Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [27]
I kept trying to understand him. It wasn’t easy. He lacked the recklessness that I had expected of him—had hoped of him, even. If anything, he was too serious. (When I was in high school, they always told you to look for a sense of humor.) He treated me in a stern, unsmiling way that made me shy. Also, I couldn’t figure out this job business. It seemed he was waiting for his life’s work to be issued like a fate. Really, he was so trustful. “Maybe you ought to just set out and seek your fortune,” I said, only half joking. “That’s what I would do. Oh, I’d love to go with you! Take off tomorrow, travel anywhere.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “Leave your mother? At this point in her life?”
I don’t know how a man like that could have been a son of Alberta’s.
In May, he bought me an engagement ring. He took it out of his pocket one night when the three of us were eating supper—a little diamond. I hadn’t known anything about it. I just stared at him when he slipped it on my finger.
“I thought it was time,” he told me. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ames,” he said. “I can’t wait any longer, I want to marry her.”
Mama said, “But I—”
“It won’t be right away,” he said. “I’m not taking her off tomorrow. I don’t even know what my work will be yet. We’ll stay here as long as you need us, believe me. I promise you.”
“But—” Mama said.
That was all, though.
I should have refused. I wasn’t helpless, after all. I should have said, “I’m sorry, I can’t fit you in. I never planned to take a second person on this trip.” But I didn’t. He was sitting next to me, and the leathery, foreign smell of his skin called up so much love that I seemed to be damaged by it. Everything he said was peculiarly clear, as if spoken in crackling cold air. It really didn’t occur to me to turn him down.
7
I woke with a sense of being rocked and shaken. I sat up and looked around me. The sun was so bright it made my eyes ache, but I could see that we were parked in a marshy, straw-colored field. Jake was at the wheel, muttering something. Two men in denim jackets were flinging themselves against the rear of the car. “Now!” one shouted, and I felt the thud of their bodies. The wheels spun. “Dunderheads,” said Jake, shutting off the ignition. “If those two would get together, for once …”
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
He gave me a slit-eyed look and got out of the car. “What we need is that there tractor,” I heard him telling the men. “All you got to do is bring it up behind and give her a shove.”
“Tractor? What tractor?” one man asked. “You talking about that yonder? Why, she’s just a little old twelve-horse thing my wife uses for the kitchen garden. You think we’re going to push you out with that? And there’s no way of getting in behind you; this bank is rising up too steep to your rear.”
“Pull her from ahead then, I don’t care.”
“Pull her neither, you’re looking at a toy. That thing don’t even tote manure good.”
“Look,” said Jake, “I got twenty dollars says you can do it if you work it right.”
Through the rear window, I saw him dealing out money to the man in the red plaid cap. Little puffs of mist were coming from their mouths. “In ones?” the man said.
“Money’s money.”
“Well, I reckon we could give her a try. Come on, Cade.”
He and Cade walked off across the field. Jake got back in the car, bringing cool air with him, and I shivered and folded my arms across my chest. I felt dislocated; I had somehow lost a whole night. “Where are we, anyway?” I asked.
“If you would take a look out the window, you’d see we’re in a wheat field.”
“I mean, how’d we get here?”
“Guess I fell asleep at the wheel,” Jake said. He started rubbing his chin, which was bristly by now. “Fact is, I must have,” he said, “but it don’t make sense. I am known for not sleeping, see. I just don’t need sleep like most people do. At a party or something I can stay up all night and be on about my business in the morning same as usual, stay up the next night too if I’ve a mind to. Gets lonesome, sometimes. Everyone sacked out and me awake. But there