Free Wildlife by Richard Ford Page A

change. It’d make everybody feel better.’
    ‘I wouldn’t feel better,’ I said.
    ‘Okay. Then not you,’ my mother said, and nodded. ‘Joe chooses for his only choice in the world to do the absolutely correct best thing. Good luck to him.’ She looked around at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn’t seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she’d done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her left with me. And I couldn’t do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would’ve had my father be there, or Warren Miller, or somebody who had the right words that would take the place of hers, anybody she could speak to without just hearing her own voice in a room and having to go to the trouble of pretending she did not feel absolutely alone.
    At seven o’clock that night my mother and I drove across the river to Warren Miller’s house to eat dinner with him. My mother wore a bright green dress and high heels that were the same color, and she had taken her hair down out of the French bun and put on perfume.
    ‘This is my desperation dress,’ she said to me when I was waiting for her in the living room, and where I could see her through the bathroom door in front of the mirror. ‘Your father should see me wearing this,’ she said, brushing herhair back with her fingers. ‘He’d approve of it. Inasmuch as he paid for it.’
    ‘He’d like it,’ I said.
    ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’m sure he would too.’ She drank the last of her cup of whiskey and left it in the sink as we went out the back door.
    In the car she was in a good humor, and I was, too, because of it. We drove through the middle of Great Falls, past the Masonic Temple where no lights were on, and past the Pheasant Lounge across Central, where the neon sign hung out dimly in the night. It was cold now, and my mother had not worn a coat and was cold herself, though she said she wanted to feel the air to get her bearings.
    She drove us down to Gibson Park and along the river so that we passed the Helen Apartments, which was a long four-story redbrick building I had never seen before but where several windows were lighted and in one or two I could see someone sitting by a lamp reading a newspaper.
    ‘How do
you
feel,’ my mother asked, looking over at me. ‘Out of reach? I wouldn’t be surprised.’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’ I was looking out at the Helen Apartments as we drove past them. They did not seem like bad places to me. Maybe our life would be better there.
    ‘Sometimes’–my mother straightened her bare arms toward the steering wheel and looked ahead toward Black Eagle, across the river–‘if you can just get a little distance on your fate, things seem okay. I like that. It’s a relief to me.’
    ‘I know it,’ I said, because I felt relieved just at that moment.
    ‘Keep your distance,’ she said. ‘Then everybody–girls included–will think you’re smart. And maybe you will be.’ She reached down to turn on the radio. ‘Let’s have some mood music,’ she said. I remember very distinctly there was a man’s voice speaking in a foreign language, which I guessed was French. He was speaking very fast, and seemedvery far away. ‘Canada,’ my mother said. ‘We live near Canada now. My God.’ She clicked the radio off. ‘I can’t stand Canada tonight,’ she said. ‘Sorry. We’ll have Canada later.’ And we turned and drove on across the Fifteenth Street Bridge and up into Black Eagle.
    Warren Miller’s house was the only one on his street with a porch light shining. And once we had stopped across the street from it, I could see that all the lights inside were burning, and the house–set up above the street–looked warm inside like a place where a party was going on or was ready to begin. Warren Miller’s pink