A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [135]
“I know that. But it sounds like some grandfather’s name or something.”
“I wish you girls would stop fighting!”
Their heads swiveled toward me, surprised. Linda bit into her muffin, then said, “This isn’t fighting, Aunt Ginny.”
Pammy stood up. “I’m going to watch ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ ”
Linda said, “I’m going to go see if Daddy’s in the barn.”
I said, “His truck is gone, honey.”
“Oh.” Now she looked at me carefully. I did my best to look noncommittal. After a moment, she said, “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
“We’ll see. We’ll see, okay?” Time was getting shorter and shorter. Rose had been gone for two and a half hours. Linda’s inspection was frank, not the look of a child, but the look of someone experienced in receiving bad news. She went into the living room. A moment later, I heard them murmuring together, and when I peeked in as I was clearing the table, they were sitting close together on the couch, staring glumly at the TV. I did the dishes. A fugitive thought that they would have been better off as Ty’s daughters, as my daughters, than as Rose’s and Pete’s—wasn’t this accident clear proof of that?—shot through my mind, but I suppressed it as mean and unworthy.
Our mother died when we were at school. We were in the cafeteria for lunch. I was sitting with Marlene Stanley, who was Marlene Dahl then, and Rose’s class, which came down later, was still in line. I saw Mrs. Ericson and Mary Livingstone in the doorway of the cafeteria, looking around. Mrs. Ericson had Caroline by the hand. I knew they were looking for me, but I put my head down and focused on my macaroni and cheese. Our teacher, Mrs. Penn, appeared suddenly in the kitchen doorway. She had that look on her face that adults get when you know they can barely cope with what has happened. It is a terrifyingly sympathetic look, and it is for you. They spotted Rose first, then came over to get me. I said to Marlene, “I guess I’m going home now. I think my mom died.”
The moments in the cafeteria were worse than things at home, where the bed in the living room was familiar, where we had been getting used to the death of our mother for weeks. When we came through the front door, the minister we had then squeezed my shoulder. My father had changed out of his work clothes, and was sitting on the couch. Caroline went over and sat beside him. The minister told us what the funeral would be like. In the kitchen, the church ladies had begun to cook. You could hear the refrigerator door opening and closing. Our job, it appeared, was to sit quietly in the living room, without reading or playing games. That’s what we did, even after the minister left. My father didn’t even read the paper. He looked out the window, across the road at Cal Ericson’s south field. We sat there until supper, and then again until bedtime. In bed, we turned out the lights without even reading Caroline a story. When we got up in the morning, the bed was out of the living room, and the furniture was back where it had been before my mother’s illness. After breakfast, we went directly to the funeral home, where we sat as we had the previous day, my father, too. Cal Ericson and Harold and some other neighbors were doing his chores. There was a light dinner in a room of the funeral home, ham and scalloped potatoes and creamed onions and coffee. After the funeral, at the Lutheran Church, and the burial, at the cemetery outside of Zebulon, we went home and ate more food. Mrs. Ericson told me they would be selling their place to my father. I watched the parrot, then went home and to bed. Rose stole the flashlight out of the kitchen drawer and read Nancy Drew under the bedcovers. Caroline cried herself to sleep. I stayed awake later than I ever had before—until three-thirty a.m. or later. My father woke me at five-thirty to make his breakfast, as I had done since the beginning of my mother’s illness. He had his work clothes on. After he was finished, when he was putting on his boots, he said, “You girls go on to school today. No use sitting around the house.” I was glad. I’d been afraid we’d