Basement Shade
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It was the Friday after Thanksgiving and my mom had gone out on a date with George Strong. I hated this guy. He spoke with a lateral lisp — everything he said sounded like kish-thish-fish, and his words came out all defeated and namby-pamby. He wouldn’t leave my mom alone. He sent her gladiolas and a plaster Navajo incense burner. I have no idea what she saw in George Strong except a warm body to have beside her at Heywood Anderson’s Hickory Steakhouse where George bought her a prime rib dinner two Saturdays a month. They were a couple of convenience in a routinized turning-away-from-loneliness-and-grief kind of way. My dad had dropped dead of a coronary a week before my fourteenth birthday, and George Strong’s wife had run off with their contractor… allegedly.
