Free Windfalls: A Novel by Jean Hegland Page A

time she chafed at the thought of giving up a weekend to visit her now. In recent years it was as though she’d somehow outgrown her grandmother. These days her grandmother seemed too simple and too sweet to understand the person Anna had become, seemed too frail and old and timid to be exposed to Anna’s world.
    Eighty miles beyond Spokane Anna entered the little city of Salish. She drove past the pioneer museum, past the entrance to Spaulding University, where Sally’s husband Mike taught English, past the public pool where her grandfather used to drop Sally and Anna on summer afternoons while he went to the John Deere dealership or to the Grange. Two miles outside of town she turned off the state highway and headed south on a county road. After the whine of asphalt, the crunch of gravel beneath her tires sounded sturdy and secure, a small comfort that did not quite belong to her.
    She passed the Levitt elevator, which loomed like a lone wooden skyscraper above the empty railroad tracks, passed the Hopkins’s place and then the Joneses’, passed the grove of bull pines where she had once seen a fox. As she drove, memories moved through her, intense as the sour candies her grandpa used to bring from the Grange. She remembered perching with Sally on top of a load of grain while the farm truck raced down the road to the elevator, remembered how the hot wind had whipped their hair, how the dusty load had shimmered in the sun, how they’d chewed handfuls of wheat into a glutinous gum and gazed like sunburned princesses out across the golden land. She remembered picking roses with her grandmother and going hunting with her grandfather in his pickup. “Don’t look for deer,” he’d told her as he drove. “Look for where you can’t see field. Sometimes you have to try to find what’s missing before you can see what’s really there.”
    The car began to labor up a hill, and she shifted into second. When she reached the crest, she eased back on the accelerator and paused to look down into the valley that held her grandparents’ house. Amid the golden fields, it sat in a tidy island of green yard, dwarfed by the spruce tree her grandfather planted the year the stock market crashed. Grandpa’s dead, she remembered, and the stab of pain that followed seemed nearly welcome for the way that—for a moment—it thrust all the other emptiness aside.
    She descended into the valley, turned up the drive, parked in the wide shade of the spruce. The front door opened, and her grandmother stepped out onto the porch, one hand shading her eyes in a worried salute. She was wearing a housedress and an apron, opaque hose and solid black shoes. Anna saw how small she had become, how lined and strained and faded, and an odd flicker of anger seared her. For a moment she felt impatient with her grandmother because she had allowed herself to get so old.
    “You’re here,” said her grandmother, coming down off the porch and holding out both her hands toward Anna. Her fingers were stained a deep maroon, and when Anna took her hands in her own, she was startled to feel how smooth they were, as if the lines and ridges of her fingertips and palms had been rubbed away.
    “I didn’t expect you before suppertime,” her grandmother said apologetically. “I’m working on the beets.”
    “The beets?” Anna asked, dropping the smooth, stained hands and reaching out to give her grandmother a careful hug. She felt her narrow shoulders and staunch spine beneath the fabrics of her apron, dress, and slip, smelled lavender and Ivory soap and the earthy scent of beets.
    Her grandmother reached up to pat Anna’s shoulder as though she were a small girl or a good dog. “Irene Hodge brought by a bushel. I doubt I can eat that many, but I hate to let them go to waste. I’ll send some home with you,” she added brightly.
    All that work for beets, Anna thought wearily. She said, “I don’t think I’ve ever canned beets.”
    “No?” her grandmother