Lemon and Sugar

Nobody saw Hester when she sprang to her feet at the kitchen table. This on a Sunday in July when the boughs of the orchard hung heavy. Church had come and gone and she was ruminating on the reverend’s words, as ever concerned she would never understand them.

The ghost of her father rested his hat upon the table and sat down before her. “May I have a lemonade?” He asked. As though it were the most natural thing in the world he waited. His thick, white moustache was wound tighter than in life. He’d been buried in a Sunday best he’d never worn in life.

“Can you drink it?” Hester found within her breast the courage and the breath to ask.

“It is a hot day.”

“‘Tis.” Obediently, Hester smoothed down the front of her apron and padded across to the cooler to oblige. It only made sense to do so. Her father’s ghost waited as she set out a tall glass all spotless and shine and retrieved her icy pitcher. The woman felt his eyes upon her and her body felt to reject the summer heat.

“Will you not join me?” He asked, almost disappointed, as she used two fingers to push to him the glass of ice water, lemon, and sugar. There were butterfly pea flowers in the mixture, amongst further decoration. It turned the yellow to purple.

“Thank you, no.” Her hostess tasks performed to the note, Hester slid again into her chair and sat straight-backed before him. She’d never seen a ghost before. “How did you come to be here?”

“I fancied conversation with my eldest.”

“Is it so easy?”

“I thought I might remind you of your gardening.”

“You might.”

He adjusted his ghostly tie. He’d never been seen to wear one in the flesh. A thick neck and work out in the field had burst the buttons from his collars. He had seen no need to make tidy for the Lord one day a week when one could worship in the dirt out under wide open prairie skies. Hester’s mother had disapproved, of that and many things. The square jawed matriarch had born, birthed, lived and died, all for duty and all in her supposed destined time. She had never missed a deadline nor opportunity to fulfil expectations. The woman had faithfully died the death of a grieving widow not one week after her beloved husband had been lain to rest, now by his side reposed in a joint plot facing the sunrises of spring.

The ghost’s eyes lingered on a clock above the oven. “Your brother is late.”

“He plans advances on a daughter of Chesterfield farm at a social tonight.”

“He would marry and leave you.”

“Free he is to do it.”

“You will live as a spinster until the end of days.”

“You might remind me of my gardening,” she circled around stiffly. The lemonade was untouched; condensation leaked in droplets down the sides of the glass.

“It is to your credit that you maintain the flowers.” His chair creaked as he leaned elbows onto the table. Hester stared. “But you are missing a point.” He narrowed his eyes.

“I do what I can. It is not for you to ask more of me.”

“Rosary peas are poisonous.”

“You think me unaware.”

The ghost indicated the seeds floating in the glass amongst the flowers. Hester smiled. “You are immaterial, a figment of God or my imagination. You cannot sup.”

“But you would join your mother and I.”

“I would live a spinster until the end of days. Free Ian is to do as he must, to carry on your name for I never will.”

For the first time, for the last time, her father’s eyes were soft. “I would not ask you to be unhappy.”

“Are you?”

“You see a kitchen, taste July on the air, feel the breeze stirring the curtains, melted ice on your palm. I see this table, these chairs, and you. There is nothing for you where I am, Hester.”

“Perhaps I want nothing.”

His lips turned downward. “Perhaps.”

She unclasped her bonnet and folded it onto the table. Her short hair was wisped and pressed sweaty against her face and her mother’s jaw stared back at Hector. “You have reminded me of my gardening,” she said softly. “You may go.”

Hester blinked. When she opened her eyes the hat on the table was gone, and so too the spectre. Alone in the kitchen she undid her apron around the back of her waist and folded it neatly beneath her bonnet. The fingers of her left hand reached out and tapped gently around the base of the glass.

The crickets rubbed their legs together in the long yellow grasses of the yard.