Read Online A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Free Book Online

the other, as if someone were walking there.
    “Is someone else here?” said Augusta.
    “It’s getting to be an old house,” said Karl. “Creaks a lot.”
    Augusta glanced up at the portrait of the young woman. “That your mother?”
    “Yes.”
    “She was pretty.”
    “That was taken when she was seventeen. Before she left the old country.”
    “What was her first name?”
    “Blenda.”
    Augusta heard a scratching under the table. There was a dog there, to one side of Olaf’s feet. The dog scrambled out of the darkness and wrapped itself around Olaf’s leg, alternately whimpering and snarling at Augusta. The thing was pitch-black, a mongrel. “You got to excuse the Bitch,” said Olaf. “She never smelt a woman.”
    Karl coughed and went red.
Bitch
. Augusta thought at the time the old Swede was simply being offensive, trying to shock her or test her mettle. But Bitch was the name Olaf had given the dog. Bitch. In all things he was to thepoint. Augusta’s mother had never allowed the dogs in the house. They smelled and shed their hair and rolled in offal. They were necessary but dirty things that should be kept outside. There would be changes when she took over the running of this house, or so Augusta thought.
    The wedding itself was a disappointment, as shoddy and small as that engagement ring. Olaf no longer believed in church-going, and Karl, apparently, didn’t seem to care.
    “Don’t you believe in God, then?” Augusta asked him.
    “It’s hard to believe in what I can’t see,” said Karl. “And I’m not going to waste my time worrying about it.”
    Even so, Augusta insisted on a real church wedding, in her own church, with the Reverend to marry them. Her dress was the one she had proposed to Karl in, a blue cotton print shift that was the best she had; her bouquet was a handful of pearly everlastings Karl had picked from the roadside. It was hot. Sweat beaded the foreheads of the little gathering—it was only Olaf, Manny, the Reverend, and a handful of church women, including Martha Rivers, whom she had not invited. She had no women friends save Mrs. Grafton, and Mrs. Grafton, though she’d said she’d come, hadn’t. It was a dreary affair, over quickly. Karl had to put that engagement ring on her finger all over again because he couldn’t afford a wedding band.
    On the way down the aisle Manny leaned close and hissed, so only she could hear, “You can still get out of it, you know.” It was exactly what she wanted at that point, to run away, to hide. She could pull her arm away from her father and hightail it out of the church and run off, but to where? What would she do? What work would she find? Her face was red—she could feel it. Her father’s grip onher elbow was tight. The room collapsed in on her, gathered her, propelled her hotly to that little carrot-haired, red-faced man, and the hand that waited.
    Then there was nothing. Karl was gone. Her father was gone. Everything was gone. She’s wasn’t in the chapel any more; she was—where?
My God
, she thought,
it’s a kitchen!
She almost laughed. There she was walking down the aisle towards a kitchen sink. It wasn’t the kitchen of the Whorehouse Ranch; it was the kitchen of her home farm, her mother’s kitchen, Manny’s kitchen. She looked down at her dress. It was no longer the pretty garment she had chosen for her wedding day; it was a ratty old house dress, and her hands were in a sink full of sudsy warm water. She was evidently searching for something in the water. Something had been lost. A ring. She had lost her engagement ring. Then there was another hand in the sink with hers, also searching. A man’s hand. Whose hand? This hand found hers beneath the water and took hold. Then suddenly she was back in the chapel, holding the Reverend’s hand. He had taken her hand and Karl’s, and was joining them.
    Augusta never told Karl about that vision. She couldn’t bring herself to discuss any of her premonitions with him.