The Aunt Who Pulled Emmys Project

It would not be that somebody had pulled a child’s work.

So I said, “Thank you for your time,” to Rhonda, in the same pleasant voice she had used on me, and I helped my daughter carry her things to the truck.

Emmy waited until the doors were shut. Then she put her forehead against the dashboard and shook.

Then she sat up and pulled her cardigan sleeve across her eyes and said the thing I will remember when I am old.

“Mom. Alexis Stroud boils her water for the baby’s bottles.”

I looked at her. “Honey, that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Not with nitrate.” She was already turning the notebook pages, and her finger found the line. “Boiling doesn’t take it out. It takes the water out. It makes it stronger. It was in the extension pamphlet, the one from the health district. Mom, her well read eighteen. The limit is ten. Hazel is four months old.”

It started in June, at Wilbur Greeley’s kitchen table. Wilbur is seventy-eight and lives alone on the next road over, and Emmy had been riding her bike over to help him with his tomato cages.

He had a glass of well water in front of him and said it had tasted off for a year or so, a little flat and a little sweet. Emmy said that was funny, because she had just read that nitrate has no taste at all.

She asked me that night what it would cost to test a well. I told her about the kits we keep behind the counter at the co-op, fifty strips and a color chart for forty dollars, and she looked at me with an expression I have seen on her father when he finds a part he needs on sale.

She paid for the kit herself. She put two twenties on my counter in front of my own boss, and I rang her up like any other customer, and I did not say a word, because it was her money and her idea.

She did it the way her father taught her to do anything, which is slowly and twice. She washed thirty-two jam jars in the dishwasher and boiled the lids. She wrote each sample number on masking tape. She bought a gallon of distilled water at the pharmacy in Hazelton to use as her blank, so she could show the strips did not turn color by themselves.

She dipped two strips for every jar and read them against the chart by the kitchen window.

Then she did the part I could not have done for her, and the part Rhonda never believed. She went to the doors.

We live in a part of southern Idaho where the neighbors are a quarter mile apart and the roads are named for whoever owned the land first. I drove, because she is thirteen and I was not about to let her bike eleven miles of county road with a crate of jars.

But I stayed in the cab with the radio turned low. She walked up every lane on her own two feet, past barking dogs and one very serious goose, and she knocked, and she said her little speech.

“Hi, I’m Emmy Underhill from over on Larkspur Road. I’m doing a science project on well water. Could I have a jar of your kitchen water? It’s free, and I’ll tell you your number.”