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“Molly, Otis is so cute. You should see him.”
“Does this mean you want grandgoats, Mom?”
“No. He’s just cute. He’s very friendly. You’d like him.”
“Which Otis is this?”
“There’s only one Otis, Molly. The other six are not Otis.”
“But they still answer to Otis?”
“Well… yes.”
“Still Oti, then.”
Mom sighs on the other end of the line.
“Ben is teaching him to do tricks.”
“Ben is teaching a goat to do tricks?”
“Yes. He’s learning to dance.”
My cousin Ben, the urbane west-coast dweller, is now teaching a goat how to do the rhumba.
“Mom, how does one teach a goat to dance?”
“Well, he coaxes him up onto his hind feet with a carrot and then the leads him around with the carrot.”
“So he’s teaching the goat to walk on its hind legs.”
“No, Otis can go back and forth. And side to side. He’s learning to dance.”
“Okay, Mom.”
My mother does not laugh like cans in a bag. Her laugh is more like bamboo wind chimes in a warm breeze.
“Did I tell you Dan and Bitsy are expecting again?”
“Expecting what?”
“Don’t be a smartass, Molly. They’re expecting another baby.”
“Great. Hope this one is better than the last one. Maybe it will get her looks and his brains this time.”
“You know he’s decided to run for state senate.”
I look out the window at the snow. 18 inches and counting. “Yeah, I know. Which is why I’m so happy to be living in Boston today.”
“Don’t be a smartass, Molly.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”


My cousin Dan went to military college on a track scholarship. Not one of the Academies, I add, but one of those Southern pseudo-military schools that gave him all the discipline and structure of the Army with the connections to be one of the Good Old Boys without the officer’s commission at the end of the line. His class was the first one to accept a girl—but that only happened after a big court battle that was on every television network in the country. Mama said it reminded her of all the fuss that happened during the sixties when the schools started letting in black kids. There weren’t many of them at Dan’s college either, come to think of it. I thought it was a fitting location, though, for the same boy who had spent most of my formative years pouring ketchup on himself to make me scream and whose favorite game was to grab my wrists and use my hands to hit me in the face saying “Why are you hitting yourself, Molly?” He had a collection of rubber Halloween masks that Nonny had to ban from her house because they upset me so much.
From time to time, I still have nightmares about those masks.
Ben just couldn’t understand why his brother would choose to go to a school where there weren’t any women. “What else is the point of going to college?” he asked.
It didn’t seem to slow Dan down any, though. There was a succession of pictures showing him in his little gray uniform and shorn head escorting one petite blonde girl or another to some kind of cotillion. Each one of them was polished, waxed, buffed and plucked within an inch of her life, and, in all likelihood, was a former Miss Sweet Corn or Miss Squirrel’s Ass. Mama called them The Vegetable Queens when Dan brought them home for weekend visits to audition for our family. Dan’s search for The Right Girl was more about marrying a woman with money and ties to the Right People than meeting a woman who could cook. But the cooking would have helped, I suppose.
I had just started my senior year at Rufus Barringer Regional High School when he brought home the Peach Queen of Derby, South Carolina. Her name was Flannery, which I thought had a lot of potential, but everybody called her Bitsy.


Bitsy, like all the other girls, stayed at Nonny and Pap’s house, because nobody thought it wouldn’t look right for her to stay overnight with Uncle Boyd and Aunt Linda and Cousin Dan.
I had stopped going to church when I was nine, much to my mother’s disappointment. I made exceptions, though, for special occasions, like Christmas and Easter and whenever Dan brought one of his girls home for the weekend, because I always liked to see what they’d do when Preacher Evans started to get fired up. Sometimes they’d smile politely and say a quiet “amen” when Pastor Evans yelled out “Can I get an amen?” Most of the time they’d start wriggling around in their puffy, flowered dresses looking. It was barely perceptible, like they had a single ant running rampant in their pantyhose.
Today Pastor Evans was in rare form. Sometimes he’d get political, which usually meant that he would rave for an hour about the abomination of homosexuality. That was his favorite topic.
“And Lot wouldn’t turn the angels over to the men at his door,” he’d shout. “Because he knew it was an abomination on the eyes of the Lord God Almighty for a man to know another man and to lie down with him. He offered his daughters instead, and then the Lord God Almighty struck them down because He had to cleanse the land of this abomination.”
