The Little Friend

A stroke. That was what it was. When she’d suffered the first one, no one knew. Any other day, Odean would have been there—but Odean had the week off, because of the trip. When Libby finally answered the door—it had taken her a while, so long that Allison thought that maybe she was asleep—she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her eyes were a little blurry. She looked at Allison as if she was expecting someone else.

“Are you all right?” Allison asked. She’d heard all about the wreck.

“Oh, yes,” said Libby, distractedly.

She let Allison in, and then wandered away into the back of the house like she was looking for something she’d misplaced. She seemed fine except for a splotchy bruise on her cheekbone, the color of grape jelly spread thin, and her hair not as tidy as she usually liked it.

Allison said, glancing around: “Can’t you find your newspaper?” The house was spanking clean: floors freshly mopped, everything dusted and even the sofa cushions plumped and properly placed; somehow the very tidiness of the house had kept Allison from realizing that anything might be wrong. Sickness, in her own house, had to do with disorder: with grimy curtains and gritty bedsheets; drawers left open and crumbs on the table.

After a brief search, Allison found the newspaper—folded to the crossword, with her glasses sitting on top of it—on the floor by Libby’s chair, and carried them in to the kitchen, where Libby sat at the table, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand in a tight, repetitive circle.

“Here’s your puzzle,” said Allison. The kitchen was uncomfortably bright. Despite the sun pouring through the curtains, the overhead lights were on for some reason, as if it were a dark winter afternoon and not the middle of summer. “Do you want me to get you a pencil?”

“No, I can’t work that foolish thing,” Libby said fretfully, pushing the paper aside, “the letters keep sliding off the page.… What I need to do is go ahead and get started on my beets.”

“Beets?”

“Unless I start now they won’t be ready in time. The little bride’s coming into town on the Number 4.…”

“What bride?” said Allison, after a slight pause. She’d never heard of the Number 4, whatever that was. Everything was bright and unreal. Ida Rhew had left only an hour before—just like any other Friday except that she wasn’t coming back on Monday or ever again. And she’d taken nothing but the red plastic glass she drank out of: in the hallway, on the way out, she had refused the carefully wrapped cuttings and the box of presents, which she said was too heavy to carry. “I aint need all of that!” she said, cheerily, turning to look Allison straight in the eye; and her tone was that of someone offered a button or a piece of licked candy by a toddler. “What you think I need all that nonsense for?”

Allison—stunned—fought not to cry. “Ida, I love you,” she said.

“Well,” said Ida, thoughtfully, “I love you too.”

It was terrible; it was too terrible to be happening. And yet there they stood by the front door. A sharp lump of grief rose in Allison’s throat to see how meticulously Ida folded the green check lying face up on the hall table—twenty dollars and no/100s—making sure that both edges were lined up and perfectly even before she creased it with a zip of thumb and forefinger. Then she unsnapped her little black purse and put it in.

“I can’t live any more on twenty dollars a week,” she said. Her voice was quiet and natural, yet all wrong at the same time. How could they possibly be standing in the hall like this, how could this moment be real? “I love yalls, but that’s the way it is. I’m getting old.” She touched Allison’s cheek. “Yall be good, now. Tell Little Ug I love her.” Ug—for Ugly—was what Ida called Harriet when she misbehaved. Then the door closed, and she was gone.

“I expect,” said Libby—and Allison, with slight alarm, noticed that Libby was looking around the kitchen floor in a jerky way, as if she saw a moth fluttering by her feet—“she won’t be able to find them when she gets there.”

“Excuse me?” said Allison.

“Beets. Pickled beets. Oh I wish somebody would help me,” said Libby, with a plaintive, half-comic roll of her eyes.

“Do you need me to do something for you?”

“Where’s Edith?” said Libby, and her voice was strangely clipped, and crisp. “She’ll do something for me.”

Allison sat down at the kitchen table, and tried to get her attention. “Do you have to make the beets today?” she said. “Lib?”

“All I know is what they told me.”

Allison nodded, and sat for a moment in the too-bright kitchen wondering how to proceed. Sometimes Libby came home from Missionary Society, or Circle, with strange and very specific demands: for green stamps, or old glasses frames, or Campbell’s soup labels (which the Baptist home in Honduras redeemed for cash); for Popsicle sticks or old Lux detergent bottles (for crafts at the Church Bazaar).