Walking Across Egypt Read Online Free Page A

got to be out that way. Maybe I could. What you going to have?"
    " 'What am I going to have?' 'I don't like butter, is your meat lean?'"
    "What?"
    "It's a saying. What Sukie Smith said one time. She was picky. We always remembered it. If you want something to eat you come on around 11:30; I'll have something either way."
    "Okay, maybe I will."
    "Well, you come on. Bye."
    "Bye."
    I bet he comes, thought Mattie. She looked at his billfold, beside the phone. Thick, heavy looking. She shouldn't look in it. She wouldn't.
    Let's see, she thought, I got soup, vegetables. I ought to cook a little something extra. I got them potatoes. Potato salad. I hadn't done any potato salad in I don't know when. And I can make that hamburger into a meatloaf easy enough.
    She walked back down the hall, put on her green housecoat, her slippers, and sweater, put the bedroom phone back on the hook, walked back to the kitchen, lifted the cast-iron frying pan from beneath the sink, got bacon from the refrigerator, pulled out three slices, separated them, carefully placed them into the pan, cut the eye on, struck a match, stuck it under the pan, cut the flame back, and got out the eggs. Cook the bacon slow, starting in a cold pan.
    After breakfast, she put on the water to boil, peeled, cut potatoes, dropped them into the water. She wasn't going to be overcome by a little soreness. Alora would do a little something to her foot, say, and there she'd be sitting with it propped up—days at a time. Overcome. Mat-tie was not that way. If something was sore, she kept it moving to get the soreness out. Nobody in her family—unless they'd married in—had ever stayed still for anything to get well. Course a lot of them were dead now too, but not from just sitting. Some had died young—when that wasn't so unusual. She and Pearl were the only two left.
    When the potato salad was all ready she looked in the cabinet for paprika. She always liked to sprinkle a little paprika on her potato salad for color. Tasted good, too. Ah, there it was.
    She sprinkled.
    That stuff's turned a little dark, I believe. It's sure turned a little dark. I didn't know I'd had it in there that long. What in the world? Let's see what it tastes like.
    Hot... What...? Chili powder!
    My goodness to gracious.
    Mattie found a spoon, scraped away the chili powder, and found the paprika.
    Have mercy. She would tell Pearl. Pearl would die laughing. She would tell Pearl—tell her that first and then about the chair.
    Mattie thought about the chair. She started laughing again. She put both hands on the counter at the sink and, laughing, looked out through the window into her backyard. She felt the soreness in the backs of her legs, in her back, and shoulders, as she laughed out loud. She laughed harder as she saw herself, feet and arms straight up, rear end all the way down to the floor, stuck. She thought of the Emmett Leftcourt story that Pearl's husband Carl used to tell about how Emmett started out as a police officer, then got to fishing and drinking so much and started going down and quit his job and started waiting tables at the Conventional Cafe at Mattamuskeet, fishing and drinking all the time, and then got fired and kept on going downhill. Carl would tell it, embellish it, about how Emmett got fired and moved in with the old catfishers who lived in a rusted tin-roof shack made from drink cartons and scrap wood. They caught and sold catfish until they had enough money for whiskey. Carl followed Emmett Leftcourt's career, watching him go on downhill, and one day walked by the shack and of all things out there in the front yard Emmett and another man were boiling a sea heron, his long stick-legs sticking straight up out of the pot, and Carl would get so tickled telling this, holding his arms straight up like the heron legs, and then when you thought he was through, Carl would say that a few weeks later a stumbling, dirty, old drunk man walked up to him and—standing still but sort of