The Grass Widow by Nanci Little Page A

jeans from the sideboard; Joss took them more out of reflex than wanting to. “You can have your privacy, or I’ll wash your back for you.”
    Joss eyed the clothes in her hands. “Well,” she murmured. “I guess you got told, sister.” And now, clean and freshly-dressed, she considered the drumstick and thigh of chicken Aidan had put on her plate with the same expression she had aimed at the clean clothes: disbelief at the oddity of such a thing.
    Aidan added a spoonful of fresh peas to her cousin’s plate.
    “Eat. If you work like you did today without food enough to sustain such effort, I’ll be back where I started this uncommon adventure: nowhere else to go and you collapsing before my very eyes.” She cut into the pan of cornbread she had made. “I don’t know about this johnnycake. I followed your mother’s recipe, but it doesn’t look like any johnnycake I ever saw.”
    Joss broke off a corner and tasted it. “I’d wager you used grits, not corn meal. It don’t taste bad; it’s just a little—” She stopped in the name of diplomacy; it was hard as a brickbat. “Corn meal’s in the lard tin with the C on the lid. Grits is marked with a G.”
    Diplomatic again, she added, “Them two look a lot alike, don’t they, Cs an’ Gs.”
    She ate a piece of the unusual bread with what Aidan had served her, and another piece with a wing of the chicken, and a fat slice of pecan pie (that morning Aidan had opened a lard can she hadn’t dared unlid before, fearing what she might find,
     
    and discovered it full of shelled pecans). “Flora Washburn’s got a whole orchard,” Joss told her when she cut the pie. “Must be a hundred trees. Ethan was goin’ by one day an’ on a whim he stopped an’ asked what she’d get for a flour sack of ‘em. ‘Boy,’
    she says, ‘you can take home whatever you can carry,’ thinkin’ he only had that one sack he’d showed her. Well, he’d been on his way to the miller—that’s Mister Nissen; he gives a penny apiece for sacks back. He must’ve had a quarter’s worth of ’em. T’ain’t hard work or he’d’ve never picked ’em all full. He said Flora like to died laughin’ watchin’ him try to hang all them sacks o’ nuts all over Charley. We was all the winter crackin’ his damn pecans. The shells’re good to light the stove in the mornin’, though. Flare right up on the leastest coals.”
    “I hope the pie’s better than the cornbread,” Aidan said; Joss was touching the rolled edge of the crust with a tine of her fork, trying to get it to flake. “I used to help Mrs. MacGuire fill the shells, but she’d never let me touch the crust.”
    Joss forked a healthy bite into her mouth. “Damn near good as Ma’s,” she allowed, and cleaned up the first piece and had another small sliver. “Let me know next time an’ I’ll help you with the crust. You got this one almost right. A tad short, but pie crust’s awful hard to learn.”
    Clean, her belly full, her back warm from the dying woodstove, Joss was nodding before Aidan finished stacking the dishes. “Stay put. I’ll do them,” Aidan said gently, and when the dishes were washed she woke Joss only enough to make her easy to lead from the table to her room.
    “I c’n do it,” Joss mumbled, fumbling for buttons when Aidan would have helped her out of her jeans. “Ain’ all that tired.”
    She let her try; she ended up doing it anyway, and she turned back the covers and guided Joss into the bed. “Sleep well,” she said at the door; she knew Joss hadn’t the night before or she never would have been in bed past the rooster’s alarm. Joss made a noise that might have been a response or the beginning of a snore, and Aidan closed the door and went to finish the last small details of cleaning up her kitchen.
     
    The Bull and Whistle was a quiet place on a Sunday night; most of the wives of Washburn Station forbade their men to take a drink or play a card on the Sabbath, but there was a