Chapter 2 - The Jar on the Refrigerator
The kitchen smelled of boiled cabbage and old laundry. It was a cold smell, the kind that settled into the curtains and refused to leave no matter how high the landlord set the radiator, which was never very high anyway.
Emma placed the purple cat purse on the formica table. The plastic chairs had chrome legs that pitted with rust near the floor, and when she sat down, her wet knees made a quiet stick-peel sound against the vinyl. She took off the rubber band, unzipped the broken track with her fingernail, and emptied the contents.
Three dimes. Two nickels. Three pennies. One sticky quarter.
Lily sat across from her, hands tucked under her thighs to warm them. Her cheeks were still blotched pink from the wind outside Barlow Recycling, and her hair, the exact shade of spun wheat as Emma’s, was drying into damp, messy ringlets around her ears.
"Where is the jar?" Lily asked.
Emma didn't answer right away. She pulled the plastic chair closer to the counter, stepped onto the seat, and reached up toward the top of the refrigerator where the dust was thickest. Her fingers scraped against glass until she found the heavy rim of the wide-mouth Mason jar.
It was an old pickle jar, scrubbed clean until the glass was cloudy. Inside lay a crumpled collection of five-dollar bills, three worn ones, a handful of silver, and dozens of pennies that made a dry, hollow sound when Emma tipped the new forty-three cents into the mouth.
She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a blue crayon—the stubby kind from kindergarten that had lost its paper wrapper long ago—and a piece of ruled paper torn from an old notebook.
Oct 12 — Cans — .43
Her handwriting was round and strained, the O too big, the t crooked. She pushed the slip into the jar, letting it float down onto the pile of copper.
"How much now?" Lily asked, leaning forward until her nose nearly touched the glass.
Emma counted slowly, moving her lips without making a sound. Her fingers traced the numbers through the dirty glass. "Forty-seven dollars and sixteen cents."
Lily’s eyes widened. "That’s almost fifty."
"Fifty isn't enough," Emma said, stepping down from the chair and pushing it back to the table with a loud scrape. "The lady at the pharmacy said the green bottle costs three hundred."
"Three hundred?" Lily repeated the number as if it were a word in a foreign language. "Is three hundred a thousand?"
"No. But it’s big."
From the bedroom down the short, carpeted hallway came a cough. It wasn't the loud, angry cough of a man in a alley, or the wet, sputtering cough of a child with a cold. It was a thin, dry sound, like paper being rubbed together in a dark room.
The girls went quiet.
They moved together, their duck-taped sneakers making almost no sound on the worn linoleum.
The bedroom was small. The blinds were pulled down, but two slats were bent, letting in a single stripe of gray afternoon light that cut across the foot of the bed. Beneath the heavy wool quilt lay Clara Wilson.
She was thirty-two, though her wrists looked like the dry twigs the girls picked up in the park after a storm. Her dark hair was combed back from her forehead, damp with a cold sweat that smelled faintly of iron and vinegar. When she heard their feet on the floor, her eyes opened. They were light blue, the same color as the girls', but clouded around the edges, like water left out in a bucket overnight.
"You two," she murmured. Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, raspy from hours of silence. "Where have you been?"
Emma reached the side of the bed first. She laid her small, cold hand over her mother’s knuckles. "Outside."
"The alley?" Clara’s eyes shifted to Lily, who stood near the closet, her thumb tucked into her mouth—a habit she only fell back on when she was frightened. "Emma... I told you not to go near the bins behind the bakery."
"We didn't go to the bakery," Emma said smoothly, her voice dropping into that calm, flat tone she used whenever she was telling a small lie to keep things quiet. "We just walked down Oakwood. Looking at the dog in the window."
Clara stared at her daughter’s eyes for a long moment, looking for the truth, but Emma had already learned how to keep her face still. Clara closed her eyes again with a slow, heavy sigh that made her collarbones stand out like knives under her nightgown.
"The soup is on the stove," Clara whispered. "Warm it up for yourselves. Don't touch the big burner."
"We know, Mommy," Lily said, stepping closer now that her mother wasn't scolding them. "We know how to use the small one."
Clara reached out, her hand trembling as she touched Lily’s damp hair. "My good girls. My brave little birds." Her voice trailed off into another raspy breath, and within two minutes, her fingers slacked against the sheet. She had drifted back into the gray, heavy sleep that took up most of her days now.
The girls went back to the kitchen.
They didn't turn on the light. The kitchen didn't need light for them to know where the wooden spoon was, or where the two mismatched plastic bowls sat on the lower shelf.
Emma dragged a stool to the stove, turned the dial until the small gas burner clicked three times and caught with a blue pop, then set the cold pot of vegetable broth over the flame.
"Is Mommy going to die?" Lily asked from the table. She was playing with the broken zipper of her cat purse.
Emma didn't turn around. She watched the gray bubbles begin to form around the edge of the pot. "No."
"The man at the store said forty-three cents wouldn't save anybody."
"He doesn't know anything," Emma said, her small hand gripping the handle of the wooden spoon so hard her knuckles turned white. "He just weighs things. That’s all he does. He just weighs dirty metal."
"He was big," Lily said softly.
"Big doesn't mean smart." Emma took two spoons from the drawer and set them on the table. "Tomorrow we’re going down to the train tracks. There are bigger cans down there. The blue ones from the beer."
"The tracks are dirty, Emma."
"Dirty cans give the same money as clean ones," Emma said. She poured the lukewarm broth into two yellow bowls. "Ray Barlow has to take them either way. The law says he has to."
May you like
She sat down across from her sister, pushed the spoon into Lily’s hand, and watched her take her first bite.
Outside, the rain had stopped, replaced by a bitter, thick fog rolling off the river. It crept against the windowpane, blurring the yellow streetlights of Oakwood until they looked like dying sparks in the dark.
