Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [50]
“No, but we’re right next door to it,” he says, standing up to throw vegetables into hot water. “Maybe some of it will fall off the tree.”
At one o’clock exactly, Rose whips off the patterned headscarf she has to wear in the window and scoops little cascades of clicking beads back into their plastic vials, careful to let none escape onto the plank floor. Mr. Crittenden allows Rose to go to lunch with Cash if they go late, after what he imagines to be the noontime rush. The truth is there is no rush, just a slow, steady dribble. Jackson Hole has a hundred Indian trading posts, and most of them have better gimmicks than a tired mother of teenagers in the front window ruining her eyes.
Rose wants to walk across town to the Sizzler for the salad bar, but Cash warns against it; a storm is cooking in the south. They stay close by at McDonald’s just in case, taking the shortcut through the little flowered strip park on Main. While Rose talks and Cash doesn’t listen, his mind counts pansies and ageratum: yellow, yellow, purple, purple, a beautiful, cast-off beaded belt of flowers stretched along the highway collecting dirt.
“Foof,” Rose says. “I don’t see how it has any business being this muggy.” While they wait for traffic she reaches back to adjust something in the heel of her shoe. Rose is thirty-eight, the age his daughter Alma would be now if she had lived, and Cash realizes he treats Rose more like a daughter than a lady friend, cautioning about getting caught in the rain, clucking his tongue over the escapades of her boys. He wonders what she sees in him. Cash at least doesn’t drink, or eat beads, but he knows he’s getting old in a way that’s hard to live with. It was a purely crazy thing for him to want to move up here two years ago. Oklahoma Cherokees never leave Oklahoma. Most don’t even move two hickory trees away from the house where they were born.
In line at McDonald’s, he notices men looking at Rose. Not a lot, not for long, but they look. Cash they don’t even see; he is an old Indian man no one would remember having just walked by. Not just because of three generations of tragedy in his family—even without cancer and suicide and a lost grandchild, those generations would have come to pass; he would have gotten old.
“Just french fries and a chef salad today, hon, I’m on a diet,” Rose says, flirting with the teenager at the register.
Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they’ve been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty’s husband’s brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in Life magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she’s still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she’s pretty and special. Which she is. That’s the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body.
It shouldn’t matter so much to Cash. He still has most of what he started with: a talent for schemes and friendship, and all of his hair. No one can ever hold a thing against Cash, except his restlessness. For thirty years, whenever Cash started talking like a white man, his wife would put extra food on his plate and turn her back tenderly and a little abruptly. After she got sick, Cash came untethered somehow, decided they needed to ride horses and see the Rocky Mountains. She died the year after they claimed she was cured: the doctor found no more cancer in her, and she only wanted to sit down and breathe out slowly and watch her grandbaby grow, but Cash danced her around the kitchen and swore he would show her the world. She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he’s been seeing