What Difference Do It Make? Read Online Free Page A

sat there and pooped in my pants.
    I never remember my daddy ever setting foot in church, except once or twice on Easter when I was in junior high and high school. I don’t have a clue what he did on Sundays when the Monkey was closed, but we never saw him. In fact, I can’t remember him ever driving us anywhere, except when he moved us to the slums in the candy truck. Sometimes he would go with us when we went somewhere, but my mother was always the designated driver so he could be the designated drinker.
    Mama taught us how to throw a baseball, and she also helped coach our games. We’d drop Daddy off at the Monkey before the games and pick him up after.
    â€œPaste that ol’ pill!” he’d command as the door slammed on our ’49 Pontiac. What he really meant was, “Hit the ball.” Later he’d ask, “Did you paste that ol’ pill for your daddy?”
    That was Earl Hall’s definition of involved fatherhood.

    My mama, Tommye, was a farm girl from Barry, Texas, who sewed every stitch of clothing we wore, baked cookies, and cheered me on at Little League . . . Tommye, [her brother] Buddy, [and her sisters] Elvice and . . . Vida May . . . all picked cotton on the blackland farm owned by their daddy and my granddaddy, Mr. Jack Brooks.
    We were poor but not the charity kind. My mama, Tommye, was a resourceful old farm gal who raised chickens in the backyard and sold the excess eggs and roosters to the neighbors. We always had plenty to eat, a rich diet of yard bird, fried Spam, and Van Camp’s pork and beans. Mama bought those beans by the case and stored them in the garage like she was preparing for Y2K. Our daily dose of them produced indoor smells to rival those indigenous to the neighborhood. Daddy always tried to blame the smell of his farts on the neighbor’s outhouse. But when I messed in my britches that time at church and tried the same thing, Mama said we were more than a mile away from there and not to be acting like my daddy.
    My parents slept on a fold-out sofa in the living room of our tiny asphalt-shingled bungalow. Outside we had a dirt yard. The dirt was smooth and powder-fine, perfect for playing with a toy dump truck—except we didn’t have one. Still, our little place looked downright fancy compared to the tar-paper shacks and unpainted lean-tos that perched precariously on bois d’arc stumps around the gravel pit nearby. The kids who lived in those sad-looking homes were even lower on the social totem pole than we were, dirty little ragamuffins who depended on handouts and sometimes had to scrounge in the trash. I heard their daddies were mostly former employees of the gravel company.
    At least they have daddies, I thought. John and I may have been living higher on the hog than the gravel-pit kids, but I would have traded places with them to have a real daddy.
    Once, we took a vacation to Monterrey, Mexico, because Daddy had heard American tourists there could drink free Carta Blanca beer all day long. At Earl’s insistence, my mother drove for two days straight through, across the Texas and Mexican deserts in a four-door ’49 Pontiac sedan, so that he could drink free in the beer garden at the Carta Blanca Brewery. That was years before air-conditioning was an option.
    We’d drop Daddy off at the brewery in the morning, and John and I would swim all day at a semipublic pool near our cheap tourist court. Mama didn’t know how to swim, so she just sat in a chair, never taking her eyes off us and holding a life preserver just in case. Right at closing time, we’d pick Daddy up.
    The whole “free Carta Blanca” thing was a real losing proposition for the company because Earl Hall never drank that brand at home. In fact, his buddies at the Monkey called him “Earl the Pearl” because he always had his fingers wrapped around a cold can of Pearl beer. He loved to show off how he could crush the cans with one