Light on snow_ a novel - Anita Shreve [22]
Each morning, in my denim shorts and pastel T-shirts, I would pick the raspberries in the brush and put them in a basket that hung from my shoulder. When I had enough berries, I’d ride my bicycle the length of our dirt road to its entrance. There I had a card table and a plastic lawn chair set up. I’d fill the fruit boxes with the raspberries and then sit and wait. I could count on at least four customers a day: a woman whose name I never did learn, but who seemed to have a lot of houseguests; Mrs. Clapper, who was a visiting nurse and who used to take a box each day to one of her patients; Mr. Bolduc, who went by every morning to get the newspaper and his mail in town; and Mr. Sweetser, who had no reason that I could ever see to drive by our road, but there he was (I don’t believe he ever missed a day). I might have four or five other customers who were doubtless so surprised to see a girl selling raspberries on that remote wooded road that they felt a moral obligation to stop. Altogether I would spend an hour picking the berries, twenty minutes riding to and fro on my bike, and three or four hours at the stand—an approximate total of six hours. I sold the berries for seventy-five cents a box, and if lucky I’d make six dollars a day. Six days at the stand (some days spent under a rigged umbrella when it rained) might yield thirty-six dollars a week, which, when I was ten and eleven years old, seemed a small fortune. I would sit in my chair and sometimes read, but mostly I’d stare off into space, occasionally noticing the way a pair of monarchs folded into each other when they mated, or the way the Queen Anne’s lace seemed to have popped open overnight. I learned to daydream that summer, and it was then that I conceived of the idea of Clara as still growing. She’d have been almost two years old that first summer and probably a nuisance, but I imagined her wandering into weeds and wildflowers, the top of her head lost below the yellow and magenta blossoms, or reaching for a raspberry and tipping over a pint box. I imagined her on her tummy on top of my card table taking a nap while I stroked her back.
Sunday is the anniversary of my mother’s and Clara’s deaths. I know it and my father knows it, but neither of us speaks of it all day. I know my father remembers, because he keeps walking from the barn to the house and back to the barn again, as if he can’t decide what to do with himself. He looks at me when he thinks I’m not aware of it. He wants to say something but is unsure of what will happen to both of us if he does. He takes a shower at midday, which he almost never does, and spends a long time in his bedroom, where I know there is a picture of my mother and me and Clara. I am twelve and keenly aware of milestones and anniversaries, and I think the day should be marked.
“Dad,” I say when he finally comes out of the bedroom. “Can we go to Butson’s Market?”
“What for?” he asks.
“I think they sell flowers there.”
He doesn’t ask me what the flowers are for.
The sun has been out for two days. I wear my jacket open. My father has on only a sweater. He’s shaved, and his hair is clean, and he’s not an embarrassment to be with, which is an improvement over the previous year. On the first anniversary of the accident, my father sat in the barn all day and didn’t move. I felt lonely and sad and in need of comfort, but I didn’t have the courage to walk to the barn and see what I might find there: my father in the Dad position, his mouth open as if his nose were stuffed, his eyes vacant, seeing only images