Suburban Renewal (That Business Between Us Book 3)

by Pamela Morsi

  "I didn't know you could cook," Lauren said.

  "I'm just learning," she responded. "I'll give you the recipe, but my mother says the secret is the freshness of the spinach. So it probably doesn't taste the same if you don't buy your produce from her."

  The last little facetious comment was meant as a joke. Everybody laughed but our dinner guest.

  "So, Jennifer, where are you from?" he asked. "You don't mind me calling you Jennifer, do you? I hate diminutives."

  "My name isn't Jennifer," she replied. "It's Jin, J-I-N. And I'm from here. I was born in Tulsa."

  He chuckled as if she'd made a joke. "Okay, I'll go with that," he said. "But your heritage is Chinese or Japanese, right?"

  “Korean, I'm Korean-American."

  "Oh, that's good," he said. "Lots of Koreans are Christians."

  "Her sister just married a Presbyterian minister," Lauren piped in.

  Gilkison nodded his approval.

  Bringing up Hye Won's wedding somehow made Jin respond defensively.

  "I'm not really religious," she replied.

  "Obviously," he said.

  He turned his attention back to his grilled chicken breast and I thought that the direction of the conversation might die a natural death. But it wasn't to be so.

  "What do you mean by that?" Nate asked.

  Lauren's eyes widened and she turned her gaze to me for help. My mind was a blank. I was helpless to change the subject.

  Gilkison shrugged and smiled. "I meant that it's obvious that an unwed mother living with her boyfriend in his parents' house is probably not very concerned with moral behavior or religious values."

  "You bastard!" Nate responded.

  Sam held up his hand for silence.

  "Mr. Oberfeld is a guest in our house," he stated emphatically.

  "A guest who certainly needs to make an apology," Gilkison said. "Believe me, I meant no disrespect to your... to Jin. And I am in no position to judge the personal life of anyone else. As I'm sure Lauren has told you, I am divorced."

  He paused.

  "It was my ex-wife who sought the divorce," he went on to explain. "But I do hold myself very responsible for not being able to keep my marriage together.

  We have four wonderful children who now suffer from the stigma of coming from a broken home. It shames me and saddens me. And it's a mistake I will not make twice."

  The last comment was made with a quick glance toward Lauren.

  She gave him a little smile.

  The weekend didn't get a whole lot better. We improvised and made him a guest room out on the sunporch. Nate and Jin made themselves scarce, Jin deciding at the last minute to make an unprecedented overnight visit to her brother's house with Makayla. And Nate just went out to his shop and stayed there.

  Sam and I persevered.

  It wasn't easy. We found Gilkison narrow and rigid, but he could also be thoughtful and kind. And he was conspicuously crazy about Lauren. So Sam and I tried to put the best face on it and stick to topics and activities that no one could object to.

  I spent my time showing him photo albums of my little girl when she had truly been that. He admired her over and over again and she preened under his praise.

  Sam got him into a business discussion. It went well as long as the talk was about stock sectors, industry growth and market direction. Things got a little dicey when Gilkison suggested Sam should sell his business.

  "It's a waste of time and energy to keep slogging at that, day by day," the man told him. "You've made a profitable company. Sell it to a corporate food-service firm. You'll make more money taking your cash and investing it."

  "Okie Tamales isn't an investment. It's my job," Sam said. "What would I do if I sold out?"

  "You'd do something else," Gilkison told him. "Get your cash out while you can. Lauren told me you got burned in the eighties oil bust. Don't hang on to this business until it washes out, too."

  "It's a food business," Sam said. "People are always going to want food."

  Gilkison shook his head. "That's where you little guys get gummed up. It's not the product anymore. It's not about making tamales or toasters or techno-bits. It's about making money. If you can't see that, then you're destined to be run out, bought out or bankrupt."

  Quickly I changed the subject. "So, Lauren," I said, "are you going on another mission trip this summer?" Before she could respond, I drew Gilkison into the conversation by directing a comment his way. "We worry when Lauren's away from home, but we're always fascinated by the stories she brings home. She sent us photos last summer of her eating a guinea pig on a stick."

