“Hon, what is it? What I said about Jax?”
“I don’t know if he is or he isn’t. How can I have a boyfriend if I’m sleeping in motels and living in a car? No wonder Turtle wants to have a funeral for herself in the bathtub.”
“This is going to pass,” Alice says, beginning to dial again.
“I know it’s hard. But you and Turtle have a home back there waiting for you.”
“Not waiting too hard,” Taylor says without looking at Alice. “When I called last night he told me he’d gone to bed with the woman that collects our rent.”
Alice’s mouth falls open. She closes it, staring at Taylor, then suddenly blinks and says, “Hello? I’m a cousin of Sugar Hornbuckle’s calling long distance, looking for her. She is? Good Lord. Yes, please.”
Taylor looks up, her eyes still watery but changed, self-contained and inquiring.
“Don’t give up the ship yet,” Alice says. “We’ve found Sugar. It sounds like they’re having a big old party in Heaven.”
Sugar Hornbuckle hangs up the phone and goes cold at the sight of blue-lipped children, a host of them, running like a crowd of small ghosts stealing from the pantry. Letty shoos them off the peach pies and out of her kitchen, and Sugar blinks away what seemed like a bad omen.
“Who was that on the phone?” Letty asks.
Sugar backs up several stitches through her quilted thoughts. “Funniest thing. A cousin of mine I haven’t seen since nineteen and forty-nine. She wants to come visit. She’s got some business with the Nation but she didn’t say what.”
Letty’s curiosity wakes up and knocks down the door.
“Well, I wonder what that could be? She got some kind of a claim?”
“I doubt it. She’s not from around here. We kind of grew up together down in Mississippi, as good as sisters. You ever been down South?”
“No. I heard it’s hot.”
Sugar laughs, wondering what could be hotter in summer than an Oklahoma woods.
“Could you give me a hand with these wild onions, hon?”
Letty asks, not about to let her escape the kitchen yet with this thrilling news item. She crosses the kitchen to her freezer chest, walking like a bear; Letty is built square, with legs sticking out from the bottom of her dress that seem to be set two feet apart. She opens the freezer chest and bends over it, exposing the tops of her thick brown stockings rolled to her knees. A cloud of steam curls around her face and touches her hair with silver.
“Why’d you all go all the way down to Mississippi to get raised up?” Letty never leaves Heaven; as far as she is concerned, Mississippi might as well be India.
“It was the Depression,” Sugar says. “Alice’s mama had a hog farm.”
“Hog farm? There’s money in that, I guess.”
“Oh, law, we never had three dollars at the same time. But we didn’t have all that bad a time of it.”
Letty grunts a little as she stoops deeply into the freezer.
“Well, sure, you get by. I heard about them civil rights they had down there.”
Sugar takes the frozen blocks Letty hands her, one by one, stacking them like cool firewood against her chest. She remembers helping Letty collect these wild onions in the spring, to be put away for a summer or fall hog fry. “It wasn’t like they make it sound now. We were all more or less in the same boat, black and white. Or maybe we were just ignorant, but it seemed like we got along. My favorite thing in the world was going down to Jackson to see the maypoles and the State Fair. There’d be just hundreds of dark little children dressed up as angels, marching down the street, singing hymns. To this day, I swear that’s the prettiest sight I ever saw.”
“Mmhm.” Letty is losing interest.
“Nobody had two bits, it was just like here. You didn’t notice what you didn’t have, because nobody was right there wagging it in your face.”
“When’s she coming?”
“She says just as soon as she can get here on the Grey-hound bus.”
Letty sighs. “Well, I’ll bring over a pie, to say hello, soon as I help get Cash settled in.”
Letty Hornbuckle is the nosiest person in three counties.
Sugar knows why she’ll bring over a pie—for the same reason she’s been helping Cash: to snoop. She’s probably been looking through all his things to see if he secretly got rich in Wyoming. Sugar helps Letty fill a pail and swish warm water over the freezer bags of wild onions. Letty will stir these into scrambled eggs, and Cash will declare he’s never leaving home again. No, Letty can’t possibly suspect her brother of having struck it rich. No Cherokee she’s ever known would keep money a secret from relatives. Cash probably came back with the same nothing he bore away three years ago, and nobody will hold it against him. Especially not after all the funerals he went through. When they finish with the wild onions, Sugar slips quickly outside to find her husband and tell him about Alice.