Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [50]
Jewel stood a minute longer with her hand to her mouth and tears welling, staring at Lusa, while her ten-year-old slowly circumnavigated the kitchen island, balancing the cardboard box of jars one-handed. The younger child, Lowell, reached up to steal a handful of cherries off the butcher block. Jewel gently swatted his hand away. “Aren’t people awful?” she asked Lusa, finally. “I know what you’re saying. When Shel—” But she stopped herself to shoo out the kids. “Go play outside.”
“Mo-om, it-’s pouring down rain!”
“It’s pouring down rain, Jewel. They can play on the back porch.”
“OK, the back porch, then, but don’t bust anything.”
“Hey, wait a sec, Chris, here.” Lusa scooped a pile of cherries into a plastic bowl and handed it to the older boy. “If you run out of stuff to do, there’s a broom and a dustpan out there.”
“To sweep with?” “To play hockey with, you’re asking? Yes, to sweep with.”
Jewel waited for the door to close behind them before she spoke. “When Shel left me, everybody just stopped saying his name or word one about him, like I’d never even been married. But we were, for some of those years—I mean, married. Even while we were still just dating, if you know what I mean. We ran off to Cumberland Falls two months before the wedding and called it our test-drive honeymoon.” For just a few seconds she stared at her hands with a faraway satisfaction, the most womanly expression Lusa had ever seen on Jewel. But then it vanished.
“I swear it’s sad,” she finished, matter-of-factly. “Pretending that part of my life never happened.” She began to unscrew the clamp that held the antique steel cherry pitter to the counter. Lusa had spent half an hour solving the puzzle of that clamp, but of course the pitter had been their mother’s. Jewel would know it with her eyes closed.
“This family’s intimidating, no doubt about it,” Lusa said. She wished she could say how hard it really was—how it felt to live among people who’d been using her kitchen appliances since before she was born. How they attacked her in unison if she tried to rearrange the furniture or hang her own family pictures. How even old Mrs. Widener haunted this kitchen, disapproving of Lusa’s recipes and jealous of her soups.
“Oh, it’s not just the family,” Jewel said. “It’s everybody; it’s this town. Four years it’s been, and I still see people at Kroger’s go into a different checkout line so they won’t have to stand there and not say something to me about Shel.”
Lusa mopped red juice from the counter with a sponge. “You’d think in four years they could come up with a new subject.”
“You’d think. Not that it’s the same, Shel’s running off and Cole’s being…”
“Dead,” Lusa said. “It’s the same. Around here, people act like losing your husband was contagious.” Lusa had been amazed at how quickly her status had changed: being single made her either invisible or dangerous. Or both, like a germ. She’d noticed it even at the funeral, especially among the younger ones, wives her own age who needed to believe marriage was a safe and final outcome.
“Well, at least everybody knows you didn’t do anything to run your husband off.”
Lusa took a pinafore apron out of the drawer and put the neck strap over Jewel’s head, then turned her around to tie the back. “What, and you did? God knows hand-to-mouth farming is a life anybody would run from. I considered leaving Cole a hundred times. Not because of him. Just because of everything.”
“Lord, I know, it’s a misery,” Jewel said, though just then they were both gazing out the kitchen window at a drenched, billowy mock orange in full bloom in the backyard—and it was beautiful.
Lusa took up her sponge again. “Don’t you dare tell your sisters I thought about leaving Cole. They’d chop me up and hide the pieces in canning jars.”
Jewel laughed. “You make us sound so mean, honey.” She donned an oven mitt and lifted the huge, flat lid of the water-bath canner, holding it high in the air like a cymbal. “You want me to put the jars in to sterilize?”
“Go ahead. What do you think I’ve got here, about eight quarts?”
Jewel