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By Root 961 0

on the tile floor, she was relentless. She wore a cast for eight weeks, and she made a sleeve for it with the words PETE DID THIS glued on it in felt letters. Every time he raised his hand, or even his voice, she threatened to wear the sleeve. She did wear it once, to show that she was unashamed and meant what she said. Pete, I suppose much intimidated by the thought of the jokes that he would have to endure at the feedstore and all over town, changed after that. His manner with everyone else grew a little more irritable, and his battles with my father sharpened, but it was a small price to pay. When the doctors discovered Rose’s cancer, one of the first things she said was, “I guess I don’t want to die just when Pete and I are finally figuring it out.”

Her idea was that there was no such thing as provocation, that no matter what she did, Pete simply should not hit her, and therefore if he did hit her he was entirely wrong, and therefore she was perfectly free to do whatever she wanted. The result was that I lived in fear for her. Once she said, “If it were you being hit, you wouldn’t be afraid, either. You’d be mad, I promise.”

Now she said, “Pete, why don’t you go outside and have a smoke? I’m going to make some decaf.”

The girls went back to their projects, and I said, “You girls getting tired? You can go upstairs if you want.” They shook their heads without looking at me.

Jess had set the table back up and retrieved all the game pieces. Now he began putting them in the box. Ty was adding points. He said, “What happened to our hundred bucks?”

Jess said, “We never collected it. We never decided what the prize was going to be.”

“We’d better decide before we find out who won.”

I glanced over at the list. A couple of columns were decidedly longer than the others, but I couldn’t read the scribbled initials at the head of each column. I said, “We played. That was the—” and Rose came in from the kitchen with the coffeepot, and Pete opened the front door and stepped in, flicking his cigarette butt behind him, and the telephone rang, and Rose said, I’ll never forget it, “What’s that?” as if she’d never heard a telephone before in her life.

Ty answered and listened, said, “Okay. Okay. Thanks. Thanks. We’ll be right over.” My sense of panic, which had eased back, slipped over me again. Ty put down the phone and said, “Your old man’s wrecked his truck. He’s in the emergency room in Mason City, and it doesn’t look like he’ll have to stay, so they want us to come get him. The truck’s in the ditch over by the state park. They’re going to pull it out with one of the park vehicles tomorrow morning and impound it until the results of his blood test come back.”

Rose said, “Was he drunk?”

“They won’t know that officially for ten days or so.”

“Did they arrest him?”

“Not yet.”

Rose said, “It’s about time.”

I said, “Is he hurt?”

“Banged up. He hit his cheek on the steering wheel and cut it. They think that’s all.”

“We’d better go, huh?” Ty nodded and took his car keys off the hook at the bottom of the stairs. As we were walking around the house to the car, I saw Jess through the windows, picking things up. He looked perfectly at home.

My car then was an eight-year-old Chevy; usually, when I drove Rose to Mason City, I borrowed her car, which was almost new, a ’78 Dodge. It was odd, I suppose, how Ty and I never rode in the Chevy together. If we went to a movie or somewhere for supper, we took the pickup, but now he went straight for the car and got in on the driver’s side. The seat belt on the passenger’s side was twisted and stiffened with disuse. I gave up on it, and all the way to Mason City, I couldn’t get accustomed to the sense of danger I felt, of imminent disaster. Ty drove smoothly and silently. The car breasted the gravel roads, seeming, like a moldboard plow, to roll the fields and the ditches to either side of us. I shook my head to get rid of the illusion, but I could not. It came of driving so low to the ground. Ty rolled down his window an inch or two and the wind carried fear right into my face. I could feel