Free Duet for Three by Joan Barfoot Page A

easier if you had faith.”
    â€œBut of course it would be easier. Doesn’t that make you suspicious? It’s like following a recipe: a cup of sugar and three tablespoons of old clothes for the Salvation Army, a quarter-pound of butter and a cup of prayer.
    â€œYou know, June, when I was little, learning to cook, I had to follow recipes exactly to get anything to turn out, and I used to watch my mother slap pies together any old way and they’d be so much better than mine. Because the ingredients came so naturally to her she didn’t really have to pay attention — a lump of this and a dash of that, while I had to measure so carefully. But finally it got to seem natural to me, too, and I didn’t have to measure either.
    â€œBut you, you have all those rules like a recipe, and you never get comfortable enough to forget about them. You always have to keep checking. I’d never have been any kind of cook if I’d needed to look up how much sugar a banana cake needs every time I went to make one. I just knew . Why don’t your rules come naturally to you like that, after all these years?”
    â€œOh, Mother, leave me alone. Why do you have to think about food all the time?”
    But of course faith is a recipe. It’s not a bit like cooking, though. Even June can make a cake or a pie fairly well by eye, but if there’s a little too much flour or sugar, or not enough, it’s not particularly important. There’s a range of acceptable taste. Faith is different. It’s one thing or the other, good or bad, enough or not enough. If a cake turns out badly, you can throw it out, but no one takes such a risk with eternal life.
    June does have the feeling, though, that her faith these days is falling short. There are flaws in her motives: a lack of generosity, a shortage of will to cast away her own life, in the manner of martyrs.
    The good thing, the best thing, is not to pray for herself, but for Aggie, for a revelation, a redeeming moment for her. No doubt it is wicked to resent any intrusion by Aggie into her prayers. Also to resent the possibility that He might in fact hear her, and provide Aggie with salvation. What would have been the point then of all June’s efforts, her scrutiny of the rules, if an old sinner like Aggie could win grace at a snap of divine fingers?
    Anyway, at the moment there are chores to be done. She leaves Aggie sitting downstairs while she tackles the plastic sheet. It crackles as she fixes it around Aggie’s mattress. She supposes it will soften, get broken in one way or another, but meanwhile Aggie is going to find it irritating.
    Later, over supper, she looks across the table, watching Aggie’s head bent over her plate, cleaning up the first course quickly, eager for dessert. If she could have chosen, who would she have picked as a mother? Not too many people spring to mind as possibilities.
    Not her aunts. The members of Aggie’s family always struck June as loud and alien. Aggie’s favorite, on the rare occasions when they visited that farm, seemed to be her younger sister, Edith, but June could never see anything special about her. To her they were all, men and women, too brawny for comfort, although in time her own mother became easily the brawniest of them all, and even that farm family seemed a bit taken aback by what she turned into.
    The men, Aggie’s brothers, were big and rough, and in the evenings leaned back on their wooden kitchen chairs, tilting them onto two legs, and laughed and sometimes sang old Scottish songs, bellowing out the words, or crooning them. Occasionally a work-roughened hand would ruffle June’s fine blonde hair, but she was timid and didn’t interest them much. Sometimes when they sang the Scottish tunes, she saw tears in their eyes. “Road to the Isles,” she remembers. She didn’t see why they would feel sad, especially when none of them had ever been to Scotland.
    The