Read Online Labor Day by Joyce Maynard - Free Book Online

Wife’s got her panties in a twist, convinced he’s headed straight for our house.
    My mother’s sewing, I said.
    I just thought I’d let your mother know. Her being on her own. You have any problems, give a jingle.

CHAPTER 7
    A FTER M R . J ERVIS LEFT , I went back to the kitchen. I had only been gone from the room four minutes, maybe, but even though it was my house, where I’d lived four years almost, and we’d just met Frank yesterday, I had the feeling, coming back in the room, that I was breaking something up. Like a time I walked in my father’s bedroom over at our old house, and Marjorie was sitting on the bed with the baby, and her shirt was open and one of her breasts was showing, and another time when they let school out early because someone did an experiment wrong and the building filled up with sulfur smell, and there was a record playing so loud my mother didn’t hear the door open and slam behind me, and from the kitchen, where I came in, I could see her in the living room, dancing. Not a regular dance with steps, or the kind she was always trying to teach me. That day she was twirling around the room like she was one of those dervishes I saw once on a National Geographic special. That’s how the two of them looked, when I came back in with the peaches. Like they were the only two people in the world.
    They had more than they could use, I said. The Jervises.
    The other part, what Mr. Jervis said about the prison escape, I didn’t mention.
    I set the fruit on the table. Frank was down on his knees on the kitchen floor, fixing a pipe under the sink. My mother sat next to him, holding a wrench. They were looking at each other.
    I picked a peach out of the bucket and washed it. My mother didn’t believe in germs but I did. Germs are something they made up to distract people from what they should really be worried about, she said. Germs are natural. It’s the things people do you have to worry about.
    Good peach, I said.
    Frank and my mother were still sitting there, holding the tools, not moving. Too bad they’re all so ripe, she said. We’ll never get through them all.
    Here’s what’s going to happen, said Frank. His voice, which was always low and deep, suddenly seemed to drop another half octave now, so it was like Johnny Cash was in our kitchen.
    We have a serious issue on our hands, he said.
    I was still thinking about what Mr. Jervis said. People out looking for the escaped prisoner. From the newspaper, I knew they’d got roadblocks on the highway. Helicopters over by the dam, where someone thought they spotted a man matching the description, only now they were saying he had a scar over one eye and possibly a tattoo on his neck of a knife or a Harley, something along those lines. Now was the moment Frank was going to take out a gun, or a knife maybe, and wrap his lean, muscled arm around my mother’s neck, that he’d just finished admiring, and press the knife against her skin, and guide us out to the car.
    We were his ticket across state lines. That was the story. I’d watched enough episodes of Magnum, P.I. to get it. Only then Frank turned around to face us, and he was holding a knife.
    These peaches, he said, looking even more serious than before. If we don’t put them to use soon, they’re goners.
    What did you have in mind? my mother said. There was a sound to her voice I could not remember ever hearing. She was laughing, not the way a person does if you tell them a joke, but more how it is when they’re just in a good mood and feeling happy.
    I’m going to make us a peach pie, like my grandmother did it, he said.
    First thing, he needed a couple of bowls. One to make the crust. One for the filling.
    Frank peeled the peaches. I cut them up.
    Filling is easy, Frank said. What I want to talk about is crust.
    You could tell, the way he reached for his bowl, that this man had made more than a few pies in his life.
    First off, you need to keep your ingredients as cool as possible,