Thanksgiving she went home for two days, sat in the back of the church as her grandmother attended mass.
With Jimmy watching football at the tall house she roasted a turkey, mashed potatoes, candied yams and baked green bean casserole, corn and dinner rolls, fed cranberries with muscovado sugar and orange juice. She laid the table, and the three of them ate together among the mountain.
“You want buttered biscuits?” she said.
“If I eat a tenth of what’s already here, I’ll likely die,” Norma replied, and then cast an eye over Jimmy, who wore the reddened eyes of a man who drank a couple of beers before lunch, and then a couple of vodkas during. He had gained weight, blamed it on Saint not being there to fix his meals so he had to order in most nights.
Norma yanked the plug from the radio before the news played out and took her brandy to the back porch where Saint wrapped herself in a blanket and sat beside, her head on her grandmother’s shoulder as she warmed the frigid air with the float of cigar smoke and swirl of her glass.
“You don’t call,” Norma said.
“I’ll do better.”
“Come back one weekend and I’ll take you for ice cream at Lacey’s Diner.”
“I’m too old for ice cream.”
“I’m worried about you,” Norma said.
“I carry a gun, Grandma.”
“I worry about Jimmy and what is happening to him. The male ego is—”
“Fragile.”
“An affliction. They know how to find the good in themselves, the decency and the respect, but sometimes they lose the compass.”
“Love is a visitor.”
Norma took her hand. “Did you marry him because I told you to?”
Saint did not meet her grandmother’s eye. “I don’t do anything you tell me to do.”
Through the starlight she saw the shape of the hive. She remembered that time like each moment was a pearl of summer, perfect and without blemish, light till so late, beginning so early, like there was scarcely room for the dark.
“It was hardly night when I was a girl.”
Norma smiled. “Must take its toll, being surrounded by everything bad. I pray for you. You know that.”
“I do.”
“He gives us the tools to be better, to build better. And if we turn around and use those tools to hack at others, to undo whatever good has been constructed, then we may turn back and accuse him of not doing the building for us.”
Saint took Norma’s glass and breathed in the warmth and the spices.
“I pray for Joseph,” the old lady said. There was so much written in each line of her face, so much pain and sadness hid completely by the greatest smile Saint had ever known.
“I need to see him,” Saint said.
Norma wore an old purple sweater that Saint had once knitted for her. “I wish the newspapers hadn’t called him Patch all those years ago. I keep the cuttings. When they said you were a hero.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Hush now.” Norma took the glass back. “When you kept the bees, I used to come out each morning before you woke to check for the dead and remove them. Their friends used to get together and attack me.”
Saint smiled.
“And you know why I did it? Because your day would be ruined. Because you take the problems…the flaws in design, and you take them so personally.”
“He’s still a kid.”
“And what does that make you? He knows right from wrong. And…”
“And?”
“And he knows how to paint. God, that boy knows beautiful.”
Saint looked up.
“You haven’t seen it?”