Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

And then she thought, Mother doesn’t want to be alone with him, that’s what it means. Refusing to go away with him meant Didi was right, she didn’t want to marry him, not at all. She must have agreed to marry for some other reason because it was plain to Didi that she didn’t love him. She must have said yes to keep a roof over their heads, that was it. She must have said she’d marry him for Didi!

She couldn’t honestly say that when she started buttering Uncle Willis up (both literally and figuratively) she knew what would come of it. She wasn’t a born Lolita, not at all (in fact in later years she won the title Miss Frigidity). But she had this feeling that being nice to Uncle Willis would better achieve her goal than kicking and screaming and holding her breath until she turned blue, her goal, of course, being the separation of state (Willis) and church (Mother). She didn’t know then and she didn’t know now what had passed between them, why they had called the whole thing off (she supposed she could find out on her magical Betamax if she knew just when it happened, but she didn’t know and she really wasn’t interested in details — God forbid — only in results). She guessed it could be said that she stole Mother’s fiancé. So be it.

By the end of the third summer (she was entering high school by then and beginning to have a life) she’d had quite enough of Uncle Willis, but then she worried that things might return to status quo. What to do, what to do? A permanent solution? Under no circumstances, no matter what the cost, Uncle Willis and Mother... she picked a date, she might be off a day or two, a week or two even, but somewhere around “September 1, 1967, Uncle Willis’s house” and hit the PLAY button.

It was early morning, a hot and muggy early morning made even hotter in the kitchen by the big kettle on the stove that Mother was tending. She was pickling, an annual ritual. Mother made delicious pickles, she made bread-and-butter pickles and she made watermelon rind pickles and she made dill pickles and sweet chunk pickles and today she was making End-of-the-Garden pickles, God, could that woman make pickles, bless her simple heart!

For Uncle Willis she always made a few jars of dill pickles kosher, he’d picked up a taste for kosher pickles on his travels and though Mother and Didi thought them too highly spiced, he loved them, so she always made a batch just for him. She saw them now, a dozen of them cooling in their Ball jars ready for their permanent seal. Uncle Willis’s pickles. A dozen of same. On the assumption that he went through one jar a month. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t. It depended. But sooner or later in the course of a year he ate twelve jars of Mother’s dill pickles kosher, she couldn’t ever recall one jar too many nor one too few. He started with twelve jars in his little cubbyhole in the cellar, when pickling time came again it was like the ten little Indians, and then there were none.

Pickles. Row after row of the finished product sat on the kitchen counter, all the varieties encased in clean and sparkling glass looking like blue ribbon samples in a magazine picture. “Whew,” said Mother, wiping her brow with the hem of her apron. “This is the end of it, thank God. I don’t know why I keep on pickling, Didi, store-bought pickles don’t cost that much.”

“But they don’t taste like yours do, Mother.” Fourteen-year-old DiDi (do note the new spelling, she’d changed it from just plain Didi on departing the ninth grade, nobody at the high school would question that spelling of her name, and she’d be a new and infinitely more interesting person with two capital D’s) was mesmerized by the pickles, such an array.

“Let me finish this last batch, will you, Mother? I need to learn how. You learn by doing, that’s what my teacher said. May I, Mother, may I, please?”

“Well...” She fanned her flushed face with the flap end of the apron. “I really could stand a shower, a nice cool shower...”

“All I do is take the jars out of their bath with this thing...” she waved the tongs her mother used, “and let them cool. I’m capable of that, don’t you think?”

Mother smiled and said, “Leave them in just ten minutes longer, Didi” (she still used the old spelling, dear stick-in-the-mud Mother). “I’ll tighten the seals when they’ve cooled.”

DiDi smiled back. “Ten more minutes. Easy as pie. Take your time in the shower, Mother. Better yet, have a relaxing bath. See you later, alligator.”

She chuckled. “See you later, alligator. You kids.” And she left.

And DiDi trotted out to the barn where such things as the lawn mower, rakes and hoes, her outgrown bicycle, old cans of paint, fertilizer for Mother’s roses, et cetera, were stored and found what she’d thought she’d find, the remains of a tin of rat poison Mother’d used last year to rid the tomato patch of varmints.