Early Warning

1971

WHEN FRANK SUGGESTED that he, Andy, and the boys spend two weeks in Paris, staying at the George V and having Christmas with Janet, who was on her junior year abroad from Sweet Briar, he had consciously fixed things so that there would be no time to go to Calais; anyway, who would want to go to Calais at the end of December? Better to stick to the Eighth Arrondissement, or the First or the Third, even to wander the catacombs, than to think that Lydia and her husband had returned to Calais, and she was sitting in a bistro somewhere, watching the door for Frank. In his mind, Lydia had entirely replaced “Joan Fontaine.” Mote by mote, he had come around to the possibility that the two women were different — maybe sisters or cousins or relatives, but not the same woman. And if he had to choose, he would choose Calais over Corsica, his mature self over his youthful self, because, as “Joan Fontaine” was gone from this earth, so “Errol Flynn” was, too, and in the leathery, hard-looking person who inhabited the house in Englewood Cliffs he saw nothing of the boy he had been.

Even so, he found himself watching the crowds along the Champs-Élysées, outside the Louvre, along the Boulevard Haussmann, even in the lobby of the George V, for that characteristic movement — from the front, the lift of the chin and the turn of the head; from the back, the sway of the hips. Her hair would be mostly gray now, but maybe, being French, she would dye it. Would the husband allow that? But maybe she had gotten rid of him somehow, left him in Calais and moved to Paris. What would she be doing? Something orderly — keeping books for a wealthy politician, performing services like making discreet calls to his mistress and paying his child support.

In the meantime, since they had come in the winter, they were surrounded by French people, not tourists, and though Janet’s French was good, and people smiled at her and were helpful, Frank was a little nettled by Janet’s loud voice, Richie’s and Michael’s exaggerated movements, Andy’s endless observations. It was this last that was a revelation — Andy had always kept her thoughts to herself, except when she had been drinking, and she only drank at home. But now that she wasn’t drinking, she talked all the time — what an elegant building, is that really Napoleon, I thought he was short, oh, there were more Napoleons than the one, look at those horse statues on that pillar. The French didn’t stare at her, the kids didn’t seem to care (though Janet answered a lot of her questions), but it drove Frank crazy. The thing he couldn’t stop noticing was the way her mouth worked. All around him, Parisians hardly moved their lips, and their words issued forth in a liquid stream. Andy’s mouth was like the mouth of a puppet flapping, revealing the empty cavern within. For ten days, he felt as though his glance was shifting between her mouth and momentary glimpses of Lydia disappearing around corners, up steps, and over bridges. By that time, too, all five of them were expressing the opinion that two weeks was too long — you could only go to the Galeries Lafayette so many times, only appreciate so many paintings of the long, pale body of Jesus, his eyes closed, being taken down from the cross, or of a short man in a fancy outfit sitting on a small, bouncy horse. Janet thought they could have spent the second week in Nice; Frank wondered why he had forgotten about Rome; the boys wished they had gone skiing; and Andy wondered when she would ever get to Madrid.

The evening of the tenth day, Janet talked them into going over to the Rive Gauche and trying her favorite Vietnamese restaurant, a cheap place where she and some of her fellow students went every couple of weeks. Richie and Michael hated the food, Andy hated the toilette, which was a hole in the ground in a room with the lightbulb burned out. Frank thought that Janet used her chopsticks in a superior way after showing off about the menu. Then she wanted to take the Métro rather than a taxi, and Richie and Michael thought they would use the map and walk — either down the Quai d’Orsay and across the Pont de l’Alma, or over the Pont Neuf and then down the street where the tumbrels had rolled, taking the condemned to the guillotine. Janet said, “That would be the only thing you two know about Paris,” and Andy said, “Isn’t it a little dangerous?” as if the two of them could not take on any muggers in the city of Paris. Look at them — they even looked threatening. So they ended up walking, freezing to death. Back at the hotel, Frank went to bed, and got up a couple of hours later, and there was Janet in the living room of the suite, wrapped in a blanket and hunched over a book. When he came in, she glanced up and then turned her whole body away.

