A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [123]
He said, “Hey! What are you doing? Did you knock? I had the radio on.”
Although the light was behind him, I saw the white flash of a smile. I said, “I guess I haven’t seen you in a while, huh?”
“Lots going on. I miss you.” His voice softened. He should not have said that. He should not have said it because then I said, “I love you,” and he said, “Oh, Ginny,” and what I heard in his voice was pure, clear remorse that resonated in the ensuing silence like the note of a bell and told me all I needed to know about every question that lingered from earlier in the summer.
After a moment, he said, “Let me come down. I’ll be right down.” But I wasn’t going to wait for that. I knew the way home, not down the open, revealing road, but between the stiff concealing rows of corn. No apologies or kindness or humiliating clarifications of his feelings would follow me there.
I was washing the breakfast dishes by six. Ty was pacing the shoulder of Cabot Street Road. At seven the construction workers arrived, already having breakfasted at the café. I started one load of wash and took another outside and began to hang it on the clothesline. I was a good machine, and soon my view of the work site was hidden by sheets and shirts, so I didn’t see two cars pull up behind the lumber truck. What I did see, sometime later, when I was carrying the basket back into the house, was the lumber truck and all the cars—including Marv Carson’s big maroon Pontiac and Ken La-Salle’s powder blue Dodge—pull onto the road in a line and drive away. Ty was standing, watching them go. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, then he put the cap back on. He stood looking after them for a long time.
I didn’t need him to tell me that Marv and Ken had made him stop work on the hog buildings, nor did I need him to confess to me that he’d paid for the weekend’s work in a futile attempt to push the construction past some point of no return. I dimly recognized as I watched him that his efforts had been foolish, a waste of our money, an extra fillip of defeat that he could have avoided, but what it looked like at the time was our crowning failure as a couple.
34
TWO MORNINGS LATER, I was getting out the vacuum cleaner. Ty was out in the hog barn, and we had spoken very little since our argument.
“Crops look terrific.”
I jumped.
Henry Dodge, our minister, was standing outside the screen with his hand on the latch.
I said, “Bin buster in the making. We’d better have a long dry spell in September.”
“Are you going to invite me in?”
I stood up. My hands dripped suds. I dried them. “Sure. Coffee?”
He pushed his thumb down on the latch and opened the door in a smoothly aggressive way, as if, I thought meanly, he was practiced at taking advantage of small openings. I recalled that he’d been a missionary at some point early on, maybe in Africa somewhere, or the Philippines.
He said, “Ginny, I thought we were friends.”
I said, “Here, sit down. There’s some cake from last night.”
“It’s a little early for cake.”
“Ty likes it. He likes pie for breakfast better, though.” I looked at him when I poured the cup of coffee. That word “friends” floated in the air, taking on more complexity the more that I looked at Henry Dodge. I said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe we’ve been friends. Maybe you could define the term more clearly.”
He laughed as if I had made a joke, then said, “You came to visit a while ago.”
“Well, I did, yeah. But it’s okay.” This remark made him seem inquisitive, and I resented it. I said, “Maybe I should have called you after the church supper. What a stir.” I rolled my eyes.
“I should have called you, I think. That’s partly why I came.”
I gazed at him. I said, “Maybe we’ve been friends. Define the term more clearly, and I’ll tell you.”
He laughed again. I felt a distant recognition of how these responses of mine could seem witty, or ironic, but I was dead serious. Henry sat down and shifted back and forth in the seat as if he were hollowing himself a spot in deep