Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Emma Murphy narrowed her eyes. “That’s very generous. I’ll consider,” she said, in the exact tone his mother had always used to pretend to consider turning down help.

“Okay, then,” he said, instead of Very well, then, which was what he’d learned to say from his father-in-law. “I’ll see that you get what you need, for the press.”

She stood. She was older than he’d realized, maybe eight or ten years his senior, and taller, too, and he was struck, looking up at her (her mistake in standing before he’d stood irritating and attracting him), at how completely unknown she was to him. He loved Susannah. She was as essential, as inextricable from his life as his own hands or feet; it was the roll of her body toward him each morning, her long, horsey braid in his face, her Lady Esther Four-Purpose Face Cream — scented skin that righted him and sent him out into the day whole. He loved Susannah as much as he ever had — it wasn’t the amount but rather the nature of his love that had changed. He felt for her now what he imagined one might feel for a sister. Most days, that passed in his mind as enough.

“I may come myself,” he said to Emma Murphy.

“You oughtn’t.” Finally, she looked away.

“True,” he said, opening the door and showing her out with a sweep of his arm that would appear dismissive to an onlooker. “But I may.”

Washington Street wound through Lanesville as close to the coves as a road could run, rearing up with the hills, skidding this way and that as the stone walls dictated. The earliest walls had been built before the road. You could still see where they had been taken apart to make way for the new lanes that climbed from Washington Street to the woods. These — among them Leverett Street — were not so new anymore, though many of the houses lining them still looked temporary: built hastily for quarrymen, their walls were thin, their doorsteps missing roofs to shield a person from the rain, their roofs cheap paper requiring frequent patching, lending the houses a disheveled appearance, even if they were well cared for.

The Murphy house was somewhere in the middle, better or worse cared for depending on the year, and Roland’s mood, and how old the oldest boys living at home were at a given time. At this time it was suffering one of its more neglected moments because Emma Murphy and her children were spending all their energies on the perry shack and Roland was away. Seven paces from the house — a few more, if you were a child — in the small yard that separated their house from the next, shaded by an old, swaybacked oak tree and assorted beech and bramble that had grown up alongside it, an outline of a cellar had been knifed into the dirt. Here Liam and Jeffrey dug with their father’s big shovels while Janie and Anne, using the oak’s trunk as a vertical sort of sawhorse, measured pine planks for the shack’s walls, and the youngest ones, Maggie and Joshua, dug with shells at the cellar’s boundary. Their other sister, Lucy Pear, had taken them to Plum Cove Beach to find the shells. She was the one who had measured the cellar’s outline and thought of using a knife — their hoe was too dull — and then cut the outline herself. She was the one who had bushwhacked through the trees dividing their yard from the next and asked Mr. Davies if he was planning to use the pile of knotty pine boards behind his house.

The boards were discards from a barn he was done building, and Mr. Davies was kind. Still, the girl’s audacity astonished Emma. Lucy had always seemed older than her years, but she had not always seemed capable of brashness. As an infant she had been so calm that Emma worried she would get trampled — for a time, she even convinced herself that Lucy might be dumb, that she had been left because of a defect or injury and that no one but Emma would ever want her. This was when Roland was still telling Emma to find the baby another home: Drop her at the orphanage at Salem, come on now. As a mother of five, soon to be six, Emma knew he was right. She was sorry — she saw how hard he worked, saw his daily, degrading amazement: it was never enough. But Lucy’s calm, the way she looked at Emma as she sucked, not tugging or bucking, only looking, her fawn-colored cheeks sighing in and out, her dark eyes locked on Emma’s until, without warning, they rolled gratefully back, opened up a hole in Emma, a new, bloody tunnel through her heart.

Roland disapproved of the nursing, too. But Emma argued it was cheaper than evaporated milk, and this was true, so she got her way, and soon enough Roland fell for Lucy, too, stopping to watch her suck, tickling the bottoms of her feet. At first Emma’s breasts, having weaned Jeffrey three months before, gave only a watery trickle, but then milk began to flow, and Lucy drank steadily, with that strange, almost unnerving calm. Even her fussing was gentle, more coo than cry.

Emma wondered if Lucy was dumb because then keeping Lucy could pass for a kind of selflessness. But Lucy turned out not to be at all dumb, only even-tempered and kind. She had the steady energy of a woman by the time she was eight, along with a boy’s knack for physical work, for pieces and parts and how they fit together, how things worked. Now almost ten, she had become a leader among the children. She led them now, pointing with a hammer to show her sisters how to measure straight despite the board’s knots. Emma sat on a stump trying to read a pamphlet she’d sent away for — blandly titled PEAR VARIETIES, though its real subject was perry — but Lucy’s voice kept distracting her. “Like that. No, a little to the right. Yes, there. Good. But now you have to check the angle….” Emma looked to see Janie’s reaction — always she watched to see if her other girls would grow tired of Lucy’s bossing. But she had her way about her. And Janie, while not a pushover, liked clear direction. She did as Lucy said, then tucked her pencil proudly behind her ear. Emma smiled. She was glad for the distraction. Perry was more complicated than she had thought. It was not simply cider made with pears. Pears had to stand longer than apples before you crushed them, and then the pulp had to stand before you crushed it. There were tannins to clear and possible “hazes” that could ruin it and “gravity” to check and other things Emma didn’t understand. She had little memory or patience for such details, or any details at all, really — though the neighbors might have guessed otherwise, Emma had tunneled through the years of boiling potatoes in time for supper and captaining the transfer of clothing from larger to smaller children and overseeing the basic hygiene and nail clipping of nine children perpetually on the verge of chaos. There was little grace involved. And now the perry seemed to require particular perry pears, not eating pears, but they would have to use eating pears because that’s all that was grown on Cape Ann, so perhaps the instructions would have to be adjusted — but how? She could not ask the perry maker she had boasted to Josiah Story about. She knew the man because she had been selling him their stolen pears over the years, but now she would be competing with him. He would not give her a recipe or help her solve yet another problem: their timing was off. The fermentation process was much longer than Emma had realized. The perry would not be ready this fall — not even close. What had she been thinking? Of money, of course. She had not understood.

“You look worried.”

Lucy came without warning, swinging her hammer silently against her palm.

Emma removed her teeth from her lower lip, attempted another smile. “No,” she said, “not worried.”

Lucy knelt down next to Emma’s stump. “Josiah Story’s not coming, is he.”