A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [170]
Howard set the nest back in the thicket. I remembered how lovely he used to look with a small wet lamb in his large splayed hands. He looked tired and unhappy, and I kept glancing at him to see if I was only imagining that he looked so tired and unhappy. It was nice of him to bring me to the park, and I said so. He smiled a lame smile. The girls ran alongside of him, by habit now. I was like a guest.
I had decided, once I knew about the farm; I had resolved that I was not going to be ungrateful about my freedom. We left the park after we’d had some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on doughy white bread, the cheapest brand there is, the same kind they served at the jail. Howard occasionally used to make bread with our cow’s milk and with flour which he ground from the wheat he’d grown. I used to tell the girls that it was the best bread in the world and they called it that, “The-best-bread-in-the-world-bread.” We stood up and ate because the picnic tables and benches were wet. We were like acquaintances, standing and eating, not quite knowing what to say. Even the girls were subdued, staring up at my bandanna.
When we were finished we made our way to Spring Grove. We drove into the garage that was attached both to our apartment and to the next apartment in the Pheasant Glade development. Howard unlocked the white door and ushered me into the small vestibule. Never, not in our strangest dreams, would we have seen ourselves in a place so new, a place that smelled as if air freshener were somehow built into the very walls. Howard’s jaw was clenched, his eyes narrowed as he moved quickly to open the sliding doors off the kitchen. He had warned me that the place was only temporary and that it was not something we would have chosen under normal circumstances. He and the girls had picked goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, and chicory from the side of a road somewhere, and put them in jars in the living room and kitchen. I sat down in the sagging wing chair we’d had on the farm and took the girls on my lap. I began to talk with them about the time my Aunt Kate moved in with me when I was a little girl, about the day she came to the door with her suitcase, how she led me right out into the yard and began planting tulip bulbs. “We’ll ask if we can plant some tulips in the back,” I said.
“There isn’t a back,” Emma said.
“The front then.”
“That’s the driveway.”
“A window box. We’ll make a window box.”
“I don’t think you should put bulbs in a window box. There’s not enough dirt in a window box.”
She was right. “We could color tulips,” I ventured, “and tape them to the walls in a border, and then we’ll have them all year around?”
“If you want to,” she said, slipping off my lap, defeat in her knock-kneed walk, resistance in her hunched shoulders. She was choosing isolation; it was all hers as she made her way up to her room and closed the door.
“What’s under your hat?” Claire asked.
I untied the bandanna and showed her my very short, soft hair.
“You’re not so pretty anymore,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’ll pet you.” She nestled into my chest and I read her Blueberries for Sal. When I was finished she said, “Can we go visit Theresa soon?”
“We’ll have to call her one of these days.”
“When?”
“One of these days we’ll give her a call.”
“This house is sticky,” she said. “I think it smells bad.”
I wouldn’t let