Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Yes, and what you do then but come home and tell on me your own self. You’s mad at me when I left yesterday, because I didn’t want to sit around after work telling stories. Don’t say you wasn’t.”

“Ida! You know how Mama gets mixed up! All I said was—”

“I’ll tell you why you did it. You’s mad and spiteful that I don’t sit around all night cooking fried chicken and telling stories when I gots to get home and do my own work. After cleaning up for you folks all day.”

Harriet went outside. The day was hot, sun-bleached, soundless. She felt as if she’d just had a tooth filled at the dentist’s, pain blooming plum-black in her rear molars, walking through the glass doors into the glare and withering heat of the parking lot. Harriet, is somebody waiting to pick you up? Yes, ma'am, Harriet always said to the receptionist, whether somebody was waiting or not.

From the kitchen, all was silence. The shutters of her mother’s room were closed. Was Ida fired? Somehow—incredibly—the question caused her no pain or anxiety, only the same dull puzzlement as when she bit hard on the inside of her cheek after a novocaine shot and it didn’t hurt.

I’ll pick her some tomatoes for lunch , said Harriet to herself, and—squinting against the glare—went to the side of the house, to Ida’s little vegetable garden: an unfenced plot, twelve feet square, badly in need of weeding. Ida didn’t have space for a garden where she lived. Though she made them tomato sandwiches every day, she took most of the other vegetables home with her. Almost daily, Ida offered Harriet a kindness of some sort in exchange for help in the garden—a game of checkers, a story—which Harriet always refused; she hated yard-work, could not bear the dust on her hands, or the beetles, or the heat, or the stinging hairs on the squash vines which made her legs itch.

Now her selfishness made her feel sick. Many painful thoughts clustered about, pricking at her ceaselessly. Ida had to work hard all the time … not just here, but at her own house. What did Harriet ever have to do?

Some tomatoes. She’ll like that . She picked some bell peppers too, and okra, and a fat black eggplant: the summer’s first. She piled the muddy vegetables in a small cardboard box and then set to work weeding, gritting her teeth with displeasure. Vegetable plants—save only for the vegetables—looked like overgrown weeds to her, with their sprawling habits and rough, ungainly leaves, so she left what she wasn’t sure about and only pulled the weeds she was certain of: clover and dandelion (easy) and long switches of Johnson grass, which Ida had a tricky way of folding so they made a shrill, unearthy whistle when she put them between her lips and blew a certain way.

But the blades were sharp; and it was not long before one of them had sliced a red seam like a paper cut across the base of her thumb. Harriet—sweating—reared back on her dusty heels. She had some red cloth gardening gloves, child-sized, which Ida Rhew had bought for her at the hardware store last summer, and it made her feel terrible even to think about them. Ida didn’t have much money, certainly not enough to spend on presents; even worse, Harriet disliked the garden so much that she had never worn the gloves, not once. Don’t you like them little gloves I gave you? Ida had asked her, rather sadly, one afternoon while they were sitting on the porch; when Harriet protested, she shook her head.

I do like them, I do. I wear them to play in ….

You don’t have to tell me a story, baby. I’m just sorry you don’t care anything about them .

Harriet’s face burned. The red gloves had cost three dollars—for poor Ida, nearly a day’s work. Now that she thought about it, she realized that the red gloves were the only present that Ida had ever given her. And she had lost them! How could she have been so careless? For a long time, in the winter, they had lain neglected in a galvanized tub in the toolshed, with the pruning shears and the hedge clippers and some other tools of Chester’s….

She left her weeding, uprooted shoots scattered harumscarum across the dirt, and hurried to the toolshed. But the gloves weren’t in the galvanized tub. They weren’t in Chester’s tool-bench, either; they weren’t on the shelf with the flowerpots and fertilizer; they weren’t behind the caked tins of varnish and Spackle and house paint.

On the shelves she found badminton rackets, pruning shears and handsaw, numberless extension cords, a yellow plastic hard hat like construction workers wore; more garden tools, of every description: loppers, rose-snips, weed-fork and shrub rake and three different sizes of trowel; Chester’s own gloves. But not the gloves that Ida had given her. She could feel herself getting hysterical. Chester knows where they are , she told herself. I’ll ask him . Chester only worked on Mondays; on other days, worked either for the county—pulling weeds and cutting grass, in the cemetery—or at odd jobs around town.

She was breathing hard, in the dusty, gasoline-smelling dimness, staring at the litter of tools on the oily floor and wondering where to look next—for she had to find the red gloves; I have to , she thought, her eyes darting over the mess, I’ll die if I’ve lost them —when Hely ran up and poked his head in the door. “Harriet!” he gasped, clinging to the door frame. “We’ve got to go get the bikes!”

“Bikes?” said Harriet, after a confused silence.

“They’re still there! My dad noticed my bike was gone and he’s going to whip me if I’ve lost it! Come on!”

Harriet tried to focus her attention on the bicycles, but all she could think of were the gloves. “I’ll go later,” she said at last.

“No! Now! I’m not going by myself!” “Well, wait a little while, and I’ll—” “No!” Hely wailed. “We have to go now!”

“Look, I’ve got to go in and wash my hands. Put all this junk back on the shelf for me, okay?”

Hely stared at the jumble on the floor. “All of it?”

“Do you remember some red gloves I used to have? They used to be in that bucket there.”

Hely looked at her with apprehension, like she was crazy.

“Garden gloves. Red cloth with elastic at the wrist.”

“Harriet, I’m serious. The bikes have been outside all night. They might not even be there any more.”

“If you find them, just tell me, all right?”

She ran back to the vegetable bed and tossed the weeds she’d pulled into a big, careless pile. Never mind , she told herself, I’ll clean it up later …. Then she snatched up the box of vegetables and ran back into the house.

Ida wasn’t in the kitchen. Quickly, without soap, Harriet rinsed the dirt off her hands at the sink. Then she carried the box into the living room, where she found Ida sitting in her tweed chair with her knees apart and her head in her hands.

“Ida?” Harriet said timidly.

Stiffly, Ida Rhew swung her head around. Her eyes were still red.

“I—I brought you something,” Harriet stammered. She set the cardboard box down on the floor by Ida’s feet.

Dully, Ida stared down at the vegetables. “What am I going to do?” she said, and shook her head. “Where will I go?”

“You can take them home if you want to,” said Harriet helpfully. She picked up the eggplant to show it to Ida.

“Your mama say I don’t do a good job. How I’m supposed to do a good job when she got newspapers and trash stacked clear up the walls?” Ida picked up the corner of her apron and wiped her eyes on it. “All's she pays me is twenty dollars a week. And that ain’t right. Odean over at Miss Libby’s gets thirty-five and she ain’t got a mess like this nor two children to fool with, either.”