Aldine was standing in the kitchen when the pain seized her, obliterated normal thought, and then let her go. It was like Krazy Kat taking a mouse in its teeth and then, at the height of terror, pretending to let it go. Aldine looked at the calendar. It was December 4. Since the Josephsons had come, she’d stopped crossing off the days and instead put next to each passing day a pencil mark so faint it could not be seen beyond close inspection. The pain again came and went. She walked upstairs to the bedroom, certain she would lie down and have a baby in a few minutes, but the awful clenching didn’t return and she grew bored. The third time, she staggered to the barn to tell Ansel, but before she could open the heavy door, the tightness that made her stagger released her once again. She told him, “I thought it was coming,” stood and watched him for a moment as he did something inside the tractor’s unfathomable parts, trying not to look at the doctor’s car. The barn was even colder than the house so she kissed him on the cheek and went back inside.
All morning, the gripping started hard and sharp, then tossed her aside to wait some more. It was exhausting, but she tried to keep herself busy. She washed a pan so she could bake a flat cornbread that needed no eggs, a recipe she’d found written on a yellowed piece of paper in the same drawer that held the vegetable seeds. She heated a jar of Sonia’s stewed tomatoes. It looked as if it might snow, and by the time Ansel sat with her at the table, white bits had begun to swirl outside the window.
He asked if she’d had more pains.
“Six times,” she said, and he neither nodded nor shook his head, but put his hand to her sleeved arm and said she should lie down after dinner.
Afternoon was silence, snowflakes that dissolved upon touching the ground, and increasingly frequent episodes of pain, which she waited for on the bed. Ansel had decided to work downstairs on some part of the tractor she could not identify. Seeing the greasy parts spread out on old newspaper on the dinner table made it almost seem as if the barn had come into the house, but she didn’t mind. She liked the oily smell, in fact, and sometimes she had to laugh, thinking what Ellie or Charlotte would do if they saw tractor parts in the front room. Each time the hurting started she counted to keep from crying out, telling herself that she could get to a larger number than she had reached last time, and only if the pain was still fierce when she reached that number would she call him upstairs. What time it was when that happened, she didn’t know because they never knew what time it was. The night had begun, and from then on he was either beside her in the bedroom, solid and still in the chair he had brought from downstairs, or he was preparing what he said he would need when the baby came; she looked up once to see him carrying a knife, another time, a stack of towels. He passed before her like a figure in a pantomime, the props suggestive of acts she could not foresee. She was mauled by the pain and abandoned, mauled and abandoned. Many hours passed in this way, the frequency of pains accelerating until there was hardly a break between them, and he looked at her and said he was going to see if he could feel the baby’s head now. He said, yes, he could, but Aldine could only feel the hugeness around which everything strained, an immensity that couldn’t pass, despite the force of what felt like a river pushing it down. “Yes, now,” he said, “it’s coming now,” and finally all the water in the river seemed to bear down at once and she felt the most wonderful shattering. “Look now,” he said, and he held up a baby girl.
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The day was cool but the sun was bright, a good day to see the Sleeping Indian and even the purplish gauze that was the ocean if you were on a hill, but Neva wasn’t on a hill. She was in the alley behind the café. The trunk of the queen palm was rippled and hairy. Blond paint was peeling off the side of the café, where it said, The Sleeping Indian Café—100% Clean. Neva found a sunny place and sat down cross-legged. She fiddled with the black and yellow Bakelite bangles, rolling them around her wrist before using them to make a pedestal for the apple she was eating, one that would, for a while, anyway, keep the bitten part out of the dirt. Charlotte had said, “Why do you even want those ugly things?” but Charlotte probably just wanted them herself.
It was a green apple, her favorite, and she took another bite. She closed her eyes and willed her father to appear with Aldine. It was Friday, only one day more to Charlotte’s wedding day, and Neva had asked Santa if he could grant an early request this year. She kept her eyes closed for an extra count to ten because she heard someone walking in the alley, a shuffling, heavy sort of walk, a man’s walk, and her heartbeat quickened. But when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t her handsome, handsome father. It was Uncle Hurd. “Morning, Miss Geneva,” he said. “The big day approaches.”
She looked down at her apple. Maybe what her mother had said at dinner was true. Her father was going to live in their old house in Kansas, and they couldn’t join him because of her. Because of her lungs. “When will he come back?” Neva had asked, and her mother wouldn’t answer. She didn’t like California if it was going to be like this. She slid her bracelets up and down on her wrist. They were sticky now from the apple.
When she looked up, Uncle Hurd was watching her so sadly that she put down the apple, stood up, and held out her arms. He lifted her up and she laid her head on his shoulder. He didn’t say anything except, “That’s better.”
He held her and stared off toward the packing plant.
“You miss your dad, don’t you?”
Neva pushed her head up and down.
“Well, we all do, don’t we?” her uncle said and then she closed her eyes while he carried her around the café. She felt the warm cotton of his shirt against her face and legs, and then, when he pulled up a little and said, “Well, hello there, Boss,” she opened her eyes and saw Mr. McNamara’s big brown head and big white smile. Uncle Hurd’s hand slipped a little when he set her down, and she felt the jolt of the pavement through her skin.
Mr. McNamara made a big show of holding open the door for Uncle Hurd and then he looked down at her. “What about you, girly? Would you like to come in?”
With the door open, the hot egg-and-sugar smell of custard seemed to brush up against her skin, and inside, behind the counter, her mother was talking to a customer and holding a spoon that shone in the long sideways sunlight.
“How about it?” Mr. McNamara said. “Could I buy you a root beer float?”
Neva turned away without a word. She didn’t feel like having a root beer float that Mr. McNamara paid for and she didn’t feel like watching men eat big mouthfuls of food and laugh big laughs. She didn’t feel like playing jacks with Marchie and she never ever wanted to put on the flower-girl dress Aunt Ida had made for her, not if her father and Aldine weren’t there. Maybe she would just stay home with Clare on Saturday. That was another reason there shouldn’t be a wedding. Clare couldn’t go, either. Charlotte should just wait some more until they were all back together again, was her opinion.
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