Free A Thousand Acres: A Novel by Jane Smiley Page A

belt of her jacket getting closed in the car door, having to stop for gas, running into a little traffic about ten blocks from the hospital, and then being five or six minutes late for her appointment. Our plan was to shop a little after the hospital, then go to the Brown Bottle for dinner, but our unspoken agreement was that it all depended on the doctor’s appointment. If the news was bad, there would be no telling what we would do—the future would lie before us as a blank, and, somehow, we would honor that.
    In fact, the appointment went beautifully. The moment we walked in the door, the nurses greeted her with happy warmth, and it was hard not to be comforted by just that, as if they already knew good news, and all they had to do was tell it to us. The doctor found nothing at all suspicious, and congratulated Rose on how muchmovement and strength she had gotten back in her arm, “in so short a time.” Rose smiled at his wording, and I did, too, but just hearing him say it lightened those long, heavy months, somehow, the worst months of the year in our part of the country, when the sky is like iron day after day, and the wind is endless, chill, and hostile, even on those days when a little weak sunlight blossoms through the clouds. It was easy, while he was giving us the good news, to marvel at how depressed we’d been, almost without knowing it, easy to regard his round pink face with affection, easy to feel transformed as we came out of the hospital into the pleasant May air, which was sweetened and colored by the flowering crabapples and beds of tulips and Dutch iris that flanked the entrance, a display we hadn’t even noticed upon going in. “It is a nice day!” exclaimed Rose, inhaling deeply, and for once her left hand didn’t stray to the lost muscles just under her arm. This was a habit she had fallen into that hurt me to see, just a light touch, the fingers asking, feathering across, discovering anew. Her hand never went anywhere else—it was as if the other, the breast, the chest muscles, were okay, well lost, an acceptable sacrifice, but this, too? She said, “Hey! Let’s eat meat!”
    “They’ve got meat at the Brown Bottle.”
    “No, I mean, let’s go somewhere expensive, like the Starlight Supper Club. Remember when we went for your tenth anniversary? They had three kinds of herring on the salad bar and some kind of garlic toasts that had been fried slowly in butter until they were as hard as canning jar lids, except that they fragmented and vanished as soon as you put them on your tongue?”
    “I can’t believe you remember the food like that. It was six years ago.”
    “I haven’t thought about it since, I bet. It’s just that I really believe him, you know? I really believe everything he said, and now I want to drink it all in, all the stuff I was going to miss, that I’d pretty much made up my mind not to think about.”
    We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, “I didn’t realize you were so depressed.”
    “I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you’ve bought in your life, and you remember howmuch it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch ’em all carry it off, and you don’t care. That’s more like how it was.”
    I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we’d been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again, and unimaginable disaster was averted.
    She stopped when we got to the opposite corner and ran her hand through her hair. She said, “Anyway, Ginny, I know this was only the three months exam. There’s the six months exam and the year exam and five more year exams, and then I’ll only be forty. I haven’t forgotten that,