“Momma, you promised me and Brenda we could go to Millsburg for school shopping.”
“You ain’t got no money for school shopping!”
“Momma. We’re just going to look around.” Lord, he wished Brenda would stop whining so. “Christmas! You don’t want us to have no fun at all.”
“Any fun,” Ellie corrected her primly.
“Oh, shuttup.”
Ellie ignored her. “Miz Timmons is coming by to pick us up. I told Lollie Sunday you said it was OK. I feel dumb calling her and saying you changed your mind.”
“Oh, all right. But I ain’t got no money to give you.”
Any money, something whispered inside Jess’s head.
“I know, Momma. We’ll just take the five dollars Daddy promised us. No more’n that.”
“What five dollars?”
“Oh, Momma, you remember.” Ellie’s voice was sweeter than a melted Mars Bar. “Daddy said last week we girls were going to have to have something for school.”
“Oh, take it,” his mother said angrily, reaching for her cracked vinyl purse on the shelf above the stove. She counted out five wrinkled bills.
“Momma”—Brenda was starting again—“can’t we have just one more? So it’ll be three each?”
“No!”
“Momma, you can’t buy nothing for two fifty. Just one little pack of notebook paper’s gone up to…”
“No!”
Ellie got up noisily and began to clear the table. “Your turn to wash, Brenda,” she said loudly.
“Awww, Ellie.”
Ellie jabbed her with a spoon. Jesse saw that look. Brenda shut up her whine halfway out of her Rose Lustre lipsticked mouth. She wasn’t as smart as Ellie, but even she knew not to push Momma too far.
Which left Jess to do the work as usual. Momma never sent the babies out to help, although if he worked it right he could usually get May Belle to do something. He put his head down on the table. The running had done him in this morning. Through his top ear came the sound of the Timmonses’ old Buick—“Wants oil,” his dad would say—and the happy buzz of voices outside the screen door as Ellie and Brenda squashed in among the seven Timmonses.
“All right, Jesse. Get your lazy self off that bench. Miss Bessie’s bag is probably dragging ground by now. And you still got beans to pick.”
Lazy. He was the lazy one. He gave his poor deadweight of a head one minute more on the tabletop.
“Jess-see!”
“OK, Momma. I’m going.”
It was May Belle who came to tell him in the bean patch that people were moving into the old Perkins place down on the next farm. Jess wiped his hair out of his eyes and squinted. Sure enough. A U-Haul was parked right by the door. One of those big jointed ones. These people had a lot of junk. But they wouldn’t last. The Perkins place was one of those ratty old country houses you moved into because you had no decent place to go and moved out of as quickly as you could. He thought later how peculiar it was that here was probably the biggest thing in his life, and he had shrugged it off as nothing.
The flies were buzzing around his sweating face and shoulders. He dropped the beans into the bucket and swatted with both hands. “Get me my shirt, May Belle.” The flies were more important than any U-Haul.
May Belle jogged to the end of the row and picked up his T-shirt from where it had been discarded earlier. She walked back holding it with two fingers way out in front of her. “Oooo, it stinks,” she said, just as Brenda would have.
“Shuttup,” he said and grabbed the shirt away from her.
TWO
Leslie Burke