Free The Lost Husband by Katherine Center Page A

family. I gave a little wave as I jogged down the porch steps intothe rain. But before I made it to the truck, I heard her call my name.
    “What?” I shouted back.
    “I promise I will never try to contact your dead husband,” she called out.
    “Okay,” I shouted back. “Good.”
    But Sunshine wasn’t quite finished. “Unless, of course,” she added, “you ask me to.”
    The next morning, as Jean scrambled some hand-gathered barn eggs for the kids and I wriggled them into their clothes for school, I said to Jean, “What do you think of Sunshine?”
    “Oh, well, you know,” Jean said. “Sunshine’s had a long road to travel.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Just that she worked like heck to pull herself together.”
    Another evasive set of answers from Jean. If I’d been asking my mother, I’d have had Sunshine’s life history by now, all the way down to her bra size. But my mom was a talker, and Jean, it appeared, was the opposite. My mom was a gossip, and Jean was a vault. I wondered if they’d been born so different, or if they’d just become that way in response to each other. Either way, I decided to tell Jean my worries about Sunshine. Because if my mother made things worse, maybe Jean could make things better.
    I didn’t want to speak too plainly in front of the kids, so I said, nice and loud, “Has anybody seen Bob Dylan?”
    “He’s behind the barn!” Tank answered.
    “He’s digging a hole,” Abby added.
    “Could y’all go get him for me?” I asked. “I need some dog kisses.”
    The kids scooted out the back door and took off running, and it was only then that I realized they hadn’t eaten yet. I looked at the scrambled egg kebabs Jean was setting on the table for them—which were really just eggs with toothpicks sticking out like bristles. “Remind me to feed them when they get back,” I said.
    We ate the kids’ breakfasts, and they were absolutely delicious.
    “It’s the worms,” Jean explained.
    I stopped chewing for a second to study her face.
    “The worms the chickens eat,” she went on. “Factory chickens just eat grains. Farm chickens, on the other hand, run around eating all kinds of good things. Seeds. Bugs. Worms. Slugs.”
    I winced a little at “slugs.”
    “What’s the word for that?” Jean mused. “The pleasure that comes from eating delicious things?”
    I’d never thought about it. “I don’t think there is one.”
    “That can’t be right,” Jean said. “We must have at least one.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
    “All the words in the English language,” Jean said, “and we left that one out.”
    She squinted and thought for a second. “Mouth-pleasure,” she suggested, but we both wrinkled our noses and shook our heads.
    “Too much,” I said.
    “It needs to be a German word,” she suggested. “Like fahrvergnügen .”
    “Or schadenfreude ,” I added.
    Jean nodded. “One of my favorites.”
    “We need a German dictionary.”
    “Nah,” Jean said. “I speak German.”
    “You do?”
    “Sure,” she said. “All the old farmers around here speak German. Just not the hippies.”
    “I thought you were a hippie.”
    “Well,” she said, “I started out German, but I converted.” Then her eyes drifted to the table as she thought. “  ‘Mund’ is ‘mouth,’ and ‘vergnügen’ is ‘enjoyment.’ ”
    “Mundvergnügen!” I said.
    “Or,” she went on, “  ‘essen’ is ‘food’ and ‘freude’ is ‘pleasure.’ ”
    “Essenfreude,” I said. “I love them both.”
    “Which is better?”
    “I guess we’ll just have to get them both started,” I said, “and see which one catches on.”
    I checked on the kids out the window. They’d climbed on the tire swings. It was almost time to take them to school, and they hadn’t even eaten. But I still wanted to ask about Sunshine.
    “So,” I said to Jean, turning from the window, “Sunshine told me she could talk to the dead.”
    “Oh, dear,” Jean