“Your father’s been drinking, that’s what,” She said loudly. “Listen to the way he’s walking. Well! Just one thing more on my shoulders!”

29

THE MIRACLE THAT HAD failed to take place with Grandma in town and with the arrival of Grandpa Willard actually occurred when Vance Hawkins moved in with them. Next to Minelda, She prized her younger brother Vance, and talked about him so much that Papa often got jealous. Vance had been everywhere. (“A lot of other folks have traveled around, too,” Papa said to this.) He had spent a year in military school, so that he had many rich friends contacted there. (“Why doesn’t he go stay with them then, if those rich people are so crazy about him?” Papa inquired.) Brother Vance was an expert telegrapher and was going to work in the London Junction Western Union office for sixty-five dollars a month, temporarily, of course, since his opportunities with his rich friends were unlimited. He had dropped telegraphy to work for the National Cash Register people in Dayton, but some girl named Mildred started chasing him and blaming things on him that were none of his doing, so he had to clear out. In Detroit he had worked for Ford Motors at thirty-five dollars a week, if you please, but had been lucky enough to catch his toe in some machine and received $3,000 damages. “It’s not a fortune,” he had modestly written concerning this triumph, “but it’s a start. You don’t need a big toe to walk with anyway.” The reason he said he was taking the London Junction job was that he had invested his little sum so shrewdly and in such a tight way that he could not get at it somehow. He wrote quite frankly that he wanted to make sort of a visit with his favorite sister instead of boarding at some stranger’s, because he wanted to save his salary with the purpose of settling in California.

Papa said the family was big enough as it was.

“It’s all your family,” his wife plaintively answered. “It’s not mine. If you see fit to have your father live with us in the house my money paid for, I certainly have a right to ask my only brother. Goodness knows, it’s time I had some of my own kin around for protection. As near as I can make out, Harry, you want not only all your own family but your first wife’s family living off of us. If I didn’t put my foot down I’ll bet you’d have old lady Reed move in on us.”

She liked to talk that way about Grandma because it annoyed Papa as much as it pained the children.

“Will Vance stay in the cellar with Grandpa?” Florrie innocently asked.

“There’s an old mattress in the potato bin. He could fix himself up pretty comfortable there,” Grandpa chuckled, fondly patting Florrie’s head.

But Vance was to have not only the biggest bedroom on the third floor but the freedom of the house as well. The girls first recognized the miracle when they came home from school one day and found a young man reclining easily on the parlor davenport, with his feet thrown over the arm. They peeked in, mindful of their place, and were shocked when he genially urged them to come on in and get acquainted. Their stepmother impatiently nodded permission. She was flushed and smiling with pride in her visitor, so excited she forgot to scowl warningly at the girls as they walked gingerly over the broadloom carpet. Even the piano was unlocked and had three pieces of sheet music arranged on it as if anybody that wanted could sit down and run through these gems, “Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold,” “Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet,” and “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine.”