But Mack is home now and taking medicine to calm his nerves and help him sleep. No one in Rita’s family is particularly high-strung, but Mack has always been the most likely to be anxious, probably because he’s the oldest and feels responsible. Rita called at Hendrikson’s this morning, just to be sure Mack made it to work. He talked with her a minute, not sounding too irritated at her checking up on him. He will be all right—Rita feels this more than knows it. After so much grief, a family has to land at a resting place. Sooner or later things get better—that’s the way it’s always worked. After you suffer a little while, the Lord lifts you up and restores you. She can’t remember the chapter and verse that makes this claim, but she knows it’s there.
Against what Tom the mechanic claims is his better judgment, he’s installed a new starter in the Ford, and now the car sits in Rita’s driveway. She notices that it could stand a good washing. This thought brings Amos Mosley to mind. Rita developed a relationship with Amos merely by watering her car on the same Saturday afternoon that he watered his. They wandered around their tires and fenders, tepid water splashing out of green hoses, and exchanged some pointless remarks about weather before eventually talking of how the kids were doing and who was living where now and what the latest count of grandchildren was. Amos offered to wash Rita’s car whenever he washed his. She said it wasn’t necessary, but she wouldn’t stand in the way if he decided to give the Ford a squirt or two while he was at it. Two weeks later Amos was hosing down his car, and Rita wandered out to chat and offer him a glass of iced tea. It was June and hot enough to dry a person out even as he hoisted a garden hose. Amos washed his car, then wandered across the strip of grass between their properties and washed Rita’s car. She protested, but mildly. It isn’t a romantic relationship, but a friendly one, a small, regular contact with another person.
Amos has a bad autumn cold this week—allergies probably—and both cars look neglected. But it’s shopping time. Rita snaps on her seatbelt and heads for the grocery store.
When Rita walks in the door, Bud says, “Got stuff here for you,” meaning a bag of vegetables and day-old baked goods behind the magazine rack. Bud is the only person manning the store. It is definitely a one-person grocery, a small storefront that at one time was part of a larger store. Some days, especially bright autumn ones when kids go back to school, Rita walks along Main Street and is caught up in old visions. She sees Beulah as its old self, full of folks, noisy but not too much, with posses of children stopping at this very grocery (it was Bruener’s Grocery back then) on their way home from school, sorting pennies, nickels, and dimes out of sweaty palms for just the right selection of bubble gum and jawbreakers, Tootsie Rolls, Fireballs, the sweet wax fangs and mustaches around Halloween, and wintergreen candy cigarettes. Years ago a wall went up where the bread and bakery aisle used to be, and now the area churches use the other side as a thrift store, collecting odd pillow-cases, pans, and clothing donations to distribute to the poorest of the poor. The grocery is a small, depressed version of its older self; Bud hires help from time to time but mostly handles every bit of stocking, pricing, and checking by himself.
He expects Rita every Monday afternoon. She shops for herself and half a dozen other old folks, and she scavenges the produce that is beyond selling at regular price—the too soft or too ripe or too spotted. In larger groceries such items would get shrink-wrapped together and sold at a deep discount. But Rita is on a mission, and Bud goes ahead of her, setting aside the not-so-prime goods and having them ready Monday afternoon, because most of his shipments come in on Monday morning. This way he deprives no one and puts the lesser products in able hands.
Rita comes by for meat scraps later in the week. Bud still cuts meat to order; this is a necessity in a town with so many older citizens. Some of them are too shaky to handle a butcher knife anymore. And most live alone and buy tiny bits at a time. For a few extra cents, Bud slices and chops, trims fat, divides chickens. The remains—bones, gristle, fat, innards—go into plastic ice cream containers in the back freezer. Rita picks them up, takes them home, and boils the life out of them. Boils them with bits of nearly too far gone onion and pepper, with the herbs from her little garden. She lets the pots of cast-off goods simmer all day on the back burner while she goes about her business. When she has steeped the last rumor of flavor from marrow and cartilage, she strains the broth twice and stores it in bags in the freezer. On Saturdays she makes soup—from the stock she’s boiled and from the leftover vegetables from Bud. Week in and week out, in all kinds of weather, Rita gathers questionable goods and makes soup. She has done this for five years.
This practice started because of Bernie Hallsted. Eighty-four years old and too feeble and absentminded to cook for himself, he lives two doors north of Rita. Bernie developed the habit of making one can of tuna and one can of pork-and-beans last a week. Just left them sitting there in the fridge. That, and crackers. Rita happened to look in Bernie’s fridge one day when she dropped off a prescription and asked if he had some cold water to drink. She found the chipped plastic container with ice water in it, a dried-up bottle of Tabasco in the door, and the two cans, forks sticking out of them, on the second shelf.
That day Rita went home and wept for the first time in years. The next day she concocted soup from whatever was in reach and took it over to Bernie. He lapped it up, his face shining with happy surprise.
“I’ll bring you bean soup next week.”
“Oh—navy bean?”
“If that’s what you like.”
“Oh, sure. Love navy bean soup.”
The next week it was navy bean with bits of ham left over after a church potluck.
