Page 34 of Grounded
In the meantime, Annie had asked them about something to help Beulah walk until the surgery. They ordered her a brace, which, aggravating as it was, did steady her quite a bit.
Beulah reached for it, trying to remember how all those pieces of Velcro worked. Positioning her knee just so, she put the brace around it and studied which piece went in which loop. She heard the screen door slam and tried to hurry, not wanting Annie to think her a helpless old fool.
“Land sakes,” she muttered when she missed threading a strap through a particular loop. “Looks like an ACE bandage would do as good.”
“Need help?” Annie asked, popping around the corner.
Beulah sat up and sighed. “I reckon I’ll get the hang of this thing, but you might need to show me again.”
“It goes like this,” Annie said, flipping the brace around so the straps fit easily into the loops. “You had it backward. Now, all finished.”
Annie stood up and handed Beulah her cane.
“Thank you.” Beulah steadied herself and hobbled toward the kitchen.
“Where are you going?”
“Thought I’d make Ms. Hawkins a chicken casserole and coconut cream pie. She’s been here over a week, and we haven’t heard a peep out of her.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“I just can’t get her out of my mind. All hunch-shouldered and looking like the weight of the world was on her. It might be a way to check on her.”
“Sure you’re up to that?” Annie asked. Beulah could hear the doubt in her voice.
“I’ll take it slow. You go on back to doing whatever you were doing,” Beulah said, determined to take back control of her kitchen. Annie turned her face away, but not before Beulah saw the start of a grin.
“Okay. I’ll be outside cleaning out the shed if you need me.”
Before getting her hands on the chicken, Beulah peeked inside at the percolator basket, trying not to burn her fingers.
“Law have mercy!” she exclaimed. The basket was two-thirds full. “No wonder that coffee was strong.”
With a deep sigh, she replaced the basket top and the percolator lid.It’s worth it to have Annie home,she thought.
With old recipes she knew by heart, her mind was free to muse over the strange vision in the garden a few days ago. It was as if she had a visit from Jo Anne for a few moments, more vivid than any dream. Maybe it was only the combination of heat and pain in her knee, but it was as real to her as the ground beneath her feet. Of all places to see Jo Anne, the garden would be the spot. Her passion was growing things, and she would have felt plumb left out to look down from heaven and see both Beulah and Annie planting together.
Beulah slid the dishes in the oven and sat down, thinking of her precious girl, gone these many years. How time had gone by. Jo Anne died on July 15, coming up on twenty years. She never allowed herself to ask why it had to be Jo Anne.If a body starts asking why the bad things, then you have to ask why the good to be fair.Why did she have good health for seventy-odd years? Why did they live in this beautiful countryside with food and with shelter over their heads? Why had she married the finest man in all of the Bluegrass when she was only eighteen? There would be no end to that line of thinking.
When Annie came in to clean up, she said she would ride over with Beulah and carry the food to Ms. Hawkins’s door. The uneven flagstone steps to the front door of the stone house were hard to manage, even for a person with good knees.
“I’m ready,” Beulah called upstairs.
“Be right down,” Annie called back. In a few minutes Annie came down the steps in faded jeans and a blue T-shirt, carrying old pictures in her hand.
“Look at these,” she said, and moved next to Beulah to look at the pictures with her. “Here we are with Mom in front of the stone house.”
Beulah looked at it. “That must have been taken right about the time Jo Anne was diagnosed.”
“Here’s one with you and Grandpa, Evelyn, and Charlie, taken on Evelyn’s front porch. You’re all dressed up and wearing corsages.”
Beulah knew immediately when that was taken.
“We were celebrating our anniversaries. It was our fortieth and Evelyn and Charlie’s twentieth. We both married in October, twenty years apart.”
“And there’s another one of Jake and me, sitting on the plank fence by the corral. We must have been about ten.”
“Now that’s a rare picture. You two were never still long enough to get many pictures.”