“I bet that made Lot’s daughters feel much better,” Nonny said after church. “I wonder why it wasn’t such a big abomination for them to know their father in the next chapter.”
I asked Nonny once why she bothered with Pastor Evans. “Well, we’ve been going to Mount Clover since your uncle Boyd was a baby. I’m not going to let one man run me out of God’s house, even if he is the pastor,” she said, then went back to kneading her bread. “Besides, I always wonder what he’s going to come up with next. Better to keep a close eye on your enemies, as Daddy used to say.”
Nonny never said anything during the service, though. “Daddy always told us to show respect in the sanctuary, and he’d get us with a switch if we talked or moved or fought during the service.”
The day Bitsy came to church with us, Pastor Evans was on the question of the ten commandments in government buildings. “It’s only right that the oldest recorded law be present in our courtrooms,” he declared. “Our rule of law comes from the first law that Moses brought down from the mouth of the Lord God Almighty, and we should give glory to that law,” then he brought his fist down on the edge of the pulpit. “Can I get an amen?”
“Amen!”
I looked over at Bitsy, and she was smiling the smile of a small town beauty queen who knows how to wave and act nice… but not much else.
On Sundays we all went to Nonny’s for dinner—which was what we called the noontime meal on Sundays. Lunch was for weekdays only. On Sunday we had dinner. Mama and Aunt Linda brought food along in casserole dishes and Tupperware containers. When Uncle Sumner and the girls moved back, we were surprised to find out that he was quite competent in the kitchen.
This week he brought a special treat. He had read about people deep frying turkeys at Thanksgiving, and even though Thanksgiving was a few weeks away, he thought Bitsy’s visit would be a nice occasion to try out the fryer.
When we arrived at the house, Uncle Sumner was out in the driveway with his fryer hooked up to a big propane gas tank. He was wearing goggles and rubber gloves and a plastic apron that said “I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian” and a cap that with the NASCAR logo on it. I don’t think Uncle Sumner ever particularly liked car racing, but I know Aunt Lily had hated it. So when they split up, he adopted Dale Earnhart as his personal Lord and Savior.
Uncle Sumner wasn’t impressed by eggplant either.
“Ya’ll just go on in the house,” he said. “Everything’s under control out here.” He checked the temperature on the thermostat in the vat of oil and turned the valve on the gas.
“You be careful with that thing,” Nonny said. “I read in the paper just last week that some guy over at Morganton set his garage on fire using one of those fryers.”
“Mama,” he said, “I know better than to use the fryer right next to the house.”
Nonny sighed and shook her head. We all followed her into the house, where she served us cheese and crackers while we waited for the fryer to finish heating up. The good thing about frying a turkey is that once the oil is ready, it only takes about 30 minutes to cook the bird.
“He’s been waiting for three weeks to try that thing out,” Gracie told me. “He’s put it together and taken it apart about a dozen times.”
“Think he’ll set something on fire?”
“Naw. Dad’s not that stupid.”
We turned on the pre-game for the Duke- Florida State match up and gathered in the den with the cheese and some vegetables and dip.
Just before kick-off Uncle Sumner called to Nonny from the kitchen. “Mama, where’s your fire extinguisher?”
I had never seen Nonny move so fast. “What have you done, Sumner?”
“It’s nothing, Mama. When I put the turkey in the oil, a little oil splattered on the burner, and threw a spark over into the leaves. They’re just smoldering a little bit.”
Nonny got the fire extinguisher from under the sink and dashed out into the yard with Uncle Sumner behind her. The rest of us gathered around the doorway to watch the scene.
The leaves weren’t smoldering. They were flaming. Not a lot. Probably less than the piles that Pap sometimes burned out in the vacant lot next door, but the vacant lot next door wasn’t ten feet from the house, and it wasn’t fueled by grease.
“I told you to be careful,” Nonny said and aimed the extinguisher at the growing blaze.
Nonny killed the fire pretty quickly, but in the meantime, the pot with the turkey in it was starting to shoot little balls of grease because it had gotten too hot. In a pre-emptive strike, Nonny aimed the extinguisher at the cooker and let the foam fly all over Uncle Sumner’s new toy and our Sunday entrée.
“I swannee,” Nonny said then. “Sumner, don’t you ever come over here with another one of those fool contraptions.”
Uncle Sumner was a 40 year old man, but he looked a little bit like he’d been kicked when his mother scolded him in the driveway in front of all of us.
