Free Windfalls: A Novel by Jean Hegland

in the careful casualness with which her mother wiped the spotless counter. The moment wavered like air above a fire. For a second she considered saying—what? I had an abortion. I burned all my work. But when she tried to imagine her parents’ response, she realized that no matter how they took it, no matter what they said or did, she could not bear to have to add their sorrow or worry or anger to her own.
    “There are a lot of variables,” she repeated, reaching across the counter for the pie. “But my show’s scheduled for December.” Picking up the knife, she said, “If my committee likes it, I’ll graduate next spring.”
    The moment became solid once more. Her mother nodded quickly, as if she’d known it all along, and although the shape of her father’s expression did not change, he relaxed back into his smile. “Next spring,” he said heartily. “That’s just fine.”
    “How’re the boys?” Anna asked, ignoring the little punch of loneliness in her gut. Placing the point of the knife at the center of the pie, she pressed the blade down through the foamy meringue. “Sally said Dylan is already crawling.”
    She spent the next two months answering phones and filing claim forms and coming home to watch David Brinkley on the evening news and eat her mother’s quiches and pork chops and spinach salads. On weekends she roamed Spokane with her camera, wandering the riverfront and Division Avenue and the Arboretum, seeking something to replace the photographs she’d burned. She hung around the lobby of the Davenport Hotel, loitered past the pawnshops down on Mission, drifted through the Japanese Gardens. But she couldn’t bring herself to expose a single frame. By mid-August, fall semester was looming like an iceberg in a dark ocean, and she wondered—sometimes vaguely and sometimes desperately—what she should do about it. It made her frantic to think of returning to school empty-handed, but when she imagined remaining in Spokane, she felt a despair so heavy it was hard to breathe.
    “You need to visit your grandmother before you leave,” her mother said one night at supper. “She keeps asking when you’re going to come.”
    “I know,” Anna answered contritely. “I meant to go down earlier. It’s just that I’ve been—” busy, she thought, though she anticipated the look her parents might exchange and didn’t say it. Instead, to camouflage the way her sentence failed, she said, “I’ll go this weekend.” Turning to her father, she asked, “Hey, boss—can I have Friday off?”
    That Friday she worked until noon and then left the office, stopping at a drive-in for a cup of coffee on her way out of town. Just west of the city, she turned off the freeway and headed south on the state highway, following a route she’d traveled all her life. But after the flat Midwest and the forested Rockies, the land she drove through seemed almost foreign. The sky was cloudless, and a late-summer light covered everything with its rich gloss. The fields spread out in all directions like earthen waves, unfenced, treeless, a vast maze of swells and curves.
    Occasionally a breeze rippled through the nearly ripened grain. Once a red-tailed hawk dropped from a telephone pole and swept in a low arc across the road while Anna watched dispassionately. She reminded herself that time was getting shorter, that she had to get to work, but she still could not bring herself to stop the car and take her camera from the trunk.
    Steering with one hand, she raised the plastic cup to her mouth. The coffee tasted bitter, chemical, its harshness like a penance. She thought of where she was headed, of the staid farmhouse alone in the open fields, of her grandmother sweeping the clean front steps or waiting on the front porch with her knitting. She wished she could be ten again, thrilled at the thought of a weekend alone at Grandma’s. She felt guilty for not having gone to visit her grandmother sooner, though at the same