Charms for the Easy Life Read Online Free

rate of a quarter a week. Nothing of that nature. Instead, something spectacular, at least for the time and place and for one so young. In 1918 he patented the design for a much-needed and humane prosthetic device for returning World War I soldiers, a well-fitting vulcanized rubber and metal contraption that made the young men feel less like Captain Hook. He was commended not only by President Wilson but by the French and British governments as well. He sold the patent to a New York firm, and while it was never clear exactly how much money he made, it was enough to build a new one-room Pasquotank Normal School and hire a teacher whose literacy was not in constant doubt.
    My grandmother believed that with medical school behind Charles Nutter and puberty behind my mother, things could finally start to happen between the two. But despite her urging, neither of them could be talked into carrying the relationship forward. They enjoyed each other’s company, but as my mother later told me, “We were not what we were looking for. I needed a boy and he needed a woman. Both of us wanted her to stop playing Cupid.”
    Then along came my father, who turned my mother’s head completely around in her collar. His family had recently made so much money so quickly in land speculation that they had torn their old house down to the foundation and built a replica of their plantation ideal in its place. Being members of the emerging class of newly rich, they didn’t know any better than to accept happily the bold daughter of an even bolder self-proclaimed doctor. She was beautiful and quick, and they loved her like a daughter right away. My father courted her against my grandmother’s wishes for a year. He proposed to her the day she was awarded her diploma from Miss Nash’s School. His family gave her fifty acres of land outright as a wedding gift, more than any of their children owned, and then during a Sunday supper they asked her to sketch her dream house on a linen napkin. It was built immediately, and then furnished with the best of everything that could be shipped from New Orleans, Savannah, New York, and Boston. This was completed weeks before the wedding. My mother would go sit in the new house that was so full of all her new things and think of her future, and then she’d go back to her mother’s house and go to sleep hearing her mother rap on her bedroom door, saying things like, “Time is ticking, but it’s not too late to change your mind.”
    She would not change her mind. The week before my parents were married, my father graduated from the North Carolina Agricultural Institute and was made the Wake County extension agent, a position he held until his death. (Let it be known that he was given the job because of his wealthy father’s influence and stayed there as long as he did because of his pretty secretary’s desires.) My mother used his responsible position to defend him, but this was batted back by my grandmother, who sat her down and explained that marrying a man who didn’t need to work would make her miserable within six months. She said he would wear the new off my mother and then grow bored, the same way an overly bright child becomes bored in a classroom and makes trouble to excite his day and titillate his spirit. He would range around seeking his pleasures, looking right through my mother as if she were invisible. My grandmother said, “All these things will happen. I’ll hide and watch them.”
    My mother refused to acknowledge her fear that any of the predictions would come true, although I can see her as the petulant childlike beauty she could be, shifting about in her seat, her lips poked out, arms crossed, breathing in quick little pants as the horror of her mistake was revealed to her. She would’ve tried to pass her squirming off as exasperation with her mother’s meddling, but her anxiety had nothing to do with her mother. She was too bright not to have known everything her mother said was true,