It was the first time since her arrival that she hadn’t had to choose her purchases based on what she was able to carry home, and today she was stocking up.
She pulled a shopping cart from the stack and was moving toward the baking aisle when Alice Amos waved at her from the checkout stand.
“Hi, Cathy! Good to see you out and about.”
Cathy smiled. “Thanks. It feels good to be mobile again.”
The greeting was nothing more than a simple hello between acquaintances, but it made Cathy feel like she belonged. Someone knew her. And the longer she was here, the more people she would meet. It felt good just to be in the world where someone else knew her name.
After that, she got down to serious shopping, and by the time she checked out and loaded up to go home, there were seven sacks of groceries in the back of her car. Canned goods. Baking goods. Extra cuts of meat for her freezer. Fresh vegetables and eggs. Extra dairy. And since Duke had mentioned it was his favorite soft drink, she had a six-pack of Coke. Now all she had to do was get home, unload it, and put it away.
But having a car made her curious about parts of Blessings she’d never seen, and for the first time since she’d come, she turned left at the end of town instead of right and drove down across old railroad tracks into a neighborhood far less welcoming than she would have imagined.
The poverty level here was a slap-in-the-face reality, which didn’t go along with the image she had of this little town. People had been so good to help her. Why weren’t they helping down here as well?
She only drove through a couple of blocks before she realized people were aware of her presence. She was a stranger in their neighborhood, and they were wary. She didn’t want them to feel anxious in any way, so she turned at the end of the block and left.
But the memory of that place, and the hopelessness she’d felt, stayed with her.
* * *
Moses Gatlin went to town to pick up some new skirting to winterize their old trailer house. Georgia wasn’t known for hard winters, but weather was so strange these days that they didn’t want to take a chance on their pipes freezing.
J.B. stayed behind to finish removing the old skirting and clean up around the trailer. They didn’t have a lawn mower, but they’d set their trailer where the old house used to be, and the grass didn’t grow much where it had exploded and burned. Still, there were enough grass and weeds around the steps and at the ends of the trailer to make the place look shabby. And now that they were in the money from the cattle-rustling venture, J.B. was trying to elevate their lifestyle.
So he went to the toolshed to poke around for some kind of clippers and found his granddaddy’s old scythe instead. He had vague memories of the old man using it to cut the grass down back in the day and decided if Granddaddy could do it, so could he.
But the scythe was rusty as hell and hadn’t had an edge sharpened on it in at least two generations, so he took it back to the trailer, got the whetstone they used to sharpen their hunting and kitchen knives, and set to work.
It took a while to get that rust off before J. B. could even begin to start whetting the cutting edge, but he knew how to do it. He’d been at it for almost an hour when he finally paused, then ran his thumb lightly against the edge to see if he had it sharp enough to take down the grass. After a couple more strokes of the whetstone, he set that aside and got up to try it. When it took the tops off the grass without effort, he grinned.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” he said, and began swinging it back and forth across the grass, just like he remembered Granddaddy doing it.
A few minutes later, he heard the sound of their old truck coming up the road. That meant Moses was back, and J. B. wasn’t quite through. In his haste to finish up, he moved closer to the concrete steps than he meant to, and on the downswing, the tip of the scythe hit the hard surface and bounced right back against his leg. He screamed out in