Chapter 10
DANI
The window is down and the morning comes in smelling like cut hay and warm asphalt, and I am, for no reason I could put a name to, almost happy.
It sneaks up on me at the stop sign past Dot's.
I have a list. Eggs, because mine are gone.
Flour, because I want to bake something that nobody will weigh me for.
The good butter from the market two towns over, the one Dot says is worth the drive, run by a man named Purdy's cousin who churns it himself and doesn't believe in price tags.
A short list. An ordinary list. The kind of errand a person runs without rehearsing how she'll explain it later.
I have not run an errand I didn't have to justify.
Dot was on her porch when I backed the car out, in the housecoat she wears until noon on principle, a mug going cold on the rail beside her.
She lifted two fingers off it, not a wave so much as an acknowledgment, the kind she gives everything, like she's been knowing you for years and sees no reason to make a production of it.
"Tell Purdy's cousin I want the cultured, not the sweet," she said, though I hadn't told her where I was going.
She just knew it was a market morning, the same as she knows the weather.
I told her I would. She told me to take the nephew's truck if I wanted the room for it, and I told her the car was fine, and she let me go without making me feel I'd refused her anything.
That is its own kind of strange to me still: being offered a thing and allowed to say no to it, and the no costing me nothing. In the house every kindness had a cost. Here a woman lifts two fingers off a mug and means only good morning, and I am learning to take it at the size it actually is.
I catch myself smiling at the windshield and I let it stay. That is the new thing I am practicing. Not smoothing it down. Not checking the mirror to see how it reads. Just letting my own face do what it wants while no one is keeping score.
The radio is on a station that fades in and out between towns, some old song I half know, and I don't change it when it goes to static.
I let that stay too. My phone is face-down in the cupholder, dark, not waiting to light up with a name.
For years the sound of it was a leash. This morning it is just a phone, and I am just a woman with a list, driving.
The town thins out fast: the gas station, the diner with its one truck nosed in, the feed store with the door already propped and a dog asleep across the sill. Then the porches give way to fence line, and the fence line gives way to corn, and there is nothing but the going.
A red-winged blackbird rides a fence wire and lets the car go by without lifting off, too sure of its morning to bother.
The corn is shoulder-high and still wet at the base, the rows opening and closing as I pass like a thing breathing.
The smell changes as the fields change: hay, then the green wet smell of the corn, then for a stretch the warm tar of a patch the county laid down and never came back to sand.
Somebody's irrigation rig throws a slow arc of water that catches the light and lets it go.
I count nothing. For years I drove with half my mind on the clock and the other half rehearsing the version of the day I'd hand him at night, edited down to what wouldn't cost me.
This morning there is no version. There is only what is actually here, and it is enough to fill the windshield.
The road out of town is two lanes and badly kept, the kind that the county fixes the same week every spring and forgets the rest of the year.
It runs straight for a while between fields, then it bends where the creek does, down past a stand of cottonwoods gone silver at the edges.
There is no one on it. There is almost never anyone on it.
I do the math without dread for once, the same figures I ran in that pharmacy bathroom and couldn't make come out hopeful.
Money first, last, and a margin. A doctor I picked myself.
A landlady who asks me nothing. A car that is mine, in my own name, the title in the glovebox where I can put my hand on it.
I built a small life out of nothing while they weren't looking, and it holds.
I keep waiting for it not to hold. It keeps holding.
My hand drifts off the wheel and settles low on my stomach.
I don't decide to do it anymore. The flinch is gone; what's left is the other thing, the thing I wouldn't let myself have in that house.
Hope is a word I distrust. But there is a hand on my stomach at seven in the morning and a list on the seat and butter to buy, and if that isn't hope it is close enough to live in for now.
You're going to be all right, I think, to the both of us.
I let Eli cross my mind the way a bird crosses a window: there, and then moving on, no need to stand up and watch it.
He'd be thirty-four. He went out on a road not so different from this one, a morning not so different, and for a long time I couldn't drive a county two-lane in summer without holding the wheel like it might come off in my hands.
Years took that down to a flicker. It flickers now, light, and I let it pass, because the man waiting on the other end of that grief was always all right about it, and because grief and going to the market are allowed to happen in the same body on the same morning.
I've only just learned that. I'm still learning it.
I think about the kitchen I'm driving back to.
The flour going into the jar Dot lent me.
The butter softening on the counter where no one will move it to make room for something that matters more.
Something with cinnamon, maybe, because the house should smell like a person lives there now, a person who is staying.
I have spent six years making other people's rooms feel lived in.
It did not once occur to me, in all that time, that I might make one for myself.
The song finds itself again on the far side of the static. I turn it up.
The bend at the creek comes up the way it always does, slow and then all at once, the cottonwoods throwing bars of shade across the lane so the light strobes through the windshield, bright dark bright dark, and I ease off the gas the way you do, the way anyone does —
The truck is already across the line when I come through the shade.
It is just there, the way a thing is there when there was no there a half-second before — a flatbed, a farm truck, somebody's morning, the driver's face a pale smear turning toward me with the same animal surprise that must be on mine.
He is in my lane. Maybe he drifted. Maybe the strobe took his eyes too.
There is no time to assign it. There is no time to do the thing you are supposed to do, the thing they teach you, steer into the open, don't lock the wheel —
My foot is already on the brake. My hands are already turning. The tires let go of the road with a sound I will not get to remember, a long animal scream of rubber, and the field tips up where the sky should be.
The last thing that is mine, the only clear thing in all of it, is not fear. I have time for one whole thought and it does not belong to me. My hand is still low on my stomach where it has been for a mile.
Hold on, I tell the little one I haven't met. Not you. Please. Not you.
The cottonwoods come down like a wall.