“That’s nice,” he said.

“Don’t take it personally, all right?” But she sounded irritated that he had even walked into a room he was paying three hundred a night for.

“I think I will,” he said.

“Fine, be my guest.” She lifted her book slightly. It was a Proust, in French, Sodome et Gomorrhe, which he thought was both shocking and pretentious. He must have harrumphed, because she looked up and scowled, and he reflected that she had always preferred Lillian and Arthur. In their family, she was a boarder who deigned to be supported in luxury, but she gave back nothing except a sort of I-told-you-so perfection of academic performance that was showing off rather than pleasing. He said, “What’s eating you?”

“Well, since you ask, I can’t stand how you elbow Mom out of the way every time you are walking along. It’s very rude. Men here actually have manners.”

“Oh, do they?” said Frank. “I didn’t notice.”

“No,” said Janet, “you didn’t.” She slammed her book shut. “But they notice you. I watch their heads turn.”

“Your mother has been talking a lot.”

“So what? She’s interested. Not all disdainful, like you, or just completely heedless, like Michael and Richie, though I admit Richie looks around every so often.”

Frank said, “When did you turn into such a little bitch?”

Janet’s face registered shock, and it was true that Frank had never called her a name before — he mostly left the discipline to Nedra and maintained his distance. But she was not intimidated. She said, “About the time I realized that you spend every single minute of your working day stoking the war machine and trying to figure out how to slaughter Vietnamese peasants more quickly and efficiently.” Her mouth snapped shut, but then she had another thought, and said, “And profitably.”

“Thank you, Joan Baez, for your input.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

Frank said, “We don’t call it the defense industry for no reason, you know. You get to sit around day after day, whining about how you don’t like this and you don’t like that, and you’re safe to do it. Do you think that the Vietnamese don’t want to defend themselves? You think they want to be communists and a client state of the Red Chinese? You think Ho Chi Minh is a nice, liberal person who is going to say to those who fought him, ‘Oh, honey, so sorry we didn’t agree, just go home and plant some rice’? This is what happens when one group of people wants to conquer the other — they move in, they slaughter the chieftains of the village, or whatever they’re called, and they put the young boys into the army. I won’t say what they do to the girls. Then they go on to the next village to do it again. That’s how human beings operate. Right here in France, they’ve done it more than once, in spite of the crème Chantilly”—he pronounced this quite nicely—“and the haute couture. Maybe because of it.”

“That’s not our business,” said Janet. “Anyway, they were chased out of Vietnam, and it wasn’t our business to take over from them.”

“So, I take it, you would drive past a family being lined up and shot, and just step on the gas because it isn’t your business?” He thought he had her.

But she said, “When did you ever stop to help anyone? Remember that couple by the side of the Turnpike outside of Newark ten years ago? She looked eight months pregnant, and he was struggling with the tire. Remember that?”

Frank must have looked blank. She said, “I don’t think you even noticed. I did. Mom did, but you just stepped on the gas.”

“Your mother noticed?”

“She put her hand on your arm, and she pointed, and you just shook her off.”

Frank stared at her. She was not a pretty girl, but she was worth looking at — what the French called jolie laide, in fact. How much credit could he take that she had developed character? But he said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am more observant than both of you.”

“I’m not saying that you didn’t see them.”

Frank walked over to the bar, opened it, and took out a beer. The door to the corridor was to the left, and he had his robe and slippers on. He could walk out and put this argument to an end right now. But he snapped the lid off the beer and turned around. He said, “Who got me started in my career? Who set me up reading documents seized from the Germans after the war? Who taught me how things work? Do you know?” She opened her mouth, but he interrupted her. “Your divine uncle Arthur, that’s who. What do you think Mr. Perfect Love thinks of imperialism? Of breaking a few eggs for the omelette? Of putting a few peasants through the meat grinder if the sausage belongs to us?”

Her scowl was deep and furious, and about twenty years old — the same scowl she had produced as a baby. He stepped up to her and grabbed her hands. When she tried to pull them away, he opened them out flat and said, “You look, Miss Priss. You take a look at his hands when you visit next, and you take a whiff, because there’s plenty of blood on them.”

