The Bobcat by Katherine Forbes Riley

Author:Katherine Forbes Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948924115
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2019-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

With their meal served the mother grew expansive again. She’d set out tall glasses filled to the brim with ice and a ruby liquid and explained to Laurelie while they ate how it was made from a Jamaican flower called sorrel that she grew in her greenhouse. The flowers had to be dried thoroughly upside down, she said, and then steeped overnight with sugar and ginger and cloves before adding dark Jamaican rum.

The food and drink reenergized Laurelie as well, and she took in the environment with newfound focus as the woman spoke. The father was eating quietly with eyes on his plate, his forehead creasing with deep lines each time he took a bite. The hiker too gazed down at his food, his movements methodical, his nostrils half-flared. Beyond the table, the patio stretched a few more yards in an interlocking pattern of red brick and tiny white stones before giving way to a sloping lawn. The top of the lawn was still dotted with the flowering redbuds of spring, making her imagine that by traveling north she’d also slipped back in time. Halfway down the slope she could see the glass roof of a greenhouse. The edge of the cleared land was not visible from her seat, but beyond and all around it the woods stretched unbroken, steeply descending to a thin stripe of sea.

“—relie?”

In the silence the last few seconds of sound replayed, calling Laurelie back to her place at the table. She swiveled quickly, flushing to realize how far she’d turned her body away. The mother was smiling at her, but it felt hard and careful, and her eyes looked so much like marbles in the fading light that Laurelie had to suppress the urge to shudder.

“Rafe asked what you were studying at Montague.”

“Art,” said Laurelie, and now the heat of her cheeks was like a brand in the cool evening air.

The father nodded encouragingly, but the mother’s eyebrows drew together into two soft puffs Laurelie recognized from the son’s own face.

“My son was going to be a doctor”—the mother’s eyes tracked now to the hiker’s face, and for a moment her voice faltered as they took in its turbulence— “but he chose to become part of our family business instead. He is much like my grandmother, I think.” Her voice grew stronger as she continued. “She started our business, many years ago. She lived far north where there were no white doctors yet, and no white medicines either. She was known for her skill with plants, and so the white harvesters and lumbermen would come to her with their sicknesses, and she would give them the medicines of her people.” Now the mother’s dark gaze reached for the sea. “The whites called them the Penobscot, but I don’t know what they called themselves. If my mother knew, she never told me. They weren’t allowed to speak their language, and so my mother spoke only English. But she learned their medicines. My grandmother taught her how to find them in the woods and fields, and to cultivate them in her own garden.

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