It is ever so much warmer here and there is no dust blowing only fruits of all kinds which Clare and Dad pick from the trees every day. Mama works in the packinghouse with Aunt Ida and Uncle Hurd. Charlotte is going to be a teacher now, she will teach sewing and cooking which Clare says is a laugh and a half because Charlotte hates to cook. I miss you so much. I’m going to go to a big school but I just know there won’t be paper planes to go to the next knot if you get 100. I wish we could come back but I have stopped coughing and Mama says I will start again if I go back. Dad has another story. He says he has borrowed my cough and likes it so much he’s not going to give it back. Mom likes it here best of all. Dad does not like it one bit. Everyone can tell how bad he misses Kansas. That’s the one bad part, that and the fact you and Krazy Kat aren’t here. Okay. I love you, Miss McKenna, and I hope God is watching you and Krazy Kat.
Your friend, Neva
Every repetition of the word Mama was like a sharp cut in her stomach, and she read it over and over again to inflict the pain on herself so she would stop longing for what would hurt Neva so much.
60
One night after the dishes were done, and Ansel was off somewhere smoking and brooding about the girl—or so she supposed—Ellie walked out to find Hurd in his shop. He wore leather work gloves and was setting long pieces of rusty metal out on the ground, then staring down at them, rearranging, staring again. His orange hair was flat with sweat.
When he saw Ellie, he nodded toward the metal and said, “What do you think?”
She studied the splayed metal on the ground. She had no idea what she thought.
“What does it look like to you?” he asked and when she didn’t answer, he said, “Doesn’t it look just like a stork?”
“It does a little,” she offered, “now that you mention it.” She smiled. “It reminds me of Mrs. Odekirk back in Kansas, and she looked like a stork.”
Hurd laughed, prized a slender piece of metal from beneath a nearby pile, regarded it for a moment, then used it to replace what she now saw was meant to be the bird’s bill. “What do you think?” he asked and Ellie said she had to admit, that made it look more like a stork.
Hurd went over to his glass of iced tea and held it toward Ellie. “Want a snort?”
She declined, and he took a big gulp, wiped his mouth on his blue sleeve, and waited. He knew Ellie wasn’t the type to idly watch him assemble his trifles.
“I was wondering, Hurd,” she said carefully. “I’m grateful as anything just to have work, you know that, but if there were any extra hours, it would mean a lot to me.”
“More hours?” Hurd said.
“I’m saving up. Well, we are. Toward our own place.”
“Well, I don’t know, Ellie. That’d just mean you’d leave us faster,” he said, but she knew that was just so much talk.
“You and Ida have been beyond kind, Hurd, but we can’t stay forever. And the sooner we have our own place, the sooner Ansel will stop thinking about Kansas.”
Hurd’s expression and emotions usually rode genially along on the surface of things, but his round freckled face softened and when he spoke his voice was low. “I don’t think you’ll ever take Kansas out of that man, Ellie. It’d be like removing his veins.”
She said nothing, and in the next moment Hurd was himself again. “I’ll do a little checking,” he said, “but no promises.”
“Thanks, Hurd,” she said, and that was just one more reason she wanted a place of her own, so she could finally stop saying thank you all the time. She walked through piles of scavenged metal toward the other end of a former olive-pickling barn, where Hurd, with encouragement—and, she suspected, financial backing—from Mr. McNamara had turned a storage bin into a darkroom for Charlotte, and on her way out, Ellie poked her head into it. It was dark as a coal hole until she found the cord to an amber light and plugged it in. A series of photographs hung clothespinned to an overhead line, images of the ocean and a fishing pier and some houses, all looking golden in the room’s amber light. There was a price tag showing on one of the jars of chemicals and Ellie went over to look at it. Thirty-five cents. Mr. McNamara bought her the paper and supplies but Ellie had no idea they were that expensive. Thirty-five cents a bottle times how many bottles? She began pulling them out to count them, and when she pulled the seventh one out, a piece of wood behind it fell forward, and revealed a small cubbyhole. Ellie peered into the darkness and tried to tell herself that it wasn’t a cubbyhole at all, but the only way to disprove the notion was to reach in, which she did with unease. Almost at once she touched something papery. What she pulled forward was a large brown envelope. She unclasped it and tilted it forward, and a sheaf of heavy papers slid out facedown. Ellie turned them over. They were photographs of a woman. That was her first thought—photographs of a woman—and she would remember it because until this moment Ellie had never before thought of her daughter as a woman. But she looked like a woman in the photographs, a woman sitting on a rock by a stream with her back to the photographer and wearing almost nothing whatsoever.
Her first thought was to leave these photographs where they lay, so Charlotte would find them and wonder who had seen them, but what if Hurd found them first—what would Hurd and Ida and who knew who else think of their family then? So she squared the photographs and slid them back into the hiding place, secured by the piece of wood and the weight of the chemical jars in front of it.
A full day passed before Ellie found a chance to speak privately with Charlotte, and by then her thoughts were more measured. It was dusk and they were walking a dirt lane that split the lemon grove. Artemis ambled along just behind. Mr. McNamara had taken Charlotte for a drive that afternoon, south on Highway 395 to a little town called Escondido that Charlotte said was full of orange trees and fruit stands. Her tone was flat and matter-of-fact.
“Did you have a good time?”
“Mmm.”
A few seconds passed before Ellie said, “Do you have feelings for Mr. McNamara?”
Charlotte hitched her chin just a little. “What kind of feelings?”
“Romantic, I guess.” This was difficult. More than difficult really.
“I don’t know about romantic,” Charlotte said. “Romantic might be taking it too far.”
“Are you friendly to him?”
Charlotte looked at her as if trying to parse her meaning. “I’m not overly anything—friendly or unfriendly,” she said. “I like going places, he likes taking me places, but, Mom, he’s a grown man.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Are his intentions honorable?”
Charlotte gave a hearty laugh. “Oh, God, Mom. He asks me to marry him practically every Sunday.”