She jerked away from his grasp and said, “Why would I believe you? I’ve known you were an asshole my whole life.”

But her face was white. And what that meant was that she would never trust her instincts again, and if she encountered love, she wouldn’t know it. And then he thought, Well, why should she be any different from anyone else?

—

WHEN THEY HAD TORN DOWN Rolf’s house years ago — seven, to be exact — Rosanna had not objected or said a word about her brother besides “Well, he took after the Vogels, but the rest of us were Augsbergers to the core” (Austrian rather than Prussian). Joe put off telling her that he and John had sold the property until she began to press him about what he was going to plant in that field — and why would she care? He always planted either soybeans or corn these days. But one Saturday in March, he took Jesse over to her place for lunch, and she said, “Jesse, you know how your grandpa and I knew that your father was going to be a great farmer?”

Jesse shook his head.

“When he was sixteen years old, he grew his own hybrid seed, and the next year he planted it, and he got, oh, I think ten bushels per acre more than your grandfather. Well, your grandfather was fit to be tied.” She turned to Joe. “You don’t experiment much anymore.”

“They do that at the ag stations, Ma.”

“You could try something with Rolf’s old field. Just anything. Perk you up.”

Did he need perking up? He took a sip of his coffee, looked at her, and honestly, in front of his son, he said, “I sold that place.”

“You sold Rolf’s farm? My grandfather’s farm that’s been in the family since Opa came to America?”

“John and I sold it. Mama, between us, we were working over eleven hundred acres. John—”

“John has not taken good care of himself. Only fifty-six, and his rheumatism is so bad he can hardly walk! If he’d started taking chamomile tea twice a day with a tablespoon of honey and a tablespoon of cider vinegar, he would be fine.”

“That may be true…”

“You should be, too. You’re old enough. It would do you no harm.”

“We got a good price, and we put it into the new harvester.”

“How much did you get?”

Joe glanced pointedly at Jesse, and Rosanna said, “He’s fifteen. He’s old enough to know.”

Joe coughed twice. He just could not quite get it out. But then he said, “Eleven hundred an acre.”

Rosanna stared at him.

Jesse said, calmly, “That’s a hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars.”

“You did not!” exclaimed Rosanna.

“We did,” said Joe.

“You could sell this whole farm for a million dollars?”

“That’s what they say. Well, more than that. Some of the fields, fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred an acre.”

“You did not spend a hundred and sixty thousand dollars on a harvester.”

“About ten,” said Joe.

“What did you do with the rest of it?”

“John and I put fifteen away for college for Annie, Jess, and Gary Jr. and used the rest to pay off loans.”

“Are we free and clear?”

“Just about,” said Joe.

Rosanna stared at him again, for a long moment, and put her hand slowly to her mouth; then the tears started running down her cheeks. Joe said, “Oh, Mama.”

“I don’t know what in the world I was thinking when we moved in here, but I certainly did not expect it to take fifty years to pay off the farm. What was it Walter bought, two hundred acres? I can’t even remember anymore, that’s how bad my memory has gotten, or maybe I put it out of my mind. But, my goodness, I guess I expected to be owned by the bank until the day I died.”

But after a bit Rosanna sat up, wiped her eyes, and said to Jesse, “You know, when your dad lived in that old house, he had four rabbits. They were named Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Moe. And he had two cats and sheep and cattle and chickens and I don’t know what all. His sheep was named Emily. He told me that when he was grown up he was going to have animals in every room in the house, and bring the horses in through the back door.” Jesse glanced at his father, who said, “I did always want a flock of Cheviots. They have bare faces.”

“Jesse,” Rosanna said, “when we took that sheep Emily to the fair, I remember your grandfather told me something you should remember.”

“What?” said Jesse.

