We’d been in school a full month already and Opal sent us off each morning wearing thick jackets. I wasn’t sure I had ever been so cold as I was walking with Ray and Bert to the schoolyard. The whole way we’d purse our lips and blow into the crisp air, pretending we were smoking cigarettes. Mama’d said long ago that it wasn’t nice pretending like that. It didn’t matter anymore, though, what Mama said. She wasn’t there to get sore or sigh or give me a sideways look.
When we stepped out of the house that morning, the air had a different kind of smell to it. As we walked and puffed out our mouths, I tried thinking of what the air smelled like. It was brand-new to me, that smell, and it was like nothing I’d ever breathed in before.
“Look at them trees,” Ray said, nodding out behind the house at the woods. “Ain’t that somethin’ else?”
It sure was. Orange and yellow and red, the trees seemed to have all changed colors over night while we were sleeping. They were so bright, so startling, I would have thought they weren’t real if I hadn’t known any better. If I squinted my eyes just right it looked like the whole forest was ablaze.
Seemed the entire world was changing right before my eyes. The air blew colder and grass poked out of the earth a duller shade of green. Fields that’d been full of growing things were harvested to stubble; the remaining stalks had gone a hay color. Geese flew south in their practiced formation.
Where Mama was, she saw it, too. I imagined her stopping in the middle of her morning to look up at a tree or to see a squirrel darting across her path with a mouth full of food for storing up. She’d put a hand to her heart, in quiet awe of the colors and the way the air smelled like spice and warmth.
And I imagined—I hoped—she maybe thought of me doing the same thing. I did hope Mama still gave me a thought every once in a while, even if it was small as a crumb.
A crumb might just lead her back to me.
After school on a Friday toward the end of October, Ray and I opened the front door of our house to the finest and sweetest smell I could have imagined. If warm had a smell, that would’ve been it. The smells of baking apple and cinnamon and sugar filled the whole house and made my mouth water.
Aunt Carrie stood in the kitchen with Opal, the two of them wearing aprons with beads of sweat on their foreheads even though the day outside was so cold. Canning jars lined the counter, most of them filled to the brim with applesauce.
“Oh, good,” Aunt Carrie said when she saw us. “Just in time. We need someone to make sure this tastes good.”
She gave each of us a spoon with a bite of the applesauce on it. It was nice and warm and tasted like autumn. I said it was real good, that I liked it a whole lot. Ray, though, said he might have to taste a little more of it.
“Maybe I’d need a whole bowl of it,” he said, shrugging. “Can’t hardly tell if somethin’s good unless I eat more’n a bite or two.”
“You sound just like your Uncle Gus,” Aunt Carrie said, laughing.
She did give Ray a good ladleful of the applesauce in a bowl. When I asked real nice she gave me one, too.
Opal told us we should sit at the dining-room table. We did as she said and ate our applesauce with the kitchen sounds of jars clomping on the countertops and the rings spinning around the glass to hold down the lids.
After we finished I went to my room and wrote a letter to Millard,
telling him about leaves and applesauce and how cold it got when the sun wasn’t warming the sky. I put a pretty orange leaf in the envelope, hoping it wouldn’t crush to powder on its journey down to Red River.
In all the letters I’d written him that October I hadn’t said one thing about Mama. I was sure he knew about her leaving though, on account each of his letters ended with him asking, “You all right?”
In my letters I made sure not to give him an answer.
My envelope sealed and addressed, I walked down to the kitchen, wishing I could capture the goodness of that canning day somehow in the folds of paper so Millard could smell it. I thought he would have packed his bag right away if he could’ve caught a whiff of that applesauce.
“Can I take this to the post office?” I asked Opal. “It’s for Millard.”
“Go ahead,” she told me. “I’ve got a stamp there in the drawer. You know the one.”
I told her thank you and headed for the front door.
“Come right home when you’re done,” she told me. “And button up that coat.”
It was a fine day. Even cold as it was, the sun was kind and my coat kept me warm enough. Not too many people were on the street that day. All the shops had their doors closed to keep the heat in. It was as if I had the whole town to myself and I liked that.
The post office was toasty and the postmaster snoozed at the counter. I let him sleep and slid Millard’s letter in through a slot in the desk and snuck out, careful not to let the door slam behind me. If ever there was a good day for napping, I thought that was it. Besides, if I’d woken him, that postmaster would have wanted to talk my ear off about the price of stamps going up or this or that and I wanted to get back to the house before Aunt Carrie left for the day. I hoped maybe she’d even give me another taste of that applesauce.
The Wheelers’ house was right across the street from the post office.
Where it’d seemed fine and grand in the glow of summer, the dim light of that October day made it dark and wicked looking. Even under the warmth of my coat I got goose pimples. I would’ve sworn that house was haunted.
I gave a start and let out a small yelp when I saw what looked to me like a ghost standing right in one of the full-length windows on the second floor of the house. Wrapping my arms around myself, I took a second look and realized it was Mrs. Wheeler standing there, staring out.
I’d hardly seen her more than a handful of times in all the months I’d lived in Bliss. She wasn’t one for coming to church and she didn’t lower herself to walk along the street with the common folk in the town. From the way Hazel talked, Mrs. Wheeler was too important and too busy to do something so regular as running errands or sitting at a friend’s kitchen table for a cup of coffee.
Far as I knew Hazel wanted nothing more in life than to grow up to be just like her mother.
She didn’t see me, Mrs. Wheeler didn’t. As a matter of fact, it seemed she didn’t see anything at all. Her eyes were fixed way down the road, in the direction that led north out of Bliss and toward places I’d never been. One of her hands was held over her mouth and by the way her body moved in jerks and how her eyes closed every once in a while I wondered if she was crying.
And I wondered what it was she was missing, what it was that made her so sad.
I couldn’t help but think on what Aunt Carrie’d said. That everybody had a hurt in their heart. Maybe even two or three. Everybody was missing something whether they liked to admit it or not.
As much as I didn’t want to, I felt sorry for Mrs. Wheeler because I’d seen that same look of pain on Mama’s face.
Grief can do terrible things to a person, Aunt Carrie had said.
How true that was. How terrible and true.
I didn’t hurry back to the house on Magnolia Street. As it was, every step made me miss Mama more and more.