went into Krystal’s room and sat down on her bed for a chat. “Little one, we need to talk. It’s not good, you insisting that the people we lost will come back or that we’ll return to them. We all want to believe we will get everyone back; we all miss the people we lost, but we have to live the life in front of us, not the one behind us.”
Krystal looked mulish. “It’s only been two months. We don’t know what happened or why. We don’t know if it will happen again. It could. Before the Ring of Fire, no one would have believed that could happen. Now everyone says it can’t happen a second time and it can’t be reversed, but I don’t believe them. It could happen again, and I just know we’ll see them before school starts again. I’m not giving up on seeing my parents again, or on going back to college. I can’t give up on Mom and Dad!”
Grannie B hugged her close, letting the tears soak into her nightie as the sobs gradually turned into hiccoughing and Krystal finally released her. “I know you don’t agree, Grannie B—it seems like no one does and I don’t understand why—but I’m not giving up on them.”
Grannie B brushed Krystal’s hair back, looking into her eyes as she held her chin. “I see that. You miss them too much to even start to let go yet. I guess you lost too much. I will let you be on what you believe. For now, as long as you enroll at the vo-tech to continue your nursing studies there, just in case. But if they do not come back, you will have to let go someday, just like we have to let go when people die. We all hurt for the ones we lost, not just you, but we still have to live our lives. Since we still own this house, Grandpa Eli and I want you to make sure all the rooms are being used, including our old bedroom.” Grannie B gave Krystal a long hug and a quick kiss on the top of her head before going back to her old bedroom for the night.
* * *
“Are you sure Krystal won’t get mad, Aunt Bethel? She’s awful insistent everything will just snap back.” Nearly two months of living with his cousin had convinced Sam that she wouldn’t see reason on the subject of life returning to normal. She had never wanted to live in West Virginia, much less Grantville, and the reality of being stuck in a century that, in her opinion, made the most backwoods area of the USA in 2000 look like something from a sci-fi movie had hit her harder than most.
Bethel snapped at him, out of patience with Krystal. “She agreed last month. She probably thought we would be back in 2000 by now, but she did agree, and she can live with it. We are only boxing some of this stuff and storing it in the back of the bathroom, not getting rid of anything. If things ever go back to how they were before, everything is still here for the old tenants to claim. If not, it’s still here for you two to use. Right now, that girl could use some familiar things to help her. And part of that is packing up Linda Abernathy’s ivy-covered Corelle dishes and putting out your great-grandparents’ Fiestaware dishes and kitchenware. So will packing up all their toiletries. No one needs to be looking at another person’s toothbrush every morning!”
“What about the family pictures? They have a ton of them lining the steps upstairs. Having strangers staring at me walking around in my robe is kind of creepy.”
“Let’s leave those for another day. Krystal will be home soon and we’ll enlist her help. I’d rather keep to small steps for now, like the dishes and toiletries they will clearly take with them to their new home. We may swap out the photos in the picture frames in the stairwell. If we change them slowly, she may not notice. They have a bunch of photo albums. If we can’t find scenic pics there, we can cut them out from magazines. If she asks, Linda and her kids can take the frames as is, but their family won’t be staring you down anymore.”
“Do you have any family recipes? She keeps complaining that the Clevengers’ cookbooks suck. Whatever kind of cookbook she is looking for definitely isn’t here.”
Bethel gave the Clevengers’ cookbook collection a quick once-over. “Hmm. I’ll look. Grannie B gave most of her cookbooks to different family members when she moved into assisted living, but I think she still has a few. Pack these away and we’ll find cookbooks with more biscuits and gravy, less Zone Diet and food fads. I have an old Good Housekeeping cookbook, and a new one. I’ll choose one and bring the other over here. That’s a safe one to start with.”