A Piece of My Heart Read Free

thataway,” she said slowly, “I guess it’ll be fine.”
    On the road back across the desert he began to try to settle things. In general, he knew, things didn’t end in your life because by all sensible estimations they
ought
to. Or because people involved did things or changed places that would ordinarily make carrying on any longer a natural hardship. Because once a force got a start in you, it grew and took on dimensions and shadings and a life separate and sometimes as complete and good as yourpractical, good-sense way, he would see that, and understand that nothing in his life
ever
ended. Things only changed and grew up into something else.
    In three weeks a letter arrived at general delivery written on drugstore stationery. It said:
    Robard:
    We are not in Tulare now, but are in Tacoma, Washington. It ain’t nice here and rains. He played good at Tulare and pitched at Oakland one time, but everybody got a hit, and he rode the bus up here the next day and I come by car. It is just a big ditch behind our little house and I am afraid it will flood and drownd me. I don’t know what will happen to me now but something will. Smell this. I love you still more. Beuna.
    He held the paper up to the light, standing in the long, airy vestibule of the post office, and smelled the paper where the writing was, and took the letter quick out to the gutter and tore it to pieces and let it flutter through the grate into the dry sewer mouth.
    In two weeks a letter came postmarked Helena, Arkansas, with a message written on Holiday Inn stationery. It said:
    Robard:
    lam home. W. W. says he will pitch at Oakland again and is still at Tacoma playing kid games. His mind will change. I love you more. B.
    He had sat on the steps of the post office thinking about W. W. set up in a strange little bungalow in Tacoma, W. W. wondering what could happen to a man’s whole life in the space of one week and how he could get it all back on track and pry Beuna loose from her stepfather’s house and get her back where he was so he could have a chance at Oakland again, where somebody could see him.
    A week later a letter arrived that simply said:
    Robard:
    W. W. has seen the light I knew. . . . Beuna.
    He figured she must have made a bet with herself that she could treat it all like she was the victim and he was the culprit for wanting to stay and pitch baseball, and she had won it.
    And after that a letter every week from Helena pleading with him to come, always on the same rose onionback, with loud promises and whatever smells she felt were useful to what she was asking. And he had stayed and stayed and put each letter in the grate and tried to forget about it.
    Though he wondered just what it was he had seen years ago and seen up in Tulare the instant he said, “All right,” when she was hoping for something richer, and what it was that made her strand W. W. out in some strange foreign country, just so he’d quit doing the
one
thing he knew to do. Twelve years ago he might have believed it was just some act of girlishness she played at, brought along by the fact that she liked mingling with her own cousin ten feet out of reach of her mother’s headboard—and that
that
right there had caused enough private turmoil to make some show of remorse creditable. And the only thing like remorse that she knew then was to make herself look cast down by something mysterious she couldn’t explain and that in all the commotion going on at 3 A.M. there wouldn’t be time to talk about. Except that didn’t work out. It had gone on too long to be just girlishness. And when he had seen her in Tulare, she had fixed on him with her pale flat eyes like a specimen she was studying, and there had been again the same forlorn miscalculation he had always seen, just as though it marked a vacancy she was beside herself wondering how to fill.

3
    At five-thirty he had gotten up, dressed, and driven up the Sierra to