Free The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich Page B

that he knew bubbled up in him, apparently because she was near, they would smile at each other. “Listen to me,” he’d say. “I just go on and on, don’t I?”
    â€œI like to hear that stuff. If I didn’t, why would I be here?”
    He told her she’d tire of it, he was sure, but as long as she’d be his legs for him, he’d be happy to point things out to her. He had only to get himself a little way off the road before he started finding and describing to her new threads in the tapestry of his practical understanding.With an eye to harvest, he showed her that an alder thicket was an almanac, and for Mr. Brusett the grass and the weeds lay this way or that way not randomly but for some reason, and the wind never merely blew, but blew from a certain direction, at a certain velocity, carrying a specific, telling scent. He was a barometer, never surprised by any weather. For Mr. Brusett, all things, saving Mr. Brusett himself, served perfectly some purpose, and through him Karen was introduced to a reassuring order. “There’ll be a mayfly hatch tonight, and if you got a fly-casting rig at sundown, you’ll have good fishing. About anywhere along the river or the lower parts of the creeks. There I go again, the endless expert, huh? But it’s true, watch and see.”
    Karen’s solitude out of doors, after she’d spent some time with Mr. Brusett, was a larger, more sovereign place; there was more in it to see and to think about, and though he’d furnished her with many new resources for being alone, she now preferred passing time in his company. She had never before been so useful to anyone, never nearly so necessary.
    â€œI was married over twenty years to the same woman,” Henry once told her, “and I didn’t know her good enough, really, just to pass the time of day. Same thing with my boys. Same thing with everybody.” He said that the state had once tried to patch him back together, back when he’d gotten bunged up, but they’d found that he was a little crazy, too, and so at that point everyone threw in the towel, and they put him on full disability, and now he was one of those drains on society that a working man always hated. They told him he suffered a form of high anxiety, a severe case of something to do with other people. “But see?” he said. “When I’m around you I get to talkin’ like the old gals down at the beauty parlor. Which I kind of like. When I’m around you.”
    Henry was to give her at different times the small pistol, a Buck knife, and six years of Reader’s Digests , and she learned to avoidlooking for very long at or commenting favorably on anything he owned for fear that he’d make an instant, irrevocable gift of it. Henry’s was a sometimes terrible gratitude. He did her the favor of seeing her, though, of attending so closely to her existence as to know her shifting essence, to confirm it, and for this favor she was every bit as glad of his company as he was of hers, but she never would convince him of it.
    The Dents saw her apprenticeship with the puzzling Mr. Brusett as a very fine thing, and they were pleased with the occasional fish that came of it, and venison and duck, and at finding red fir split and rucked high and deep on their porch. When Karen brought home her .243 Savage, her first gainful wage and first substantial property, Jean offered thanks in prayer: “Lord God,” she said, “thank you for this rifle, and for the blessing of showing our girl a way to get by.” Karen knew that the Dents liked to see her put to good use, but Karen knew that what especially pleased them was having her so frequently off somewhere with Mr. Brusett and not, therefore, lurking around the property, in and out of sight. They liked her better at a distance, and they always had.
    As graduation approached, Karen had only one certainty regarding her future, and