A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [159]
“I knew he was angry. He was muttering on the way home, but I didn’t pay much attention to it.”
I let my gaze travel over his face. I saw that its measure of hope—the feature by which I always used to recognize Ty as my husband—had given way to something more mysterious and remote. I said, “Did you agree with him? With what he said?”
“Ginny—” Resentful frustration edged his tone. He heard it and began again, more carefully. “Ginny, when your father told me what to do and how to farm, I paid attention. Otherwise, I didn’t. But he always threw you women into a panic.”
I stood up. “I’m fifteen minutes late now, and I don’t want Eileen to get after me. I think fifteen minutes is all the farther I can push her.”
“You’ve got to have the last word, huh.”
“Well, have it. I don’t care.”
But neither of us said anything, leaving Wendy’s and crossing the parking lot and street and the Perkins lot to his Malibu. He unlocked the driver’s door, then turned to me with a gesture that took in the street, the restaurants, the parking lot, and me. He said, “I don’t understand living like this, this ugly way. But I guess I’m gonna be getting used to it.” That was the last word. We waved simultaneously as he drove off, and that was the last gesture. It made a little pair with the first thing I ever saw him do. He was a senior; I was in junior high. For once, Daddy had let me go to a football game with some other girls, early in the season when it was still hot. I was taking off my sweater when I saw a rangy, good-looking older boy waving at me. I was flattered, so I smiled and waved back in spite of my habitual fearfulness. It was Ty, and when he saw me wave at him, his face went blank. I looked around. The girl he was waving at was two rows in back of me. After we started dating, five years later, he swore he could not remember this incident, and I’m sure he didn’t, but it was burned into my memory as a reminder of the shame you courted if ever you made the mistake of thinking too well of yourself.
44
ALTHOUGH TY would have sworn that my loyalty to Rose was unshaken, and probably pathological, he would have been wrong.
I could not bear getting an envelope from her. Her notes were never more than a paragraph. They were friendly and matter-of-fact, with a slight undertone of setting me straight which was simply in the nature of our relationship. It was clear from them that she was still, and consciously, allowing me to define how we would be sisters, and that her patience with me was inexhaustible. That there was, in addition, no escaping being sisters was implicit in every word, even in the address, “Ginny Cook Smith,” and the return address, “Rose Cook Lewis.” It was largely because I feared calls from Rose that I never had a telephone installed.
Even so, when she really wanted me, she got me. In the October after the April that Ty stopped, the phone rang at the restaurant during my break, and it was Rose. I knew it would be as I walked to the cashier’s desk where the incoming phone sat, its receiver so threateningly, demandingly off the hook.
She was at the hospital in Mason City. That was one thing. The girls were alone on the farm. That was another. She wanted to see me. That was the third. I said, “I’ll be there by three.”
Eileen, I knew, would give me the time off. She had been pushing me to take time off for a year. I wore my uniform, which seemed like it would protect me, and it didn’t occur to me to pack anything. I left from work with only my handbag, just as if I were going home.
When I got to Mason City, I stopped at a phone booth and called her doctor, who came at once to the phone. He told me that the resurgence of her cancer was already far advanced. The second radical mastectomy had been performed in July, during the summer lull in farm work. Radiation and chemotherapy into August had bought Rose another harvest. Now the harvest was over.
She was thin, and little in the bed. When I came into the room, her eyelids lifted like velvet curtains. Her gaze