It did go normally. Minnie lay on her side and squeezed out piglet after piglet, until the littertotaled seven. Lily sketched the pigs while Jack kept the apple slices coming.
“How they doing?” Ed asked when he returned with fresh water.
“They look great,” Jack said.
“Well, Vina’s got some breakfast cooked, if y’all wanna eat before you go.”
“You know me,” Jack said, scrubbing her hands. “I wouldn’t miss one of Vina’s breakfasts.
They’re this job’s number-one fringe benefit.”
Lily sat with Jack at the table in Ed and Vina’s spotless kitchen, with the morning sun shiningthrough the red-and-white gingham curtains. The table was spread with an artery-clogging breakfastbuffet: hot biscuits, red-eye gravy, cooked apples, fried eggs, grits, ham, bacon, and sausage.
“Now you girls eat all the biscuits you want,” Vina, a smiling, plump woman said, filling theirmugs with coffee. “I just put another pan in the oven.”
“Thanks, but I’m sure one pan will be plenty,” Lily said. But after she saw the way Jack wasfilling up her plate, she wasn’t so sure anymore. She bit into a biscuit and surveyed the numerous pigproducts on the table uneasily. “So,” she said, “what’s gonna happen to my piggy namesake after shegrows up?”
“Same thing that happens to most pigs, I reckon,” Ed said, spearing a sausage patty.
“Oh.” The thought of the little piglet surviving a difficult birth only to wind up on someone’sbreakfast table depressed Lily. The piglet’s plight seemed similar to Mimi’s. Lily mourned for smallcreatures who had no control over their destinies. She was embarrassed to feel a tear sliding down hercheek.
“You city girls get softhearted about animals, don’tcha?” Ed asked, pouring gravy over a splitbiscuit.
“Sorry,” Lily said, feeling foolish. “It just struck me as sad, is all.”
“Well, shoot,” Jack said, helping herself to a third fried egg. “If you’re gonna get that upset aboutit, I reckon Ed and Vina can just bring Lily the pig out to me after she gets weaned. I’ll pay as good aprice for her as they will at the meat market, and I reckon I’ve got room on my farm for a pig.”
“You and your farm,” Vina laughed, emptying the second pan of biscuits into the bread basket.
“Ed and Vina always make fun of my farm,” Jack began. “Of course, I reckon they’ve got a rightto. It’s more of a petting zoo than a farm. I’ve got half a dozen dogs — some I found on the side of theroad, some I took away from people that was mistreating ’em; five cats; an old swaybacked horse I savedfrom getting shot; and a goat with just one horn. You oughta bring your little girl out to see ’em.”