Free A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton Page A

thought I had steeled myself against her, against my own irritation, I was always amazed, as if for the first time, by her little speeches, her slights, her apparently careless generosity that later implied a condition or two.
    Howard was adept at concealing his exasperation, but I knew him well enough to understand that the steady gaze he now turned on me was his way of pleading for help. I shrugged my shoulders and pushed my plate back. She wanted him to look nice. Her son was going to smell of manure and have a dirty face at church; he wasn’t going to put his best foot forward and no one would know what a good, smart boy he was. I could see the worry in her puckered face. Her son’s wife was a disgrace,and he wasn’t going to look as if he was separate from her. Nellie was tired, and she was growing old. To her credit she had said very little about Lizzy’s death, and giving her the benefit of the doubt, the suit business was probably her way of trying to make it all right for us. I did feel a little bit sorry for her. He had already jeopardized the cows’ productivity and comfort by milking two hours earlier, so why not oblige her? “I’ll drive,” I said to Howard. And to Nellie I murmured, “We’ll find him something presentable.”
    On the way to town I couldn’t keep from saying my usual line: “Someday we have to stop taking her money.”
    “I know.” It was characteristic of him to speak in monosyllables when there might be an argument.
    At the men’s store in Blackwell, Hutchin’s, conveniently open late on Fridays, Howard tried on three suits, all of which were big around the middle and too short in the sleeves. Although he is color blind he picked out a respectable gray-and-green ensemble. “This isn’t pink, is it?” he whispered. The saleswoman reminded him that he needed shoes and a tie, a shirt and socks. She winked at me as if to say, We are on the same side. We have a mutual interest in dressing the senseless mannequin. When it dawned on her that something was wrong with me, that I was feebleminded or deaf, she turned her back and addressed Howard as if she had only just recognized his genius for matching socks to ties.
    We sat for fifteen minutes scratching our legs and thumbing through the Reader’s Digests while the suit was being altered. The seamstress lived right around the corner and was called from her supper for the emergency. For all our bad luck there was a speck of good fortune. I found a fashion magazine with a scratch-and-sniff perfume ad and applied the strip vigorously to my wrists. After a while Howard began playing his front tooth with his fingernail and tapping his foot on the hardwood floor. Finally he got up and burst into the back room where the woman sat doubled over, her nose in the hem of the pants. From his pocket he took the needle he had used to sew up the back end of the cow with the prolapsed uterus that afternoon. “I can fix it with a neat slip stitch,” he said. “No need to worry. I took an upholstery class in college.”
    The startled seamstress had a forehead the size of Mount Rushmore. It was astonishing that a person could have such little eyes, an acorn of amouth, hardly any hair, and yet so much forehead. I couldn’t help staring, thinking how you’d have to be careful coming around the corners with a forehead like that, how easy it would be to wham into the icebox or the kitchen cupboard.
    “We’re short on time,” Howard was explaining. “Should have been there a half hour ago.”
    At 6:15 the suit was finished. He paid a terrific sum, carefully writing the figures on Nellie’s check, and then he went into the dressing room to put on his finery. He emerged, silent, looking down, as if he couldn’t believe that anything below his neck was still his own body. I stood back marveling at him, at the handyman, who didn’t care how he looked, who had little use for daily personal hygiene, and there he was ravishing in his suit. It was only