Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [176]
Jewel asked, “Have you done any pickles yet?”
Lusa leaned forward on her stool until her forehead rested on the cutting board.
“I take it that means yes,” Jewel said. “Lord, I can’t believe what you’ve done here.” Lusa sat up and caught Jewel’s nostalgic admiration. The jars of golden peaches lined up on the counter looked like currency from another time. “Nobody’s done this much putting up since Mommy died. You should be real proud of yourself. And you should quit. Don’t kill yourself. Give it away.”
“I have.” Lusa gestured with her paring knife. “People down the road run the other way when they see me coming. I caught Mary Edna behind her house throwing the squash I’d given her on the compost pile.”
“Don’t feel bad. Some summers just overdo it like this and there’s a little too much of everything. You can let some of it go.”
“I can’t, though. Look at those peaches, I should throw those away? That would be a sin.” Lusa smiled, self-conscious but proud of herself. “The truth is, I like doing it. I won’t have to spend money on food this year. And it seems like hard work is the only thing that stops my brain from running in circles.”
“Isn’t that the truth. I’d be up here helping you if I had the energy.”
“I know you would. Remember that day you helped me with the cherries?”
“Lord, Lord.” Jewel sat against the table. “A hundred and ten years ago.”
“Seems like that to me, too,” Lusa said, recalling her ravaged psyche that day when widowhood had still been new and fierce: her helplessness against life, her struggle to trust Jewel. Crys and Lowell had been strangers she was a little afraid of; Crystal, in fact, had been a boy. A hundred and ten years ago. “You can just throw the mail on the table. Looks like junk and bills—all I ever get.”
“All anybody ever gets. Who’d think to write a letter anymore?”
Lusa swept her pile of sliced carrots into the colander for blanching. Thirty seconds of steam did something to their biochemistry that colored them as orange as daylilies (so why did the canning book call this step blanching?) and kept them perfect in the freezer. “How are you feeling today, Jewel?”
Jewel put a hand against her cheek. “Pretty good, I think. He’s letting me take more of the painkillers now. It makes me stupid as a cow, but boy, I feel great.” She sounded so sad, Lusa wanted to go sit down next to her and hold her hand.
“Anything I can do for you today? I’m going to bring down your mother’s vacuum and do your rugs when I get a chance. That thing works miracles.”
“No, honey, don’t put yourself out. I need to get back to the house. I left Crys in charge of burning the trash, and you know where that could lead. I really just came up to show you something.”
“What?” Lusa wiped her hands on her apron and crossed to the kitchen table, curious to see what Jewel was pulling out of an envelope.
“It’s the papers from Shel. He signed them. I knew he would, but still, it’s a load off my mind. It’s good to be done with it. I wisht I’d done it a year ago.” Jewel unfolded the sheaf of stiff-looking papers and handed them to Lusa for her inspection. She sat down and looked them over, her eyes skimming through words invented by lawyers that seemed to complicate something so pure and simple. These children belonged to their mother. Soon, probably sooner than anyone was prepared to believe, they would come to live with Lusa.
A signature was scrawled in blue ink at the bottom of two of the pages, in a hand that was masculine but childish, like a fifth-grade