  Lauren smiled uneasily.

  Gilkison's tone was adamant. "Lauren won't be going on any more of those trips," he said. "I simply can't permit it. It's not safe or even advisable for a young, single woman to be out in those dangerous, dismal places working with people from primitive cultures. I can't imagine how you've allowed it."

  Sam and I shared a quick, meaningful glance.

  Neither of us had been supportive of Lauren's evangelical treks. And for some of the same reasons that Gilkison voiced. But hearing it said aloud made it sound more priggish and narrow-minded than we'd considered ourselves to be.

  "These are church trips," Sam pointed out. "Doing good work for people less fortunate than us."

  "Yes, well, I've never been a big supporter of global missions," Gilkison said. "I'm not opposed to sending Bibles or doing radio broadcasts, but I think we have plenty of needs in our own church without looking outside the community for a way to spend money."

  By Sunday afternoon, I was glad to see them drive away in his gleaming white Land Rover that was almost too large to fit in our driveway.

  We waved goodbye from the porch. When they were out of sight, we turned to go into the house and Sam slipped his arm around my waist.

  "Whatever she wants," he said.

  I nodded. "I'm hoping this guy isn't it."

  Being home, even helping with Makayla's schedule, gave me lots more time for working on EducationEnvironments.com. I was still doing mostly gratis work for low-income school districts, so the business wasn't really getting bigger.

  Amazingly, my vision and philosophy of the needs of the environments was growing tremendously. I owed this expansion in my thinking to Jin's pregnancy and all the research I'd done of Korean culture. I began to see differing cultures as a variable in the success of design. By using what we know about the classroom populations, I was able to utilize diversity as a positive influence.

  On an afternoon in early May, I was working on a comprehensive work-flow design for a third-grade classroom in a school district in coastal Georgia that had twenty-two black children and eleven Vietnamese. I was so involved in the details, I wouldn't have noticed the weather if Jin hadn't interrupted me. She came into the family room barefoot. Her shirt was still unbuttoned. She'd been nursing Makayla and now had the baby against her shoulder, trying to coax a burp out of her.

  “Have you looked outside?" she said. “It's looking really bad out there."

  I stopped to save my work before glancing up. As warm as it had been at noon, a little rain would be welcome on the spring flowers.

  Looking out the French doors of the family room the afternoon sky had turned a yellow so dark it was almost green.

  "Turn on the TV," I said.

  Jin grabbed the remote from the cushions on the couch and punched it on. The Tulsa station was giving out the beep-beep-beep warning and they were showing a brightly colored radar map of the state—it was mostly yellow with large red blotches. The voice-over provided an announcement.

  "The National Weather Service has issued a tornado warning. Repeat, this is a tornado warning for the counties in northeastern Oklahoma. Tulsa County is included in this warning. A funnel cloud, potential tornado is being tracked on Doppler radar and verified by local law enforcement near Prattville, heading north/northeast at approximately thirty miles per hour. Persons in far north West Tulsa, the n
orthern suburbs and Lumkee should seek shelter immediately. If you must remain in your home, take cover in a cellar or a first-floor interior room away from windows."

  Jin and I both jumped to our feet.

  "Let's go to the cellar!"

  "I don't have my shoes," she said.

  The civil-defense siren at the fire station began blaring.

  "Oh, my God!"

  "Let's go!"

  The electricity went out. I jerked open the door and Jin ran out ahead of me. Nate was running toward us from the shop. He met us at the edge of the deck and without a word, in one swoop, he lifted Jin up into his arms.

  Gram's old storm cellar was at the edge of the property, next to the alley, only about thirty yards from the back door. That afternoon it seemed like miles. By the time we got there an eerie darkness had settled around us, and the wind was full of trash and papers. It was then we heard it—a roaring, an ominous and distinct roaring.