“This farm was worth eleven dollars an acre.” She leaned toward him. “Eleven! Nothing! Didn’t matter what we put into it. He bought it right after the first war — paid a hundred, he said. I always thought maybe a hundred and ten. Exorbitant! But he was bound and determined to get out of his parents’ house, mortgage or no.” She slapped her hands on her knees and looked at Joe. “Well,” she said, “glory be! What now?”

“Worry,” said Joe.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, yes. Just like always. But buy yourself something. At least a couple of Cheviots. You can build a little pen out behind the Osage-orange hedge. Jesse, wouldn’t you like some sheep?”

“Ma,” said Joe, “I think you must be losing your mind. I never heard you say a good word about animals.”

“Well,” said Rosanna, “it’s dull around here. Minnie’s the principal, Lois is running Crest’s, Annie and Jesse are in school all day, and you wear earmuffs from the noise. Sheep would be a little company.”

Joe laughed, and then wondered, where would you even get sheep these days? No one had sheep. He did look around when he headed out to the barn before supper. He did say to himself the words “a million dollars.” But he knew enough at his age to know that dollars were like drops of mist — they fluttered around you and then dissipated. The real mystery was how your farm bound you to it, so tightly that you would pay any price (literally, in interest) or make any sacrifice just to take these steps across this familiar undulating ground time and time again.

—

AS BASIL HAD SUSPECTED, Henry and Philip (never “Phil”) were quite compatible, though if Basil cared about things like how the corners of the pillows on the couch were turned, or whether sweaters were arranged by color right to left (“Always red!” exclaimed Philip as he was rearranging. “How could you make such a basic error?”), or how much garlic was in the spaghetti, Henry would be surprised. As for other matters, Basil had cultivated Philip quite nicely. He thought sex was a lovely game. Like Henry, he had been a magnet for the women and always wondered what they saw in him. He said to Henry, “Then Basil came along and explained to me what was going on. I was thunderstruck.”

“He explained it to you?” said Henry. They were eating from a box of the first strawberries of the season.

“Well, darling, I might as well have been a detached head, I was so cerebral. Don’t you remember the girl I told you about, the one in my class who only realized she was preggers when the infant dropped preparatory to delivery? I mean, she said afterwards that she wondered what that strange sensation was, the kicking, don’t you know, but it never occurred to her to ask anyone.” He helped himself to another strawberry, sucked it between his lips, and pulled out the hull. Henry took the opportunity to smooth the hair back from Philip’s very lovely forehead. “All the other graduate students said, well, only in America, so I didn’t tell them about the time I went swimming and emerged with a leech attached to my bum and never noticed it until it swelled and dropped at my feet while I was chatting up two girls from Sydney.” For Philip was born not in England but in Australia — Brisbane to be exact — though never once had Henry caught him out, pronunciation-wise. He did it like an actor — BBC most of the time, yes, but he would also do Johannesburg, New Orleans, Minnesota (which made Henry laugh), and Parisian-homme-speaking-broken-anglais, which came in handy for his literary-critical studies.

And then the door opened, and here they were, stark naked on the couch in the middle of the afternoon, and as soon as he saw Claire, Henry remembered that she’d told him she and Paul were coming for the weekend, a getaway, and he had sent her a key in case he was at school. But that was three weeks ago; it had slipped his mind completely. Claire looked at Philip, then at Henry. Her hand was still on the doorknob, and Henry thought for a moment that she would back out the door and disappear, but she said, “Yoohoo! We’re here! Did you remember?” And behind her was Paul — and even though he had on a beautiful Harris-tweed sport jacket, he was so stiff and pale that he might as well have been wearing his white coat. Philip said, “I say, you must be Claire. What a spiffing frock, darling. The color is perfect for you. I’m Philip. We’re almost finished with the strawberries, but the best ones are left.”

Henry got up, went to his room, and returned with his jeans and Philip’s khakis. Claire was on the phone. Philip made a gesture to him to keep silent as Claire was saying, “Yes, Sarah. We got here just fine. I left the snacks in the refrigerator. Did you find them? And no TV until after they eat supper. We are so looking forward to the play. Yes. Kiss the boys for us, and thanks so much for helping us take the weekend.” Paul held out his hand for the phone, but Henry saw that she turned away, as if not noticing. In the quiet after she hung up, Paul stepped up to Philip and said, “I’m Paul Darnell.”

