“What?” Vern asked Gogo, but Bridget stopped further conversation by calling everyone to the kitchen for breakfast.
“Can me and Feral eat down here?” asked Howling. Bridget was already ahead of him, spreading newspaper on the floor before setting their plates on top. The children weren’t used to sitting in chairs so high up from the ground. It made their bottoms hurt.
Vern grabbed the crutches and shuffled over to the card table right next to the kitchen. She took a seat in one of the fold-up chairs, and Bridget sat down across from her after laying out the food.
“You coming?” Bridget asked Gogo. Gogo shooed away the question with a flick of her hand. “Don’t mind her. That girl lives on black coffee. More for us.” She piled food onto a plate for Vern and pushed it in front of her. “Eggs over easy, venison steak, and wild rice risotto. That there on the side is wojapi. Berry sauce, basically. It’s good on everything but especially the meat.”
Vern shoveled overstuffed forkfuls into her mouth, pausing only for sips of water. Her passenger needed vittles and she did, too. And Howling and Feral, who chomped loudly as they ate, trading stories with each other despite mouths full of food. “They haven’t given you too much trouble, have they?”
“The kids? No. No, not at all. They’re good kids. Really good kids.”
“I know Howling especially can be a handful,” said Vern, quietly, not wanting the elder twin to hear the criticism.
“He’s smart as blazes, that’s all. One of the brightest kids I’ve ever met. Precocious doesn’t really cover it. Gogo used to be like that, you know?” Bridget smiled, wistful. “You don’t have to apologize for either of them. You’re lucky. Truly lucky.”
Vern’s face hardened. “I wasn’t apologizing. Just, acknowledging the work they can be.”
Bridget stirred her coffee. “Fair enough.”
Vern was thankful for the lull in the conversation so she could keep eating. It didn’t take her long to get through the meal. “You a chef or something?” she asked once her plate was almost clean.
Bridget worked her way through her own plate at a much more reasonable pace. “In a fashion. I run Auntie’s, which is part restaurant, part soup kitchen. People around here don’t have access to the freshest food, so a couple of us got together to form Auntie’s as a cooperative. Almost all of that on your plate was harvested, hunted, or foraged by yours truly. Chanterelles, garlic, sorrel, the wild rice.”
Vern finished what remained of her water, and Bridget spooned more food onto Vern’s plate. “Lucy talked about your cooking a lot,” said Vern. “Her mam wasn’t gifted in the kitchen.”
Bridget stood from the table with a hardy laugh. “Evelyn had a lot of admirable qualities, but her cooking was not one of them, no. Learned that not long after meeting her. We must’ve been thirteen, fourteen? She couldn’t even scramble eggs. In her defense, foster parents rarely take the time to teach that kind of thing. At least Ms. Franks, that was our foster mother, made sure the supply of Pop-Tarts was consistent and didn’t have rules about when we used the toaster. I only learned to cook later when I made it back home as a teen.” Bridget removed more food from the freezer to thaw, and Vern was grateful she didn’t have to ask for it. Her hunger didn’t surprise her—it was the sickness’s doing—but it still overwhelmed her with its force. All she could do was surrender to its might.
“Evelyn and I shared the same foster home for four years. The aforementioned Pop-Tart lady. We lost touch, but around the time that Lucy was born she reached out to me because she needed help getting away from Lucy’s dad.”
The mention of Douglass squashed any cheer Vern had felt to be talking freely about her best friend. “That didn’t exactly work,” said Vern, disdain creeping into her voice.
Bridget’s eyes flicked up but then quickly back down. “It did for a time, but it’s not easy, Vern—leaving, staying gone.”
“It was easy for me,” Vern said, believing it as the thought first occurred to her but doubting it upon hearing the words out loud. When she’d argued the same point to her mam on the phone a few years ago, condemning Ruthanne for her cowardice, Vern was sure her own bravery, good sense, and gumption were the reason for her survival. Later, she learned she’d lived only because Ollie had taken an interest in her.
“Sometimes I still can’t wrap my head around what went on there and how the judge just returned custody of Lucy to her father,” Bridget said. She switched on the stove and spooned old bacon grease into a cast-iron Dutch oven before adding in a block of frozen food to reheat.