Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [34]
Things at least quieted down after dark, when all the reasonable hours for eating or visiting were past. Even that nudnick the minister wouldn’t show up now. But nights were the worst for Lusa. She had to prowl the upper rooms, avoiding the bedroom where she and Cole had slept but effectively being trapped upstairs since Jewel and Hannie-Mavis still held the downstairs, for the fifth night in a row. Apparently they had moved in. It was Saturday now—Sunday morning, rather, could that be right? Didn’t they need to go home to their husbands and children? Lusa lay on top of the coverlet on the daybed in the spare room (her sisters-in-law called it the girls’ room), listening to the toneless mutter of their conversation. She wished for deafness—she had already overheard too much, too many suppositions about her fragility, her plans, her lack of religious faith or even her own kin to lean on. Mary Edna had said to the minister, sotto voce, “Now, you know, the wife isn’t Christian.” As though that explained, in part, her impossible bad fortune. All of them, sisters and neighbors, intimated to one another the mysteries of her father’s long-lost parentage (“that Jewish business, in the war”) and her mother’s more recent poor health (“back in the spring, sad—no, not all that old”), without understanding how life had left Lusa with two speechless parents. Ever since the stroke, her mother’s frantic eyes searched so desperately for words that Lusa could hardly bear to see it, while her father resigned himself to the silence as if it were his own death and he’d been waiting for it. When she called to tell him her awful news, his son-in-law dead, her father seemed slow to grasp how this new tragedy was connected with him. They hadn’t even discussed his coming for the funeral.
Hannie-Mavis and Jewel were down there in the kitchen now, mousy, downcast Jewel playing foil to the more dramatic Handy-Makeup, whose tears invoked constant facial repair (though the emotive Emaline had outdone her earlier by letting out loud wails in front of Cole’s baby picture). Things seemed to calm down a lot when the visitors left, but Lusa could still hear them talking and handling food. Everything in the kitchen remained exactly as their mother had organized it. When Lusa had tried to rearrange the cupboards, they’d all treated it as a mistake to be repaired and forgiven. She could picture the two of them now, their hands uncrinkling and reusing squares of aluminum foil to cover the casseroles. The incessant opening and closing of the refrigerator—a whine and a hiss—had become the theme music to Lusa’s misery.
If only she could sleep, only leave this place for a little while.
When the Regulator clock downstairs chimed one o’clock, she gave up. Sleep would not come to her tonight. There were ghosts everywhere, even here in the neutral guest bedroom where Lusa had hardly spent an hour of her life before this. The bed had no memories in it, but there was Cole’s big bass fiddle standing up in the corner, spooking her with its presence as badly as if it were a man standing there in the shadows. She kept thinking of Cole’s hands on its neck sliding fluidly up and down, as if there were still some parts of him that hadn’t yet conceded to die. One more piece of the bottomless unfairness of this death: she’d never really taken the time to listen to him play. He’d let the music go in recent years, though she knew back in high school he’d been good enough to travel around the area with a bluegrass band. Out of the Blue, it was called. She wondered who the other members were—the fiddle, the guitar, the mandolin, all played by hands that probably had shaken hers in the last few days, though no one had mentioned it. Now Cole was permanently missing from their number, like a tooth knocked out, and his upright bass stood waiting in its corner. She stared at its dark, glossy curves, realizing that the instrument was old, probably older even than this hundred-year-old house. Other