Read Dimestore for Free Online Page B

in?” and continues without missing a beat, “Isn’t this Walmart just wonderful? I tell you, it has changed our lives.” Her husband stands grinning behind her.
    I manage to nod but turn on my heel without a word. No I can’t do this, I realize. I cannot. I rush back out to the open escalator area where smiling Charles Clevinger has latched onto some other visitor, thank God, so that I have a chance to walk over to the huge wraparound picture window and get a good look at Grundy from this high vantage point: there’s the flat moonscape area below us, crisscrossed by its tiny access roads with their tiny colorful cars; the busy bridges; the tame little river that started it all, improbably, running between its high ringwalls; route 460, where the old stores used to be. Across the eternal traffic jam, I can see Maple Street, the post office, the Appalachian School of Law, the Masonic Lodge—everything up to the bend of Slate Creek. The old stone courthouse with its high clock tower, once the largest and handsomest building in the county, has shrunk to insignificance. I take another picture. Later, I will blow it up. Viewed from the top floor of Walmart, the entire town looks like a toy town, like the train set Daddy always kept set up in the dimestore’s basement toy section.
    SUDDENLY I REMEMBER A LONG-AGO spring in Grundy, one Sunday afternoon several weeks before Easter. Daddy had taken me down to the dimestore with him to help make the Easter baskets, which didn’t come premade and packaged in those days. Many of the girls who worked in the store were there, too, and lots of little chocolate rabbits, and lots of candy Easter eggs. The women formed into an informal assembly line, laughing and gossiping among themselves. They were drinking coffee, wearing slacks and tennis shoes. It was almost a party atmosphere. As a “helper,” I didn’t last long. I stuffed myself with marshmallow chickens and then crawled into a big box of cellophane straw, where I promptly fell asleep while the straw shifted and settled around me, eventually covering me entirely, so nobody could find me when it was time to go.
    â€œLee!” I heard my daddy calling. “Lee!” The overhead fluorescent lights in the dimestore glowed down pink through the cellophane straw. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. “Lee!” they called. I knew I’d have to answer soon, but I held that moment as long as I could, safe and secure in that bright pink world, listening to my father call my name.

Recipe Box
    MY MOTHER’S RECIPE BOX SITS on the windowsill in our North Carolina kitchen where my eye falls on it twenty, maybe thirty times a day. I will never move it. An anachronism in my own modern kitchen, the battered box contains my mother’s whole life story, in a way, with all its places and phases, all her hopes and the accommodations she made in the name of love, as I have done, as we all do. I can read it like a novel—for in fact, our recipes tell us everything about us: where we live, what we value, how we spend our time. Mama’s recipe box is an odd green-gold in color. She “antiqued” it, then decoupaged it with domestic decals of the fifties: one depicts a rolling pin, a flour sifter, a vase of daisies, and a cheerful, curly-headed mom wearing a red bead necklace; another shows a skillet, a milk bottle, a syrup pitcher, three eggs, and a grinning dad in an apron.
    Oh, who are these people? My father never touched a spatula in his life. My mother suffered from “bad nerves,” also “nervous stomach.” She lived mostly on milk toast herself, yet she never failed to produce a nutritious supper for my father and me, including all the food groups, for she had long been a home economics teacher. Our perfect supper was ready every night at six thirty, the time a family ought to eat, in Mama’s opinion, though my workaholic daddy never got