The Little Friend

“But I told him not to tell! We were in his room, and she banged on the door and started yelling—”

“Yes, and what you do then but come home and tell on me your own self. You’s mad at me when I left yesterday, because I didn’t want to sit around after work telling stories. Don’t say you wasn’t.”

“Ida! You know how Mama gets mixed up! All I said was—”

“I’ll tell you why you did it. You’s mad and spiteful that I don’t sit around all night cooking fried chicken and telling stories when I gots to get home and do my own work. After cleaning up for you folks all day.”

Harriet went outside. The day was hot, sun-bleached, soundless. She felt as if she’d just had a tooth filled at the dentist’s, pain blooming plum-black in her rear molars, walking through the glass doors into the glare and withering heat of the parking lot. Harriet, is somebody waiting to pick you up? Yes, maam, Harriet always said to the receptionist, whether somebody was waiting or not.

From the kitchen, all was silence. The shutters of her mother’s room were closed. Was Ida fired? Somehow—incredibly—the question caused her no pain or anxiety, only the same dull puzzlement as when she bit hard on the inside of her cheek after a novocaine shot and it didn’t hurt.

I’ll pick her some tomatoes for lunch, said Harriet to herself, and—squinting against the glare—went to the side of the house, to Ida’s little vegetable garden: an unfenced plot, twelve feet square, badly in need of weeding. Ida didn’t have space for a garden where she lived. Though she made them tomato sandwiches every day, she took most of the other vegetables home with her. Almost daily, Ida offered Harriet a kindness of some sort in exchange for help in the garden—a game of checkers, a story—which Harriet always refused; she hated yard-work, could not bear the dust on her hands, or the beetles, or the heat, or the stinging hairs on the squash vines which made her legs itch.

Now her selfishness made her feel sick. Many painful thoughts clustered about, pricking at her ceaselessly. Ida had to work hard all the time … not just here, but at her own house. What did Harriet ever have to do?

Some tomatoes. She’ll like that. She picked some bell peppers too, and okra, and a fat black eggplant: the summer’s first. She piled the muddy vegetables in a small cardboard box and then set to work weeding, gritting her teeth with displeasure. Vegetable plants—save only for the vegetables—looked like overgrown weeds to her, with their sprawling habits and rough, ungainly leaves, so she left what she wasn’t sure about and only pulled the weeds she was certain of: clover and dandelion (easy) and long switches of Johnson grass, which Ida had a tricky way of folding so they made a shrill, unearthy whistle when she put them between her lips and blew a certain way.

But the blades were sharp; and it was not long before one of them had sliced a red seam like a paper cut across the base of her thumb. Harriet—sweating—reared back on her dusty heels. She had some red cloth gardening gloves, child-sized, which Ida Rhew had bought for her at the hardware store last summer, and it made her feel terrible even to think about them. Ida didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to spend on presents; even worse, Harriet disliked the garden so much that she had never worn the gloves, not once. Don’t you like them little gloves I gave you? Ida had asked her, rather sadly, one afternoon while they were sitting on the porch; when Harriet protested, she shook her head.

I do like them, I do. I wear them to play in.…

You don’t have to tell me a story, baby. I’m just sorry you don’t care anything about them.

Harriet’s face burned. The red gloves had cost three dollars—for poor Ida, nearly a day’s work. Now that she thought about it, she realized that the red gloves were the only present that Ida had ever given her. And she had lost them! How could she have been so careless? For a long time, in the winter, they had lain neglected in a galvanized tub in the toolshed, with the pruning shears and the hedge clippers and some other tools of Chester’s.…

She left her weeding, uprooted shoots scattered harumscarum across the dirt, and hurried to the toolshed. But the gloves weren’t in the galvanized tub. They weren’t in Chester’s tool-bench, either; they weren’t on the shelf with the flowerpots and fertilizer; they weren’t behind the caked tins of varnish and Spackle and house paint.