A Kind of Grace Read Online Free Page A

practice, and before removing my coat, run into our toasty kitchen. With the aroma of simmering pork chops and gravy wafting through the air, I stood in front of the stove with my long arms outstretched toward the inside of the oven. After my bones were good and warm, I removed my coat and hat and returned to the kitchen and took a seat beside my sisters on the floor.
    Leaving the oven on for so long wasn't safe, but it was either that or freeze. The stove so bathed the kitchen in heat, I hated to go into the other parts of the house, where it sometimes got so cold I could see my breath when I talked. At night, that heated kitchen floor was our mattress. We covered the brown linoleum with blankets and sheets and slept in front of the open oven. Even Al, who usually craved privacy, camped out with us.
    The other virtual certainty during winter was that the water pipes would freeze and burst. After the first episode, which resulted in a sinkful of dirty dishes, an unflushable toilet and no bathwater, my mother devised a backup plan. On fall Saturday mornings, I stood at the sink, filling a dozen plastic milk jugs with tap water while Debra and Angie stacked them against the wall.
    East St. Louis, Illinois, is twenty miles across the border and the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. Our home sat on Piggott Avenue, between 14th and 15th Streets on the south end of town, in the center of a rough-and-tumble precinct. Tiny, wood-frame shotgun houses with painted cement porches lined both sides of our block, except for a fifty-meter stretch of assorted businesses directly across from our front porch.
    For a certain kind of man, those enterprises catered to almost every need. He could grab a haircut, shave and shoeshine at the barbershop, then walk to the corner convenience store for a pack of cigarettes before joining his buddies in the poolhall for a cold beer and a few games. Or he might lay down a bet on someone else's cue stick and listen to the blues playing on the jukebox. After that, he could fill his tank in the tavern next door and grab a fifth for the road at the liquor-sales counter. The Swahili Club, a bar and lounge just around the corner on 15th, catered to the velvet-banquette-and-tablecloth crowd. Ruby D's, another lounge in the vicinity, had similar ambience.
    The entire one-block radius around our house was a magnet for assorted winos, pimps, gangsters, ex-cons and hustlers. But we always said hello to the men who called the spot headquarters. Two of them, who were known to everyone in the neighborhood as Squirrel and Doug, were around so much they seemed like neighbors. My father had grown up with them. They practically adopted Al, who worked in the barbershop shining shoes for 35 cents with the kit Daddy had given him as a Christmas present. In addition to Squirrel and Doug, I vividly recall three other men whose nicknames were Slick, Dick and Bubba. They wore sunglasses, wide-brimmed hats, shiny alligator shoes, brightly colored suits with bell-bottom pants and open-necked print shirts. And lots of gold chains. Slick, Dick and Bubba were reputed to be the biggest gangsters in town—men who'd actually committed murder, according to local legend. The men greeted Al the same way each time they walked into the barbershop. They extended an open palm and waited for my brother to slap it, a gesture known as “givin'em five.” “Hey little A.J., what's up, man? Anybody messing with you?” they'd ask him during the ritual.
    Al pulled his box over, shined their shoes and listened to their war stories. When he was done, they gave him fives—bearing Abraham Lincoln's picture. I walked out on the porch one afternoon and found them sitting on the steps with Al, helping him put his train set together. During my brother's senior year in high school, Slick, Dick and Bubba were ambushed late one night and gunned down, gangland style. When Al heard about it, he cried as if a member of our family had been killed.
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