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

added, “Queenie, it was a joke.” She didn’t sound like it was a joke, however.
    Rita was quiet for a minute. A hummingbird stopped in midair and stuck its beak down the throat of an orange trumpet, then flew off.
    “I like the green hummingbirds best. The red ones are mean,” I said, changing the subject. It wasn’t polite for me to talk about the baby if Rita didn’t want to.
    But she changed it right back. “I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, it’s nice to have a baby, only with things the way they are, it’s not a very good time. Sometimes I get awfully down in the dumps. Agnes said getting pregnant is all my fault. Maybe she doesn’t know it takes two to tango.”
    “Agnes T. Ritter is sour cherries,” I said indignantly.
    “Agnes is bad cheese.” Rita giggled.
    “Agnes T. Ritter is stepping into fresh cow pie—in your bare feet.”
    “Are cow pies what I think they are?” Rita asked. I nodded, and she laughed so hard, she bent over double and then sat up straight, as if she’d picked up another splinter.
    “You all right?” I asked.
    Rita put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a needle. “I forgot this was here,” she said. She took out a wadded-up quilt square and held it up for me to see. “It’s bum, isn’t it?” It was.
    “You’ll learn. My first one was worse than that,” I told her, although that wasn’t true. I’d worked so hard on my first piece of patchwork that it had turned out to be almost perfect. But I wanted us to have more in common than being short and not liking Agnes T. Ritter, which was nothing special. Everybody didn’t like Agnes T. Ritter. Then I reminded myself Agnes T. Ritter was a member of the Persian Pickle Club, so I had to like her and be her friend.
    “I don’t seem to get the hang of it,” Rita said. “I keep pricking my fingers.”
    “Put rubbing alcohol on them. It’ll toughen them up.”
    Rita ironed the patches with her hand, then put the thread hanging down from the back of the patch through the needle. The thread was dirty. “The needle’s as sticky as that awful fly-paper Mom hangs in the kitchen. Well, I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it,” Rita said, wadding up the patchwork and throwing it between us on the bench.
    Instead of letting Rita know I was too dumb to get what she said about spinach, I picked up the quilting and said, “There’s nobody who can sew in this weather except Ella Crook.”
    “She’s a funny one. I can’t exactly figure her out. She looks like she’d fall down if you blew on her, but she walked all the way up here for a visit in the awful sun yesterday and didn’t even work up a sweat. She hardly said two words when she got here, just handed Tom a plate of fudge and muttered something about remembering how much he liked it. I thought she didn’t like me, but Tom says she’s as shy as anybody he ever met. Is that so?”
    “Yes. Even when you get to know her, she doesn’t say much.”
    “How come she takes in sewing? She couldn’t make much money at it, what with everybody in such a pickle about money just now. Who can afford to send out sewing?”
    “She’s alone, kind of a widow. She has to make do. We all help her out a little when we can.”
    “Does she live with that busybody?”
    “Mrs. Judd? No, but Mrs. Judd looks out for her. We all do.” I pressed my finger on the main seam of Rita’s sewing so that it lay flat. “It helps if you iron the seams open before you start the next row,” I said, changing the subject. “Do you have a thimble?”
    “I can’t use one,” Rita said, and I could tell I had my work cut out for me in making Rita a quilter.
    “What do you mean, ‘kind of a widow’? Where’s her husband?” Rita asked.
    “Whose?”
    “Ella Crook’s?”
    With Ben Crook, it was best to let sleeping dogs lie, as Nettie put it. I wanted to change the subject again, but Rita was looking at me with such curiosity, I knew she wouldn’t let me. “Nobody knows,” I