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By Root 1061 0

on death and bad luck and anger and destruction. Listen to this. One night he was late for dinner. It was a complicated squash soup that we’d made together, and he didn’t get home till eight, and I was annoyed, but I didn’t think that much of it, until he started acting sheepish and guilty. Well, it turned out he’d been to see Harold! Those old ladies had made a big deal out of it, and Harold had been nice to him, and after that it was just like watching your lover go back to his wife. Whatever you have, however passionately you want it and he seems to want it, what he wants more and more is to fit in and be a good boy. Then everything he feels for you feels wrong to him. The stronger he feels it, the more wrong it feels, and he starts repudiating stuff. A while later we got this material in the mail about green manures, and he came in and saw it and didn’t open it, and I knew that was it, and it was. He packed up ten days later and left without saying exactly where he was going, and it turned out he’d gone to stay a week with Harold before going back to Seattle. I’m sure Vancouver’s the perfect place for him. He felt as pure as the driven snow when he was there before.” She sniffed, then caught my gaze. “I might have killed him if I’d known what he was planning.”

She said this last with flat conviction. I believed it. Or, at least, I believed that she had sojourned in the land of the unimaginable, as I had. Now she lay back, gray and tired, and let her lids drop over her great eyes. I said, “Do you ever hear from him?” But she waved her hand, dismissing the question, or, maybe, just too exhausted to answer it. I mulled over whether to tell her about the call I had made the night before, but instead, I picked up a Ladies’ Home Journal by her bed. I read an article about planting annuals in window boxes and other containers, then an article about ways to eliminate fat from your diet without missing it. She would know when the phone bill came, maybe. She fell asleep. After all, he was far too young for her now. We all were.

I went for a walk in the hospital parking lot, which was busy and lifted my spirits with all those converging and diverging intentions, even though some of the people in the parking lot were visibly ill or injured. When I came back, Rose had been served her dinner, which she was not eating.

I said, “You could eat the canned pears. Those go down easy.”

“I’ve gotten to where I hate it if I can tell what something is, or was. Hospitals should have some kind of nutrient-rich kibble. ‘Patientchow’ they could call it.” She pushed the tray and it rotated toward me.

I said, “I’m going to leave in an hour to get the girls. It’s almost noon.”

“I want to tell you some things first. Practical things.”

“Okay.” I was still wearing my waitressing uniform. I pulled the skirt down over my knee.

She said, “I’m leaving the farm to you and Caroline, not to the girls.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t want it to come to them. I want all of this to stop with our generation.”

“I don’t want to farm. Ty’s in Texas. Caroline doesn’t want to farm.”

“Three years ago I would have said rent it out. You could get ninety dollars an acre. But if it were up to me, I wouldn’t do that now. It’s too encumbered with debt.” She glanced at me, then looked out the window. “Anyway, Marv Carson’s going to make you sell. I don’t know what there’s going to be above and beyond paying off the debt and the taxes. I just don’t know. It’s a bad time to sell.” She sighed.

After a moment, I said, “What if there’s nothing? What do you think about that?”

“Pam and Linda know they might have to work, and if they want to go to college, they might have to go into the service. I warned them about that.”

I waited.

“Ginny, you don’t like me to say what I really think. I need you. I don’t want to alienate you. I haven’t changed my mind about Daddy or the farm or what was done to us, but if I repeat myself, you could just walk out of here. I don’t trust you.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“Well, there you are then. Except that what is there about me not to trust? I