Free The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley

such a pleasure from his daughter. All these thoughts occur simultaneously and are accompanied by a lifting of the anxiety he felt in the shower. She isn’t coming. She is never coming. He is off the hook. He says, “But it’s hard for you to give it up, Mieko. It is for me, too. I’m sorry.”
    The sympathetic tones in his voice wreck her self-control, and she begins to weep. In the five months that Kirby knew Mieko in Japan, and in the calls between them since, she has never shed a tear, hardly ever let herself be caught in a low moment, but now she weeps with absolute abandon, in long, heaving sobs, saying, “Oh, oh, oh,” every so often. Once, the sounds fade, as if she has put down the phone, but he does not dare hang up, does not even dare move the phone from one ear to the other. This attentive listening is what he owes to her grief, isn’t it? If she had come and he had disappointed her, as he would have, this is how she would have wept in solitude after swallowing her disappointment in front of him. But this is her father’s doing, not his. He can give her a little company after all. He presses the phone so hard to his ear that it hurts. The weeping goes on for a long time and he is afraid to speak and interfere with what will certainly be her only opportunity to give way to her feelings. She gives one final wailing “Ohhh” and thenbegins to cough and choke. Finally she quiets, and then sighs. After a moment of silence, she says, “Kirby, you should not have listened.”
    “How could I hang up?”
    “A Japanese man would have.”
    “You sound better, if you are back to comparing me with Japanese men.”
    “I am going to hang up now, Kirby. I am sorry not to come. Good-bye.”
    “Don’t hang up.”
    “Good-bye.”
    “Mieko?”
    “Good-bye, Kirby.”
    “Call me! Call me again!” He is not sure that she hears him. He looks at the phone and then puts it on the cradle.
    Two hours later he is on the highway. This is, after all, two days before Christmas, and he is on his way to spend the holidays with his two brothers and their wives and children, whom he hasn’t seen in years. He has thought little about this visit, beyond buying a few presents. Mieko’s coming loomed, imposing and problematic. They had planned to drive out west together—she paid an extra fare so that she could land in Minneapolis and return from San Francisco—and he had looked forward to seeing the mountains again. They had made reservations on a bus that carries tourists into Yellowstone National Park in the winter, to look at the smoky geysers and the wildlife and the snow. The trip would have seemed very American to her. Buffalo and men in cowboy boots and hats. But it seemed very Japanese to him—deep snow, dark pines, sharp mountains.
    The storm rolls in suddenly, the way it sometimes does on I-35 in Iowa, startling him out of every thought except alertness. Snow swirls everywhere, blotting out the road, the other cars, sometimes even his own front end. The white of his headlights reflects back at him, so that he seems to be driving into a wall. He can hardly force himself to maintain thirty-five miles an hour, although he knows he must. To stop would be to invite a rear-end collision. And the shoulder of the road is invisible. Only the white line, just beside the left front corner of the car, reveals itself intermittently as the wind blows the snow off the pavement. He ejects the tape he is playing and turns on the radio, to the state weather station. He notices that his hand is shaking. He could be killed. The utter blankness of the snowy whirl gives him a way of imagining what it would be like to be dead. He doesn’t like the feeling.
    He remembers reading two winters ago about an elderly woman whose son dropped her off at her apartment. She discovered that she had forgotten her key, and with the wind-chill factor at eighty below zero, she froze before she got to the manager’s office. The winter before that a kid