Alice Bliss - Laura Harrington [12]
Angie was starting to let herself go for a bit but yanked herself right back from the edge with an iron hand. She got a new haircut and renewed her fitness commitment, swimming half an hour three days a week after work. The housework and the cooking are not so high on her list of priorities, but the personal appearance thing has become very important. Alice thinks her mom secretly likes the fact that stress and worry have finally made it possible for her to drop those last pesky ten pounds. She is slipping back into some pre-Ellie clothes. Okay, so it’s natural to think your mother is a total idiot at this age, but when your dad’s out of the picture it’s hard to have your mother quite so strange and foreign. It’s a little disconcerting, the sudden lack of parents. Or, to be honest, when nobody prefers you. When you are not anybody’s special somebody. This is when it would be nice to have a dog.
Alice doesn’t know, can’t know, what Angie is going through. Angie, who can’t sleep at night or if she does fall asleep, wakes with a start to the unfamiliar silence that is Matt’s absence. They have been together since their sophomore year in college; in eighteen years they have slept apart on very rare occasions. Angie wonders whether it is even possible to sleep without him.
In the middle of the night she haunts the house and the closets, running her hands over his jackets and shirts, feeling inside the pockets of his coats for coins, or keys, or penny nails, or anything at all that he has touched.
She’s having trouble concentrating at the office, and she’s terrified of losing her job. With Matt gone she’s suddenly aware of every bill, every little possible repair. It feels like the Camry might need new brakes, and she knows they’re due for two new tires. All the things that Matt would take care of or that they would discuss and decide together now tick through Angie’s mind like an endless scroll.
Yesterday Angie drove out to the Holschers’ farm and sat at Edna Holscher’s kitchen table to go over this year’s policy and then broke down crying for long minutes when Edna asked how she’s holding up. This is not professional, she thinks, this is not what old man Beeman had in mind when he gave her these accounts.
Angie keeps a pair of tall rubber boots and a slicker in her car for her visits to her farms. Once she’s appraised them for insurance purposes, everything from buildings to outbuildings to barns to vehicles and tractors and tools and animals, she feels like she belongs to them or they belong to her.
She knows the cost per head and replacement value of every last animal on every farm that she covers. This is another side of Angie, the flip side of the high heels and silk blouses. It was a surprise when old man Beeman took Angie under his wing and taught her the farm side of the business. Pretty Angie, the least likely adjustor in the office to be chosen by Beeman for farm work. Give her commercial real estate, give her residential, give her life insurance, who could say no to Angie? But farms? Try making sense out of that.
It’s the big animals, she’ll tell you; she fell in love with cows and horses and fields and farms and the way Route 20 curves through mile after mile of fertile, rolling land. Like stepping into another century.