  Nate set Jin on her feet beside the cellar door and tugged at it to get it open. We hurried down the steep narrow stairway into the musty blackness. Makayla was crying. I felt like crying, too. The place was cold and dark and I was scared. When Nate pulled the door shut, it was as if we were in a tomb.

  "There's a lantern in here someplace," Nate said, fumbling around among the antique canning jars, odd pieces of metal pipe and God-only-knows-what on the shelving behind him.

  "There won't be any kerosene in it," I warned him.

  Jin and I sat down on the long, hard bench that ran the length of the wall. When this had been Gram's cellar there was always oil in the lantern, fresh water in the jug and clean quilts on the bench.

  Nate managed to find a candle and a match. I watched as he lit it, his hands shaking.

  Makayla's crying abruptly stopped as Jin began to nurse her.

  The quiet inside the closed space made the roar outside sound more frightening.

  The light helped a little, though the flame flickered as if the wind was whipped up inside as well. The door rattled slightly and Nate tied the rope to the back of the door, pulled the length of it across the room and looped it twice around the support pillar before sitting in the chair nearby to hold it taut. The door didn't rattle. But my knees did.

  It was over in minutes. The roaring moved on. Beside me I stroked Makayla's head.

  Nate undid the rope, climbed the stairs and opened the door. It was as if Jin and I were collectively holding our breath.

  "Come on out," Nate said. "It's fine. It missed us. The house is okay. No damage, really."

  He took Jin's hand. I followed after them. Everything was standing, although the yard was strewn with lumber and trash and shingles.

  "What a mess!" I said. And then I laughed. I was so relieved.

  That's when the sirens began.

  "Is that the all clear?" Jin asked. Even the tone of her question was skeptical.

  Then another siren sounded.

  "It's fire trucks," Nate said.

  "Or ambulances."

  Nate was looking along the horizon.

  "Oh, God," he said. "I think it's downtown."

  If he said anything else I don't remember. I began to run. I ran up the alley to West Hickory. I turned and continued running to town. My thoughts were muddled, scared. I had to get to Sam. Sam was downtown and I had to get to Sam. I was near the end of West Hickory when I got lost. I don't mean I really got lost. It was as if I suddenly couldn't recognize where I was.

  A big tree blocked the street and I had to actually walk on somebody's porch to get around it. I didn't recognize the house. It looked like a dilapidated shack. There were no shacks in this part of Lumkee. I recognized the park only by the cement benches along the street. It seemed to be all broken limbs and downed trees and power lines.

  I hastily picked my way around that disaster to find myself on Main Street. Or what had once been Main Street. There were no buildings, there was nothing. Yet there was everything. Mountains of bricks, cars standing on end and huge chunks of things I didn't recognize.

  Where was Sam?

  I'd lived my whole life in this town. I couldn't tell where my father's drugstore had been. I couldn't tell where my husband's business might be. I couldn't tell where the sides of the street once were.

  There was no way to run through the piles of debris. I began climbing over it, crawling through it. I was not alone. There were people everywhere, dirty, frightened-looking people, sifting through the mess, calling out names.

  I began calling, too.

  “Sam! Sam! Where are you? Damn it, Sam! Where are you?"

  “Corrie!"

  I heard my name and rose to my feet, looking all around. I saw him standing in a pile of rubble, a hundred yards away in a direction opposite to the one I pursued.

  “Corrie! Over here." He waved at me.

  I was crying then, crying as I made my way to him as quickly as I could. He was covered with dust and sweat and blood. I wanted to throw myself in his arms. But there wasn't time for that.

  "Mr. Chai is in here," he said. "Help us dig him out."

  It was then I noticed—Cho Kyon was on her knees, tears streaming down her face as she dug through the bricks of her grocery store.

  32

  Sam

  1999

  It was a wonder that there weren't more people killed. Seventy-six tornadoes in Oklahoma that Monday. Forty-three people lost their lives. Two of those in downtown Lumkee. Harjo Peeples, who had been instrumental in keeping the name of our town, was driving home from the post office. His old car was tossed into the bank like a toy. And Brian Gilbert, the new pharmacist Hye Won had hired to manage Maynard Drug had been crushed when the walls of the old building collapsed upon him.

