WHEN WE PULLED UP in front of the house on North Third Street, I
could not believe we were actually going to live there. It was a mansion,
practically, so big that Grandma Smith had had two families living in it,
both paying her rent. We had the entire place to ourselves. Mom said
that it had been built almost a hundred years ago as a fort. The outside
walls, covered with white stucco, were three feet thick. "These sure
would stop any Indians' arrows," I said to Brian.
We kids ran through the house and counted fourteen rooms, including
the kitchens and bathrooms. They were filled with the things Mom had
inherited from Grandma Smith: a dark Spanish dining table with eight
matching chairs, a hand-carved upright piano, sideboards with antique
silver serving sets, and glass-fronted cabinets filled with Grandma's bone
china, which Mom demonstrated was the finest quality by holding a
plate up to the light and showing us the clear silhouette of her hand
through it.
The front yard had a palm tree, and the backyard had orange trees that
grew real oranges. We'd never lived in a house with trees. I particularly
loved the palm tree, which made me think I had arrived at some kind of
oasis. There were also hollyhocks and oleander bushes with pink and
white flowers. Behind the yard was a shed as big as some of the houses
we had lived in, and next to the shed was a parking space big enough for
two cars. We were definitely moving up in the world. The people living
on North Third Street were mostly Mexicans and Indians who had moved
into the neighborhood after the whites left for the suburbs and
subdivided the big old houses into apartments. There seemed to be a
couple of dozen people in each house, men drinking beers from paper
bags, young mothers nursing babies, old ladies sunning themselves on
the sagging, weathered porches, and hordes of kids.
All the kids around North Third Street went to the Catholic school at St.