The Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas Read Free Book Online Page A

hadn’t waited for my invitation. She’d probably gotten them in the blackberry patch.
    We walked across the yard, where Mrs. Ritter’s hollyhocks and morning glories were in full bloom despite the heat that wilted man, beast, and even Grover, and sat down on a wooden bench. It was as cool a place as you could find, being in the shade of the sod house that Tom’s grandfather had built when he moved onto the land, way back in the 1870s.
    Now, the old place was a toolshed, but it was still pretty, because somebody had planted trumpet vines to hide the sod, and those orange flowers covered the house and hung down over us, blocking out the sun.
    Rita wiggled back on the bench, then stood up fast and said, “Oh, hell. If it’s not the chiggers, it’s splinters.” She pulled a half-inch sliver out of the back of her leg and sat down again carefully and fanned her face with her hand. “I don’t know what’s worse, the cookstove or the heat out here.”
    “Were you helping with the jam?” I asked.
    “No, I was just heating water to rinse the dinner dishes. Agnes says we have to pour boiling water over everything. I forgot to do that yesterday, and she washed the dishes all over again after I’d dried them and even put them away. Agnes sure knows her onions about dirt. All she does is criticize, criticize, criticize. I wish she’d stop telling people about how I didn’t know the difference between salt and sugar. She’s brought that up ten times, and even if it had happened to someone else, I wouldn’t have thought it was funny. Why, a person who cooks every day could get them mixed up.” Rita pulled a trumpet flower off the vine and put the end in her mouth and sucked out the sweetness.
    “What happened?”
    Rita threw away the blossom and picked another. “1 made a cake, only I used a cup of salt and a pinch of sugar instead of the other way around.”
    “Anybody could do that,” I said, even though it seemed pretty peculiar to me. “Shoot, I bet even Agnes T. Ritter could get them mixed up.”
    “Why do you call her that?” Rita asked me, pretending the flower was a little horn and blowing through it. “Why do you always call her Agnes T. Ritter instead of just Agnes?”
    The question made me blink. She’d been Agnes T. Ritter all her life, and I’d forgotten why, so I had to stop a minute to remember. “We started calling her that when we were kids. You know that baby rhyme, ‘Jack, be nimble, Jack, be quick?’ Well, one day Floyd said, ‘Agnes T. Ritter, Agnes T. Quick.’ And Agnes T. Ritter got so mad that it just naturally stuck.”
    “I can tell she doesn’t like it. She frowned every time you called her that at the club meeting. She frowns a lot.” Rita seemed pleased about that. She peered through the end of the trumpet flower as if it were a spyglass. “How come you’re called Queenie Bean?”
    “Because that’s my name.”
    “Oh.” Rita scratched the back of her neck, and I could see a little red chigger bump. “Try not to scratch. It’s better if you don’t,” I told her. “Sometimes a little butter and salt mixed together help.”
    Rita made a face.
    “You don’t eat it,” I said quickly. “You rub it on the welt.” I didn’t tell her Grover used tobacco spit.
    Rita stretched back, leaning her head against the dry wire grass of the soddy behind her, and that was when I realized she was pregnant. Seeing me look at her stomach, she said, “Six months. It seems like ages.”
    I started counting backward, and Rita knew right off what I was doing. “December. We were married the end of December. I got pregnant the first month,” she said. “Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Everybody counts. Agnes even counted out loud.”
    “Well, I’m sorry,” I said.
    “Me, too. I didn’t want a baby right off.”
    “Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean the counting. I think you’re so lucky to have a baby.”
    “You can have it,” Rita said. I must have looked shocked, because she