  There were serious injuries as well. Broken arms, broken legs, electrical burns and internal damage. Some of it permanent and severe.

  Mr. Chai's back was broken. He would never walk again. Loretta, one of my most dependable employees, had her left eye put out by flying glass.

  And Cherry Dale Pepper, taking a day off work to celebrate her forty-fifth birthday, was in her double-wide mobile home when it was picked up from its foundation and rolled end on end for a city block. She was alive but in a coma.

  There were tragedies in the aftermath as well. One young teenager was electrocuted by stumbling across a live wire. A telephone repair worker was hurt when he freed a line from the trees only to have it snap back on him and knock him from his perch on the cherry picker.

  Corrie's dad was out cleaning up debris in his yard and suffered another stroke.

  The damage estimates were over the moon. And because our disaster looked piddling compared to the cities of Moore and Stroud, we didn't get a lot of attention from the news cameras, FEMA or even our own insurance companies.

  The path of destruction started just west of the city park, plowed through the main business district and then into the three blocks of houses on the east side. The experts estimated the funnel was less than a mile in length and had touched the ground less than three minutes. But with so much loss.

  Building inspectors condemned the few buildings left standing. The entire downtown commercial district was wiped out.

  How we got through those first days, first weeks, first months, remains a blur of work and worry. All of us were up at dawn, working until after dark and falling into bed exhausted.

  Jin was helping to take care of her father. Corrie was helping with Doc. Nate and I were simultaneously trying to sort through what was left of our building and keeping the business afloat and our employees working. We'd set up the tamale production in our garage. Of course, I couldn't expect the health inspector to sign off on that for public distribution, so we fed the tamales to ourselves, our families and the volunteers downtown. Financially, I wasn't sure how long we could keep that up. But my staff continued to draw pay-checks, so they didn't have to take jobs elsewhere.

  The interior of Okie Tamales was a total loss. They found part of our huge steam o
ven in a cow pasture two miles from town. In many ways, the loss of our financial records was more trouble than the loss of the equipment. All the paper was backed up on computer files, but both were literally "gone with the wind." I didn't know who I owed or who owed me. And I had no idea how I would pay my quarterly taxes. I was too busy to worry much about it. Life had become a day-by-day operation. Which was good for me. Emotionally I was kind of tapped out. The enormity of what had happened affected the way I thought about things. Or it made me think about them for the first time in a long time. I'd lived through uncertainty in my job and uncertainty in my finances. I'd even begun to let go of any sense of control over my children's lives and futures. But still, there are things that you take for granted will always be there. The little downtown where I'd spent all my life was one of those things.

  What I found was that the loss of that made me value more those things that truly matter to me. I felt a surge of love for my kids, my home and especially for Corrie.

  We were so busy, we hardly saw each other all day. At night we were both so exhausted, I didn't have the energy to spell sex, let alone have it. But I could lie in our bed and hold her in my arms.

  "I love you, Corrie," I told her, probably more often in those frantic, busy months than I had in all the rest of the years of our marriage.

  "Me, too," she responded, and turned her back so that she could spoon up to me in the center of the bed.

  It was amazing how just the feel of her body next to mine could ease all the strain and aches and tension that a long, hard day could make.

  As soon as her final exams were over, Lauren returned home. Gilkison came with her. When I saw his Land Rover in the driveway, I groaned aloud.

  To my surprise, I found him in the garage helping out with the tamale packing. The man wasn't afraid of work.

  The next few days proved that as a certainty. He stayed for a week, and Nate and I put his shoulder to every task that came up. To our complete surprise he never grumbled, complained or shirked. Gilk, as Nate and I began to call him despite his dislike of nicknames, salvaged lumber, hauled out trash by the wheelbarrow-load and fed Doc chicken soup at the hospital. Wherever we needed him, he was willing to go.