Leach’s Gro

Uncle Bill was dead. Mom was very close to Bill and Clovee. She helped them run the store. The news shocked her and she went into labor. While Bill lay int he funeral parlor, mom lay in a delivery room and I was born.

Mom continued to work in the store. She sat me in a cardboard box on the counter all day, nursing when I was hungry. I lay quiet and well behaved under the eyes of the customers and the roof of the store.

Clovee’s health began to decline and mom took on more and more responsibility. Betty was too young and Mary had already moved away. Mom, the middle child, was set to take over. As I learned to walk among the aisles, teetering between the chip rack to the register, mom learned the accounts and got to know the delivery men. She learned who got the favors and the credit. Clovee as a very ambitious woman. She was the first woman on city council, a member of Eastern Star. and dear friends with the commonwealth attorney. This was the type of store where people sat and drank pop from glass bottles and ate sandwiches from the deli counter, shared the news and gossip. It was the kind of store that anchored communities, and Clovee had the kind of friends who swayed them.

I remember the store, just barely. Flashes of the ice cream cooler, the wooden boards under my bare feet, the clink of bottles. I remember the adults who had looked down on me in my cardboard box, who had watched me swaying about on my first steps, watching me recite Old King Cole for them. I remember Aunt Clovee, just barely. Her raspy wet voice, the quite house with the odd antiques and the ticking clock. The long thin cigarettes in the always overflowing ashtrays. The yapping invisible dogs in the back room.

I was in the house quite a bit, as mom spent more and more time at the store, smiling at the customers, balancing books, running up tabs, absorbing the gossip, the news, keeping the shelves full and the counter clean, the door open. With her there, the store continued to be a harbor, its rafters ringing with laughter, its sides swelling with life.But if

But if the store was a harbor in the community, there was a storm of controversy at home. Dad and God pulled in one direction, blood and legacy the other. Loyalties were questioned and power struggles were played out, the kind of things any young man newly married has to deal with. The kind of questions any young woman must face. My mom was a child of the 60’s. The Sexual Revolution skipped over Jamestown, for the most part. My mom was the middle child, used to negotiation and compromise. The store stood silent, more than just canned goods and paper products sitting in its shelves, watching all of us.

I would hear all about this for the rest of my life. The issue never settled, the resentment often stronger than the love. And no one to tell the other side of the story. No one to speak for the store. Thirty years later and they still have heated arguments about it.

I have a memory, I’m not even sure if it’s real. I’m sitting in Clovee’s house, on an antique love seat, yellowed with smoke, watching PBS. I look over at Clovee she is sitting in an overstuffed leather chair, cigarette resting in a delicately clawed hand, staring at me and smiling, sadly, eyes moist with memories.

Clovee passed on and and so did the store. The yard is low on one side where the foundation lay. There’s nothing left now but photographs. Mom became a preacher’s wife and moved to other communities, long years of quiet devotion, mostly unrewarded and unrecognized. She was used to negotiation and compromise, to a fault really. She never spoke to those people who came into the store, the quiet affluent, the pillars of the community. If she sees them, I think they both look away. The store that once brought them in, that brought them together, just an absence between them.