Mama had Mylie up and dressed by the time I’d finished gathering the eggs the next day, and Mylie was sitting in her high chair drinking juice with a big smile on her face while Mama penciled in the crossword.
She was always good at the crosswords—words, Mama had said to me ever since I could remember, were her best thing. They sure weren’t mine, though; I’d always done better with numbers, which never go and change on you when you aren’t expecting it. You couldn’t grow up with a mama like mine and not get to liking reading, but I still had a hard time in English class, especially if we were supposed to read something aloud to the whole room, which was a surefire way to make me blush all the way to the roots of my hair.
The place where I was good with my words was telling stories to people I knew well: Mylie, or Mama and Daddy, or Arden. I liked the feeling of those stories rising up inside me, filling me with light and wonder. Math made me feel close to Daddy, but stories made me feel close to Mama. She had been telling me stories as long as I could remember—fairy tales, Bee Stories, funny things about what she got up to when she was growing up. One year, when I was five or six, I’d had trouble falling asleep at nights, and Mama had sat by my bed and told me stories about a family of kittens who got up to mischief until I’d drifted off to sleep.
Sometimes, even now, I could still hear her soft voice telling those kitten stories when I closed my eyes at bedtime.
“Got a bunch of eggs this morning,” I said, sailing past the table to the stove and pulling out a frying pan. Cooking wasn’t really my best thing, either, but I knew that if I was going to carry through on my plan to fix Mama’s brain, I needed to practice. I turned the heat up under the pan halfway, just like Mama always did, and put a dollop of butter inside it.
“You find Matilda’s?” Mama asked me without looking up.
“Cluck! Cluck!” shouted Mylie, banging her cup on the high-chair tray. Mama reached over, eyes still on the crossword, and pushed Mylie’s cup down so she couldn’t bang it again.
“Mm-hmm.” The butter was starting to melt and sizzle against the pan now, filling the kitchen up with that sharp warm smell butter gets when it’s cooking. I wiped sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand and cracked six eggs into the pan as carefully as possible, but a few shell pieces still snuck in. I tried to grab them out with my finger, hoping hard that Mama wouldn’t look up and yell at me for having my hands in the food, which was the thing she hated more than just about anything in the world.
Good thing the crossword was keeping her pretty busy.
“There,” said Mama a minute later, after I’d finished fishing out the eggshells and grabbed a rubber spatula to scramble up the eggs. “I got every single one. Ha! Your mama’s vocabulary is as extensive as it is erudite, Della.”
She looked up at me, her smile freezing as she noticed the pan I was stirring. “You know I don’t like you to turn on the stove without asking, hon. What are you doing?”
“Just making some breakfast,” I said, leaving the eggs for a minute to wash a couple of peaches. “So you don’t have to.”
“Goodness, what’s come over you?” Mama asked, but there was a laugh in her voice, and I knew she wasn’t mad. I breathed a teeny little sigh of relief. “Usually it feels like pulling teeth to get you to do chores around here.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, knowing Mama was right and feeling about as bad as I could feel. Was that part of the reason she was getting sick again?
“Better turn that off,” Mama said. “Smells like it’s burning.” I jumped and looked back at the pan, which was starting to smoke just a little. I pulled it off the heat and stirred the eggs up again, frowning at the little brown bits and the way a layer of egg was stuck tight to the bottom of the skillet. It was going to take a lot of scrubbing to get it clean, but I hoped it would be worth it.
I popped four slices of bread into the toaster and started cutting up the peaches, pulling the little paring knife around the peach pits slowly and carefully, just like Mama had shown me when I was younger.
“I’m going to help you extra from now on, Mama, I promise,” I said, arranging the peach slices on a plate and spreading butter and strawberry jam on the toast. “That way you can get plenty of rest.”
“Rest?” Mama said, a funny look on her face, but before she could say anything else, the back door banged open and Daddy came inside.
“I think it’s gonna be even hotter than yesterday,” Daddy said, wiping his face with his shoulder and leaving a big dark sweaty mark on his sleeve. He came into the kitchen and ran his hands under the cold water for a long, long minute, cooling himself down just as much as he was washing up. “It keeps on like this, eastern North Carolina will end up looking like Death Valley before long.”
