Free The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas Page A

Tom and Rita didn’t want to go. Before they left, we asked them to sign our guest book on account of it was Rita’s first time in our house. Tom wrote, “Next time, I’ll take pie in the sky, if you don’t mind.”
    As they started across the lawn, Rita called, “See you in the funny papers.” Grover and I watched them walk down the road in the starlight. Once Tom turned back and sang,
    “K-K-K-Queenie, Beautiful Queenie, you’re the only B-B-B-Bean that I adore.”
    After a while, his singing faded and was drowned out by the racket from the crickets. Then Tom and Rita disappeared into the night. Grover smelled for rain, but we both knew there wasn’t any in the air. A coyote howled a long way off, and Old Bob barked. Grover put his arm around me and said, “Time to hit the shucks,” and we went inside.
    “You’re pretty nearly the best friend Rita could have in Harveyville, even if she might not know it yet,” Grover said, hooking the screen door and following me into the bedroom.
    I raised my eyebrow to ask what he meant, but in the dark, he couldn’t see the gesture.
    “I know Tom appreciates what you did.”
    “Fixing dinner isn’t so much trouble. I liked doing it,” I said, pushing up the bedroom window as far as it would go. The air was still hotter outside than in, but before morning there might be a breeze to cool us off, and I didn’t want to miss it. You couldn’t be a farmer without being an optimist about the weather. I stared into the night sky, but there were no clouds.
    “1 don’t mean inviting them for supper. I’m talking about your pie. That was a real nice thing to do, Queenie.” Grover took off his clothes and sat down on the edge of the bed to wind the clock, even though he always woke up long before the alarm sounded. As he turned to read his watch in the moonlight, checking the time against the clock, the light coming through the window into the dark room caught the bald spot at the back of his head, making it gleam like a silver dollar. Grover reached over and set his watch on the bureau, got into bed, and held out his hand for me to come to him. “Both Tom and I know there isn’t a farmgirl alive who can’t tell the difference between rhubarb and Swiss chard.”

Chapter

4
    I ‘d taken dinner out to Grover in the field, and we ate it sitting on a wall of the old adobe house that somebody had built way back in history. The house had all but blown away —dust to dust, but then, what wasn’t dust in Kansas these days?
    We were in the shadow of a big cottonwood that must have been set out by the people who built the house. There’s a special kind of man who plants a tree when he knows he’ll move on before it’s big enough for him to sit in its shade. Grover was that kind of man, and I told him so, but he wasn’t listening to me. He was looking out across the field.
    I took a piece of gooseberry pie from the dinner basket and looked at it with pride before I held it out to him. The crust was golden, and the berries were as plump and pretty as jade beads. “It’s better than what we had at Persian Pickle yesterday,” I told him. This had not been a bumper year for refreshments at club. Instead of the popcorn Rita had suggested, Agnes T. Ritter dished up tapioca pudding, and the time before that, Nettie served her fruitcake, which she mixes up every few years in a five-gallon drum. She said it would last for fifty years, and I told Ada June it had twenty more to go. The only good thing was that Nettie had soaked it in some of Tyrone’s bootleg. When I whispered to Rita that it was a shame we couldn’t just lick the whiskey out of it, she replied Tyrone must be a real pip to make booze that good. I meant to remember the word.
    “You want this, honey?” I asked Grover, who still wasn’t paying any attention to me.
    “Who’s that coming?” he asked.
    I shaded my eyes and looked over the field. “He’s in a real pip of a hurry, whoever he is.”
    Grover turned