She started looking carefully then at other seniors who lived around her. She realized that nearly everyone in her neighborhood was old, retired, without a spouse, and barely making it on Social Security. It was especially hard for those with medical bills, which included nearly everyone. Several people had stopped taking medicine, since they couldn’t afford prescriptions and the light bill in the same month. Groceries were often one of the first expenses to eliminate, after the telephone.
One gray day in late August—a close, irritating day when dust and sour smells clung to everything—Rita nearly passed out from the heat in her kitchen. She’d gone to Bud’s and bought up all the vegetables she could afford, along with beans and stew meat. It was ninety in the shade, but never mind, soup was the best way to get nearly every food group accounted for: rice and kidney beans, onions, peppers, zucchini, corn, tomatoes. Faded celery leaves, sprigs of thyme from her patch outside, lots of salt and pepper—old folks couldn’t taste too well. For good measure she’d added a glob of peanut butter, which thickened the broth and added flavor. The pot was filled to the brim before she began dipping its brew into mason jars. At four in the afternoon, she hauled a cardboard box full of sixteen jars, all gleaming and warm. Real food floating in there. Nothing starched up or full of additives. It didn’t taste bad.
She offered the same transparent story at every doorstep. I made way too much soup—all those years of feeding a family, can’t get out of the habit of making enough for an army. It’s not much, just old vegetable soup. Hope you like it. The next week she couldn’t think of a story that was plausible. Edie, d’you like the soup last week? I’m trying a new recipe this time around. Tell me what you think. After that, she didn’t explain, and the acceptance was settled. She’d take soup on Saturdays. Along about Thursday, the squeaky clean jars would show up on her back step, little thank-you notes or no notes at all. Sometimes there’d be a can of beans or something: Had extra. Maybe you can use this.
But Rita was on a fixed income too, and soon after she began making soup for her neighbors she was picking up those Saran-wrapped odds and ends on the less-than-glorious table of the produce section. After a while Bud caught on (hard not to do when a dozen senior citizens tell you within the same few days that Rita makes the best darn soup—and have that happen three weeks in a row),
and he made sure Rita found everything there was to find. He saw her eyeing the stew meat and walking on by, and the thought struck him about the meat scraps. And then the day-old bakery items.
Now it is custom and sacred, Rita’s soup. No more dried-out, stinky cans of tuna stretched beyond possibility. In the winter she bakes bread sometimes to go with the soup. But most weeks there is bread enough from the day-old supply.
Rita has always been a decent cook, although, on a farm, you cooked what was in season, and there were never a lot of extras to spice things up. You could be creative within limits. Jodie bought her starts of herbs one Christmas, and between the two of them they kept most of the plants alive through a nearly sunless winter. Now Rita’s herb garden takes over a new square yard of ground with each summer. So maybe her cooking is better, even if it’s mostly soups and casseroles.
It was never her intent to become the neighborhood cook. She’s not terribly fond of cooking. But sometimes a thing just clearly needs to be done, and no one else is doing it. Maybe no one else is left to do it—the kids are all grown and moved away; the husband or wife is gone. Rita thinks that a lot of holy callings must happen just this way. Some little congregation without a pastor can’t afford one of those seminary graduates from the city. Bill Winney’s son is a good boy with a strong voice; he loves talking about God and has a soft spot for people. Hard to say which happens first—the call into a preaching ministry or a need that leads to a solution. If soup every Saturday is a divine solution, then it is the only such divinity Rita has touched in her lifetime. It isn’t much, but, at her age, it will have to be enough.
She finishes her shopping at Bud’s, stops at the pharmacy—the only other real business left on Main Street—picks up prescriptions for Flo Dansen and Eloise Waul, then gets mail for half a dozen people and makes her deliveries. The car behaves itself, although the first few times she switches it off a little panic grabs her. Here in town, she could walk to about anyplace she needs to go, but she is used to having a car with a seat and plenty of room to stash things. She’ll lock herself up in her own house the day she has to wander the streets with a grocery cart like some city bag lady.
At Eloise’s place, she visits for twenty minutes because Eloise has no family left and is too feeble to go to church regularly anymore.
“Eloise, I got your prescriptions here. You need anything from the store?” Rita’s voice booms in the small living room where Eloise spends most of her time. She has retired in the same sizable house where she raised her children, but she lives in essentially two rooms of it now.
“Oh, no. No need to bother any.” Eloise has the round, smiley face of a woman who once looked like a perfect china doll. She reaches out with cool, paper-thin fingers to grasp Rita’s hand. Her eyes are light blue and watery, looking as if they see when mostly they remember. “Thank you, Rita. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Well, you know my number if you need anything.”
“I do. But I’m just fine. Could you bring me a glass of water? I’ll take these pills right now before I forget.”
Rita gets the water, remembering Eloise as a girl, vivacious as could be and simply lost without an audience. It’s a cruel thing to see her alone now. Rita didn’t like Eloise much back when they were young women with families and living on their respective farms. Eloise was older, had more money, more children, and went to cities often. She imagined herself in another class, no doubt. But her husband Gerald came back from Korea an invalid, and Eloise’s life has shrunk up ever since.