—

CLAIRE WHISPERED, “I don’t think my mother knows that such a thing exists.”

“They’re very open about it.”

“Henry always acted like he’s never found the right girl.”

“Your mother told me that no one is boring enough.”

“How wrong she is,” said Claire.

It was only about nine o’clock; the ceiling of the bedroom was still flowing with light, like the surface of a pond. Paul shifted her head on his shoulder, and she said, “I feel like my whole life is being readjusted.”

“He’s thirty-eight years old. I can’t believe no one thought of this possibility before now.”

“Remember when he brought Jacob to our house for Christmas?”

“Jacob has kids. Whatever he was thinking about Jacob, Jacob wasn’t thinking that about him.”

“But he was gorgeous, I must say.”

“Now we know,” said Paul.

Claire hoisted herself onto her elbow and stared at her husband. She would have expected him to be more outraged and to say something about how maybe Henry shouldn’t spend time with their boys anymore. She would have expected him not even to shake Philip’s hand, or to put on a rubber glove before doing so. But he had been in a good mood all the way over from Des Moines, enjoying the drive and not complaining. She wondered if she was going to have to change her perception of Paul as well as to continue her marriage to him. She said, “You don’t want to go to a hotel?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Paul.

But he made no move toward her. They both lay quietly, and then he said, in his doctory voice, “You know what they’re doing, right?”

She hated to admit, “Not exactly.”

Paul shifted against her, and said, “Well, I do, and being near it doesn’t turn me on.”

Claire said, “Okay.” The room was now almost dark, which had a way of magnifying the significance of the silence from the other end of the hall.

Paul’s voice rose a bit. He said, “I mean, you really didn’t know about this?”

“I really didn’t. Did you?”

He moved away from her slightly, not as if he did so knowingly, more as if he suddenly felt uncomfortable. She said, “It’s only ten after nine. Let’s go to a hotel. We can afford it.”

But at the hotel they had a fight — not about Henry, or the boys, or what Paul called “her behavior”; it was about where they had eaten dinner with Henry and Philip. Why would you come to Chicago and not eat Italian? Or at least go for a steak? Why had she just smiled and agreed when Philip suggested Greek food? Paul hated Greek food — too many olives and strange-tasting cheeses, and what was the meat in a gyro? It tasted repellent, and smelled worse.

Claire said, mildly, “You could have said something.”

“Why do I always have to sound like the spoilsport? You just leave it to me, and you agree with me — you picked at yours and only ate bread.”

Claire tried to keep her voice down. “Can’t we try something new every so often?” Since the departure of Dr. Martin Sadler, almost a year ago now, she had cultivated a soothing manner.

“I’m over forty years old. I’m from Philadelphia. I’ve tried everything I intend to try. If you come to Chicago, you do so for a reason. You know that. You said you were looking forward to a steak. You betray me. I’m always the bad guy.”

Claire apologized.

Paul said, “Don’t apologize. That makes it worse.”

Claire put her pillow over her face and lay silently on her back while Paul prepared again for bed, as he had done earlier at Henry’s — brushing his teeth, washing and drying his feet, lubricating his eyes, adjusting the covers so that they wouldn’t weigh too heavily on him, setting his pillows carefully against his body. Since the end of her affair with Dr. Sadler, she had thought over and over of telling Paul, who still didn’t seem to have found out about it, even though he mentioned Dr. Sadler and his brother every so often (“They’re doing well enough; I guess pediatric foot problems are commoner than I realized”). Times like these, she thought it would be a kindness to tell him, so that he could understand who was the real bad guy. Or gal.

—

IT WAS COLD — first of May and hardly above freezing — in fact, there had been a frost the day before yesterday, and Joe expected another one. He was walking along the grass verge he had planted above the creek. It was thick and tough in spite of the bad weather, and the creek was high, too, up to thirty feet across and five to seven feet deep, muddy and a little foamy. He had sprayed this field with atrazine on March 30, and expected the whole thing to be planted in corn by now, but it had been too wet. He had fourteen days left to get his planting done, and he was fretful.

