All Together in One Place Read Online Free PDF

in. “Poor people have poor ways, you know. Did you put spices in that pie, Elizabeth? It is Elizabeth, isn't it? I never can taste a thing, but sometimes I think I can smell spices.”
    Elizabeth nodded her head to the questions. “No harm in wishing good things for our kin, I'd guess,” Elizabeth said. “Best things we mamas do.”
    Then Mazy's mother left to organize the food on the table and turned back to talk with Kay Krall and Janie Switzler, women watching toddlers waddling on the grass. Mazy heard the younger women laugh, noticed her mother join in.
    Her mother fit like a hand-cobbled shoe, as though she'd always been a part of Cassville. Mazy guessed it was Elizabeth's backwoods upbringing, with a dozen cousins living close by, that let her turn everyone into family. It was a trait Mazy longed for in herself
    “Is Tyrell leaving soon?” Mazy asked Adora.
    “Not soon enough.” She opened and closed the clasp on her wrist purse without ever looking inside. “Truth is, I've a worry she might just run off. I know I'll watch her like a cornered bear the day he leaves and for two weeks after. He could have joined up before this—I wish he had. Tiptons keeping him here, in a daze, with all her flirting. Look at her,” Adora said, but Mazy heard pride rolled into the words of scoldTipton Wilson laughed. The girls high cheekbones flushed rose, a color Mazy guessed she'd pinched into them just before she swirled open her parasol for shade. Petite and blond and draped in blue—including the stones in her ears—she was the Wilsons’ only daughter. The girl didn't just stand between her father and Tyrell, she composed the center of the circle. She stared up at her intended, flashing even, white teeth clasped together as though she posed for a portrait and had been told not to move a muscle. Tipton blinked long eyelashes, touched a gloved finger to her cheek. She spoke and the men laughed. Tyrell Jenkins's face splotched pink in the bare places free of his rhubarb red beard.
    “She'll be a handful for any husband,” Adora sighed.
    “Desserts are fixing to spoil,” Mazy's mother interrupted. “And my stomach's agrowling.”
    The women signaled their men, who headed for the tables. Tipton and Tyrell walked as though weighted, their heads bent in conversation.
    Mazy noticed Tipton's brother loitering behind, his gartered shirt sleeve pressed at his shoulder against the tree. That odd notch out of his ear silhouetted against the light. He tossed something shiny in his palm, coins it looked like, clinking upward without his watching His eyes stared at Tipton instead, a glare until he noticed Mazy watching. A half smile formed at one corner of his pursed lips. He made no move to join the others.

    Hathaway asked the blessing over the brown betty pudding, cobbler, cookies, and pies. Elizabeth had baked Mazy's favorite raisin pie; the plump fruit had been carried in spring water in a crock jar all the way from Milwaukee. Light conversation filtered over the eaters, in between bites and batting at horseflies, gentle chastisements of children. Toddlers scampered beneath the lilac bushes, the ribbons on the girls’ dresses limp and the boys’ knees covered with grass stains. A half-dozen dogs laybeneath wagons. Pig panted in the shade of a buckboard while food and well-wishing were washed down with sun tea. Mazy thought of the pleasantness of this place, these people, and swallowed back tears.
    Finally filled, they said good-bye, hugs and hands patting on backs. The women expressed good wishes with a sense of relief, Mazy thought, relief that it was she leaving and not any of them. She looked around her. These were good people, but she'd become close to none these two years past. Perhaps that was a blessing.

    “I've made a decision,” Jeremy said.
    The three of them rode home through the timber, the mules clop-clopping like a grandfather clock on the packed road. The squeak of the leather and the swish of the mules’