Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [104]
“Jewel! Herb? I thought Herb was a gelding.”
“You’d be surprised. He’s not the only one, either.”
Lusa grimaced. “Get out of here, you’re embarrassing me. Go check and make sure there’re enough plates and stuff for the ice cream, would you? And make sure they put the peaches and blackberries in it, there’re fresh peaches in that cooler already cut up. You put the fruit in last thing.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“OK. I’ll be up in a minute. I just want to walk down to the pond for a second and look at this moon.”
The grass laid a cool dampness between the soles of her feet and her rubber thongs. She moved herself along the bank until the moon’s reflection hung dead center in the pond, a white, trembling promise as old as night. She felt the enormous sadness inside her waking up. Sometimes it slept, and then she could pretend at life, but then it would rise and crowd out anything else she might try to be, hounding her with the hundred simple ways she could have saved him. He’d had a cold that day. He could have laid off, declined to take that trip over the mountain. If she’d been a better wife she would have kept him home.
“Cole,” she said out loud, just to put the round word in her mouth, but then she regretted it because it summoned his presence so fully that her heart began bleeding out wishes: I wish you were here tonight. I wish I could have back every minute we wasted being mad at each other. I wish we’d had time to make a baby together. I wish.
“Ssssst.”
She turned her head. The wall of the barn that faced the moon was whitewashed in light, but she couldn’t see anything else. She smelled smoke, though. Then saw the red bouncing ball of a cigarette’s lit tip.
She wiped her eyes quickly, though it was quite dark. “Who is that?”
“Me,” came a whisper. “Rickie.”
“Little Rickie?” Her coconspirator. She walked toward him, navigating carefully around the marshy spots at the edge of the pond. “Did you see what I got?” she asked him, trying to be glad about this distraction from her self-pity. “Did you check out my field up above the tobacco bottom when you drove in?”
“Shhh!” His hand closed around her wrist in the darkness and he pulled her around the corner of the barn, into deep moon shadow.
“What are you doing, being a bad boy, smoking behind the barn? Here, look how bad I’m being.” She held out the bottles, which he refused to sample.
“Pew, that hooch of Uncle Frank’s is nasty.”
“You think? I was just about to decide I liked it.”
“That means you’re skunked.”
“Possibly. Who on earth are you hiding from?”
“Mom.”
Lusa laughed a little. There was no end to family charades. “Your mom, the Queen of Camels—from her you’re concealing your evil habit?”
“Not mine, yours,” he said, lighting a cigarette and putting it in her hand. Lusa frowned at it for a few seconds, then put it to her lips and inhaled. After a few seconds she felt a pleasant, tingling rush running through her arms and under her tongue.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I’m liking this. You are a very bad influence. Did you see my goats?”
“Yep. Looked like about forty or fifty up ’air.”
“Fifty-eight, I’d like you to know, and not one of them previously pastured with a buck. They’ve got one now, though, you better believe. If he gets busy and does his job I’ll have fifty suckling kids in time for Id-al-Fitr, and my new barn roof paid for.”
“Dang, that’s something. All from just that one ad in the paper?”
“My telephone ringer broke, Rickie. I swear I’m not kidding, that’s how much it rang. Have you ever heard of a telephone wearing out? I was in the pickup pretty much dawn to dusk all last week.”
“Yeah, Aunt Mary Edna said she seen you coming in and out. She prolly knows how many trips. How much you have to pay out, total?”
“A dollar sixty-five for the ad is my total investment so far. Goose-egg for the goats. You wouldn’t believe how thrilled people were to give me these animals. You’d think I was hauling toxic waste