Born Under a Lucky Moon by Dana Precious Page B

Evan had taught me that the year before when he saw that I would become confused and pull away from them as they were still in mid-head-bob mode, their lips searching uselessly in the air.
    â€œWhere is everybody?” Anna asked a bit too brightly. She’d been with Evan long enough to know his family.
    â€œThere was a little accident.”
    Her eyes narrowed, waiting.
    â€œBut everything is fine and they’ll be here soon.” I deftly pawned the family off on Sammie and made an excuse to go get a waiter. Instead, I went to the powder room and waited it out on a chaise lounge with my Laura Ashley floral skirt folded under me, until I heard new voices. My parents had arrived and were introducing my grandmother to Anna’s family. I had completely forgotten about her in all of the commotion. I went out.
    â€œHi, Grandma, how was your trip?” I bent down to give her a hug. I was only five feet four, but Grandma was about three feet tall. At least she seemed that way. I watched her lips move soundlessly. “It was good, huh?” Her lips moved again. None of us ever had a clue what she was saying. She had lived alone for so many years that she seemed to have lost her voice. She said everything in an inaudible whisper. It made me want to turn up her volume control. Usually, after a few days with us, her projection got better, probably in sheer self-defense against the noise that surrounded her. I took a shot at what she had just said. “So you didn’t get lost in the United terminal this time?” She shook her head vigorously.
    We smiled at each other in that way grandkids and grandparents do when they haven’t seen each other in two years and have no idea of what to say.
    Grandma had lived in the same house in Houston for more than forty-five years. It was about four hundred square feet with a chain-link fence around it. She waged a continuous if losing battle against the cockroaches, and that was the central topic of conversation with her. I myself have a morbid fear of cockroaches. While they may be a fact of life in Houston, they weren’t something I wanted to know too much about. Over the years, Grandma’s neighborhood had declined, and her neighbors were now mostly crack dealers mixed in with the few elderly people who, like Grandma, were still there. Last time I visited, my rental car was stolen.
    My grandmother was the seventh out of seven kids. She grew up in West Texas, about six miles outside of Leuders, population 182, about an hour’s drive from Abilene. They lived in a small farmhouse on 161 acres of farmland on which they raised cotton. Her family had a bit of money until her father fell ill. He cut himself shaving one day in 1915. He ignored it and went out to tend to the mules and check the crops. The cut became infected, and bright red streaks traveled up the side of his face. His wife cleaned it but it didn’t check the infection. A week later, he collapsed in the kitchen. His wife and his youngest son, Fred, dragged his two-hundred-pound body across the floor and lifted him into bed. It was the only time in his life he had been in bed at 7 a.m. He struggled to breathe the white-hot Texan air. His wife lay a cool cloth across his head and spoke quietly to Fred, who was eight years old. The rest of the kids were far out on the farm with the two mules bringing in the cotton.
    â€œFred, you are going to have to run as fast as you can into town. You have to catch the train and take it into Stamford and bring the doctor back. Hurry!” She hugged him and sent him out. She stood on the porch and watched him running across the cotton fields. The one dirt road to town wound circuitously through several other farms and would have taken three times as long to travel.
    She watched the smoke from the train on the horizon. The train, known as the Doodlebug, came through twice a week. Fred saw it, too. He and the train were both converging on the town from