A Piece of My Heart Read Free Page B

in your life didn’t disappear once they were begun, and that your life just got thick with beginnings, accrued from one day to the next, until you reached an age or a temperament when you couldn’t support it anymore and you had to retire from beginnings and let your life finish up on momentum. And he wasn’t to that point yet! So that whatever she had fostered inside him couldn’t be counted on simply to retire, but to protrude into the middle of everything indefinitely and give everybody a bad time, unless serious adjustments were made to transform her and it into something he
could
live with, in the way everybody lived with things.
    He drove into town to the front of the post office and stopped, thinking, in the heat, that seeing Beuna as an impediment or assomething to be survived was only one way of looking at her, and not by any necessity the way she was. He stepped in where the air was cool and dry. The lobby was a long empty arcade with wired-up skylights that clouded the room with submerged shadows. He picked up the letter at the registry and walked back out into the sunlight, looking up the street to see if he saw anyone he knew. He thought about breakfast and decided to let it slide.
    He stuck the letter under the visor and started back toward the mountains. He drove out across the meadow until he crossed the Works Progress bridge at Inyo Creek and stopped and got out and walked back to the railing. The breeze stiffened and flicked the page, and he read the words over and over, poring over them, his lips forming the words each time. And after a while he walked down in the yellow and green checkered light and stepped into the sedge and laid the envelope on the surface and watched it turn and dance away until it snuffed like a flicker of light. He puzzled for a moment at the letter, the page fluttering in his hand, and suddenly folded it into quarters and backed out of the wet grass. He climbed the bank and crammed the page down inside his instep and started back toward the truck.
    He thought again that to see Beuna as an obstacle was only one narrow-minded way of looking at her. And not the only way. Since another was to think that he was not finished with this part of his life yet, wife or no wife, this part left with Beuna, and with women in general, and that there was still this much left, this much of an opportunity to do with the way he wanted, and that thirty-four was still young, inasmuch as you only got to live one time and this was his time right now.

4
    He drove down into Arizona and slept in the afternoon behind a motel in Flagstaff. He got up at four o’clock and drove straight until dark, and slept on the truck seat outside Bluewater, NewMexico, and woke up in the high sunshine and drove into Grants to eat breakfast. At Grants he stepped out in the breeze, between the highway and the Santa Fe yards, and watched cattle cars being switched onto the main line from south Texas, the cattle asleep on their feet in the cool tinted air. He watched the train get made up and disappear out to the east, then drove to Albuquerque and up again across the purple lip of the Manzanos back into the desert.
    Out of Santa Rosa a Buick convertible was pulled down off the road and a blond woman in white pants was standing beside it in the sun, shielding her eyes with one hand and waving the other hand lazily as though she were signaling someone up the road. The Buick had had its left taillight bent in, and the warning signal was flashing dimly in the sunlight. He looked up the highway to see if someone was standing back up on the shoulder, but there was no one, only the black imprint of Santa Rosa quavering on the low table of the desert.
    When he stopped, the woman quit waving and rested her hand on her hip, but kept her eyes shielded with her fingers. He got out and walked along the car, looked down in the back seat and saw it strewn with beer cans, some with beer spilling out.
    â€œSun’s real