She had some apples waiting to be cored. Some cooking already. Others she’d already pureed and put in jars that were waiting to go into the water bath and be sealed.
“How long have you been doing this?” he asked.
“Since they brought in the first bushel,” she said. “I’ve already put the unsweetened applesauce in the jars and freezer. This is the sweetened batch.” She turned back to the counter, where she had a box of silver ring lids, jars, three bushels of peaches she hadn’t even touched yet, and a stack of apple cores she hadn’t quite put in the trashcan yet.
“I forgot about this stack of paper towels,” she said, horrified now. They looked like they’d been soaked in blood, but it was really just a bundle of red apple skins that had seeped through the paper towels.
“I have no idea how to do this,” he said behind her, and Beth abandoned her idea to take the full trash bag out and put in a new one so she could clean up the counter. She didn’t have time to do that right now anyway. She needed to check the seal on the jars in the water bath, and then she needed to stir the cooking apples beside the giant black pot on the stove.
She returned to Trey’s side to find him holding an apple in his left hand and the knife I his right. “Do you do any carving at all?” she asked.
“Carving?”
“Wood carving?”
“I mean, I can shave down a horse’s hoof.”
“This is like that,” she said, though it wasn’t at all. “Here.” She took the knife from him and then the apple, taking a moment to make sure it wasn’t pressing against her wound. She’d changed the plastic glove she wore over her injury three times that day already, and she’d finally gotten out some medical tape and taped the opening to her wrist so liquid would stop getting into the glove.
“Watch.” She put the blade of the knife just under the skin of the apple and pulled down. “You can do it in strips like that. Just drop the peels in the sink.” She pulled, pulled, and pulled, and a few seconds later, the apple was peeled.
“That was incredible,” he said, his voice awed.
A timer went off, and Beth smiled at him as she passed the knife back. “Quick as you can, Trey.” A glance at the clock told her she needed to leave in a few minutes to get TJ from school. She had an alarm set on her phone for that, so she pushed it from her mind.
She cracked the lid on the water bath and tilted it away from her face so she wouldn’t get a steam treatment she didn’t want. One tap on the top right lid told her this batch was done, and she used her jar tongs to remove the piping hot and utterly beautiful jars of applesauce.
She took a moment to cover the water to get it back to boiling and then she admired her long rows of applesauce.
“How often do you do this?” he asked.
She turned back to him. “Once every three years or so,” she said. “Next year, I’ll sell the apples to Mary Watson. She takes them for her own applesauce every third year.”
“What about the year after that?”
“I’ll probably ask Merilee Fenton,” she said, her voice turning airy. Trey looked at her, pausing in his peeling to do so.
“You sound like you don’t like her.”
“Do I?” Beth turned away from Trey and took the lid off the cooking apples. They looked ready to drain and puree, so she quickly switched off the burner and slid the pot to the back of the stove.
“That goes right here when you’re done,” she said. “In fact.” She lifted the pot and put it on the burner, re-lighting it. “Get those in as quickly as you can.”
“I didn’t know this was a race,” Trey said. “I’ve done one apple.”
“You only have four more,” Beth said. “I like Merilee just fine, by the way.”
“Whatever you say,” he said.
“She brought me a rhubarb pie after Danny died,” Beth said, unsure as to why she was telling this story. “When she knows full-well it makes me sick. It felt like a personal attack is all.”
“Was it?”
“Does it matter if it was or not?” Beth asked, annoyed by the conversation. “I threw the whole thing away and never returned her pie plate. That’s why she doesn’t like me either.”
Trey’s knife made clunking noises against the cutting board, and then his chuckle started to rise above that. It was such a joyful sound that Beth found herself smiling as she put her jars in the water bath.
That done, with the timer set, she picked up the heavy pot of cooked apples and said, “Scootch over a little, Mister.”