The Songs She Never Gave Him

In the Appalachian highlands, the year a daughter is born, her mama brews seven jars of cider.

When the girl comes of marrying age, she opens one jar a year, waiting for the man she loves.

If all seven are emptied and she still isn't wed, the jars get smashed, and she waits no more in this life.

The first six, I drank alone.

Because every year, Luke Weiss said: not this year.

He was a musician who'd come to our town to collect the old heritage folk songs, and he stayed three years.

I taught him to sing the old mountain harmonies. He taught me to record sound on a phone.

He said once the album was finished, he'd come back to marry me.

The day I broke the seal on the first jar, he went to the next county.

Said a folk singer named Mavis Pruitt had ruined her voice, and he had to take her to the state capital to see a doctor.

The second jar, Mavis was cutting a record.

The third jar, Mavis was touring.

The fourth, fifth, sixth, I can't remember the reasons anymore.

I only remember that every time I called, I could hear her laughing in the background.

The seventh year, I carried the last jar up from the cellar.

Twenty-three years it had aged, the mouth sealed by Mama with a twist of straw rope, my handprint still pressed into the clay from the day I was born.

That evening I dialed his number.

He said he was at the airport, that he had to fly with Mavis to New York to sign a deal.

"Wait for me. Soon as it's signed, I'll come back."

"I mean it. This is the last time."

The last time.

He said the last time every year.

But I only had this one jar left.

I broke the clay seal and bent to the mouth of the jar, breathing in.

Twenty-three-year cider, so rich it had gone bitter.

When Mama brewed it, she surely never imagined her daughter would drink it down alone in the end.

I lifted the jar and poured it into me, mouthful by mouthful.

Cider no one comes to share, you don't keep.

When it was gone, I set the empty jar in the yard.

Moonlight dropped inside it and trembled.

It held nothing.

……

Before light, I carried the other six empty jars out of the kitchen.

I lined them up beside the seventh I'd finished the night before, all in a row across the yard.

The oldest one had a chip out of its rim, moss crawling up the side.

I scratched at it with a fingernail. It wouldn't come off.

The phone buzzed once in my pocket.

Luke Weiss, 2:47 a.m.: "Aria, it's signed. First flight out. Wait for me."

A second line under it: "I mean it. Trust me."

I pressed the screen dark and put it away.

I went inside, took two changes of clothes, locked the door, and started down the flagstone path toward Mama's.

Fog lay heavy over the town. Passing the bell-tower hall, I could see only its peak.

Mama was at the stove, simmering porridge.

When she saw me come in with clothes in my arms, her spoon didn't stop.

She glanced at me once.

She asked nothing.

A second bowl appeared on the counter.

I set the clothes in the back room and came out to tend the fire.

The wood snapped in the firebox.

Mama's spoon tapped the rim of the pot. "Aria."

I stirred the coals.

"Your uncle just came by. Said there's a man standing in your yard."

"Dragging a suitcase."

The tongs paused in my hand.

Mama said no more.

She turned and ladled out the porridge.

I ate two bowls.

She sat on the threshold stitching a shoe sole, then looked up at me. "All seven jars, gone?"

"Yeah."

The needle stopped against the sole.

She said quietly, "Then it's over."

Mama couldn't read, but no one knew the town's customs better than she did.

After the porridge I remembered my ID was still in the cabinet at home.

And a few heavy coats I needed to bring over.

I went back down the flagstone path. The sun had just climbed over the ridge.

I pushed open the gate.

Luke Weiss was crouched in front of the seventh jar.

His suitcase tipped over by the door, not yet pulled inside, his coat thrown over the back of a chair in the front room.