Free Northwest Corner by John Burnham Schwartz Page B

searching for an invisible plane of dignity on which to stand, not finding it. “I’m sorry about all this, Norris. But I’m glad to see you’ve found somebody nice to be with.”
    “Wanda and I found each other,” Norris replies a bit too firmly.
    Ruth is silent. She can feel the cool poultry insides of the pie through the aluminum plate and, ridiculously, her mouth begins to water. Had she known she was going to run into Norris she would have put off buying the pie until later, in fact would have skipped the fair altogether. No turkey pie, however perfect, can be worth this scene.
    “I know about Sam leaving school,” Norris says. And having delivered himself of his most dramatic line he rests, looking at her significantly, knowing he has her full attention now. But even his indignation, it strikes her, is like an old tire leaking air.
    “Who told you?”
    “Who is not important,” uttered as though nothing in New Englandcould be more so. “I happen to know someone at the university.”
    “Don’t people have anything better to talk about than other people’s kids?”
    “Sam’s my stepson and you should’ve told me.”
    “That would have been awkward.”
    “I don’t care.”
    “I’ve been a little preoccupied, as you can imagine.”
    “I think he needs me, Ruthie. He sounds pretty confused, all right, just bolting school like that for no reason.”
    “Maybe he has his reasons.”
    “I want your permission to call and invite him to stay with me and Wanda.”
    She stares at him, honestly dumbfounded. “But Norris, Sam doesn’t like you.”
    “That’s exactly the kind of thing you would say. Look, I’m sorry you’re sick, Ruth, but you really need to deal with the anger.”
    “I’m not angry with you. And my health has nothing to do with this. My doctor says my odds are terrific.”
    “I happen to know your doctor—Cusack at Yale–New Haven? Played golf with him last year.”
    “Stay out of my business, Norris. Jesus, one of these days I’m going to move out of this fishbowl into the biggest city I can find.”
    She’s allowed herself to overheat, is speaking too loudly. Glancing out from under the burdensome limbs into the searing sunlight, she sees a few people turn their heads to avoid getting caught spying. Lucinda Jarvis, for one, will sell no more turkey pies until this puppet show is over.
    “I need to get home, Norris.”
    “Will you at least tell Sam to call me? Tell him I’m here if he needs me. Tell him that.”
    “I’ll tell him.”
    High on a limb overhead a squirrel jitters, pursuing its squirrel life, and a cracked branch falls through the leaf-dark air and landsinches from Norris’s left foot. He flinches at the sound, then colors for having flinched.
    Striding on trembling legs back across the green to where she’s parked, her chin forced up, carrying that golden pie like a reward for being good, she is radioactive, her own little Chernobyl. People staring at her through their sunglasses.
    But who, she desperately needs to know, will be there in the end to see her over to the other side?
    She drives away wiping tears, unable to imagine dinner.

DWIGHT
    T HE WORKDAY PASSES . During my lunch break Sandra comes up and asks if she can talk to me alone. We go back to the mechanicals room, where she tells me that she doesn’t care if he’s, like, her cousin or whatever, she’s sick to here of Evander stealing shit out of the store and selling it to kids behind the high school, and she isn’t going to put up with it no more, okay? I calm her down and send her back to the registers with an order to keep it buttoned. Privately I check the books against our inventory, which confirms her account. Then there’s nothing to do but wait for Tony to come back from lunch.
    He doesn’t accept the facts at first—“Family stealing from family? Fuck yourself, Dwight, okay!”—and comes awfully close to outright calling me a liar. My blood is up and we might be heading for