A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [156]
43
ONE MORNING, SEVERAL YEARS into this routine, I came up to the table of a solitary man in a cap. From behind, I took him to be a trucker. I was just beginning my six a. m. shift, and there were already four other truckers smoking alone at four other tables. I smiled and said, “What would you like this morning, sir? I can recommend the potato pancakes with applesauce,” when I saw a white envelope on the table with my name on it. I looked the man in the face, probably in a startled way, and saw that it was Ty. He said, “Hey. Open it.”
I said, “Hey. How’s Rose?” Dead now? I wondered at once. Why else would he come to see me?
“Same as always.”
It was a birthday card. Inside the card was a picture of Pammy, who was taller and big-busted now, standing next to Rose herself. Linda, on the end, was wearing glasses. Her hair had darkened and grown out to a thick, glossy mane. She looked pretty but interesting, like Pete as an intellectual. She was wearing a lot of black. I made myself look carefully at Rose. She looked unchanged. I said, “I guess today is my birthday, isn’t it? I hadn’t remembered it yet.”
“Thirty-nine.” He smiled, but it was easy to tell he wasn’t happy. This transfixed me, and I forgot my place and my business until he said, “Let me order something,” and cocked his eyebrow at Eileen. I glanced at her. She smiled. I said, “Oh, she’s just curious. She thinks I’m without living relatives.”
“Are you?”
“Of course not.” People started filling up my section. I said, “Have the blueberry pancakes and the sausage. That’s the best. I’ll bring a pot of coffee.”
“Funny how we fall into this pattern.”
I put my pad in my pocket. I said, “Don’t flirt with me.”
He lingered over his breakfast, reading the Des Moines Register he had brought along, as well as a Star and a USA Today that he got out of our newspaper rack (and folded up neatly and replaced). He drank four cups of coffee and asked for hash browns, then a piece of apple pie. I tried to spot our pickup in the parking lot as I scurried from table to table, but I didn’t see it. He paid, talked for a moment to the cashier, and walked out. He left a 20 percent tip. Generous for a farmer but cheap for a trucker. I had the birthday card and the picture in my uniform pocket. Once or twice I took it out and looked at it.
He was back at ten-thirty, my “lunch hour.” We went across the street to Wendy’s.
My birthday fell on the twenty-ninth of April. The Ty I had known for all of my adult life spent the twenty-ninth of April in the fields. I ordered a Coke. Ty asked for another cup of coffee. We sat by the window, fronting the Perkins lot across the street. There were no pickups at all in the lot. I said, “What are you driving?”
“That Chevy.”
It was a beat-up yellow Malibu. Things piled in the backseat were visible through the rear window. I said, “Why?”
Ty, I would have to say, did look different. I had seen a lot more men in the last two and a half years, a catalog of American men in every variety, size, and color. Ty looked like the settled ones, those with habits of such long standing that they were now rituals. That, I had come to realize, was the premier sign of masculinity and maturity, a settled conviction, born of experience, that these rituals would and should be catered to. He didn’t look unattractive, though. Weathered, loose-limbed. I wouldn’t have picked him for a trucker from the front.
He said, “I didn’t want to carry all my stuff out in the weather. I’m going to Texas.”
“What for?”
“They’ve got big corporate hog operations down there. I thought maybe I could get myself a job at one of those.”
He watched me, waiting, I knew, for the question I was supposed to ask, but I couldn’t ask it. Finally, he shifted his feet under the table and said, “Marv Carson wouldn’t give me a loan to plant a crop this year. I didn’t have any collateral except the crop itself, and they decided to stop making those kind of loans, with the farm situation the