Free A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Page A

flowering crab apples and beds of tulips and Dutch iris that flanked the entrance, a display we hadn't even noticed upon going in. "It is a nice day!"

    exclaimed Rose, inhaling deeply, and for once her left hand didn't stray to the lost muscles just under her arm. This was a habit she had fallen into that hurt me to see, just a light touch, the lingers asking, feathering across, discovering anew. Her hand never went anywhere else-it was as if the other, the breast, the chest muscles, were okay, well lost, an acceptable sacrifice, but this, too? She said, "Hey! Let's eat meat!"

    "They've got meat at the Brown Bottle."

    "No, I mean, let's go somewhere expensive, like the Starlight Supper Club. Remember when we went for your tenth anniversary?

    They had three kinds of herring on the salad bar and some kind of garlic toasts that had been fried slowly in butter until they were as hard as canning jar lids, except that they fragmented and vanished as soon as you put them on your tongue?"

    "I can't believe you remember the food like that. It was six years ago.

    "I haven't thought about it since, I bet. It's just that I really believe him, you know? I really believe everything he said, and now I want to drink it all in, all the stuff I was going to miss, that I'd pretty much made up my mind not to think about."

    We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, "I didn't realize you were so depressed."

    "I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em all carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was."

    I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we'd been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again, and unimaginable disaster was averted.

    She stopped when we got to the opposite corner and ran her hand through her hair. She said, "Anyway, Ginny, I know this was only the three months exam. There's the six months exam and the year exam and live more year exams, and then I'll only be forty. I haven't forgotten that, but I still want to do something special. Something that would scandalize Daddy. Just to mark the occasion.

    "I don't think there are any male strippers in Mason City."

    "Did you see that on Phil Donahue?" Rose grinned.

    "Last Wednesday? Where they were wearing about three square inches of shiny blue underwear?"

    "The one guy was in black."

    "The blond guy."

    "I didn't know you were watching that. I was kind of embarrassed to be having it on."

    "I turned off the picture and listened to the sound, like it was on the radio."

    "You did not!"

    "You're right," I said. "I watched every minute, even after they had their clothes on."

    Rose laughed giddily, then exclaimed, "There's a whorehouse in Mason City, did you know that? Pete told me. It's next door to the Golden Corral. There's the USDA office on one side and the whorehouse on the other."

    "How does Pete know?"

    "Those guys he hired to help him paint the barn last summer told We paused in front of Lundberg's and gazed at the dresses. Rose said, "But we don't have to go that far just to scandalize Daddy. I think shopping would actually do the trick."

    "What a relief."

    We went in. It was not lost on me that Rose hadn't bought anything to wear since the diagnosis, had possibly not paused for very long in front of a mirror since that time. I concentrated on a rack of blouses, trying to relax the vigilance that kept asserting itselfattention to what sizes she was looking at, what sort of cut she was attracted to; whatever dress she chose to try on first, I wanted it to be flattering. When she took her limit, four, into the