Read Grace and Grit for Free Online Page A

our unfinished house. My mother rocked in her chair on the front porch and cried. Her tears took me by surprise. It was one of the few times I’d seen her cry. After all that fussing over the years, my mother didn’t want me to leave. And when I did, she’d expected me to move a stone’s throw from her like she did with Papa. I looked around one last time. The path I cut through the woods to Louise’s house would soon be overgrown with wisteria and sumac vines. I recalled how Louise and I used to make a game of throwing cotton bolls at each other when no one was looking. I thought about how much I’d miss my father, who loved to make a special treat of any occasion. Those trips to town on Saturday, he looked like a king dressed in his best suit and one of his dark felt hats. Before we left, he always slipped me a quarter to buy an Archie comic book and a Hershey bar at Watson’s Drugstore. I wondered what happened to the miniature doll bed he made me from apple crates—the one I used to stuff Buzz into—that Christmas Mama said there wasn’t any money for presents.
    As I loaded my few belongings into Charles’s car, my eyes rested on Papa’s house across the road. He was one person I wouldn’t miss.
    Driving away, passing fields that would be ready for planting soon, Charles held the steering wheel, his arms taut from years of farmwork and the last months framing our house. As I clasped the box holding Granny Mac’s fragile teacup set in my lap, I wanted to grab Charles’s arm and stop the car.
    T HE MORNING Charles laid down the law, I sat on our bed in our bedroom, fully dressed and ready for school, my stomach clenched with anxiety. Charles was still in the kitchen finishing the ham andbiscuits I’d made for us before he set out for work and dropped me off at school on his way. I hadn’t eaten a bite.
    Now I looked out the window at the dirt Charles had prepared for my flower garden. When I’d reminded him about the senior trip that morning at breakfast, he acted surprised. My trip was only two weeks away, and then there was graduation. I wanted to be with the friends I’d spent my childhood with before we went our separate ways.
    “But you’ve known all along I wanted to go,” I’d insisted. Mrs. Self’s school trips were famous. I’d looked forward all year to seeing the White House and New York City.
    “It’s not a good idea,” he’d said without emotion.
    I could feel that familiar anger well up in me. It may have been his law, but it sure wasn’t mine. I’d worked hard for that trip. For weeks my father had driven me up every back road in Calhoun County to sell the second-most magazine subscriptions in my high school so that I could afford to go. I’d told Charles months earlier that I was going. Over breakfast, as he tried his best to eat his food while it was still hot, we went back and forth until, exasperated, he finally said, “You’re married now. Married people don’t go on trips alone.”
    He meant married women. Surely, he wasn’t worried about the rowdy boys in my class who drove across the state line to buy liquor in Georgia every weekend. I suspected they’d misbehave as usual on the trip, but that had nothing to do with me. I remembered that Charles had made sure that I was indifferent when he made me throw out a silly necklace one of them had given me a long time ago. I sighed as the morning light streamed through the window, a strange contrast to my dark mood. Charles clearly expected me to be a “good wife,” and that meant I was to stay at home where I belonged.
    But this wasn’t one of our ordinary squabbles over blankets orthermostats. I hated the way, in the middle of the night, Charles, fast asleep, jerked the blankets to his side of the bed, leaving me with one thin sheet, shivering. It killed me when he changed the thermostat behind my back; he insisted on keeping it at 65 degrees, practically freezing me to death. Now I really felt left out in the cold. I