Mama patted the chair next to her. “Come on and sit down, Miles. Della made us breakfast.”
“Thought I smelled something funny,” Daddy said, but he winked at me. I balanced the toast plate in one hand and the peach plate in the other and brought them to the table, then grabbed the pan of eggs and added that, too. I gave Mylie a piece of toast, which she promptly dumped upside down on her tray and rubbed around.
“Wed!” she shouted, pointing at the red jam smeared across her tray. “Woooooah.” She cackled and swooped her fat white fingers through the jam like it was finger paint.
Mama didn’t say anything, just put a peach slice on Mylie’s high-chair tray, so that I wondered if she even saw or heard anything else going on in the kitchen. Her face was pulled into a strange shape, a sour, wrong-looking kind of grimace, like she was in pain. I turned away quick, my hand tight around my fork. I wished for the hundredth time that my conversation with Miss Tabitha yesterday had gone differently. How could she not see how important this was?
“I’m still worried about my watermelons,” Daddy told Mama as he dished eggs onto his plate. “Ben thinks maybe it’s anthracnose fungus. Gave me some kind of oil to try, but if it doesn’t work, I might have to give up on keeping them organic this year and order some of the stuff my daddy always used. I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong to try to make so many changes at once after my daddy had to leave last year, Suzanne. We just can’t afford to lose this batch of melons right now.”
Daddy sighed. Way back when he’d gone to college he’d studied agriculture science. He and Grandpa had always had different ideas about how to run things on the farm—Grandpa wanted to do it the way his daddy and his granddaddy had done it, while Daddy wanted to try some of the things he’d learned in college, things Grandpa scoffed at and called ridiculous. Like getting rid of all the chemicals Grandpa had used, and putting the big spiral tiller in the shed and investing in other equipment Daddy said wouldn’t hurt the soil as much.
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Ben’s oil,” Mama said, like she’d come back to earth again from wherever she’d been a minute ago.
I tried to eat my breakfast as fast as Daddy did, and by the time he’d got up from the table and headed back outside, I was already gathering up plates from the table and rinsing them in the sink so they could go right into the dishwasher.
“I like this new version of you, Della,” said Mama, heading toward the sink, where Mylie’s washcloth was drying over the faucet.
“Let me wipe Mylie up,” I said, grabbing the washcloth before Mama could and getting it wet.
Mylie squirmed away, squealing, “No way!” as I tried to wipe her, but I made growling noises and chased her with the washcloth till she giggled and opened her fingers for me to clean. She was a mess, strings of peach flesh wrapped around her fingers and bright red jam smeared all over her cheeks and stuffed up her nose.
“I’m gonna take care of Mylie for you today, Mama,” I said, pulling out the high-chair tray and picking Mylie up. “That way you can rest, all right?”
Mama put her hands on her hips. “I appreciate the thought, Della honey, but I don’t need any rest, and I’m not sure where you came by the idea that I do. It’s my job to keep you and Mylie safe. Besides, you gotta go help your daddy this morning and then watch the farm stand—you know full well Arden can’t stay there all by herself. Who knows what might happen to her all alone on that highway?”
I stood planted there in the middle of the kitchen, Mylie hot and sweaty in my arms, little drafts of breeze trickling down from the ceiling fan. “You sure?” I said finally, hugging Mylie a little tighter and feeling old and young, all at the same time.
Mama nodded, her face relaxing and softening, the way the sky unwrinkles after a thunderstorm. “Of course.”
“If you’re really sure,” I said, remembering all the ways Mama hadn’t been her normal self lately. Mama nodded one more time, and I sighed and handed Mylie over to her. Mama’s arm was slick with sweat where it brushed against mine, and her red cheeks made her look as hot as I felt. For just a minute I found myself thinking about rain, about the way most Carolina summers brought thunderstorms nearly every afternoon, pounding the houses and the dirt and your skin with so much water all at once that it ran like a river through the gutters and irrigation canals.
Right then, I don’t know if Daddy or I was wishing harder for one of those big, beautiful rainstorms.