A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [79]
I was supposed to take Daddy to Pike, to the chiropractor, so he could be aligned after the shock of his accident.
Rose said, “Get him to shop, too. There must be something he needs, socks or something. You could use up a whole day.”
“We could have dinner at the café.”
“That’s a good idea. Then tomorrow, he and Pete can finish with the combine. That should take a few days. If we’re going to keep him busy, then we’ve got to keep him really busy.”
I nodded at that. We were standing by my back door, and over her shoulder I saw Jess Clark come jogging down the road. He stopped to watch the construction. Rose turned, saw him, looked back at me, and smiled a very small smile. I wondered if I had betrayed myself, but said in a light tone, “What are you doing today?”
“Linda bought some material for a sweat suit outfit. I said I would help her cut it out. You know what that means.”
“Tears and rage?”
“You got it. You know, you can buy these outfits at the Kmart in Mason City for something like twenty-five bucks. They’re cute, too. But Linda won’t have a thing from Kmart now. Does your sewing machine work on that kind of fabric?”
“I think so. You can do it at my house if you want.”
“We’ll see.” Now she had turned, and was surveying the construction site. She turned back to me. “One last favor?”
Sure.
“Get the chiropractor to talk to him about exercise. I’m sure that’s his problem more than the accident.”
“Whatever you say.”
“You’ll see.” Her voice was rich with irony. I laughed and got into my car.
Daddy was waiting beside the kitchen cabinets in his driveway. Since breakfast, he had changed out of his overalls and was now wearing clean khaki trousers and a dark blue shirt. I pulled up, and he got in without saying anything. When we turned past the busy construction site, he pivoted in the seat and stared out the back window until long after everything was lost in the dusty haze.
I could not drive with Daddy, or even be in the same room with him, without a looming sense of his presence, but once he turned forward in the seat and began to look out the window, I took up my now habitual thoughts of Jess Clark. It had been five days since our rendezvous at the dump, two days of rain, the others filled with business, family duties, and now building. It was readily apparent that privacy would be minimal at best, maybe for weeks. Since the Monopoly games had ended, Jess didn’t come around as regularly, and so there wasn’t even the fearsome pleasure of maybe exposing myself to the scrutiny of the others as I handed him cups of coffee or asked idle questions about Harold.
I told myself that all of this was okay with me, that a life could be made of this proximity, that maybe that was the only possible life to make, since the other paths, which my imagination had instantaneously traveled, were all equally impossible. To imagine ourselves living together somewhere else, on the West Coast, say, was to imagine that we were not ourselves, and, in a way, that we had nothing for each other, since what we had for each other seemed to grow out of our entwined history and to be specific to this place. But to imagine ourselves together in this place was to imagine collisions and explosions, seismic movements of the earth we were standing on. It was to imagine everyone around us dead, in fact. And I imagined it, with a current of muted fear that ran under my usual eagerness to imagine the worst. To imagine Jess gone was to imagine two other impossible things, that he had never returned (but he had, and at times I realized this afresh with a