Free The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver Page A

be like.
    “If you’re going right now, could you check in for my little boy? His name’s Seattle. I’m sure he’s the only one there named Seattle. Just make sure he’s okay, will you?”
    “Like Seattle, Washington?”
    “No, like Seattle Slew, the racehorse. He’s a little towhead, you can’t miss him, he looks just like me only his hair’s blonder. Oh, they have a requirement that they have to be able to walk. Can your daughter walk?”
    “Sure she walks. When there’s someplace she wants to go.”
    A celery stick fell out of the bucket onto the floor, and Sandi swiped it up and took a bite. “Well, I couldn’t very well let a customer eat it,” she said.
    “Don’t look at me,” I said. “It’s no skin off my teeth if you want to eat the whole bucket of celery, and the artificial grapes besides. For three twenty-five an hour I think you’re entitled.”
    She munched kind of thoughtfully for a minute. Her eyelashes were stuck together with blue mascara and sprung out all around her eyes like flower petals. “You know, your little girl doesn’t look a thing like you,” she said. “I mean, no offense, she’s cute as a button.”
    “She’s not really mine,” I said. “She’s just somebody I got stuck with.”
    Sandi looked at both of us, her elbow cocked on her hip and the salad tongs frozen in midair. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.”

FOUR
    Tug Fork Water
    L ou Ann’s Grandmother Logan and Lou Ann’s new baby were both asleep in the front room with the curtains drawn against the afternoon heat. For the last two weeks Granny Logan had stomped around the house snapping the curtains shut just as fast as Lou Ann could open them, until finally Lou Ann gave up the effort and they all moved around in the gloom of a dimly lit house. “You’d think somebody had died, instead of just being born,” Lou Ann complained, but the old woman declared that the heat was unnatural for January and would cause the baby to grow up measly and unwholesome.
    When she woke up, Granny Logan would deny she had been sleeping. She had said she only needed to rest her eyes for the trip back to Kentucky, three days on the Greyhound.
    In the kitchen Ivy Logan and Lou Ann were packing a paper bag with baloney sandwiches and yellow apples and a Mason jar of cold tea. Ivy’s heavy arms and apron-covered front moved around like she was the boss, even in her daughter’s unfamiliar kitchen. Under her breath she hummed one line of a hymn, “All our sins and griefs to bear,” over and over until Lou Ann thought she would scream. It was an old habit.
    Lou Ann pushed her damp blond hair back from her face and told her mother she wished she would stay a few days more. Whenever Ivy looked at her Lou Ann could feel the tired half-moons under her own eyes.
    “You haven’t hardly had time to say boo to Angel. He’ll have Tuesday off and we could take the truck and all go someplace. We could all fit in some way. Or otherwise I could stay here with Dwayne Ray, and you all go. It’s a shame for you to come all this way from home and not see what you can see.”
    Surprisingly, Angel had agreed to move back in until after her mother and grandmother’s visit. He might be hard to talk to and unreasonable in every other way but at least, Lou Ann realized, he knew the power of mothers and grandmothers. If Granny Logan had known they were getting a divorce she would have had an apoplectic. At the very least, she and Ivy would insist that Lou Ann come back home.
    “Oh, honey, we seen plenty from the bus,” Ivy said. “Them old big cactus and every kind of thing. Lordy, and them big buildings downtown, all glass it looked to me like. I expect we’ll see a good sight more on the way home.”
    “I guess, but it seems like we haven’t done a thing since you got here but set around and look at the baby.”
    “Well, that’s what we come for, honey. Now we’ve done helped you have him, and get settled with him, and we’re