“I’ll check on you in a couple of days, all right?” Rita makes sure the trash hasn’t piled up too much. She checks the refrigerator. There are a few single-serving things lined up on the second shelf. Rita opens each one, using a can opener or a flip top, and leaves the lids setting in place. She unseals the half-gallon of milk she just bought and punches holes in the top of the apple juice can. She tosses several things that no longer look edible. On her way down the back steps, she notes the three or four potted plants that are miraculously carrying on. No hard frost yet.
As talkative as Eloise is around town, evidently she never got along well with most of her kids. They are all elsewhere now, off in those cities Eloise used to visit. A couple of the older ones have offered to have her come live with them, but there is always a reason she can’t abide that particular home or that particular child. Now here she is, doomed to a quiet house in a town where nothing much happens. To Rita it is a classic lesson in “the first shall be last and the last first.”
She passes the Methodist parsonage. The Sipeses used to live there, but they have moved on. Still, the sight of the yard awakens bad memories in Rita.
“But, reverend, you’ve got two deacons who’ve plumb taken advantage of every farmer in this county.”
“Rita, they’re not breaking any laws. And besides, I don’t know the particulars of all these situations. The man’s a banker, and he has to answer to people too.”
“He makes his own decisions about foreclosures—you know that.”
“It’s not my business.”
“If a family losing its livelihood isn’t your business, then I don’t know what is.”
After that, Rita stopped volunteering at the church or attending anything but Sunday morning worship. Helen Sipes tried to visit after Taylor died, but for the first time in her life Rita put good manners behind her. She turned away the covered dishes and refused to answer the phone. She stood at the front door of the farmhouse and told Helen that she was wasting her time.
“The time you and your husband could have helped is long past.”
Well, a lot has happened since then, and Rita does church in the next town. But she looks at the weedy little patches that Helen used to coax into blankets of chrysanthemums, and she feels a certain loss.
Mack
Mack drives out of his own county and well into the next one before entering a town he doesn’t know that well and then finding the address they gave him at the clinic. It goes with a double-wide mobile home, but the sign on the door identifies it as the Family Support Service. It is subsidized by three or four denominations and is therefore free to Mack, at least for now. Who knows how long an outfit like this can keep going, but Mack has picked it for its relative distance from his home and neighbors. Until the hospital business, he’d never gone to any doctor who traded in people’s minds and emotions. His guts are in a knot when he opens the door, but the girl at the desk acts like it’s completely normal for people to walk in and talk for a while. She gives him a form to fill out and then points to a plastic chair among several that are lined up where probably the living room used to be, when this was a home and not an office. He writes down his information and returns the form. Ten more minutes go by, and the girl directs him to the door at the far end of the trailer.
George Dooley looks like a guy who has blown one career and then become a counselor by default. He appears as Irish as his name, ruddy cheeks and reddish-brown hair and a burly physique that makes his friendly manner all the more a relief. George’s office is chaos, and for this first session they go to someone else’s office while a woman mutters and frantically sorts through the papers on George’s desk. “I’ve lost something important,” says George. “Fortunately, Maryanne has a knack for getting the rest of us organized.” Then he chuckles softly, a coffee-stained front tooth catching the light.
Mack sighs and waits for George to get on with his questions.
George allows the smile to fade, then settles back and looks at Mack intently. He says not a word.
Mack shifts in the chair. It is too soft and full of stuffing. He tries to find a point of balance, where he can be comfortable without listing to one side. George is still looking at him. Mack makes a little motion with his hands.
“I guess I filled out all the papers they needed.”
“If you didn’t, I wouldn’t know anyway. We can proceed as if all the paperwork’s in order.” George is not smiling but l
ooks pleasant.
“I don’t know what you want,” Mack says.
“This isn’t about what I want, is it?”
“It’s not about what I want either.” Mack can feel sweat breaking out on his palms. “When they released me, I agreed to come here once a week.”
“A parole situation, is it?” Mack expects George to chuckle again, but he doesn’t.
“That’s what it feels like.”
“Well, since you have to be here, maybe you could come up with something you might get out of it. Then at least we can make it worth your while.”
The room is uncomfortably warm. Mack tries to get a good breath.
“It’s a nerve-wracking thing, having to talk to a total stranger about what’s going on in your guts.” George crosses his legs and appears to get comfortable in the straight-backed chair.
“I don’t really see the point. I’m all right now. Just got too tired, I think. There for several weeks I didn’t sleep. Put everything out of whack. But they’ve got me on this stuff for the sleep.”
“Sleep deprivation is a serious matter. I suppose that’s what led to your depression.”
“Yeah, I think that was it.” This is easy enough. George talks like he’s the pragmatic type, not one to get so concerned about what Mack might be feeling this particular second. Not likely to put great stock in dreams or in coaxing out tears or angry outbursts. This might turn out okay.
“But there’s a reason you weren’t sleeping. And we want to be certain you’ve dealt with that original cause. Otherwise, sooner or later, it’ll all start again.”
Vinita Hampton Wright Page 5
