Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [166]
They paused in the front hallway, hearing the children’s voices. Lowell and Crys were in the parlor with a stack of ancient board games Lusa had pulled out of a closet. Their favorites were Monopoly and the Ouija board, which they pronounced “Ow-jay.”
“Where are your pills?” Lusa asked.
“Oh, shoot, my purse is in the car.”
“Let’s get you onto the parlor couch, then. I’ll run and get it.”
Jewel gave Lusa a pleading look. “Could we go upstairs? I hate for the kids to see me like this.”
“Of course.” Lusa felt stupid for not thinking of that. Jewel gripped the banister with a tight, white hand, and Lusa carried most of her weight up these stairs, too. She guided Jewel into the bedroom, deciding not to care that the bed wasn’t made and clothes were on the floor. “Here, you sit and I’ll be right back.”
She flew down to the car and back, breathless, just taking a quick glance at the kids to see that they were occupied. They were arguing over Monopoly money, so they hadn’t noticed anything. Keeping her voice as calm as she could, she asked them to go out and close the rabbit fence around the garden and then gather the eggs, which she knew Lowell loved to do, so long as his sister protected him from the rooster. Then she ran back upstairs, pausing in the upstairs bathroom to draw a glass of water from the tap. When she returned to the bedroom she found Jewel settled into the green brocade chair by the window, Lusa’s reading chair. She was running her fingers over the vine pattern on the nubbly green fabric, as if reading something written there in Braille. Lusa handed her the glass of water and sat on the floor at her feet to work on the childproof ca.
When she got it open at last, Jewel swallowed the pills and drank the whole glass of water, obediently, like a child. She set down the glass and went on rubbing the arms of the chair, thoughtfully. “We used to have two of these,” she said. “A pair. Mommy’s good parlor chairs, till they got old. Lois finally spilled something on one of them. Or, no, she cut her leg open with a pocketknife and got a big streak of blood from here to there. Lordy, she was in trouble.”
“For cutting her leg?”
“Well, no, see, for doing it in that chair. She was trying to make a soap carving of Marilyn Monroe! We weren’t supposed to be in the parlor at all; it was just for company. That was a whole mess of trouble. Mommy about had a fit. She couldn’t clean it for anything. She had to throw that chair out! Lord, I wonder where it ever ended up.”
“Probably in the barn, along with everything else in the free world. Do you know there’s part of a piano in there?”
“No,” Jewel said quietly, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper over the bed. “She put it down by the road. That’s the way you did back then, when we were kids. Somebody would always come along that was worse off than you and didn’t mind putting a sheet over a stained chair, and they’d take it. It’s somewhere now. Somebody’s using it someplace.” Her eyes focused and came down like a pair of blue butterflies to light on Lusa’s face. “Isn’t it funny how you never know how things are going to wind up? I get so mad, thinking about not having a chance to get old. Darn it. I want to see what Lois looks like with white hair.”
“I don’t think any of us will live to see that. As long as Lady Clairol’s still in business.”
Jewel let out a weak laugh, but Lusa felt bad for trying to cover this awful, important moment with a joke. She had suffered so much herself from people’s platitudes and evasions of death, yet here with Jewel she had no idea what else to say. “You never know, Jewel, you still might outlive us all,” was what came out.
Jewel shook her head, keeping her eyes steady on Lusa. “I’m not going to see another summer. I’ll be gone before you’re done eating the canned goods in your pantry.”
“I’m sorry,” Lusa whispered. She reached up to take both of Jewel’s hands in hers and held on to them without speaking for several minutes. An occasional syllable of the children’s shouts drifted in through