Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [174]
Garnett held aside the curtain in his kitchen window and angled for a better view, though it was fairly hopeless at this distance. Dr. Gibben had been pestering him for years to get the surgery for the cataracts, and up until right about now Garnett hadn’t even considered it. His thinking was, the less he could see of this world of woe, the better. But now he realized it might be the gentlemanly thing to do, to let those doctors take a knife to his eyes. For the sake of others. With so many bandits running loose, you never knew when a neighbor might need you to come to her aid.
Well, the boy had left, he’d seen to that. Garnett had stood his ground right here by his kitchen window and watched while that boy gave her the envelope and then high-tailed that little green jeep back to Roanoke, where people had nothing better to do than think up ridiculous new names for old roads.
But Nannie was acting strange. That was what worried Garnett. She was still standing out on the grass in front of her house as if that boy had said something awful enough to glue her to the spot. He’d driven away five minutes ago, and she was still standing there with the letter in her hand, looking up at the mountains. The look of her wasn’t right. She seemed to be crying or praying, and neither one of those was a thing you reasonably expected from Nannie Rawley. It weighed on Garnett’s mind, wondering what the young man had said or done to upset her this much. Because, really, you never knew who might be next.
When Garnett positively couldn’t wait any longer he went to the bathroom, and when he came back to the window she was gone. She must have gone into the house. He tried to putter around his kitchen and get his mind on something else, but there weren’t any dishes to wash (he’d just had dinner at Pinkie’s). And there was no point even thinking about what to cook for supper (Pinkie’s was all-you-can-eat!). And he didn’t dare go outside. It wasn’t that he meant to spy on Nannie outright. Whatever was going on over there, it really didn’t matter to him one way or the other. He had plenty of other things to do, and people who were counting on him to do them. That girl over at the Widener place with her goat troubles, for one. Poor little thing, a Lexington girl! Petunia in the onion patch. He would go upstairs right now and get down his veterinary manual and look up about the vaccine, check whether those goats would need seven-way or eight-way. He hadn’t been sure when he told her. They didn’t get red-water disease in goats around here, but there might be some other reason to go with the eight-way. Now he couldn’t even remember which one he’d told her to use. It had felt so strange going over there to that house again. It had put his head in a peculiar twist, as if Ellen could be alive again, just for the time being.
Her greatest regret was that she’d never gone to see that baby—that was what she told him, last thing, there in the hospital bed. Greatest regret, as if there’d been a whole host of others a husband couldn’t be told about. And now there were two babies, a boy and a girl, Garnett believed. Ellen never even knew about the second one. Garnett had come so close to asking the Widener girl about them, the other day when he went