Whistle Stop by Maritta Wolff

Author:Maritta Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1969-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

THE NEXT MORNING JOSETTE GOT OUT OF BED, dressed and went to school. It was a day that seemed never to end for her, a torment and an agony. She went about classes and books and Ashbury streets all in a haze. There was a strange feeling always with her, a strange gnawing persistent feeling, a feeling of unreality, uncleanness that could not be dispelled. The day was for her a caricature of a nightmare of a day. But it ended at last, and she got out of Nina Warren’s car and walked into the lowering sun, up the uneven wooden front porch steps at home. She went through the house to the kitchen and there she found Molly bent over a cake on the oven door. Molly held the broom in one hand, and broke straws off it and jabbed them down through the cake intently. She straightened up from the hot oven as Josette came in, her face streaming with the heat.

“Lord,” she said crossly, “I swear this is gonna be the last baking I do till the cool weather comes. It ain’t no sense in me baking this kind of weather. Hanging around this hot stove just tuckers me all out. It’s just exactly as cheap to buy your knickknacks from the bakery as to bake ’em here to home this weather. Besides, there ain’t enough of you to home here for meals to pay me the trouble.”

“I saw Jen up to Ashbury this afternoon,” Josette said, filling a water glass out of the pail of warm brackish drinking water, indifferently. “She said to tell you that she wouldn’t be home till late, maybe not till tomorrow.”

Molly shoved the cake back into the oven, closed the door on it gently, and then mopped her face. “Well, for Lord’s sakes, what is she…” Molly sat down hard on the old wooden chair by the door. “Why, say, how did that Cope girl come out with her operation anyway?”

“Not so good,” Josette said. “Jen said they couldn’t remove the tumor. When they got in to it they found out they couldn’t remove it, so they just had to sew her up again. The doctors said she probably couldn’t live over a week or so.”

Molly shook her head and sighed deeply. “Well, it ain’t nothing more than I expected right along. You can’t tell me that them doctors can go fooling around with the inside of somebody’s head and them still alive. It sure is a terrible thing though, when you stop to think, her just a little young girl like that, and nothing they can do for her. Lord, I’ll bet her folks are just all broke up over this.”

Josette set the water glass down, and looked out of the kitchen door to the garden, and the trees and the sky. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a radio blared music into the quiet of the day’s end.

Molly continued conversationally, “And, you know, they say now that that Rita Sibley is a-going to pull through up there to the hospital.

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