The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas Read Free Book Online

out herself if I brought her some paper. Then I said if she did that, I’d trade her the pattern for fabric scraps. It’s funny how quilting draws women together like nothing else.
    After we’d eaten our ice cream and bid the Massies good night, we drove down the old road to the highway. “I’ve got an errand to run. You want me to take you home first?” Grover asked, fiddling with the radio dial in hopes of getting the weather.
    “I guess I’ll go along for the ride. Did you offer him work?”
    Grover chuckled. “I told him a dollar a day wasn’t much, but it was as good as anybody around here ever paid. Blue’ll mend fences, spread manure, do other chores. It won’t be for long.”
    “What about Tom? He’d be glad to work for a dollar a day.”
    Grover thought that over for a minute. “Tom’s got a place to live, and he doesn’t have a family to support. I’ll offer him work at harvest, when I need men, but I can’t ask my best friend to be my hired man.” I understood. I wouldn’t ask Rita to be the hired girl, either.
    Grover and I rode out into the country. In the moonlight, it looked like the Kansas farmland Grover and I knew when we were growing up and there was plenty of water. I could almost smell lilacs and honeysuckle. We passed a fallow field that all of a sudden made me shiver, it was so dried up and ugly, and I slid over next to Grover to get warm. He put his arm around me, asking if I was cold, and I told him I was.
    We drove toward Auburn and stopped at a house just this side of the river. Grover got out of the car and knocked at the back door, spoke with a man for a few minutes, then followed him into a shed. A few minutes later, Grover came back to the car and put a box into the back of the truck.
    I waited until we were on the road again before I said, “Is it a good water pump?”
    Grover put his arm around me and asked how come I was so smart. I turned the dial until I found Fred Waring’s Pennsylva-nians on the Topeka station, and we drove on through the dark without talking. I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep until Old Bob jumped up on the car and Grover said softly, “Wake up, hon-eybunch. We’re home.”

Chapter

3
    I ‘d come to be Rita’s friend. Of course, I couldn’t say anything so silly to her. I told Rita I was there to get to know her better. It took me longer to come calling than I’d planned, what with the Massies moving in and, after that, me having to put up tomatoes and to dry peaches. Bottled tomatoes I like, but dried peaches are a waste of good time, since there’s nothing that tastes worse than dried peach pie, unless it’s a rail fence. Grover likes them, however, but then, Grover likes anything.
    “That’s nice of you, dearie,” Mrs. Ritter said. “You girls go sit out where it’s cool.” Mrs. Ritter smelled like the blackberry jam that was cooking on the stove.
    Rita smelled like a hired hand. Her bangs were plastered to her forehead, and sweat rings stained her dress under her arms. There were blackberry stains on her apron, which was really one of Mrs. Ritter’s and was big enough to go around Rita three or four times.
    Agnes T. Ritter started to take off her apron, too, but Mrs. Ritter spoke up. “Agnes, would you help me with these dishes while we wait for the berries to cook?” Agnes T. Ritter sighed and retied her apron. She filled the teakettle from the pump on the sink and put it on the cookstove.
    “Don’t spill the dishwater on the floor. Nettie says if you do that, you’ll marry a drunk,” I told her.
    I guess it served me right for being mean, because Agnes T. Ritter said right back, “I hear you set up a squatter village on your place.”
    “Agnes!” Mrs. Ritter said. “It’s not our business.”
    “It is if we all get head lice,” she muttered.
    I itched my head for fun and turned to Rita. “Let’s go sit under the trumpet vine and scratch chiggers.” I could see the red welts on Rita’s arms and knew she