Though Annie can’t see her, Caroline will have drawn her dark hair over one shoulder and will be petting it hand over hand. She’ll be blinking slowly so the light glitters in her long, dark lashes and smiling at Jacob Riddle.
Caroline is younger than Annie by a scant twelve months, but a person looking at the sisters side by side would never think such a thing. It isn’t only Caroline’s body that would deceive a person, though it would surely be enough. She would never make the mistake of leaving the house without the proper undergarments. The weight of her bosom wouldn’t let her forget. Caroline takes up more space than most. That’s what Grandma says. Caroline’s cheeks glow, her lips shine, and she carries herself with a straight back, chin lifted, head tilted ever so slightly to the side as if she’s all the time seeing a friend who’s been long lost to her and is so very happy to see her again.
Annie’s hair never looks freshly brushed even if she still holds the brush in hand. It’s ordinary. All of her is ordinary, and ordinary doesn’t take up so much space. While Caroline’s softness begs to be touched, an urge that is surely testing Jacob Riddle at this moment, Annie is hard and straight and no more touchable than an elm trunk littered with cicada husks.
“Don’t guess I much care,” Annie says, working the towel around another jar and rubbing her fingers over the thick raised letters that dress each jar.
“Still a shame,” Grandma says. “Here it is your day and you’re the one doing all the work.”
Once today is over, Daddy will walk between the rows of bushy lavender, talk with the fellows in town about what weather they expect will come this way over the next few weeks. He’ll snap a stem here and there, bend it, twist it, smell its insides. He’ll cup a fist around a lavender stalk, close it just enough, draw it out, and come away with a handful of gray buds. He’ll rub them between his fingers, sniff them too. He’ll close his eyes, shake his head, and exhale as if he’s smelled lavender one too many times, one too many Goddamn times, and finally, he’ll decide.
He’ll give Grandma a date, a Sunday later this month, maybe early July, and come seven o’clock the first Monday morning in June, Grandma will begin mashing overripe bananas and mixing up her lavender banana bread because it freezes especially nice. She’ll take her sewing kit from the top shelf of her closet and pretend to just get started on cutting and stitching the sachets, though everyone knows she’s been working on them since Christmas, quietly each night in her bedroom. In a few weeks, she’ll have Annie stuffing the small bags made from swatches of fabric she pretended to be cutting for one of her quilts with dried stems and buds, and Caroline will stitch them closed. This year’s harvest date will also be the day Abraham Pace gets married.
“Why was Ellis Baine here?” Annie doesn’t look at Grandma when she asks.
The nylon brush goes still in Grandma’s hand for a moment, and then it starts back up. “Visiting.”
“I don’t think so,” Annie says.
“He’s here because his mama died,” Grandma says, handing off another clean jar. “And because he’s trying to put the cap on the end of something. Folks need that, you know? To cap things off. That’s all.”
By the time Annie had come back from the field, Ellis Baine was gone. Daddy and Sheriff Fulkerson were starting back up the hill toward the tobacco barn, and the sheriff was wearing his shirt again even though Annie never did get to that button. Grandma must have sewn it on because it was buttoned up tight by the time Annie returned home. They wanted to know where Annie had gone off to, and she told them she’d been to see Miss Watson at the fields, which made both men smile because they thought that meant Annie had been to see Ryce at the fields. Run a brush through your hair next time, the sheriff had said and laughed, and then he asked to have a word, another word, about what Annie had seen last night.
Did you see the shotgun lying there alongside Mrs. Baine, he’d asked. Did you see how far she’d strayed from her front porch and that the garden hadn’t been tended in a good long time? Did you see that all those tomatoes were volunteer, come up from the year before, and that she hadn’t been out there tending her plants but had been there, a good long ways from her porch, for some other reason?