Mama and Aunt Linda and Aunt Claire went to work in the kitchen, then, opening Tupperware and heating the contents. Aunt Claire found a canned ham in the pantry and popped it in the oven, because we couldn’t be expected to subsist only on the mountains of potato salad, green beans, casseroles and breads that they had brought.
I kept an eye on Bitsy through all of these events, wondering what she must think of all this. She just smiled in her parade float way. “Danny, your family is just darling,” she said and hugged his arm on the way back into the den.
Pap didn’t come out to watch the fireworks. He was the only one in the house who thought watching Florida State score 21 points on Duke in the first quarter was more interesting than seeing Uncle Sumner set the yard on fire.
Uncle Sumner settled in the recliner next to Pap’s with a glass of iced tea. “Well, Dad, you missed the excitement.”
“Shit,” Pap said. “I’ve seen fire before. Remember that time Ricky tried to weld your mother’s rosebushes together?”
Uncle Sumner laughed, but he didn’t seem to like being compared to Uncle Ricky.
Aunt Claire ushered Nonny out of the kitchen. “Mama, you’ve done enough today. Just let us take care of it.”
Bitsy sat on the couch with Dan. Nonny sat down beside them and picked up her knitting. “Oh, are you knitting?” Bitsy asked.
“Yes,” Nonny said.
“What’s it going to be?”
Nonny’s knitting was a strip of wool about five inches wide and, at the moment, three feet long. It looked, to the naked eye, like a scarf.
“It’s a scarf for Dan’s brother. He says it gets really cold in San Francisco.”
“Danny didn’t tell me his brother lived in Mexico!”
“San Francisco is in California,” I said.
“Oh. One of my sorority sisters went to Los Angeles last year and said she saw Sylvester Stallone in a deli.”
Nobody said anything, but Gracie looked at me and crossed her eyes.
“Yeah? Gracie here once sold a pint of milk to Harrison Ford.”
Everyone was quiet after that.
The house filled with the warm smells of bread and ham and dried onions on top of green beans. Aunt Linda called us and we gathered in the kitchen, surrounding the island in the middle of the room where the Sunday feast was piled up. Everyone held hands and Uncle Boyd said grace. “Heavenly Father, we thank you for these and all our many blessings. Pardon our sins. For Christ’s sake. Amen.”
“Amen.”
We always did dinners at Nonny’s buffet-style, because there wasn’t enough room on the table for all the food. Aunt Claire also contended that it cut down on the risk of someone throwing a turkey and killing her dog—the new one was a rescued greyhound called Bubba—but she never said so within earshot of Uncle Sumner.
Once the food was on the plates, we took plates to the dining table, though there wasn’t enough room for us all there, so usually the men ate on TV trays in front of the game while the women gathered around the table.
Gracie and I stayed in the kitchen. Phyllis was 14, and spent a lot of her time brooding. She had taken her plate upstairs to one of the bedrooms to be alone.
“Where do you think Dan found that one?” Gracie said.
“Her dad’s probably a governor or chair of the Republican party or something. Maybe he executed all the right people,” I said through a mouthful of sweet potatoes and marshmallows.
“You think?”
“You ever get the feeling that Dan’s always trying to sell you something?”
“Yeah. Looks like that girl’s buying it all.”
“Poor thing.”
We turned our attention back to our macaroni and tuna casserole and slices of canned ham.
Nonny came in to get another biscuit. She sighed. “I do believe that girl is dumber than a bag of hammers. She’s in there talking about her last manicure. Where’s the pie?”
They got engaged the following May, right after Dan’s graduation. And then we were eleven.

When I walk down the street to the market and smell the produce, it always makes me think of Pap and his store on Main Street. He took over the store from my great-grandfather, which made the place one of the oldest businesses in town. He did battle with the Winn-Dixie for nearly 30 years before he retired and took up fishing.
All of us worked there at one point or another. Uncle Boyd, Uncle Sumner, Ben and Dan all worked their way through high school bagging groceries and making deliveries. Mama and Aunt Claire, and for a brief time in the fifties, Nonny, all worked the checkouts. Gracie and I started working there shortly after our respective fifteenth birthdays.
When I was little, Ben used to push me up and down the aisles in a cart while Pap cooked the books at the end of the week. We’d usually reach maximum velocity in the frozen foods section, and Nonny would come out of the office to yell at us. When Ben graduated and went off to school, Dan and I would race carts, because I was too big to ride in them. Even if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have trusted Dan not to push me headlong into the banana display and then blame me for the mess.
