Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [147]
“Well, it beats the Irritated Babies all to pieces.”
“Irascible Babies.”
“What’s that mean, irascible?”
“Irritated, I think.”
“So I had the right idea, anyway.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you did.”
“And you forgave him for going to bed with that what’s her name? That landlady gal?”
“Mama, I’d given him permission to do whatever he pleased. I The Snake told him when I left in June that we weren’t, you know, anything long-term. So how could I hold it against him?”
A passing pickup truck, whose paint job looks very much like whitewash, slows down, then speeds on by when the driver doesn’t recognize the two women carrying flowers.
“Mama, I’ve decided something about Jax. I’ve been missing him all summer long. Whether or not we get to keep Turtle, I’ve decided I want to start thinking of me and Jax as kind of more permanent.”
“Well, that don’t sound too definite.”
“No, it is. I mean, I want us to be long-term. He’s real happy. He wants to get married. I don’t know if married is really the point, but you know what I mean.”
“Well, Taylor, that’s wonderful!” Alice cries, sounding ready enough to be wrong about men this once. She sings “Dum, dum da dum,” to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride,” and ties knots in the stems of her flowers, pulling each one through the next to make a crown. When it’s finished she holds it out in her two hands like the cat’s cradle, then places it on Taylor’s dark hair. “There you go, all set.”
“Mama, you’re embarrassing me,” Taylor says, but she leaves the flowers where they are.
“What changed your mind about Jax?”
Taylor uses her long bouquet like a horse’s tail, to swish away gnats. “When the social worker asked Turtle about her family today, you know what she said? She said she didn’t have one.”
“That’s not right! She was confused.”
“Yeah. She’s confused, because I’m confused. I think of Jax and Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray, and of course you, and Mattie, my boss at the tire store, all those people as my family. But when you never put a name on things, you’re just accepting that it’s okay for people to leave when they feel like it.”
“They leave anyway,” Alice says. “My husbands went like houses on fire.”
“But you don’t have to accept it,” Taylor insists. “That’s what your family is, the people you won’t let go of for anything.”
“Maybe.”
“Like, look at Mr. Stillwater. Cash. He’s still just aching for Turtle after all this time. I hate to admit it, and I’m not going to say I think he should have her. Turtle is mine now. But he doesn’t accept that she’s gone. You can see it.”
Alice has seen it in Cash. She saw it long before she knew what it was. A man who would go out of his way.
Taylor has woven her flowers into a circle, and she crowns her mother with it. Alice reaches deep into herself and evinces a dramatic sigh. “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.”
A string of cars crackles by on the gravel, all following an old truck that is fairly crawling. The drivers stare, each one in turn, as they pass.
“Where’s that sign?” Taylor asks.
“What sign?”
“The one that was in that magazine ad, remember? With Sugar, when she was young? You’ve showed me that fifty times.”
“That sign that says WELCOME TO HEAVEN.” Alice looks thoughtful. “You know, I haven’t seen it.”
“Maybe this isn’t really Heaven!” Taylor says. “Maybe we’re in the wrong place, and none of this is really happening.”
“No, it’s Heaven all right. It says so on the phone book.”
“Shoot, then they ought to have that sign up. I wish we could go pose in front of it. Maybe somebody’d come along and take our picture.”
“I wonder if they tore that down. I’ll have to ask Sugar. I bet anything they did.”
“Does that mean we’re not welcome anymore?” Taylor asks.
Two more cars pass by, and this time Alice and Taylor smile and wave like Miss America contestants.
Alice says, “I reckon we’ll stay till they run us out of town.”
Some kind of fish jumps in the river. Annawake stares at the ring of disturbed water it