Part 10
The divorce was quick. There was nothing between them worth dividing.
Sam went to live with Julia that fall, after she rented a room in Millbridge and found work. The parenting arrangement was settled through the court, with the child welfare assessment considered.
At first she cleaned the school because it was the only job available. In January she became a cook in the cafeteria.
The caseworkers visited, looked around, and spoke to Sam.
“I want to be with Mom,” he said.
They asked whether he was afraid she would get sick again. He thought before answering. The woman with the dragonfly brooch was quiet afterward.
“She wasn’t sick. They were giving her something.”
A month later he brought Julia a sheet from an old drawing notebook, folded into quarters.
It was the family picture. The house, the crooked apple tree, the sun in the corner. His father to one side, his grandmother by the porch, a boy in the middle, and his mother standing.
“I hid it for two years,” Sam said. “Grandma told me not to draw you like that. She said it would hurt your feelings. I wouldn’t do it over.”
Learning to walk again took Julia a year and a half. People in Cedar Fork later made the story short: she got up and walked. In fact it was a long, dull, punishing business.
The therapist in Missoula was a lean man with bitten fingernails who set her between parallel bars and counted, one, two, one, two. After three weeks she could manage a hundred and thirty feet with two stops. After that, in the rented room, she tied small bags of dried peas around her ankles and lifted her legs, counting. She rose from a chair without her hands, fifteen times, then thirty. She walked the hallway with her fingertips on the wallpaper, then made herself let go for two steps, then three.
Her left leg never quite caught up with her right. Toward evening it dragged, and on tired days she kept the cane. For almost a year her mind had gaps too; she would forget why she had gone into the hall, or tell the same story twice. The doctor said recovery needed time, so she gave it time. There was little left over for self-pity.
When the collection notices came that spring, she went to the office herself before anyone had to come looking for her. A young woman with a photograph of a dog on her desk explained the payment forms.
“I’m going to pay,” Julia said. “Tell me how to set it up monthly and still have enough left for my son.”
They set it up. It would take her four years.
She reopened the cellar in May.
Her grandmother’s house had been boarded up since she left. She pulled the boards from the windows, washed the floors, and lit the stove. Then she spent three days sitting on the porch because going farther inside hurt too much.
At last she went down to the cellar.
The stainless steel vat bought with grant money was still there. It had been included in the inventory of the business’s assets but left in place. Julia dismantled Lydia’s shelving and stacked the boards in the shed.
She closed the recess where the cookie tin had stood. She brought clay from the river and sand, filled the space with stones, and plastered it herself, squatting until her back cramped.
There was no starter left.
That was the worst part.
Her grandmother’s whey culture had been kept in the family for four generations. They had fed it, transferred it from one vessel to another, carried it in a milk can on a wagon when they moved.
Under Lydia it had died. She had stopped maintaining it because packets of dried starter were easier to buy.
Julia sat in the empty cellar and cried as she had not cried during the hearings or at the sentencing.
Then she drove to Pine Creek to see Flora Haskins, who was nearly ninety.
“Starter?” Flora said. “I’ve still got Martha’s. She gave me some back in the seventies, when my cow was sick. I’ve kept it going. Who wants the old kind these days?”
Julia put her first wheel on the shelf in June.
The milk was her own. She had bought one cow with money borrowed from Anna, who this time refused to be argued out of it.
The stamp turned up in the trunk: the basswood block, cracked but whole. Julia pressed the date into the soft rind and sat on the floor beside the shelf.
She watched that wheel for perhaps half an hour…
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