The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [74]
She did. “A circular domed tent of skins stretched over a lattice framework,” she read, pronouncing each word slowly without a Kentucky accent. She pronounced “a” like the letter “A.” “Used by the Mongol nomads of Siberia.”
As they say in the papers, I withheld comment.
“So what do you think, Taylor? Do you think it would have a floor, or plaster walls inside, anything like that? Think the bugs would get in?”
What popped into my head was: George eats old gray rutabagas and plasters his yurt.
“The part I can’t get over is that he asked for me,” she said. “He actually says here that he misses me.” She mulled it over and over, twisting her gold wedding band around her finger. She had stopped wearing it about the time she started working at the salsa factory, but now had put it on again, almost guiltily, as though Angel might have packed a spy into the box along with the belt and the boots.
“But I’ve got responsibilities now,” she argued, with herself certainly because I was giving no advice one way or the other. “At Red Hot Mama’s.”
This was surely true. In just three weeks’ time she had been promoted to floor manager, setting some kind of company record, but she refused to see this as proof that she was a good worker. “They just didn’t have anybody else to do it,” she insisted. “Practically everybody there’s fifteen years old, or worse. Sometimes they send over retardeds from that Helpless program, or whatever the heck it’s called.”
“It’s called the Help-Yourself program, and you know it, so don’t try to change the subject. The word is handicapped, not retardeds.”
“Right, that’s what I meant.”
“What about that woman you told me about that breeds Pekingeses and drives a baby-blue Trans Am? What’s-her-name, that gave you the I Heart My Cat bumper stickers? And what about the guy that’s building a hot-air blimp in his backyard? Are they fifteen?”
“No.” She was flipping the dictionary open and closed, staring out the window.
“And Sal Monelli, how old’s he?”
Lou Ann rolled her eyes. Sal Monelli was an unfortunate fellow whose name had struck such terror in her heart she forbade him to touch any food item that wasn’t sealed and crated. Lou Ann’s life was ruled by the fear of salmonella, to the extent that she claimed the only safe way to eat potato salad was to stick your head in the refrigerator and eat it in there.
“He actually wants me to go,” she kept repeating, and even though she said she wasn’t going to make up her mind right away, I felt in my bones that sooner or later she’d go. If I knew Lou Ann, she would go.
It seemed like the world was coming apart at the gussets. Mattie was gone more than she was home these days, “bird-watching.” Terry, the red-haired doctor, had moved to the Navajo reservation up north (to work, not because he had head rights). Father William looked like he had what people in Pittman call a case of the nerves.
The last time I’d really had a chance to talk with Mattie, she’d said there was trouble in the air. Esperanza and Estevan were going to have to be moved to a safe house farther from the border. The two best possibilities were Oregon and Oklahoma.
Flat, hopeless Oklahoma. “What would happen if they stayed here?” I asked.
“Immigration is making noises. They could come in and arrest them, and they’d be deported before you even had time to sit down and think about it.”
“Here?” I asked. “They would come into your house?”
Mattie said yes. She also said, as I knew very well, that in that case Estevan’s and Esperanza’s lives wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel.
“That just can’t be right,” I said, “that they would do that to a person, knowing they’d be killed. There’s got to be some other way.”
“The only legal way a person from Guatemala can stay here is if they can prove in court that their life was in danger when they left.”
“But they were, Mattie, and you know it. You know what happened to them. To Esperanza’s brother, and all.” I didn’t say, To their daughter. I wondered if Mattie knew, but of course she would have to.
“Their own say-so is no good; they have to