After Eli by Rebecca Rupp Page B

due to flax being hard to chew.
    “I know what your dad says about me,” Emma said. “Jim and I go places, and there’s always somebody wondering why Jim has anything to do with me. My whole family is messed up. My dad took off and left us when I was four, and my mom had all these boyfriends that used to beat us around. My sister got pregnant when she was sixteen, and I don’t even know where she is anymore. And I ran around with a lot of guys and did a lot of stupid-ass stuff I shouldn’t have done. I didn’t even finish high school. I dropped out my junior year.”
    “That sounds great to me,” I said.
    “Well, it wasn’t,” Emma said. “But I hated high school. The kids were mean and the teachers were mean and my guidance counselor made it pretty clear that she didn’t think I was heading for anything but six kids and welfare. I was probably pretty hateful too, if you want to know the truth. The only one nice to me was Miss Walker.”
    “She talked at Eli’s funeral,” I said.
    Emma said, “She’s something else, Miss Walker. When she heard I was quitting school, she asked me over to her house. She made Earl Grey tea. Like I would know from Earl Grey tea.”
    I knew Earl Grey tea due to it being the drink of Captain Jean-Luc Picard of
Star Trek
’s starship
Enterprise.
Though at home we have Lipton’s.
    “It was real nice,” Emma said. “She didn’t try to talk me into anything or out of anything, and she didn’t act like a teacher. We just talked. And she gave me a copy of
The Secret Garden.
She said everybody has a special book, and she thought maybe that one might be mine.”
    I thought about what might be my special book. Probably one of those pathetic old kindergarten readers with little stories about seeing Spot run.
    “So what’s it about?” I said.
    “It’s just an old kids’ book,” Emma said. “It’s about this girl, Mary, who comes from India to live in a big old house in England. Her parents are dead and her guardian doesn’t care about her and she just hates everything. Then she finds this locked garden and she finds a way to get inside and she starts bringing the garden back to life. And by the end of the book, she’s saved the garden and she’s saved her whiny little crippled-up cousin and she’s saved herself too.”
    “That’s your special book?” I said.
    “It’s what I thought of right off when Jim told me about the farm,” she said.
    She took a bite of flax cookie and chewed for a long time.
    “I met Jim when I was waiting on tables at Bev’s Caf,” Emma said.
    Bev’s Caf used to be Bev’s Café, but the
é
fell off the sign and nobody ever bothered to put it up again, so ever since it’s just been Bev’s Caf. Anybody who wants to get elected to something or to collect money for something always starts out at Bev’s Caf, and it’s where you put a sign up if you’ve lost a cat or a dog, and where all the kids go after prom or graduation or a football game. My mom and dad got engaged at Bev’s Caf. Every year they used to go back on their engagement anniversary and play “Some Enchanted Evening” on Bev’s extremely old jukebox, and split a bottle of wine. One anniversary Eli and Jim sneaked up under Bev’s window and serenaded them on trombones. Eli and Jim were the entire trombone section in the Fairfield High School Orchestra and Band.
    Emma said, “Jim’d come in all the time and sit in one of the booths, and I thought he was nice. Quiet, but nice. Not that we talked about anything much but the weather and did he want another cup of coffee and how about the special on pie. But I could tell. Then one day I just got up the nerve and asked what all he was doing now that he wasn’t going to college anymore, and he said, why didn’t we go someplace when I got off work and he’d tell me. That’s when I heard all about the farm. And I thought it was just like
The Secret Garden,
you know? How there he’d been, all screwed up, and then he