A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [67]
“Mr. Goodwin?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Sylvia Romero, from the Racine Journal Times. I’m sorry to bother you this morning—”
“I hate cornflakes,” Emma squalled.
“—I know this must be a very difficult time for you. I’m sure your wife’s arrest—”
“Must have come as a sh-shock,” I finished for her. I covered the receiver with my hand and stamped my boot at Emma.
“I’m sure it was! These unfortunate types of situations seem to gather force on their own. I’m sure you know that since this story broke yesterday there is already a lot of talk in your part of the county about your wife. We are very concerned that you too have an opportunity to tell us what you know about the charge. It is only fair that you—”
I hung up. I hung up and poured milk into the girls’ cups, and sat down, rubbed my eyes, took off my T-shirt. When the phone rang again I considered, for three or four rings, not answering.
“Hello?” I said finally.
“I want to tell you what she did.” It was a gravelly woman’s voice, not someone I recognized. “My daughter says your wife used to come up to the locker room when they were taking showers after gym class. She says she ran her hand down her friend’s back, up and down her back. She says she stood and stared at the girls while they were naked in the shower. She kept running her hands up and down the girl’s back until the girl got away. Your wife also told a neighbor, twelve years old, that she could ‘get it on,’ I believe those are the words she used, with a tampon.”
I wiped my left underarm with my wadded up T-shirt, and then I said, “Who are you trying to reach? This is K&L Rental Cars.”
“Let’s drive,” I said to the girls. “Let’s go driving.”
“We’re not done eating,” Emma cried, “and you don’t even have a shirt on.”
I snatched the keys from the pegboard and started out the door. Ken Hegeman, the editor of the Blackwell Dispatch, was just pulling into our yard. He had done an article on the farm two years before, when “Sustainable Agriculture,” an old concept, was the brand-new buzz word. I’d done a lot of experimenting with compost preparations, which I used in place of pesticides. I’d been getting reasonable yields all along. Because of stray voltage near the barn and the amount of pasture land we had I also was a strong advocate for rotational grazing. The somatic cell count in our cows was about as low as it goes. I would have liked to have used horses instead of tractors, but it wasn’t practical for the acreage. I latched the screen door and started for the back stairs, whispering, “Come on, come on, come on.” I pulled Claire along with me as I ran. The girls sat straight on the bed in our room. They were breathing heavily and straining to hear more than their own breath. We waited while Ken rang the bell and knocked at the window at regular intervals. Later, after he’d given up and driven off, a crew from the Channel Four news team parked their van across the road. They filmed the house. I locked the doors and we went upstairs again. That time we waited in the windowless hall. There’s an old mahogany dresser by the bathroom filled with junk. Again, for something to do, we began clearing out the drawers. We threw out sheaves of paper, old shoes, dried-up rolls of masking tape, various odd baby toy pieces, and incomplete decks of cards. It was a game for the girls, like a hunt for treasure. All of the stuff was useless.
After the van was gone we sat in front of the fan in the bedroom. Claire fell asleep while I taught Emma to play War. What if the Channel Four news team found more secrets in our house than I would care to believe? I shuddered to think how an unpainted, clapboard farmhouse would speak to them when they reviewed their footage. For the first time I saw the place as an outsider. It would look to their experienced eyes as if it should be condemned.
When I had clear thoughts, they were of one thing: how I could lay my hands on one hundred thousand dollars. If we sold the car, the old combine, and the new baler we might get seventeen thousand. If I sold