The woman busied herself lighting the stove. Her braids fell forward.
"I forgot to ask your name. Mine's Mavis Albright."
"People call me Connie."
"I'd appreciate some coffee, Connie, if you got any."
Connie nodded without turning around.
"You work here?"
"I work here." Connie lifted her braids from her chest and dropped them behind her shoulders.
"Is any of the family here? Seem like I knocked for the longest time."
"No family. Just her upstairs. She couldn't answer the door if she wanted to and she don't want to."
"I'm headed out by California. You think you can help me get some gas back to my car? Show me the way out of here?" The woman sighed at the stove but didn't reply.
"Connie?"
"I'm thinking."
Mavis looked around the kitchen that seemed to her as large as her junior high school cafeteria and that also had swinging wooden doors. She imagined rooms full of rooms beyond those doors. "You all ain't scared out here by yourselves? Don't seem like there's nothing for miles outside."
Connie laughed. "Scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside." She turned from the stove with a bowl and placed it before Mavis, who looked in despair at the steaming potatoes, over which a pat of butter melted. The Early Times drunk turned her hunger into nausea but she said thank you and accepted the fork in Connie's hand. Anyway, the smell of the coffee was promising. Connie sat down next to her. "Maybe I go with you," she said. Mavis looked up. It was the first time she saw the woman's face without the sunglasses. Quickly she looked back at the food and poked the fork into the bowl.
"What you say me and you go to California?"
Mavis felt, but could not face, the woman's smile. Had she washed her hands before warming up the potatoes? Her smell was walnuts, not pecans. "What about your job here?" Mavis forced herself to taste a tiny bit of potato. Salty.
"It's by the sea, California?"
"Yeah. Right on the coast."
"Be nice to see water again." Connie kept her eyes on Mavis' face.
"Wave after wave after wave. Big water. Blue, blue, blue, yes?"
"That's what they say. Sunny California. Beaches, oranges…"
"Maybe too sunny for me." Connie got up abruptly and went to the stove.
"Can't be sunnier than here." The butter, salt and pepper mashed into the potatoes wasn't all that bad. Mavis was eating rapidly. "Go for miles and don't see a speck of shade."
"True," said Connie. She placed two cups of coffee and a pot of honey on the table. "Too much sunshine in the world. Vex me. Can't take it no more."
A breeze swept through the kitchen door, displacing the food smell with a sweeter one. Mavis had thought she would gulp the coffee when it arrived, but the satisfaction of the hot, salty potatoes made her patient. Following Connie's example she spooned honey into her cup, stirring slowly.
"Did you think up anything about how I can get me some gasoline?"
"Wait awhile. Today maybe, tomorrow maybe. People be out to buy."
"Buy? Buy what?"
"Garden things. Things I cook up. Things they don't want to grow themselves."
"And one of them can take me to get some gas?"
"Sure."
"Suppose nobody comes?"
"Always come. Somebody always come. Every day. This morning already I sold forty-eight ears of corn and a whole pound of peppers." She patted her apron pocket.
Blowing gently into her cup, Mavis went to the kitchen door and looked out. When she first arrived she was so happy to find someone at home she had not looked closely at the garden. Now, behind the red chair, she saw flowers mixed in with or parallel to rows of vegetables. In some places staked plants grew in a circle, not a line, in high mounds of soil. Chickens clucked out of sight. A part of the garden she originally thought gone to weed became, on closer inspection, a patch of melons. An empire of corn beyond.
"You didn't do all that by yourself, did you?" Mavis gestured toward the garden.
"Except the corn," said Connie.
"Wow."
Connie put the breakfast bowl in the sink. "You want to clean yourself up?"
The rooms full of rooms Mavis imagined to be lying through the swinging doors had kept her from asking to go to a bathroom. Here in the kitchen she felt safe; the thought of leaving it disturbed her. "I'll wait to see who comes by. Then I'll try to get myself together. I know I look a sight." She smiled, hoping the refusal did not signal her apprehension.
"Suit yourself," said Connie and, sunglasses in place, patted Mavis' shoulder as she stepped into her splayed shoes and on out to the yard.
Left alone Mavis expected the big kitchen to lose its comfort. It didn't. In fact she had an outer-rim sensation that the kitchen was crowded with children-laughing? singing? — two of whom were Merle and Pearl. Squeezing her eyes shut to dissipate the impression only strengthened it. When she opened her eyes, Connie was there, dragging a thirty-two-quart basket over the floor. "Come on," she said. "Make yourself useful."
Mavis frowned at the pecans and shook her head at the nutcrackers, picks and bowls Connie was assembling. "No," she said. "Think of something else I can do to help. Shelling that stuff would make me crazy."
"No it wouldn't. Try it."
"Uh uh. Not me." Mavis watched as she organized the tools.
"Shouldn't you put some newspaper down? Be easier to clean up."
"No newspapers in this house. No radio either. Any news we get have to be from somebody telling it face-to-face."
"Just as well," Mavis said. "All the news these days is bad as can be.
Can't do nothing about it anyway."
"You give in too quick. Look at your nails. Strong, curved like a bird's-perfect pecan hands. Fingernails like that take the meat out whole every time. Beautiful hands, yet you say you can't. Make you crazy. Make me crazy to see good nails go to waste." Later, watching her suddenly beautiful hands moving at the task, Mavis was reminded of her sixth-grade teacher opening a book: lifting the corner of the binding, stroking the edge to touch the bookmark, caressing the page, letting the tips of her fingers trail down the lines of print. The melty-thigh feeling she got watching her. Now, working pecans, she tried to economize her gestures without sacrificing their grace. Connie, having launched her into the chore, was gone, saying she had to "see about Mother." Sitting at the table, smelling the pleasure the wind brought through the door, Mavis wondered how old Connie's mother was. Judging by the age of her daughter, she would have to be in her nineties. Also, how long before a customer would come? Had anybody bothered the Cadillac yet? At whatever gas station she got to, would there be a map showing the way back to sweet 70, or even 287? She would go north then, to Denver, then scoot west. With luck she'd be on her way by suppertime. With no luck, she'd be ready to leave in the morning. She would be back on concrete, listening to the car radio that had got her through the silence Bennie left, hours of nonstop driving-two fingers impatiently twirling for the better song, the nicer voice. Now the radio was across a field, down one road, then another. Off. In the space where its sound ought to be was… nothing. Just an absence, which she did not think she could occupy properly without the framing bliss of the radio. From the table where she sat admiring her busy hands, the radio absence spread out. A quiet, secret fire breathing itself and exhaling the sounds of its increase: the crack of shells, the tick of nut meat tossed in the bowl, cooking utensils in eternal adjustment, insect whisper, the argue of long grass, the faraway cough of cornstalks.
It was peaceful, but she wished Connie would return lest she start up again-imagining babies singing. Just as the length of the woman's absence seemed much too long, Mavis heard a car crunching gravel. Then braking. A door slap.