Jewelweed (19 page)

An hour later, he was still there, grappling with hope and staring at his hands.

N
ate's drive to Red Plain took a little over an hour, an interminably long time for his heightened expectations. Yet when the road curved around the last outcropping before continuing into the haphazard assortment of nine hundred homes and commercial buildings, he didn't feel sufficiently prepared. Familiar sights on both sides of the street presented a gauntlet of memories, impeding his movement. After Blake's mother took off, he found a short-distance hauling job with regular hours, and often delivered beer and other supplies to the taverns here. The rooming house where Blake lived when he first moved away from home now had a Room for Rent sign hanging out front. In the old downtown area, one of Nate's uncles owned a secondhand store, and the side of the building still read Antiques & Treasures in his aunt's bold red-and-green lettering.

The cement plant's sign had been repainted recently. He parked underneath it and entered the office with a quart of raspberries. Pictures of patios and tile samples hung on the wall, and a sagging line of seventy-pound mortar bags led away from the door. A woman was seated behind the counter. She was wearing a tan short-sleeve blouse, buttoned up the front. Her fingers frolicked over a computer keyboard as she stared into the monitor. She glanced quickly at Nate. “Be right with you.” Then she stood up and carried several papers into a back room, her skirt falling behind her calves, her shoes somewhere between brown, tan, and maroon. An unseen fax machine hummed, dialed, whistled, and beeped. When she came back, the telephone rang and she picked up the receiver. Nate slid the basket of raspberries onto the counter and shifted his weight from his right leg.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, hanging up. “Everyone wants things done yesterday. How can I help you?”

“Bee, I'm Nathaniel, your cousin.”

She lowered her glasses along the ridge of her nose and looked over them. “No you're not.”

“I'm pretty sure I am.”

They looked at each other more carefully.

Unable to discover the Bee he remembered, Nate panicked. He tried to match his memory's picture with the person in front of him, but it didn't fit. Taking a deep breath, he tried again to rediscover her, and with each failure he encountered inner weakness. He followed the curves in her face and studied her neck, the tiny earrings, and the streaks of gray in her short brown hair. All these features led to her eyes, blue-green-and-brown irises with lively, almost-black centers. Holding these glistening planets in front of him, he tried again to fit his memory's stubborn image to her living form. Again he failed, and his soul withered inside him, like someone returned from war to discover that the sacred place of his childhood was gone.

Then a dimple caved into her chin as she smiled, and his joy launched. Bee lived, and from this glad discovery came feelings he feared he'd outgrown. Visions of youth seeped into his mind, recollections of more wonderful things than he had time to recall—tumbling scenes peopled with beauty and enchantment, and standing in the middle of them, the person before him.

“Bee,” he uttered softly.

“You're older, Natie,” she said.

“I brought some raspberries.”

Again the dimple winked from her chin, engaging an even more satisfying level of familiarity—Bee's extra portion. As a girl, this characteristic had seemed like a protective coating, a genetic guarantee that her knees would never be knobby. But in its present form it was clearly not that at all. Rather, something better-than, an infectious merriment, a double helping. Something that could never be defined in her overflowed in him and filled his conscious container to the brim with clear and untroubled ambitions. In her company he felt good about himself, better than anywhere else. She licensed him, loaned him the rightful authority to be
himself. With Bee, the memories of his family became memories of their shared family, and they were no longer hard to carry. Her presence taught him where to find the right dramas and how to discard the rest. Through her dimpled smile he could stare into the future without blinking.

“When can you leave here?” he asked. “Is your car outside? I have some fruit for you. It's so good to see you, Bee. I have so much to tell you. Where are you living? Do you remember a man in Iowa near Mason City—an older fellow with a beard? You'll never believe this, but I was there. I stood under the tree. Can you believe it? And the old man, he walked through the rows of corn carrying a meal you'd taught him to make when the timing chain blew in your car. You sent the recipe. I was there. I ate the lunch. See, I pulled off the road because the corn grew so flat and uniform and straight for miles and miles. It seemed like it would never end, and I couldn't remember ever being young and I thought—”

“Slow down, Natie.”

“It's so good to see you, Bee. Do you remember me?”

“Of course I do, dummy. What do you think?”

“When can you get out of here?”

“I've got another ten minutes before I close up.”

“Is your car outside?”

“I don't need to drive. I've got feet, you know.” As evidence, she lifted one behind her and looked over her shoulder at it. Again the dimple winked at him, an almost-flirtatious beckoning, the come-hither nod of a gatekeeper opening the door, the effortless charm his older cousin had always wielded, subduing him without effort, comforting him with the protective wing of her approval.

Nate couldn't look away. He rediscovered the old Bee in every part of her, rushing from one view to the next like someone returning to the place they had once lived and hurrying from room to room. Yes, I see what you've done with it, and I also remember when the table used to sit against the wall over there, and the back door rattled when the wind blew. . . .

“Then I'll drive.”

“I can't go anywhere, Natie. I've got to get supper for Mom.”

“Yes, of course, of course you do. How is Aunt Nadine?”

“About the same as she's been for several years—since her stroke. If I don't sit with her she won't eat.”

“She lives with you?”

“Of course she does, Natie. What did you think? Mom had a stroke.”

“I thought Rufus might be looking after her.”

Bee horse-snorted at this suggestion, puffing air out of her nostrils in a time-honored, species-jumping expression of scorn. “Rufus can't take care of his electric bill, let alone anyone else.”

Bee had always illustrated her feelings with physical expressions borrowed from the animal world. When Nate was young, he was a little frightened by this uncanny ability, but he had learned to accept it. Now he cherished it. For some reason creaturely mannerisms seemed to be more available to her than they were to most other people, and he felt a glimmer of childlike awe in the presence of her clearly superior skills.