If you farmed nine hundred acres, leaving about two hundred fallow every year (and there weren’t all that many farmers Joe knew who still did that), you had to love atrazine. It was cheap, it was safe, it did a wonderful job. You sprayed the field before you planted, and the foxtail and the plantain and the dockweed just didn’t come up. No one had to walk down the rows with a hoe, whacking at the stems of the weeds, using the corner of the hoe to drag out as much of the root as possible. When they’d had Jake and Elsa (admittedly, long, long ago) cultivating had been fun, at least for the youthful him, sitting on Jake’s back, his fingers twined in the harness as the two horses pulled the cultivator. But riding a tractor was not fun, and it did disturb the soil much more than the horse-drawn cultivator had done. And then along came atrazine, and the manufacturer sent out a rep, and everyone from all around gathered at the feed store and watched the fellow drink a glass of the stuff, burp, laugh, and say, “Mmmm.” Of course Joe knew he was drinking water, but the demonstration was somehow effective. And then there were the magic words “no till,” words he’d never expected to hear in farm country. Lois was careful about the well — for weeks after he applied the stuff, she brought water home from the market. He didn’t object, just as he didn’t object when she started saying grace before every meal (the first time, he and Minnie had exchanged a glance, but soon they got used to the “dear Lord” and the “amen”).

He had given in on the sheep idea and found Jesse four Suffolks— black faces, black legs, curious and frisky. Jesse cared for them responsibly, though without much interest, but Joe himself went out to see them ten times a day and laughed at their antics. He’d bought them from an ambitious 4-H’er down in Burlington whose brother was dedicated to Berkshire hogs. Walter had preferred Berkshires; Joe didn’t remember them as being so graceful, ears pricked, belly tucked up, feet dainty white in spite of their massive size. Thinking of them and frustrated about planting, Joe was almost ready to build a confinement barn and go into the hog business — breed them, far-row them, feed them for six weeks, and sell them to someone else to finish. Forty-two days equaled fifty pounds each, and off they went, still rather cute. Ten sows might produce three or four litters each in the course of a year and a half. It made him smile to think of it.

The habit of worrying was a hard one to break. His corn yield had been as high as he’d ever seen it — a hundred bushels an acre, with the soybeans almost forty-five — that was almost thirty thousand bushels of corn and about eighteen thousand bushels of beans he had carted to the grain elevator. And somehow, against all probability and history, there had been a market. Minnie had said to him, “Well, if land is up to fifteen hundred an acre”—and it seemed to be, according to all the farmers sitting around the café in Denby—“there must be a reason.” Walter would have shaken his head and said, “No, no reason. Never made sense and never will,” but Joe was beginning to believe that there was a reason and there was a market. Maybe it was true, as many farmers said, that the middlemen — the grain companies and the traders on the exchanges — were getting the longer end of the stick, but the stick was getting fatter, too. What was the world population now? More than three and a half billion, and no sign of slowing down — some book Lois had seen called The Population Bomb or The Population Explosion predicted widespread famine. Or, Joe thought, the arrival of an era when farmers might get paid for what they produced.

Oh well, four lambs was a good start. And a dog, maybe. When Nat died, and then Poppy, he hadn’t replaced them. The wind picked up as he headed back toward the barn. He hunched his head into his shoulders. Not much hair to keep him warm anymore, and his feed cap was worthless. He stopped, though, just to watch a goshawk dive straight down at the bare field, walk about for a minute, peck quickly at something, and then rise into the air with a snake in its talons, long and slender. Joe had never seen that before — in fact, it was maybe two or three years since he’d seen any hawk, longer than that since he’d seen a goshawk. He stood and watched as it rose higher, the snake writhing at first and then drooping. Soon, they disappeared into the clouds, and Joe headed back to the barn. What he would do there, he didn’t know — one thing a long cold spring was good for was making sure that every gear was greased, every joint was oiled, every belt on every piece of farm machinery was tight.

