Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [27]
She and Gabriel passed the months on Ledger’s shantyboat with their hearts in their throats, dreading the end of summer. Gabe, her roommate in the before-life, who followed her out the birth door and right through childhood. Sweet Gabe, who was stolen from the family and can’t find his way home. She holds the photo as close as her eyes will focus, and drinks the frightening liquor of memory: an A-frame of twins leaning on themselves, elbows around each other’s necks. When Annawake runs she can feel the stitch in her side where the invisible wound closed over, the place where they tore him out. How would it have been to go through high school with Gabe? To walk into adulthood? To have had that permanent date, instead of being the Only. The perfect lonely heart. Two hearts, they became, separated by the Texas Panhandle and a great plain of want.
She turns the photos facedown and glances through other things. Letters from her brothers and Uncle Ledger, a photo of someone’s new baby. And the family inheritance: a very old book of medicine incantations written by her grandfather in the curly Cherokee alphabet Annawake wishes she could read. She still speaks Cherokee in her dreams sometimes, but never learned to write it. By the time she was six, they only taught English in school.
With her fingertips she delicately unfolds another old document and is surprised to recognize a fragile, creased magazine ad, black and white, showing a smiling young woman wearing a halo of flowers and holding up a soft drink under the sign outside their town. WELCOME TO HEAVEN, the sign in the ad declared, so everybody in America could laugh at the notion of finding heaven in eastern Oklahoma, she supposes. The ad is older than Annawake—the woman was a friend of her mother’s, Sugar Hornbuckle. The picture made her famous for a time.
The cat is back at the door, staring in.
“No, you go on now. I’m not a reliable source.”
She puts the photographs away. She should have taken these things to school with her. In that air-conditioned universe of mute law books she was terrified that she might someday fail to recognize her own life. You can’t just go through life feeding cats, pretending you’re not one of the needy yourself. Annawake has spent years becoming schooled in injustices and knows every one by name, but is still afraid she could forget the face.
7
A World of Free Breakfast
THE WORDS ON THE PAGE in front of Franklin Turnbo have disappeared. He stares at the front door of his office and sees a little forest of African violets there, leafy and leggy and growing out of their pots, heading for the light as if they intend to walk once they get out there. A bright yellow eye blinks in the center of each purple flower. The front office space where Jinny and Annawake work is overgrown with plants as healthy as children: a huge rubber tree slouches at ceiling level like a too-tall girl, and something with small leaves spreads itself flat-handed against the storefront window. Jinny brings them in and tends them, Franklin supposes. He feels sure he’s never seen the plants before this moment, although he could have been hanging his hat and coat on the rubber tree for months, for all he knows. As usual, the place is being taken over benignly by women, without his notice.
The front door jingles and Pollie Turnbo brushes past the violets. She comes into her husband’s office cubicle and sets a basket on his desk. “I made