Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart Read Free Book Online Page B

Kaufman has received the invoice,” was all I said.
    Norma raised an eyebrow at me and put down her cards. “It’s nearly dinnertime. Constance and I will finish the noodles.”
    â€œDon’t cut them into squares!” Fleurette called as we left for the kitchen. “They taste better as triangles.”
    On the kitchen table Norma had rolled out the noodles for
Krautfleckerl
and laid a wet towel across the dough. When we were girls in Brooklyn the entire building knew what the Kopp family was having for dinner when the odor of onions, vinegar, caraway, and cabbage filled the hallway.
    â€œIt’s what Fleurette wanted,” Norma said, before I could ask why she was making a hot cabbage dish on a sweltering summer evening. “She was missing Mother all day, and you weren’t here to do anything about it.”
    â€œIt was good of you to play cards with her.” I took a knife and began cutting the noodles. Norma watched me warily from the stove.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” she asked when I made the first cut.
    â€œTriangles.”
    â€œYou’re making a mess of them. Just cut them the way we always do and let Fleurette make her own triangles.”
    â€œBut she doesn’t want it that way. I thought we were making this for her.”
    Norma reached for the knife. “I’ll cut the noodles. You do the cabbage.”
    I pushed her away and sliced a row of perfect squares. “Well, you’re right about Henry Kaufman,” I said. “He is the most ill-mannered young man I’ve ever met. And that gang of thugs he runs around with! What’s a businessman doing with a crowd like that?”
    Norma dropped the noodles into the pot, and a cloud of steam rose up around her. The curls at the back of her neck were slick against her skin. Without turning around, she said, “He was not so happy to see you?”
    â€œNo, he was not. I don’t expect we’ll be getting any money out of him.”
    She banged her spoon against the pot and turned around, waving it at me. “It’s just as well that we forget about Henry Kaufman. I’ve got that boy working on the buggy. He brought over an old runabout the dairy isn’t using. We can ride that until ours is finished.”
    I took a breath and tried to summon the nerve to tell her what had happened. But the air sailed right back out of my mouth the way it came in, and no words followed. What was the point in revisiting the entire awful encounter?
    â€œThat’s just fine,” I said at last. “I’d like to forget about it.”
    Through the kitchen window I could see the neighbor’s pigs pacing in their pen. I tossed our kitchen scraps to them, a small service that earned us a flitch of bacon in the fall. The pigs were still some weeks away from slaughter, but already their bellies dragged in the mud as they staggered around, calling out in their guttural pig language.
    I dropped the pitted stalk of the cabbage into a bowl and looked around for something else to feed them.
    â€œTake the potato peelings,” Norma said, and I did, walking them across the road in the unrelenting heat. The cicadas whined from some distant grove, and the crickets in the tall grass around the dairy pond raised their own chorus, which was not a song at all but just the dull scraping of a hundred blades against each other.
    The pigs grunted and shuffled toward the fence when they saw me coming with my bowl of scraps. With the drone of the countryside all around me, I didn’t notice Henry Kaufman’s motor car until it was nearly on top of me.
    He was driving and there were three men with him. The setting sun kept me from making out their faces, but I thought I could see the young man with the droopy eyes gaping at me, his mouth half open, his front tooth jutting out in a look of perpetual, confounded surprise, and the great hulking figure of the man with the stovepipe arms next to him.