Flavors by Emily Sue Harvey Page B

Grandpa’s. Tonight being Sunday, no one shelled peas or broke string beans. But I didn’t want to talk with anyone. With Grandpa’s tale revving up, no one noticed me as I slipped through the screen door into the empty house. It was dark. And I was glad.
    Yet – the silence rang loudly.
    The emptiness of the house washed over me. Cried out. I tried to shut it out, but it was too persistent. My chest began to take on the heaviness of cold, wet concrete again. I peered around in the darkness for a place to be and realized that, for the first time ever, I felt a grown-up anger.
    I went to the pallet laid in an out-of-the-way corner, already occupied by my little sleeping brother, curled up with my arm thrown protectively over him and soon, fell into a deep, restless slumber.

    All week long, I lay around when I wasn’t helping with chores. The empty space left by Maveen howled and groaned. Grandma seemed not to miss a lick with her own chores agenda, though I suspected that Gene’s distancing and simmering anger was beginning to wear her thin.
    I spent much solitude in the meadow on pretty days, thinking about home, where peace and kindness abounded.
    I thought of Maveen, at her mama’s house so close to ours, and suddenly, I wanted to go home so badly I hurt all inside. My tummy ached again and my head throbbed. The next morning, I saw blood stains on the pallet and in my panties. This time, Grandma saw and wordlessly supplied me with pads, homemade but reliable.
    Neediness assailed me. I instinctively cringed from the feeling. I wanted to dive into a hole and pull it in after me to cover
my shame of the ghastly craving. It just wasn’t there for me, the validation and succor for which my very pores screamed and wailed.
    Even Frances, when I helped slop her, ignored me.
    â€œWhy don’t Grandma love me?” I asked Nellie Jane that evening as we lolled in the woods, sampling the first of the muscadines and scuppernongs.
    â€œWhy do you think that?” She seemed truly confused.
    â€œI don’t know,” I spit out the seeds of the still tangy pulp. The purple fruit, so like Concord grapes, was not yet completely ripe. “She just don’t act like she does sometimes.”
    Nellie Jane didn’t say anything else. But the next day, as we took a walk, she said, “I told Ma you didn’t think she loved you. And she said, ‘Why does Sadie think that? She ought to know that I love her.’”
    The words warmed me a bit, but I wondered at the same time why Grandma herself had not reassured me?
    Melancholy stirred inside me like thick sugarcane syrup, the kind Grandpa bought in gallon buckets to feed the fruit of his loins. King’s Golden Syrup. We used tin plates in which – atop the wooden stove – to melt scoops of freshly churned butter, covered it with the golden syrup, stirred it together over heat and sopped it with fluffy, hot buttermilk biscuits.
    The flavor that day was buttery-caramel. A bittersweet blend of missing home and designing my escape.
    A blueprint commenced to form in my brain. On Wednesday, I watched all the adults scatter to their separate chores, older males down to the back bottoms and Grandma to the barn to gather eggs. When Clarence Henry and Doodle-Bug, visiting again, disappeared into the woods to explore, I saw my chance and grabbed Little Joe’s hand.
    â€œC’mon,” I whispered to him, tugging his hand.

    He gazed up trustingly at me with huge, bottomless blue eyes as he toddled along beside me, trying to keep up with my longer stride. We had to hurry. Grandma wouldn’t be at the barn very long. Nellie Jane ironed clothes inside the house, immersed in her favorite radio soap opera, “Our Gal Sunday.”
    Little Joe and I moved quickly up the dirt road that converged into the paved highway, just past the corn patch. The high stalks soon shielded us from view of the farm. I knew that once we