Making Applesauce

“Honey child,” Hazel started in that deep mountain twang, “your Mama’s gone.” Audra remembers nodding, as if Hazel was standing in front of her. She could easily picture her mother’s sister in an oversized floral print house dress, loose from years of being stretched over increasingly sagging breasts, leftover stains from gravy splattering from the cast iron pan, barefoot, scraggly blonde hair in a long, thin braid.

“Okay, Auntie,” Audra replied. She managed to swallow the rest of her apple, and then stood staring at it, the phone cradled between her shoulder and her eat, one hand holding the apple and the other a knife. That would be the image she returned to every time she woke from her broken sleep to eat her apple, to fulfill the ritual that started that afternoon in October. Audra forgot to speak for a while, just stood without moving, knowing that something was going to have to change if she was ever going to escape the fate of being an old mountain woman sitting on a rotting wooden porch.

“Audra, you there?”

“I’m here,” she managed in a broken voice. “How’d she,” Audra trailed off, not wanting to ask the rest of the question.

“Your brothers are here,” Hazel said, ignoring her question. “Guess you ought to just come on home, get out of that city and back down here to where things make sense.” Hazel’s suggestion wasn’t an idea. It was an order, a demand, and the very least that Audra could do. Sense of honor, commitment, and duty to her now dead mother weighed on her. It would be easy to make up an excuse; that work was too busy, or she couldn’t get a ride, or that she just couldn’t go. But then she’d have to deal with two differing types of guilt – one for not being there and saving Ginny, and the other for not going to see her put to rest. She’d thrown the half eaten apple against the wall, the impact making applesauce on the bowed and bubbled drywall.

“I’ll be on the next bus down,” Audra had said. Hazel murmured some agreement while Audra watched the apple chunks slowly start to slide down the wall, and considered making applesauce. 

Arranging her travel was easy enough. The gas station where she was working said they understood, and to take all the time she needed. Her roommates were deferential, apologetic, intrigued. None of them had had a parent die yet; it made Audra something of a celebrity in the house. She hadn’t told them that Ginny blew a hole the side of a sweet potato in her stomach with a handgun; that Pete and Jimmy had spent hours scrubbing the wooden porch and old rocking chair, trying to clean up the bits and pieces of Ginny’s inside, or that Ginny had been suffering in her mind for as long as Audra was alive. There didn’t seem to be a point in sharing any of that with them. Her roommates were just passing friends; girls she lived with and shared a bathroom with; not anyone with whom she wanted to make lasting connections.

The Greyhound station was busy at eleven at night. This is how the poor travel, Audra thought to herself as she boarded the bus, under the cover of darkness and loss.