I read it all. I want you to hold onto that. Rhonda Vanderhoef said, in a place she believed was private, that I could not follow anything, and I followed the whole sentence, every word, from forty feet away, through a mirror, while eating ham.
And then I saw Cordell’s mouth make the shape of her name, and I saw the coat sleeve behind the door, and I saw my husband’s face come around the corner of the frame.
I was not angry at Rhonda. She is a good girl, she teaches nine-year-olds to read, she brings us a hot dish every other Thursday, and she was tired, because her mother has a bad heart in Mitchell and her husband worries at night. What I felt was that the words had been waiting. It was my own thought in somebody else’s mouth, and I had never let myself finish it.
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What I felt for Alvah was something else. I watched him come out of that mudroom with his coat on his arm and a face like a barn door shutting, and I knew that he had heard it, and I knew that he thought I had not. And I knew exactly what he would do about it, because I have watched him for fifty-two years. He would say nothing and carry it. He would carry it past the water tower and up the lane and into the house, and he would put it somewhere in himself next to the pneumonia and the rasp, and it would sit there.
I looked out the truck window the whole way home. I did not turn my head. I thought, if I look at him, he will see that I know, and then he will have to carry mine too.
The Window
On Monday morning I woke at ten past five with a cold place in the bed beside me. Alvah rises at five. He has risen at five since the Carter administration. I heard nothing, because I hear nothing, and I lay there waiting for the smell of coffee, and there was no smell of coffee.
I got up and went to the bedroom window. It faces the machine shed across the yard, about eighty feet, and the shed has a little side window with a bare bulb behind it that he leaves on all winter.
He was not in the shed. His truck was gone from the yard. I dressed and did the breakfast dishes for one person and watched the lane. A little after ten the truck came back up it, and he got out of it and stood by the door with something under his coat, the way a boy carries a stolen apple. He looked at the house once. I stepped back from the glass.