The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel Page A

wore essentially the same clothes, first at the grain elevator (gone now), and then at Jo-Gro: a red shirt with blue trim (the sleeve length varied by season), his name sewn over the left pocket, and blue pants. Even after a shower he seemed to retain some of the dust of the shelled corn, and a certain chemical sheen.
    “Is Mom still at church?” Langston asked, sitting down.
    “She’ll be home directly.”
    The glider eek-eeked back and forth on its track. Walt pushed them with his dusty work boots.
    “It’s a shame about Alice Baker,” Langston said.
    “Sure is.”
    They glided.
    “You hear how she died?” Walt asked, looking a little to his left, away from Langston, shyly.
    “No. I assume some wasting cancer. It seems to be how everyone dies these days.”
    “That’s not—”
    “I know she’s dead; I don’t feel compelled to know the details. Why explore the nature of her wound? As Mercutio said, ‘It will suffice.’ I paraphrase.”
    “Hmmmm.”
    “I’ve remembered a lot more about her in the past two days,” Langston said. “Like how she was one of the first girls in our class not to have a dad. I’m sure it’s quite common, now.”
    “He died.”
    “I remember. We were in the second grade and our teacher said he’d been in an accident. Alice wasn’t at school for a week, and then she came back and I don’t . . . I don’t know what happened after that.”
    They glided.
    “Was he, wait a second. Was he electrocuted?”
    Walt nodded. “Trimmin’ trees.”
    Germane stood up, circled, lay back down.
    “And also how Alice was the best in our class at making those string designs, those little string things you made with string. Do you know what I’m talking about? how you hold a string over here and over here and then do something with your fingers and it makes a little, what, a little design?”
    “Cat’s cradle, Jacob’s ladder.”
    “Right. And she could also braid things, braid hair or strips of leather, very elaborate things.” Langston thought a moment. “There’s a connection, isn’t there? Moving her fingers, seeing a pattern where there is none.”
    “She went into textiles.”
    “Excuse me?” It had never occurred to Langston that Alice might have had a profession.
    “She was an artist. Made baskets, some as big as a room you could walk into. Shown all over the country.”
    “Are you
sure
?”
    “Taught it, too. Went around to schools. Children loved her.”
    This stunned Langston into silence. That little flat-faced girl with the overbite and the cowlick? She was an Artist in the Schools and children loved her?
    Germane’s tail started to thump and Walt said, “That would be your mama,” and then AnnaLee came into view. Oh, she was a mess, her mother, Langston thought, but at that moment she looked so pretty. Langston didn’t look anything like her—she favored the Braverman side of the family (it was Taos who was so clearly AnnaLee’s child)— and this distance, this lack of a resemblance, allowed Langston to see her mother, sometimes, the way strangers surely did. Everything about AnnaLee was strong: her chin, her jaw, her shoulders, her upper arms. Her calves knotted into muscle with every step, even though the only exercise she took was walking and gardening. She had broad, flat hands; widely spaced, narrow green eyes, thin lips. She never wore makeup or jewelry, apart from her wedding ring. When she smiled she had thin wrinkles everywhere—they radiated out and then connected in the middle of her cheeks, and even those looked lovely on this Sunday, to her daughter.
    “Hey, you two,” she said, walking up to the edge of the porch.
    “How was church?” Walt asked, as he did every week, although as far as Langston knew he never went to church and probably didn’t actually care how it went.
    “It was good. Amos . . . he’s a good preacher. He gets to me, somehow.”
    Walt nodded.
    “You should come with me sometime, Langston. I think you’d find him