Page 78 of Devoted

"I know what it is. Church sale."

"You've had it my whole life."

"Then it owes me nothing." Edna moved down the counter. "There's a good bowl in Midland already. It's called your aunt's."

Olivia wrapped the platter in newspaper and laid it in with the others. They'd been at it since breakfast, her mother calling the piles and her doing the wrapping, and the piles weren't close to even. Midland was a rented place with a kitchen the size of the pantry here, and Edna cut to fit, no hesitating, no picking a thing up twice. The roasting pan went. The canning kettle went. The pie plates went, all but two.

At the end of the counter Edna took the wire egg basket off its nail by the door. She stood with it a second. Then she hung it back on the nail and said, "That percolator's church sale," and went on down the cabinets, and Olivia wrapped the percolator and asked her nothing.

"What am I taking?" Olivia said.

"You're asking me?"

"You've had a list since February. I figured I might be on it."

Edna reached past her for the cake stand, looked at it, put it in the church box. "You're taking your clothes and your books and that rocking chair, because you've said no to every other thing I've offered you since I sat down at Nathan Greene's." She moved on down the counter. "Where you're taking them is your business, and you haven't said."

"Midland. Till I know."

"Till you know." Edna set the last two pie plates on the table for Midland. "That's the first honest answer I've had out of you in a month. Wrap those."

The box of her daddy's things had sat open in the front hall since the branding. She'd taped it shut this morning, before coffee, fast, and written MIDLAND across the lid, and gone to the kitchen and started on the glasses.

She'd been excellent for ten days. At school, at church, on the phone with Charla about the settlement, in the feed store aisle with everybody being kind to her without ever looking straight at her. It was costing her sleep. She paid it every night on her back with her eyes open, got up, was excellent again, because if she stopped she wasn't going to get started again before June.

"Somebody's coming," Edna said, at the window over the sink.

Olivia heard it then, a car on the drive, taking the washboard stretch slower than anybody local took it.

"It's a car. Who’d come visit us now?"

Edna leaned to the glass.

"Get the porch swept," she said. "It's the Cadillac."

Nobody in Soluno drove a Cadillac but Pearl, and nobody but Pearl would have brought one up a caliche drive in her church coat on a day with no church in it. She parked square in front of the porch, got out with her purse over her arm, went around to the passenger side, and straightened up with a pie carried flat on both hands like a collection plate.

Olivia came down the steps. "Pearl."

"Honey. Take this level. It rode level from town and I won't lose it in the last ten feet."

Olivia took it level. It was warm through the plate. "Marge send this?"

"Marge cried in it. She'll deny it. There's a thumbprint in the crust the size of a griddle handle, that's how you'll know." Pearl shut the car door. "Peach. She put up more fruit last summer than this town could eat, and she's been baking at it since the sale made the paper."

Edna had come out on the porch. "Pearl. You're wearing the coat."

"I'm making a call, Edna. The coat makes it official."

"Official." Edna looked at the pie, and at Pearl, and the two of them stood there a second with forty years going back and forth and none of it out loud. "The good chair's still on the porch. Everything else is spoke for." She got her cane turned around. "I've got a linen closet to empty. Pearl."

"Edna."

Her mother went in, and the screen door shut easy behind her.

Pearl took the good chair and settled her purse on her knees. Olivia set the pie on the porch rail and sat down on the top step with her back against the post.

"You've took your curtains down?"