“I'll come with you.”

“No you won't. Mom gets mixed up about when she's living—now or then. Having you there would tip her off-center. I'll need a lot of time to prepare her.”

“I'm in no hurry,” he lied, and Bee knew it.

“Look, Natie, go outside. I'll come as soon as I finish a few things.”

Then she put a berry in her mouth, bit into it, chewed thoughtfully, and took another.

“Hmmmm. Where did you get these?”

“Michigan.”

She took a third and handed the basket to Nate. “Take these with you,” she said, looking out of the corners of her eyes in comic mimicry of a wary animal. “If Gladys comes in there won't be any left. You can't find good raspberries anymore. Go on now. Go on.”

Nate walked out. Too pleased with himself to get into the pickup, he walked around the parking lot and inspected a cement mixer in need of a registration sticker, then considered a green refuse bin next to the warehouse. A shallow pool of water lay between, an oil-film rainbow greasing one end. Nate walked around it three times and went back to his truck.

When Bee came out, she sat next to him in his pickup. While she ate raspberries, he drove the eight blocks to her gray bungalow with green trim and parked on the road in front. The small house was patrolled on all sides by an army of lawn ornaments, and Nate remembered how his aunt Nadine's yard had always looked like that. She was a collector, and everywhere she went she found something to go nicely with something
she already had. She never tired of stopping and looking, and as a result no one ever wanted to go anywhere with her.

He glanced quickly at his cousin. A fondly remembered shame threatened to make him blush. “Take the berries,” he said. “I'll go over to the tavern and come back after an hour or so. Could we go somewhere together then?”

“Which tavern?”

“The closest one. Can I at least carry the peaches up to the porch for you?”

“No. Mom might see you. She usually goes to bed right after supper. You can bring them then, though I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all of them. They don't last very long, Natie. What were you thinking? A whole case?” Again the dimple winked at him from her chin.

Nate watched Bee get out of the truck. She hurried through the lawn ornaments and he observed the way she walked—a unique uplift in her step, a midstride bounce, almost a gambol. Everything about her possessed an unanticipated exuberance.

At the mostly empty tavern, Nate drank a dark beer and contemplated his own eagerness for time to pass. Fifteen minutes later he bought another beer, and the man behind the counter asked, “Is your last name Bookchester?”

Nate nodded.

“I thought I remembered you.”

Nate said nothing, so the man continued. “You made deliveries years back. And you've got a son named Blake—”

“He's in prison,” said Nate, completing the thought for him.

“Bad luck, that. Good kid. He used to live around here—he and the Workhouse girl.”

“I guess he did at that.”

Nate carried his beer to a booth by the window, where he sat down and watched the evening cast shadows along the street. When Bee walked by, he went out to meet her. She'd changed into a sweatshirt, faded jeans, and tennis shoes.

“That didn't take long,” he said.

“I already had supper made, just heated it up. Mom ate a couple bites, then went to bed and fell asleep. It's one of the things she does well, dear
thing. Look, Natie, maybe you could help me put up those peaches. I worry about leaving Mom home alone at night. We'll have to be quiet, but the jars are already clean and I have all the lids we need.”

“Nothing I'd rather do,” said Nate, grinning like a jack-o'-lantern.

They walked back to the bungalow, and Nate carried the fruit through the menagerie of ceramic gnomes, dwarves, cherubs, bears, rabbits, squirrels, wizards, giant mice, and red rhinoceroses. “I didn't want all these dumb things in my yard,” said Bee. “But they came anyway.”

Inside, Bee reminded Nate that they had to be very quiet in order to keep from waking her mother. Then she rustled through the cupboards, looking for pans: an old black-and-white-speckled canning kettle with thin sides, a smaller midnight-blue baked-enamel dual-handled pot for blanching, a stainless-steel pot with a long handle for the sugar syrup and lemon juice, and a saucepan for the jar lids. Climbing onto the counter to reach above the cabinets, she handed down twelve blue-sealers, quart-sized. Nate set them on the counter and they cluttered together in antique conformity, shining, bulging, their round mouths gaping open.

Nate sharpened paring knives on the stone. Bee said they didn't need sharp knives for peaches. Dull ones worked better. Much better. Nate shook his head, disagreeing.

They half-filled the speckled canning kettle with tap water, centered it over the hottest back burner, and put the lid on. Nate slid a stack of yellow-gold canning lids with red rubber rings into several inches of water in the saucepan, and put it on the other small back burner. Bee took down a sack of sugar from the cupboard, and Nate found a fresh lemon in the refrigerator. He cut it in half, testing the edge of the knife. Bee mashed the pulp against the ribbed nose cone in a glass juicer. Like a struck match, the pungent citrus smell came alive in the air between them. She poured the juice into a measuring cup.

“You don't need to measure it,” whispered Nate. “It's just to keep the color.”

“I'm older than you and I know what it's for,” whispered Bee. “And I always measure.”

They poured four inches of water into the smaller pot and set it on the front burner. Nate set the crate of peaches on the counter and they inspected them for rot and bruises. Their skins were fuzzy, firm, and fragrant—a little
larger than tennis balls. Bee bit into one and a stream of peach juice ran down her chin. She stopped the drip with the back of her hand and handed the peach to Nate. He bit into it, felt his teeth scrape against the pit, and his mouth filled with flavor. He bit off another piece and fed the last dripping piece to Bee.

Then they rinsed off their hands under the faucet and went back to inspecting the rest of the peaches in the crate.