Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [10]
As a husband, though, Foster wore his adventures thin. He made a career of what he called “fresh starts,” which meant getting fired from one house-framing job after another and consoling himself with Old Grand-Dad. Anything that’s worth doing, he told Alice, is worth starting over right in a new town. And then he told her she was too much fun, as if it were her fault he could never settle down. He made Alice promise she would never try anything cute like getting pregnant, and she didn’t, for nearly ten years. It wasn’t so easy in those days; it was an endeavor. When it finally did happen, she’d known Foster long enough to know a good trade when she saw one, him for a baby. He had given her fresh air, but that’s not such a gift that you have to stay grateful your whole life long. When he moved on from Pittman, Alice and the baby stayed.
She’d believed that motherhood done fiercely and well would end her family’s jinx of solitude; Alice threw herself into belief in her daughter as frankly as Minerva had devoted herself to hogs. But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run. She looks at the clock again: seven-thirty in Tucson. She picks up the phone and dials.
A baritone voice says, “Yo.”
That would be Jax. Alice feels ridiculous. What she saw on TV was not about Taylor and Turtle. They are probably still in bed. “Oh, well, hi,” she says. “It’s me, Alice.”
“Hey, pretty Alice. How’s your life?”
“It’ll do,” she says. She never knows what she ought to say to Jax. She hasn’t met him and finds him hard to picture. For one thing, he plays in a rock and roll band. He comes from New Orleans, and according to Taylor he is tall and lanky and wears a little gold earring, but his voice sounds like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.
“Your daughter has fled the premises,” Jax reports. “She took the second generation and went to see the Grand Canyon. How do you like that?”
“Then it’s true!” Alice shouts, startling herself.
Jax isn’t rattled. “True blue. They abandoned me here to talk things over with the door hinges.” He adds, “Then what’s true?”
Alice is completely confused. If something had happened to them, Jax would know. “Nothing,” she says. “Some darn thing I saw on TV. Harland had the news on and they had somebody falling over the Hoover Dam, and I could have swore there was Taylor Greer talking to the camera, just for a second.”
“If Taylor fell off the Hoover Dam, she wouldn’t be talking to the camera,” Jax points out.
“Well, no, she wouldn’t, so I got worried that it was Turtle that had fell off.”
“Couldn’t be,” Jax says in his gentleman’s drawl. “She would never let Turtle fall off anything larger than a washing machine. And if she did, she’d be on the phone to you before the kid hit bottom.”
Alice is disturbed by the image but feels fairly sure Jax is right. “I kept hoping they’d show it again, but Harland’s gone over to Home Shopping now and there’s no coming back from that.”
“Could be they’re at the Hoover Dam,” Jax says thoughtfully. “She doesn’t always keep me up to date.”
“They both did go, then? She took Turtle out of school?”
“School is out for Easter break. They thought they’d go have a religious experience with sedimentary rock.”
“You should have gone with them. That ought to be something, that Grand Canyon.”
“Oh, believe me, I wanted to. But my band got a gig in a bar called the Filth Encounter, and you can’t miss something like that.”
Alice finds herself calming down, listening to Jax. He always sounds so relaxed she wonders sometimes about his vital signs. “Well, that’s good they went,” she says mournfully. “That little girl’s already way ahead of me. I’ve never even got down to see the new Toyota plant at Georgetown yet.”
“Is everything okay?” Jax asks.
Alice touches her