A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [139]
For dinner that first night in Spring Grove we had a ground beef and cheese casserole that Theresa had made. She’d left it on our doorstep in a cooler at the farm sometime after dawn. As we were eating in our new kitchen Emma looked at me and said, “If Mom can’t ever come home, do you think we could live with Theresa? Could she be like a grandma?”
“I want Mama,” Claire protested.
“But I mean, if she couldn’t ever come home, ever, ever, could we go live with Theresa for part of the time, so we could be with a lady?”
My daughters were guileless. Out our window, past the deck, you could rest your gaze on the dumpsters. I’m sure all of us were thinking about what it would be like to come downstairs in the morning in that house in Vermont Acres. We’d come down to the kitchen where there’d be so much love in the air it would be visible—yellow, thick, probably exactly how radon looks.
When Alice came to her visiting station the last Sunday she was in jail she studied me before she picked up the phone. I waited for the conversation to begin with the receiver at my ear. She was wearing the pink bandanna on her head. Her face had grown longer, thinner in jail, her blue eyes larger. I didn’t think I looked any particular way, but after a minute she grabbed the phone and said, “Don’t tell me you sold the farm. Just don’t tell me that. I haven’t had a letter from Theresa in ages, or one from you all week, and it makes me nervous as hell. Rafferty’s even been wondering about you. He says he leaves messages and you don’t call him back. There’s no law that says Emma has to go to kindergarten. We could teach her ourselves. The farm is the first place I ever felt safe and alive, and—oh Christ—real, and at home. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I sold the farm,” I said, as calm as my usual old self. “I’ll tell Rafferty when I’m ready. I thought you would want to know.” She surprised me by crying. “The auction was yesterday,” I continued. “A farmer from New Derry took the cows. He took the pop-up baler too.” The tears were streaming down her face and splashing on the counter top. I wouldn’t torture her further. No need to mention how little some of our fine equipment had brought. “I sold it, Alice,” I said, “because I want to get you out of here, more than anything.” There were elements of truth there. “I sold it, because our life in Prairie Center is over. We’ll be guilty even if we’re proven innocent. That’s what Rafferty doesn’t understand. As soon as we close we’ll come and get you.”
She got up to tell the guard that she was finished. I swore, watching her go, that I wasn’t going to come to the visiting room one more time. I swore I wasn’t going to leave the girls out in the parking lot again. We’d start up our life fresh, once Alice was out, back along the straight and narrow. If she was proven guilty, we’d try to keep to our rigid path. We’d try to go slowly, creeping, so that after she’d served her term, she’d run only a short distance to catch us.
“Is this what you meant by being a hobo?” Emma asked after a few days in Spring Grove. It was no use drawing the ever-receding future. I didn’t know if our fortunes would improve, if I could find a job, if the trial would come out in our favor. If Alice was acquitted then we would take to the road. We could go to Alaska, South Dakota, Australia. We could move to California where I could set up a Dairy Shrine West, to honor the dairy industry that had helped to drain