Love Medicine Read Free Page B

her go to ruin.”
    “Well, she couldn’t get much more ruined than dead,” Aurelia said.
    The odd thing about the two-Mama with her careful permanent and rough gray face, Aurelia with her flat blue-black ponytail, high rounded cheeks, tight jeans, and frilled rodeo shirts-was the differ enter they acted the more alike they showed themselves. They clung to their rock-bottom opinions. They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.
    Mama gave up discussing June after Aurelia’s observation and began on me.
    “Have you met any marriageable boys in Fargo yet?” Her flat gray thumbs pursued each other around and around in circles, leaving perfect squeezed scallops. By marriageable I knew she meant Catholic. I shook my head no.
    “At this rate I’ll be too old and stiff to take care of my own grandchildren,” Mama said. Then she smiled and shrugged her shoulders lightly. “My girl’s choosy like me,” she said. “Can’t be too choosy.”
    .… . . ……… Aurelia snorted, but contained her remark, which probably would have referred to Mama’s first husband.
    “Albertine’s got time,” Aurelia answered for me. “What’s her rush?
    Believe me”-she addressed me now with mock serious vigor-“marriage is not the answer to it all. I tried it enough myself ” “I’m not interested anyway,” I let them know. “I’ve got other things to do.”
    “Oh my,” said Mama, “are you going to be a career girl?”
    She froze with her hands in the air, seemingly paralyzed by the idea.
    “You were a career girl,” I accused her. I handed her the pickles, all diced into little cubes. Mama had kept books for the priests and nuns up at Sacred Heart since I could remember. She ignored me, however, and began to poke wheels of fork marks in the tops of the pies. Aurelia mixed. I watched my mother’s hands precisely stabbing.
    After a while we heard the car from the main road as it slowed for the turn. It would be June’s son, King, his wife, Lynette, and King junior.
    They drove up to the front steps in their brand-new sports car.
    King junior was bundled in the front seat and both Grandma and Grandpa Kashpaw were stuffed, incredibly, into the tiny backseat.
    “There’s that white girl.” Mama peeked out the window.
    “Oh, for gosh sakes.” Aurelia gave her heady snort again, and this time did not hold her tongue. “What about your Swedish boy?”
    all
    “Learnt my lesson,” Mama wiped firmly around the edges of L Aurelia’s dishpan. “Never marry a Swedish is my rule.”
    L, F Grandma Kashpaw’s rolled-down nylons and brown support shoes appeared first, then her head in its iron-gray pageboy. Last of all the entire rest of her squeezed through the door, swathed in acres of tiny black sprigged flowers. When I was very young, she always seemed the same size to me as the rock cairns comm em I 0 orating Indian defeats around here. But every time I saw her now I realized that she wasn’t so large, it was just that her figure was weathered and massive as a statue roughed out in rock. She never changed much, at least not so much as Grandpa. Since I’d left home, gone to school, he’d turned into an old man. Age had come upon him suddenly, like a storm in fall, shaking yellow leaves down overnight, and now his winter, deep and quiet, was on him. As Grandma shook out her dress and pulled bundles through the back window, Grandpa sat quietly in the car. He hadn’t noticed that it had stopped. “Why don’t you tell him it stopped,” Grandma called to Lynette, Lynette was changing King junior’s diaper in the front seat.
    She generally used paper diapers with stick-‘em tabs at her home in the Cities, but since she’d been here my mother had shamed her into using washable cloth diapers and sharp pins. The baby wiggled and fought her hands.
    “You hear?” King, already out of the car and nervously