Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [52]
Jewel was behind her at once, rubbing her shoulders. “For later,” she said simply.
“I should live so long.”
“What on earth do you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” Lusa said. “I just can’t picture later. Spending my nothing of a life in this kitchen cooking for nobody.”
“I wish you’d make a pie for my kids once in a while. When I get home from work I’m so tired, I practically feed them hog slop on a bun.”
Lusa wondered whether this was a real request or an attempt at redeeming her empty life. “I could make a pie and bring it down sometime.”
Jewel sat down, brushing a strand of mouse-colored hair out of her eyes. “That’s not what I was asking for. I don’t know if this is, well, polite to ask. But could they come up here and eat dinner with you sometimes?”
Lusa studied her sister-in-law’s face. She seemed so tired. The request was genuine. “Well, sure. You could, too, Jewel, if you didn’t feel like cooking. I could use the company.”
“But I mean, if I wasn’t here?”
“What, like if you had to take the late shift at Kroger’s? You know you can ask me that anytime. I’m glad to help out.”
“You wouldn’t care to have the kids up here sometimes, then?”
Lusa smiled. “Of course not.” It had taken her a year to learn that when mountain people said “I don’t care to,” they meant the opposite of what she thought. They meant “I wouldn’t mind.”
Jewel held her eye, shy and bold at the same time. “But they said you’re going back to Lexington pretty soon.”
“Who did?”
She shrugged. “I can see why you would. I’m just saying I’d miss you.”
Lusa took a breath. “Would you get this house and the land then?”
“Oh, no. Mary Edna would, I guess. She’s the oldest. I don’t even have a man to farm it.”
“So Mary Edna wants the place.”
“It’s yours, honey; you could sell it or whatever you want. Cole didn’t have any will, so it goes to you. She said they have that law now, a success statue or something where it used to be the family would get a farm back, but now it goes to the wife.”
Lusa felt a rush of adrenaline through her limbs. Only one thing could account for Jewel’s acquaintance with “success statues”: they were consulting lawyers. “I haven’t made up my mind about anything yet,” she said. “I haven’t been able to think straight since everything happened.”
“You seem like you’re doing good, honey.”
Lusa looked at Jewel, longing to trust, knowing she couldn’t. She felt dismayed by the complexities of even the simplest of things, a conversation with a sister—not her own—in a kitchen, also not her own. “Probably you all think I’m not behaving like a decent widow,” she said, surprised by the anger in her chest.
Jewel started to protest, but Lusa shook her head. “You see me pushing right along, canning cherries like everything was normal. But when nobody’s here, sometimes I have to lie down on the floor and just try to keep breathing. What am I supposed to do, Jewel? I’m twenty-eight. I’ve never been a widow before. How does a widow act?”
Jewel offered no advice. Lusa took one of the jelly jars in her hand and stared at its ruby redness, that clear, proud color that she knew she loved, theoretically, but that couldn’t touch her just now. “I grew up in a family where suffering was quiet,” she said. “My father is a man who’s lost everything: his family’s land, his own father, his faith, and now his wife’s companionship. All for unfair reasons. And he’s just kept working, all his life. I was always more of a complainer, but I’m learning to be quiet. It seems like the only grownup way to face this brutal thing that’s happened.”
Jewel’s eyes were so much like Cole’s, so earnest and perfectly blue, that Lusa had to look away from her.
“I may look like I’m doing all right, but I don’t know if I’m coming or going. Whoever told you my plans knows more than I do.”
Jewel put her hand on her mouth—a nervous habit, apparently. “It’s none of my business, but there wasn’t any life insurance, was there?”
Lusa shook her head. “Cole wasn’t planning on dying this year. We’d talked about insurance, but with everything so tight, it just seemed like