The Help / Прислуга. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Purple stuff!” Mae Mobley say and I let her hold the can a cranberry. She smile at it like it’s a old friend. She love the purple stuff. In dry goods, I heave the two-pound bag a salt in the cart, to brine the turkey in. I count the hours on my hands, ten, eleven, twelve. If I’m on soak the bird for fourteen hours in the salt water, I’ll put it in the bucket around three this afternoon. Then I’ll come in to Miss Leefolt’s at five tomorrow morning and cook the turkey for the next six hours. I already baked two pans a cornbread, left it to stale on the counter today to give it some crunch.

I got a apple pie ready to bake, gone do my biscuits in the morning.

“Ready for tomorrow, Aibileen?” I turn and see Franny Coots behind me. She go to my church, work for Miss Caroline on Manship. “Hey, cutie, look a them fat legs,” she say to Mae Mobley. Mae Mobley lick the cranberry can.

Franny bend her head down, say, “You hear what happen to Louvenia Brown’s grandson this morning?”

“Robert?” I say.

“Who do the mowing?”

“Use the white bathroom at Pinchman Lawn and Garden. Say they wasn’t a sign up saying so. Two white mens chased him and beat him with a tire iron.”

Oh no. Not Robert. “He… is he… ?”

Franny shake her head. “They don’t know. He up at the hospital. I heard he blind.”

“God, no.” I close my eyes. Louvenia, she is the purest, kindest person they is. She raised Robert after her own daughter died.

“Poor Louvenia. I don’t know why the bad have to happen to the goodest ones,” Franny say.

That afternoon, I work like a crazy woman, chopping onions and celery, mixing up my dressing, ricing sweet potatoes, stringing the beans, polishing silver. I heard folks is heading to Louvenia Brown’s tonight at five-thirty to pray for Robert, but by the time I lift that twenty-pound turkey in the brine, I can’t barely raise my arms.

I don’t finish cooking till six o’clock that night, two hours later than usual.

I know I ain’t gone have the strength to go knock on Louvenia’s door. I’ll have to do it tomorrow after I’m done cleaning up the turkey. I waddle myself from the bus stop, hardly able to keep my eyes open. I turn the corner on Gessum. A big white Cadillac’s parked in front a my house. And there be Miss Skeeter in a red dress and red shoes, setting on my front steps like a bullhorn.

I walk real slow through my yard, wondering what it’s gone be now.