Gracie and I used to like to play in the stockroom in the back, building forts and playhouses out of the giant boxes that brought stocks of paper towels into the store. There was an old Co-Cola machine back there that still served glass bottles. Pap kept it stocked for the staff that worked there. They only cost a quarter, right up to the day he closed the store for good.
By the time we worked there, Pap was only a few years from retirement, and it was clear that he was losing the battle with Winn Dixie and Food Lion. We knew most of the customers, so we were able to keep up with everything that was happening in town.
During the first summer that we worked for Pap—our Sophomore year of high school-- a film crew came to town scouting locations for some kind of historical/ action movie. The rumor was that Harrison Ford had been cast to play a Civil War officer who was fighting in a war he didn’t believe in. The script called for him to go AWOL from his troops and hide out in the woods, where he takes up with some backwoods family, but eventually dies of pneumonia because of exposure to the elements. He dies with a clear conscience, though. The crew was considering filming some of the outdoor, hiding sequences in Avery Gorge, about half an hour away from Reynolds.
It was a slow afternoon at the store. I think it was a Wednesday. The highlight of our morning had been when some guys from the football team had come in to buy Gatorade, because summer practices had started that day and most of them were out of shape.
Then the air conditioning went out, and we propped open the doors. Gracie and I took turns standing in front of the refrigerator cases until Pap fussed at us for leaving our registers unattended. Then we passed a few hours having a contest to see who could blow the biggest bubble, hoping Pap wouldn’t discover that we were stealing pieces of the three cent gum.
We read stories to each other from the Enquirer and, my personal favorite, The Weekly World News.
“You really think Elvis is dead?”
“Sure. We buried him in Aunt Claire’s backyard. Remember? Your mom killed him.”
When I said it, I immediately felt guilty, thinking it was kind of a mean thing to bring up. She giggled though. “You remember when Aunt Claire made him that white rhinestone jacket?”
“Sure. We buried him in it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Ben gave the eulogy.”
“There was a eulogy?”
“Yes. And Nonny baked a chicken pie.”
“Now you’re kidding.” “Yes.”
A man wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses came in the door. The sleeves on his blue work shirt were rolled up to the elbows and his khaki pants were rumpled. We didn’t recognize him from town, but he seemed familiar anyway. He didn’t look all that different from everyone else in town, so I decided he must be one of the new suburbanites that were starting to move into some of the new developments on the edges of town.
He brought three bananas, a quart of milk, a box of Rice Chex, three cans of tomato soup, and a pint of vanilla fudge swirl to Gracie’s counter. Eddie the bag boy was off that day, so I stepped over. “Paper or plastic?” I asked, though I didn’t know why. We only had paper.
He said, “Paper is fine,” which was lucky for me, since we only had paper, but then I realized why he seemed familiar.
I tried to get Gracie’s attention.
“Is a check okay?”
“In state only,” she replied.
I interrupted, “No, a check will be fine, Gracie. Just be sure to get his ID.”
“Pap said…”
I gave her a look, “No, Pap changed the rule.”
Gracie shrugged. “I’ll just need to see your driver’s license, then.”
She picked up her pen and started writing numbers on the check, “So, California, huh? You like it there?”
“Yes. It’s nice. Nice here too,” he said.
“You’re with the film crew over at Avery Gorge?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then, Mr….” Gracie swallowed her gum, “Ford.” She tried to chew the gum she had swallowed and bit her tongue. “That’s $15.27.”
“I know,” he said.
My toes curled inside my Keds. I love you…. I know.
“Molly here will carry your groceries to your car if you want.”
“Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. I can get them.”
I think I heard Gracie squeak has she handed the license back to him.
He hefted the bag off the counter. “Thank you, ladies,” he said and gave a little wave as he walked out the door.
A few minutes later, Pap came out of the office. “What’s all that noise about? Why are you two squealing?”
We showed him the check, and Pap said, “Who?”
“Han Solo? Indiana Jones?” Gracie said.
Pap shook his head. “So he’s famous.”
“Yes!”
“Hmmm.”
Pap took the check, framed it, and hung it over Gracie’s register. Half the high school came through to see Harrison Ford’s “autograph.”
Pap gave the check to Gracie when he closed up shop a few years later.