Tending to Grace Read Free Page B

stutter?” she asks as I hand the cup back to her.
    Why does everyone always ask that? I don’t know when. In first grade,
I already hated talking, that’s all I know.
    I shrug, but I don’t know if she sees me, because I’m drinking more water.
    We watch two squirrels scream at each other in a pine tree and then we climb over a stone wall and down a short slope and then up another rise. I brace myself for the advice everyone gives, especially my mother:
Try harder, Corns, for goodness’ sake. I know you could talk
regular if you pull yourself together. Just pick easier words.
    Or the fifth-grade teacher, helpful as hail:
Take a breath, Cornelia.
Slow down, relax, think about what you want to say before you say it. You
just need more backbone, that’s all.
    They made it sound so easy. Try harder, stutter less. But when I try harder, I stutter more. When I pick easier words, I stutter on easier words. And I can’t pick an easier word when someone asks me my name.
    So I quit talking most of the time. Always better to keep stuff inside. Squish the shame down to your toes if you have to. Keep it hidden there. No one gets it anyway.

20
    I feel Agatha behind me as I pour suds into her kitchen sink and pile my socks beneath the running water. A rusted washing machine sits unused in the corner of the kitchen, its top spread with clay pots of apple mint and rosemary and sage.
    Agatha wears the same overalls day after day and switches from a flannel shirt to a T-shirt, depending on the weather. The only exception she makes to her laundry system is her underclothes. She wears cotton things she calls underdrawers edged in lace and she washes these by hand with soap flakes. Then she hangs them on the branches of an oak near the house, a spot anyone could see from the road.
    I fix all this, of course. I hang a clothesline out back, first of all, and get her underwear out of sight.
    There isn’t much I can do about ironing because she threw her iron away when it broke years ago. “Ironin’ makes no sense at all,” she tells me one day as I try to press a pair of my overalls with my hands. And of course she keeps no starch and no fabric softener. My clothes smell wonderful when I bring them in from the line, all warm from the sun, but soon they pick up the odor of the house, sort of the way a cupboard smells when it hasn’t been opened in a while.
    â€œE-e-e-everything around here s-smells old and d-d-dried out.” I am folding clothes into neat piles on the table, my nose buried in one of my shirts.
    â€œYou want your clothes to smell good?” my aunt says, looking up from the peas she is shelling. “Then go roll around in the hay.”

21
    â€œYoo-hoo!” Agatha yells to me through my window one morning. I am reading again. There are no books in this house other than what I brought, and I’ve read everything so many times I’d read a dictionary at this point.
    â€œCornelia, I need help getting to the dump.” Agatha presses her nose against the screen to see into my room. I sink further into my book. “Get out of that bed and come help me.”
    I roll over, pretending she is a puff of smoke, gone in an instant. “You read too damn much, Cornelia. You’re hiding in those books. Now get your butt out here and give me a hand.”
    When I don’t move, she pulls the screen out of the window. “If you don’t get out here, I’m coming in there and dragging you out.”

22
    Agatha hands me a straw hat and then walks quickly to the barn. “What’s this for?”
    â€œYou’ll see,” she yells over her shoulder.
    As soon as she pushes open the wooden doors, the dry smell of crushed hay and the sweet thickness of old manure soar up my nose. The stalls are empty; the floor lumps with wear. A big pile of trash bags heap in one corner. A broken rake, chipped canning jars, and a coil of old rope lie on top.
    When I