Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Page A

ask you to sell it. I didn’t say you could sell it.’
    ‘You said you need money, I got you money.’ He strikes a match and lights a cigarette, throws the rest of the pack at the table.
    ‘That car was all I had,’ she says.
    ‘Then you didn’t have nothin’.’ He blows smoke out the screen. ‘You had a wreck. Lucky I didn’t get charged to get it towed – off my land.’
    She nods and leans against a cupboard, adding the money mentally to the money in her skirts. How on earth can they move on with this? ‘I had things in that car,’ she says. She sounds petty, but she doesn’t care.
    ‘Flour and feathers. Your girl got what she could. Good girl, that Amity.’
    Her thumb goes to her bare finger. No wedding band and nothing left to sell. Amity wouldn’t have known to look for it.
    He sits to smoke, stretching his legs beneath a clattering drop-leaf table. ‘I can’t have you all stayin’ here.’
    ‘No,’ she says.
    ‘Can’t have you dancin’ ’round my yard like lunatics, hangin’ your scanties like some Chinese laundry on my porch. Come harvest, I won’t have time for this. Got my hands full already and no one here to do the work.’
    ‘I can help you.’
    ‘Fat load of good you done so far.’ He taps ash onto the tabletop and she moves to him, scoops the ash into her palm, then throws it in the sink. He shakes his head at her.
    She wonders how long it is until harvest, when he might need to take on extra hands. She wonders how she could help him then. She wonders if he has food.
    ‘So that’s that, then,’ he says and scrapes his chair back. He opens the door to a rusting Frigidaire and she glances into it to see what he has: cans of beer and condiments, opened cans of soup and beans. The squat dome of a half package of baloney and a stack of cheese in plastic sleeves. He sees her looking. ‘You want one?’ He snaps a beer can off a six-pack ring and holds it out to her.
    She turns her head away and he laughs at her. She imagines opening a beer with him, sitting down across from him, at his table, the spray of the pull top, the fizz of foam on her tongue, and the cold bubbles of alcohol rushing down her throat. She swallows.
    What if she confided in him, told him all that had happened to bring her to this moment? Would he understand her? Would he sympathize? Would he tell her what to do, tell her how to push on for Mexico, or help her find a better plan? Would he ask her to stay? Would he tell her she was right to leave her husband after all?
    ‘Well?’ He wiggles the can before her.
    She sets her two thin piles of money on the table.
    ‘That’s yours,’ he says.
    ‘It’s for the use of your porch. We will go.’
    ‘I ain’t rentin’ you my porch. And I don’t see you going.’ He pops the tab on his beer and takes a long slug of it. He reaches in to pull another can out, then he stomps back up the stairs, leaving her money to lie where it is, calling a quiet ‘’Night’ down behind him.
    There are coffee grounds speckled over Formica countertops. There are giant tubs of Folgers and Coffee-mate in his cupboard. There are drawers filled with battered cutlery and rusting tools: cheese graters, cherry pitters, paring knives with blades sharpened into crescent moons. Rubber bands, bread bags, foil balls, books of matches from bars: Mac’s, Dino’s, the Do Drop Inn.
    She thinks of the commercial refrigerators back home, scavenged and bartered, crammed full to the brim with the industry of women: curds and creams, sausages and cheeses. What wouldn’t she give for chokecherries, huckleberries, sweetgrass honey from their hives? Hand-milled and roasted chicory, fresh and frothy goat’s milk?
    She counts out the money for her car. Through his window, she sees the dark shapes of her children, playing shadowy hand games before the fire, and she pulls out a ten-dollar bill. She yanks open his fridge and takes the baloney, a squeeze bottle of mustard. From the crisper, two wizened,