Free Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos Page A

photograph. A gauzy, faded photograph of a soldier not much older than I was, dressed in the ragged, dirty, gray uniform of the Confederate States Army. And beside the soldier stood, unmistakably, Aunt Bridey, when she was maybe fifteen years old.
    SMACK! went the picture, facedown on the table, shattering the glass. Aunt Bridey glared at me, picking a shard out of her finger. “It’s rude to stare at other people’s personal effects,” she snapped. “Now, if you don’t mind, out!”
    Luke and I obediently trooped through the door.
    “Wait,” she said, following. “I’ve got something for you.”
    I could tell Luke was expecting her to fork over a handful of magic beans, or fetch a spinning wheel and weave for us an enchanted cloak, but instead she led us through an orchard of tiny, gnarled trees, arrayed like a hundred little old ladies on parade in her backyard. “Apricot orchard,” said Aunt Bridey.
    “Did you plant it?” asked Luke.
    “No,” she snapped. “Elves did it while I slept.”
    “I was just—” protested Luke.
    “I know what you were just,” shot back Aunt Bridey. “Now. Look here.”
    She led us to the face of a cliff looming over the northern border of her garden. Into the base of the cliff was bolted a wooden door. Aunt Bridey retrieved the key from atop the lintel. Behind the door, hidden in the cool shadows, were thousands of jars of apricot jelly.
    “It’s just me up here,” she said, “and I have an overly large orchard. So I make a lot of preserves. About two hundred times more than I could spread on my toast over the next fifty years.”
    “But why—how do you—are you saying this is for us—are you on our side?” asked Luke.
    “Despite these glasses, I’m not blind,” she told us, glaring furiously past the edge of the cliff. “And I’m not deaf. I know what goes on. Don’t touch the Honey Brook Nectar!” she added suddenly, as I reached toward a row of glass bottles on a high shelf. “And don’t you dare tell the government about it!”
    I knew from my days in Mississippi that this meant Honey Brook Nectar was actually moonshine.
    “My bees make the honey from apricot blossoms and I make the nectar from the honey and it’s off-limits!” emphasized Aunt Bridey.
    Apricot blossom honey moonshine. “We won’t tell the government, Aunt Bridey,” I promised.
    “And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t let anybody from the Victory Corporation find out I’m giving you jam,” she added.
    “We’ll be careful, Aunt Bridey,” Luke assured her.
    “Good-bye!” she said, stalking back to her little house. “Take a bushel of those brussels sprouts from beside my porch when you go! And don’t forget your dead animals.”
    Aunt Bridey’s apricot jelly and the brussels sprouts helped. And Reginald and Stew made for one very nice dinner. But after that, without bread, or biscuits, or crackers, we just had to eat the jam with a spoon, and surprisingly, jam out of a spoon didn’t make for a very satisfying meal. And brussels sprouts, well, when you get right down to it, they’re nothing but brussels sprouts.
    And the cold air blowing off the mountain got colder.
    I gave Preston my blanket and managed to convince him I thought it was fun sleeping in my coat, boots, hat, and gloves, but still he got sick and then he got sicker.
    Doc O’Malley, who didn’t seem to notice the difference between the brick homes of Victory and the tents of Canvasburg when the people inside them were sick, listened to Preston’s chest while he lay on his cot and said, “Double pneumonia. One, you need to keep him warm. And two, you need to feed him something besides apricot jam.”
    Luke, who had been hovering in the corner of our tent hanging on Doc O’Malley’s every word, disappeared before he got to “two.”

Margaret
    2014
    WE DON’T CALL IT A GIFT. I did once, entirely by accident. The word just slipped out the way words sometimes do when you’re trying to read a