Read Online News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh - Free Book Online

“Jesus, you’ll be glad to go back to school.”
    â€œTen more days,” I said, grinning. I’d forgotten—it was easy to forget—that Melanie had been a farm kid, too.
    â€œDo they still make you write that essay? ‘What I Did on Summer Vacation’?”
    â€œSome vacation,” I said, mopping my forehead with a towel.
    â€œMy vacation was just super,” Melanie said in a simpering voice. “I watered two hundred head of dairy cattle.”
    â€œI hauled manure a quarter mile to the garden,” I added.
    â€œI sat by the highway all day in the blazing sun,” said Melanie, “and I sold six ears of corn.”
    I laughed so hard no sound came out, a feeling both delicious and frightening. Through the open window, I saw my mother come up the garden path with another bushel of cucumbers.
    â€œI put up a million quarts of bread-and-butter pickles,” Melanie continued. “For God’s sake! Does anybody like bread-and-butter pickles?” Then she noticed my expression. “Gina? What’s the matter?”
    My mother stood in the doorway, her cheeks flaming. The screen door spanked shut behind her. She glanced around the kitchen: the steam rising from the stove, the counters, covered with old towels, where I’d set the jars to dry. “You don’t have to help if you don’t want to,” she said, an odd tremor in her voice.
    â€œPeg,” said Melanie, turning to face her. “We were just having fun.”
    My mother set her basket on the table. “Don’t bother with these. I guess we have enough.”
    â€œ H ow long is Melanie going to stay?” I asked my mother.
    We were preparing Sunday dinner—roast beef, potatoes and carrots, a relish plate of pickled beets and my mother’s vinegar cabbage, which we called chowchow. It was the standard menu for when the relatives came to dinner. For summer visits like this one, a platter of cut vegetables was added, whatever was ripening in the garden, but otherwise my mother made no concession to the season. Even today, maybe the hottest of the year, she didn’t consider a barbecue or cold supper, to avoid firing the oven all afternoon.
    â€œYou never know with Melanie. You can’t pin her down.” She opened the oven door. A wave of heat smacked my bare legs.
    â€œBut doesn’t Tilly have school?” My own classes would begin in a week, an event I looked forward to with a mix of excitement and dread.
    â€œNot for another month. The Florida schools start later. The heat, I suppose.”
    The screen door slammed and my father appeared, still dressed in his church clothes. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows. Sweat rings showed under the arms of his white shirt.
    â€œMakes sense, if you ask me.” He turned on the faucet and scrubbed his hands and forearms, streaked with farm dirt. My mother frowned but said nothing, just watched the filthy water pool in the sink.
    I persisted. “A month, then?”
    â€œGoodness, no. I’m sure Dan will want her back before then. A week at the most.”
    My father raised his eyebrows. “A week is a long time.”
    â€œDon’t be silly. She’s my baby sister. Who knows when we’ll see her again?” My mother arranged tomato slices on a plate. “It won’t kill Regina to share her room for a week. When I was a girl, we slept three to a bed, except for Carl.”
    This was not new information. I’d heard my whole life that I’d been spoiled by having my own room. (My uncle Carl, the one boy in his family, had been similarly pampered, a privilege he’d apparently paid for by being killed in the war, long before I was born.) I was often treated to sermons on the value of sharing, wearing hand-me-downs, and waiting in line for the bathroom—lessons I, the first only child on either the Yahner or Schultheis sides of my family, had failed to learn. I