A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [69]
“Hmm.”
“Do you believe me?”
“Oh, I believe you.”
“Well, what?”
“Ginny, it’s after midnight. You said you’d have breakfast on your father’s table by seven. Let’s just see if the thing you learned tonight is true tomorrow, okay?”
“Fine.”
He closed his eyes. I marched across the hallway to the west-facing bedroom and looked toward the Clark farm, staring and staring until I could hear my husband’s breathing deepen and slow.
In the morning, there was a fair amount of grunting and groaning. I was immune to it. I set my father’s breakfast—French toast, bacon, a sliced banana and some strawberries, a pot of coffee—in front of him, and I handed him the syrup and the butter, and the sugar for his coffee, and I straightened up the kitchen after myself. I served him well, but I withheld my sympathy. On the other hand, he didn’t ask for it. He finished eating, pushed his plate away, and stood up. I moved to the window after he banged out the door, and watched him trudge up the blacktop toward our place, where Ty was waiting in the barn. Normally he would have climbed into his truck and driven the quarter mile, so he walked as if he were disoriented, surprised by the very act of walking. He was stiff. His shoulders hunched. His legs swung out and around. That was something he needed, too, more exercise. He didn’t look back, but Rose waited until he was a dot on the road to cross from her place.
I was wiping the range with the dishrag. The screen door slapped, and Rose said, “He’s okay, then?”
“He should check in with Dr. Henry in Pike today, and maybe get some more painkillers. They gave him two Percodans, but I don’t know if he’s taken any. I’ll get him there this afternoon. The state troopers won’t be coming around for another ten days or so, not until the blood test is back from the lab.”
“They ought to put him in jail. I just can’t believe how lenient they are.”
“Nobody got hurt, Rose. It would have been different—”
“That’s pure luck.”
“You get to take credit for that luck, legally, just like if your luck is bad and somebody does get hurt, you have to—”
Rose planted herself in the center of the doorway to the living room, and fisted her hands on her hips. “Jeez, Ginny, don’t you get tired of seeing his side? Don’t you just long to stand back and tell the truth about him for once? He’s dangerous! He’s impulsive and angry, and he doesn’t give other people the same benefit of the doubt that they give him!”
“I know that. Last night I really gave him a talking to—”
“Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes waves of hatred just roll through me, and I want him to die, and go to hell and stay there forever, just roasting!”
“Rose!”
“Why are you saying ‘Rose!’ in that shocked way? Because you’re not supposed to wish evil on someone, or because you really don’t hate him?”
“I don’t. I really don’t. He’s a bear, but—”
“He’s not a bear. He’s not innocent like that—”
I raised my voice above hers. “Last night I told him in no uncertain terms that if he drove drunk again, I’d take the truck keys away from him. He heard me, too. He was looking right at me. Ty’s putting him to work. I think things’ll improve. He’s hard to live with—”
Rose turned on her heel and stomped into the living room. I followed her. She was standing by a little bookcase. Twenty issues or so of Successful Farming magazine were stacked there, brochures for farm equipment, some National Geographics, a Bible, two Reader’s Digests, and a book of American folk songs. Nothing personal, or reminiscent. She was staring down at the Reader’s Digests, tapping the top one with her fingernail. She said, “Sometimes I hate you, too.”
I waited. I thought at once of Linda and Pammy, the way they sometimes confided in me instead of in their mother, the way I liked to give them things, or take them places that Rose wouldn’t have approved of if she’d known. For years, they had been the unspoken issue between us, and I at once felt guilty, sorry that she could justifiably accuse me of undermining her, of wanting them so much