Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [136]
“Honey, honey, you’re not even thirty yet. We all loved Cole, but nobody thinks you’re going to carry a torch for him the rest of your life.”
Lusa looked down into the bottom of her empty teacup, which was blank. No leaves, no future to read. “I have to think about this in the light of day,” she said. “I have no idea what to say. I just had no idea.”
Hannie-Mavis tilted her head. “I didn’t aim to hurt your feelings.”
“No, you didn’t. I thought the problem was me. I didn’t realize the problem was—what would you call it? Progeny. The family line.”
“Well,” she said, slapping her hands flat on the table. “I’m going to call it a night. This day’s done me enough damage already.”
“I think it’s tomorrow already.”
“Law, so much the worse. I’ve got to get home and feed the cats, ’cause I’m sure Joel forgot, and then get back over to Jewel’s.” She gathered up her balls of Kleenex and stuffed them in her purse. Lusa wondered if this was a country custom, to take your own secretions with you when you left. They stood facing each other for a second but held back from a hug.
“Please tell Jewel I’d be happy to keep both kids for another day. And if she needs anything—I mean it. You can’t do all the nursing by yourself. You get some rest.”
“I will, honey. And I’ll tell Lois to bring up Lowell, if he wants to come. Thank you, honey.”
“Lusa,” Lusa said. “I’m your sister now, you’re stuck with me, so you could all start using my name.”
Hannie-Mavis stopped and turned back in the hallway, touching the sleeve of her dress. She seemed hesitant to speak. “We’re scared of getting it wrong, is why we don’t say it. Is that a Lexington name?”
Lusa laughed. “Polish. It’s short for Elizabeth.”
“Oh, well, I thought so. That it was foreign.”
“But it’s not hard to say,” Lusa insisted. “What kind of name is Hannie-Mavis?”
Hannie-Mavis smiled and shook her head. “Just strange, honey. Just awful, awful strange. Daddy was original, and Mommy couldn’t spell. You get what you get.”
In the morning Lusa was startled awake, once again, by the sound of car tires on the gravel drive. She sat up in bed, looked at the light in the window, and checked the clock. She’d slept late. Whoever it was out there was going to catch her in her nightgown at ten o’clock, a mortal sin in farm country.
But she heard the car door slam and the tires slowly roll away down the hill again. She heard footsteps come toward the house at a clip, and footsteps in the next room as well, bare feet muffled by the hall rug and then slapping quickly down the steps. Lusa got up and walked quietly out into the hall but heard nothing more. Then voices, whispering. She looked down over the banister and her face went hot, then cold. There they were again, side by side, sitting very close together on the second step from the bottom. A small boy and a bigger girl with her arm around his shoulders to protect him from the world. He was not the little boy she’d believed she would know anywhere, at any age, and the older one was not his sister Jewel.
Not Jewel and Cole. Crys and Lowell.
{19}
Predators
The sound of a shot startled Deanna awake. She froze, listening to the after-ring of that sound through the hollow and the forced, universal silence that spread out behind it. There was no mistaking it for anything but a gunshot. She sat forward and looked around groggily, trying to shake the wool out of her head. This was the third or fourth occasion she’d fallen asleep smack in the middle of the day, this time in the old overstuffed brocade chair on the porch, where she’d sat down to rest just for a minute.
She rubbed absently at the viny pattern of the nubbly green upholstery, tracing with her fingers the long brown stain that ran across one of the arms onto the seat—she sometimes wondered how this chair had plunged from an elegant former life in someone’s parlor to humble service on this porch. And how had she gotten here today, catnapping in this chair? Deanna tried to reconstruct her afternoon. She remembered only plopping down