Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [181]
“It does,” Lusa said. “Trust me. Barring a few rocks in the road, it’s all uphill from high school.” She thought about this, surprised by the truth of it. “I can vouch for that. Even depressed and widowed and a long way from home, I like my life right now better than I liked it in high school.”
“Is that so?”
“I think so.”
“You like the country, then. You like farming. You were meant for it.”
“I guess that’s true. It’s weird, though. I was born into such a different life, with these scholarly parents, and I did the best I could with it. I raised caterpillars in shoeboxes and I studied bugs and agriculture in school for as many years as they’ll let you. And then one day Cole Widener walked into my little house and blew the roof off, and here I am.”
Rickie nodded, brushing a fly away from his eyebrow. She had her back to the low-slung sun, but he was looking into it. His skin was the color of caramelized sugar against his red shirt, and his dark eyes glowed in the slanted light. She picked a dandelion and smoothed its furry yellow face. White sap bled from its stem onto her fingers. She tossed it away. “I was mad at him for dying and leaving me here, at first. Pissed off like you wouldn’t believe. But now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me. I’m so grateful to him for that.”
Rickie smoked in silence, squinting into the distance. Lusa didn’t mind whether he spoke or not, or whether he even understood. Rickie would just let her talk, anytime, about anything. It made him seem older than he was.
“Did I tell you my parents are coming to visit?” she asked brightly. “Right before classes start in the fall, when my dad has a week off.”
He looked at her. “That’s good. You don’t see much of your folks, do you?”
“I really don’t. It’s like a state occasion; my mother doesn’t travel very well since she had her stroke. She gets confused. But Dad says she’s doing better—she’s started on a new medicine, and she’s walking better. If she can do the stairs, I’m going to try to talk him into leaving her here for a while. For a real visit. I miss my mother.”
He nodded absently. He had no earthly understanding of what it would feel like, Lusa realized, to be anything but completely surrounded and smothered by family.
They heard the bobwhite again, declaring his name from the hillside. Lusa heard it not so much as “Bob White” but more like a confident “All right,” with a rising inflection at the end, as if this were just the beginning of a long sentence he meant to say. She loved that he was there on her fallow pasture: he was not himself her property but rather a sort of tenant, depending on her for continued goodwill. In all her troubles she had never yet stopped to consider her new position: landholder. Not just a mortage holder, not just burdened, but also blessed with a piece of the world’s trust. The condition forbidden to her zayda’s people for more than a thousand years.
After a decent interval, long enough to permit a change of subject, Rickie asked, “You’re not worried about that coyote?”
“Am I?” She drank half her glass of tea before answering. “You’ll just think this is crazy, but no, I’m not. I mean maybe, at the worst, it could get one kid, and that wouldn’t break me. I can’t see killing a thing that beautiful just on suspicion. I’ll go with innocent until proven guilty.”
“You may change your tune when you see it running off into the woods with that poor little kid squalling bloody murder.”
Lusa smiled, struck by his language. “Listen, can I tell you a story? In Palestine, where my people came from, about a million years ago, they had this tradition of sacrificing goats. To God, theoretically, but I think probably they ate them after the ceremony.” She set her glass down, twisting it into the grass. “So, here’s the thing. They’d always let one goat escape and run off into the desert. The scapegoat.