A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [161]
In addition to that, although I knew that I would certainly have come had Rose told me about her condition, it galled me that I hadn’t even begun to resist. The summons, backed up by the word “hospital,” had been enough. I turned the chicken pieces over. It was already dark as midnight outside, and not even six-thirty in the evening. The restaurant would be filling up at this hour, each cheerfully lit table bright with menus and paper place mats. On the other side of the black windows of Rose’s kitchen, though, there was only outer space, a lightless, soundless vacuum that on this thousand acres came right down to the ground. I went to the back door, fumbled for the switch, and turned on the yard lights, three spots on tall poles that lit the way between the house and the barn and the machine shed. They helped, but I didn’t really believe them.
Linda stood in the living room doorway. She said, “Pam has a history report due tomorrow, but I can help you.”
“You don’t have homework?”
“I did my geometry in study hall. I have to read some chapters in a book.”
“What book?”
“David Copperfield.”
“I read that.”
“It’s pretty long.”
“That was the first school book I ever liked.”
“I liked Giants in the Earth. We read that last year. This one is hard to read because the writing is funny.”
“You mean old-fashioned?”
“Yeah.” She sat down at the kitchen table and watched me. After a moment, I said, “Are you cold? The kitchen seems cold.”
She said, “No.”
I looked at her for a long moment. She looked unsuspecting. I said, my voice idle as could be, “Has your mom got canned stuff down in the cellar, or what?”
“There’s some. We don’t do as much as we used to, like beans or things. We tried drying some stuff.”
“Huh. That’s interesting.” I waited.
“There’s lots left in the other house. It was too much trouble to bring over here.”
“I suppose.” I started peeling potatoes and dropping them into a bowl of cold water. She watched me attentively. At first, it made me nervous, but then I realized that there was some purpose in her watching, and that it would bear fruit if I were patient. After I had peeled four potatoes, she said, “Could you peel some more, so there can be leftovers? Mommy makes mashed potato pancakes for breakfast.” I kept peeling. It felt to me like Rose had been gone for weeks, but obviously that wasn’t true. I said, “When did your mom go to the hospital?”
“Monday.”
Three days before.
“Have you been to see her?”
“She doesn’t want Pam driving the pickup, and she’s got the car. Anyway, she said she’d be back soon enough.”
That wasn’t what I guessed. I said, “Do you want to go see her?”
“I don’t think she’ll let us. She doesn’t want us to see her.”
“But do you want to see her?”
She thought for a long moment. “Yeah.”
“Pammy, too?”
“Yeah.”
“So, why should Rose make all the decisions?”
I intended this rhetorically, a remark to punctuate opening the refrigerator door and looking for some broccoli or something else green, but Linda said, “She always does.”
“Not this time. We’ll go tomorrow after school.”
She was biting her lips. “I’ll tell Pam.”
I lay in bed after the girls fell asleep, uneasy and restless. Finally I got up and went to the phone and called Vancouver information. There was a Jess Clark, and it wasn’t too late to call that time zone, so I dialed the number. I felt so cold that I had to sit with the quilt wrapped around my shoulders while it rang. On the fifth ring, an American man’s voice did answer, but when I asked