The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

Harvest Days

On the third Saturday in September, I was at the church pie booth on the courthouse square, cutting a chocolate cream for a man in a feed cap, when I saw Jessamyn Hurley walk up to Berniece with a baby on her hip and a flat box under her arm.

I knew the box. It was one of ours, from the August batch.

I could not hear what she said. I saw Berniece take the sheet and unfold it. Her face went still, the way a pond goes still when the wind drops, and then her mouth shaped one word, and I watched it from forty feet away.

Mine.

I put the pie server down on the table, and it slid off and hit the pavement, and the man in the feed cap said, “Ma’am?”

I told him I had to go and let Ladonna’s daughter finish the booth. I drove home on Route K with both hands on the wheel and sat in my own driveway, engine off, the barn standing empty at the end of the lane, and I did not go in.

Orris found me an hour later. He came out the screen door slowly, the way he does now, one hand on the rail, and opened the truck door.

“Something happen?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You don’t sit in the truck for nothing.”

I looked at the barn. “Berniece found out about the kits. Jessamyn Hurley showed her one at the square.”

He stood very still. “I thought Berniece knew.”

I had told him that. In October, in Branson, after the first big sale, he had asked me, and I had said, She said go ahead. She said she’d never use it for anything. I said it in the same voice I use to ask whether he wants gravy.

“Thelda,” he said.

“I’ll fix it.”

“You told me she said yes.”

“I know what I told you.”

He did not raise his voice. He put his hand on the roof of the truck as if it were the only solid thing left in the world. “I took that money on your word,” he said. “I put it in the hospital on your word.”

Then he went back to the house, and he did not say another sentence to me until Monday.

The Back Room

I have told you what I said. Let me tell you what happened inside me while I said it, because it is the only thing I have to teach anybody.

I did not feel angry. People will want me to have been angry, because anger is a sort of excuse. I felt frightened. I watched Berniece’s eyes land on the fifth point and I knew that she knew. That tiny hitch was a signature only she could read, and I understood that if she traced the line back she would come to my door.

And so the sentence I had practiced in the truck, We should have told you, did not come. The cold one did. I reached for a weapon because I was standing in front of a woman with a true thing in her hands, and I did not have a true thing of my own.

Devona told her three hundred and forty. Ladonna looked at her thumbnail. Iona studied the table and Nadyne would not lift her eyes. I will not blame them. They had followed me into this the way women follow a friend whose husband is sick.