Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [53]
“I won’t prescribe anything now,” Dr. Knight says. “But my recommendation is that you strictly avoid all caffeine. That includes coffee, tea, cola, and chocolate.”
On a prescription pad, he lists the items. At Dolores’s request, he writes down the name of her disease. She folds the list and puts it inside the pamphlet.
The doctor says, “I want to check you again in three months. Maybe I’ll need to order an X-ray. But there’s no need to be alarmed.”
As she drives home, Dolores feels confused, surprised that her sense of relief feels so peculiar. There is nothing momentous in what she has been through. Nothing important has happened that morning. A tree has been cut down; her daughter has cut out a weskit; the doctor has made a routine examination; Dolores has forgotten to make lunch. She stops at a grocery and buys bread, baloney, mustard, and on impulse, a watermelon from Georgia. The doctor’s words linger in her mind. “Fibrocystic disease.” She likes the sound of it. She could talk about this the way Dusty talks about her gall bladder. Dusty has to resist fried chicken; Dolores will have to resist chocolate cake. Somehow, this is a welcome guide for living, something certain—particular and silly. Yet somehow she feels cheated. She wonders what it would take to make a person want to walk with the Lord, a feeling that would be greater than walking on the moon.
At home she trips over the yellow extension cord Glenn has trailed through the kitchen and almost drops the watermelon. Glenn takes the watermelon from her and bends to kiss her. He asks, “Are you still mad at me for cutting down the tree?”
“I wasn’t mad at you,” she says. “I don’t care how many trees you cut down.”
“You sound funny. What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you later.” Dolores nods at Petey, who has followed the watermelon into the house.
Glenn goes outside, and the electric chain saw roars. Dolores slaps sandwiches together. Bread, mustard, baloney. With quick sawing motions, she slices the watermelon and then thrusts a chunk at Petey.
“Here, smarty, feed your face,” she says.
With an energetic twist in her walk, she goes to call Glenn and Boyce in to eat. Her husband is rolling a log into a growing woodpile, a neatly organized grouping, like an abstract sculpture. Dolores hardly recognizes the leaf-littered yard, the twigs flung everywhere, the pile of wood chips at the end of the driveway, the raw sections of the tree strewn around. Her eyes rest on a familiar quince bush in front of the house. It flowers in the spring, but sometimes in the fall a turn of the weather, or perhaps a rush of desire, will make the bush bloom again, briefly, with a few carmine flowers—scattered, but unmistakably bright.
RESIDENTS AND TRANSIENTS
Since my husband went away to work in Louisville, I have, to my surprise, taken a lover. Stephen went ahead to start his new job and find us a suitable house. I’m to follow later. He works for one of those companies that require frequent transfers, and I agreed to that arrangement in the beginning, but now I do not want to go to Louisville. I do not want to go anywhere.
Larry is our dentist. When I saw him in the post office earlier in the summer, I didn’t recognize him at first, without his smock and drills. But then we exchanged words—“Hot enough for you?” or something like that—and afterward I started to notice his blue Ford Ranger XII passing on the road beyond the fields. We are about the same age, and he grew up in this area, just as I did, but I was away for eight years, pursuing higher learning. I came back to Kentucky three years ago because my parents were in poor health. Now they have moved to Florida, but I have stayed here, wondering why I