Free Loving Frank by Nancy Horan Page A

in the open window of their room, she could see the housekeeper pulling sheets off the bed. Mamah pressed her lips together.
    “In college,” he said, “I knew I was the clumsy kid, and you were the…You were just so beautiful. I’d see you standing on the steps, talking with some other smart girl…” He shook his head. “All those years later, when I tracked you down in Port Huron? I really believed it was a new day. I believed I was rescuing you from that backwater town. I wanted to bring you to the city and give you everything you deserved.”
    Edwin trained his eyes on hers. “Do you remember when we were first married? I’d had a couple of back teeth pulled by the dentist, and I came home and lay down on the couch afterward. I put my head on your lap, and you read to me—an entire book. It was one of the happiest times of my life.”
    Mamah remained silent. If they were now who they had once been, she might have joked, “You were on morphine.” Instead, she breathed evenly, bore it. She owed him this and more.
    “I can never remember the name of the book,” he went on, “but I remember the story was about a couple who lived on an island, alone. They grew all their own food and built their own house. You said you wanted to do that with me someday.” His eyes grew watery again. “I gave you the wrong things, didn’t I?” He waved his hand toward the house.
    Mamah glanced at her hands in her lap, folded like a penitent’s. She unlaced her fingers. “It just happened, Ed. It’s not your fault.”
    From Martha’s bedroom window, a shrill giggle echoed against the walls.
    Edwin’s head was down, across from her knees, as he tied his shoe. The few strands of hair that he always combed back across his tender pate looked absurd now, like strings on a banjo. For a fleeting moment she wanted to put his head in her lap, stroke it. But when he lifted his eyes, he wore a baleful expression.
    “You can take them to Colorado with you,” he said. “But don’t think for a minute you could ever get custody of them.”
             
    ROWS OF ILLINOIS CORN fanned out from the horizon like green spokes in a wheel that kept turning. Across acres of farmland west of Chicago, the black earth divided itself from the sky in one flat pencil line.
    “On to the Rockies,” she said softly.
    John held Martha steady as she stood with her nose pressed to the window. He was behaving even more kindly to his sister than usual. Mamah was certain he was aware of the crisis in the house during the past week. At seven, John was the most empathetic, finely tuned creature she had ever known. Even as a baby, he’d been a watcher. Cautious, reserved. When he was six months old, he had sat on her lap, an exclamation of brown curls at the top of his otherwise bald head, and watched. She recalled the time she’d broken her ankle in a fall from a bicycle. John was four at the time. He had come to her room to find her in bed with her foot bandaged and elevated by a pulley. He had stood at the door with a pained look on his face and said simply, “It hurts me.”
    She reached out and rubbed John’s back. “Grandpa was a train man, you know.”
    “You always say that,” he said. “But what did he do?”
    “Well, he wasn’t always a train man. First he was an architect, and then a carriage builder.” Mamah rallied, injecting cheeriness into her voice. “But when the Chicago and North Western train came through Boone, he took a job with the railroad. He could fix anything, and he got very good at repairing trains. Pretty soon they put him in charge of all the men who repaired North Western trains.”
    “Is that why you moved away from Iowa?”
    “I think so. Papa started working for the railroad around the time I was born. And I was six when we left. Maybe he was in charge of things by then.”
    “What was Boone like?”
    “We lived in an old house in the country. That’s where I was born. I remember we had chickens, and