“They’re real pretty.” She purposely annoyed him. “Black kid, cut low, with
ribbons that lace right here across the instep and tie around the ankle. I got some
clogs, too, with wooden soles and canvas straps, to wear over them, protect them
from the snow or mud.”
“Now I know why you be needin’ a team of oxen.”
“Believe me, I wish I could go off with just a few shirts and trousers like you,” she said wistfully and this was the truth. “I didn’t make the rules about what women have to wear. But a person is better off decently dressed than not.
Especially when that person is going someplace new. We’ll have to depend on
other folks now and then and it’s best they don’t start out with a bad
impression.”
Olivia owned few items of sentimental value. One of them was her mother’s
hairbrush. It was wooden, with an intricate pattern of scrolls carved into its back.
Every evening when she brushed her hair, she wondered what Nola June would
have thought about her daughter running off. Was she up there in heaven
horrified? Or cheering her on? Olivia couldn’t help but wonder if her mother’s state of “not quite right in the head” hadn’t been simple boredom.
One evening in mid-March Olivia knocked on Tobey’s door. He was lying on
his bed, thumbing through a catalog of dry goods. He sat up and swung his legs
over the edge and she perched next to him, holding out the wooden brush.
“Do you remember this?”
“Am I supposed to?”
“It was our mother’s. She gave it to me one Christmas. Told me Gram
Sessions gave it to her, when she was my age.”
She ran the brush through her hair and then held it in her lap.
“Can’t say I do recall it.” Tobey blinked at her.
“What do you remember about her?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what do you remember about her?”
He thought for what seemed like an awfully long time.
“She used to knit a lot.”
“She did?” That took Olivia by surprise. She couldn’t understand how anyone
had the patience to fool around with all those balls of yarn. All that knitting and
purling and you had to take it on faith that anyone would want to wear what turned out. But it especially surprised her to hear that about Nola June. She couldn’t imagine her mother sitting in one place long enough to finish a row. In
Olivia’s imagination Nola June never stopped moving.
“Oh yeah, she did. Hats and mufflers.”
“What else?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe she made a sweater now and then.”
“No, I mean, what else do you remember about her, besides knitting?”
“Well, let’s see. I remember her planting a lot of stuff out back. It’s all overgrown now, but when she was alive she kept it all trimmed and nice. Used to
keep a real colorful flower garden. And she liked lemonade. I remember that.
She was always pounding lemons on the kitchen table and mixing up big
pitchers of it, so sweet even a kid could hardly drink it. She planted mint leaves