Standing in the doorway of the barn, looking at the four lambs and the rest of the empty, chilly landscape, a bright sky (though not sunny) arching over the spreading dark and waiting fields, Joe didn’t see a soul. The earth, in his experience, was a bigger place than most people could imagine. Sheep made him think of breeding, how the strain of Walter and the strain of Rosanna mixed with the strain of Roland and the strain of Lorena (a little inbreeding there, he knew). He shook his head — breeding was about profit, not love. He fiddled around the barn until late morning, so idle that he began to contemplate dogs. A pointer. A pointer arrowing across the fields after a pheasant or even a rabbit would be a beautiful sight, a luxury, and a friend. And, after all, a man whose land was now worth almost a million and a half dollars maybe deserved a pointer.

—

ON MONDAY, which was a nice day, Rosanna put on her socks and boots and a sweater over her housedress and walked out to the newly painted barn, where she knew she would find Joe. The corn ran in a long towering barrier on the south side of the barn, and the Osage-orange hedge, hardy as ever, hid everything to the east (though Rosanna could hear the ewe Joe had decided to keep and breed — Hasta her name was, for hasta la vista, Joe’s idea of a joke). The puppy was cute, too, a purebred golden retriever named Dory, or D’Ory, which meant “golden” somehow. When she opened the door, the puppy ran over and sat right down, because Joe had taught her that she only got petted if she sat. Rosanna leaned down and scratched her ears, thinking she had turned into a softy for sure, then straightened up and declared, “I want to learn to drive a car.”

Joe stared at her.

She said, “I mean it. I’ve been sitting inside my house for forty-five years. I can’t even remember why I didn’t want to go out. Something to do with looks, I’m sure — I was a very vain young woman.”

“Where would you go?”

Rosanna put her hands on her hips. “Wherever I feel like.” That must have been the right answer, because Joe smiled. “You could drive Lois’s car to start with — that’s an automatic.” Then he said, “Want to try it right now? She hasn’t left for work yet.”

Rosanna took the dare and followed him to his house, where he told Lois, “My mother wants to borrow your car,” and Lois, who was deep into making something complicated and French, must not have heard, because she only waved her hand. “The keys are in it.” They walked out the front door before Lois could come to and stop them.

Rosanna had been in Lois’s car a few times. It was a new Volkswagen, a small blue station wagon. Joe backed it around, drove it out onto the road, and parked it. Rosanna got behind the wheel, and Joe got into the passenger’s seat. He pointed to the ignition, the brake, and the accelerator. He showed her where drive was, where park was, and where reverse was, then said, “Still want to do this?”

Rosanna said, “Since we’re heading down the road toward Usherton, more than ever.”

“Well, wait until tomorrow to go there.”

“You’re not letting me do this because you want to get rid of me, are you?”

Joe laughed. “I have no hope on that score.”

She thought she might get to the corner, but in the end, she got them all the way around the section (admittedly, only four turns, but all left turns). She sat up, stared through the windshield, and drove past the boarded-up old school, past the road to John’s farm, past Rolf’s old farm with the house gone, past her own driveway, over the creek, left again. She was careful about the deep ditches to either side of the road (maybe she did stick too close to the center, but no one came along), and she eased slowly up to the stop signs, using her left-turn signal (no putting your arm out the window these days). Joe seemed relaxed — at least, he didn’t startle or gasp at anything she did. The panorama through the windshield was a strange new perspective for someone who usually rode in the backseat. When she stopped in front of Joe’s house, she said, “That’s not so different from driving old Jake to town.”

“I always wanted to do that.”

“I know you did. I wish I’d let you.”

It had taken half an hour. She left the keys swaying back and forth in the ignition (lovely word!), gave Joe a hug, and got out. Without daring to encounter Lois, she went around their house, then clomped through the corn back to her place, where she straightened the living room, did the breakfast dishes, and headed upstairs to look in her closet. If she was going to start driving into town, she realized, she would have to do something about her hair and her wardrobe.