Acts of God Read Free Page A

for me. That was how he put it, “I’ll make an exception for you, Squirrel,” and even though I didn’t know what an exception was at the time, I was happy to have one made for me.
    Art cried because he was only six and had to stay home and Lily tried to explain to him that when he was bigger he’d go. In the end she had to pry his fingers from the car door. “Another year or two, Squirt,” our father said, but Art just screamed that it wasn’t fair and in the end our father had to agree with him. “You’re right, son,” he said. “Life isn’t fair.” Lily stood in the driveway, in an apron, holding Art back with one hand, blowing kisses with the other as we drove away. Her skirt caught in the wind and she pushed it down.
    My father blew kisses back, a smile on his face, but the minute we turned north on Lincoln and drove under the railroad trestle, he put the radio on loud and started to croon. My father sang at home, but never loudly. Lily came from a big family and she didn’t like noise. “But it’s music, Lily,” he’d argue with her, but she didn’t agree. No shouting; no doors being banged. No music played loud. If you slammed a door behind her, my mother jumped in the air.
    My father moved silently through our lives, but as soon as we were past the railroad tracks, heading west, he was tapping his fingers, humming along. We weren’t half a mile from the house before we were all singing along to “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog.” We sang for miles at the top of our lungs.
    When we stopped for gas, I slipped into the front seat, but Jeb complained. “Trooper,” our father said, “you always get to sit there. Give Squirrel a chance.”
    It was hot even with the windows rolled down. The air smelled of pigs and fertilizer. The sun was boiling, heating up the vinyl seats of the car, but I didn’t care. This was an adventure. Where we were going there had been a flood. Last year it was drought; this year it’s flood, my father lectured us as we drove. Now the Everly Brothers were singing “Dream” and my father sang along. Though he was a little off-key, I was surprised he knew all the words.
    My father had a deep baritone voice that would sound good on the radio, I thought. I could imagine him announcing things—the weather, the news, sports. Sometimes when I listened to the radio, I pretended it was my father’s voice coming to me from far away. Now it almost made the car shake. I had only heard that voice at night when he sang to put me to bed, but it wasn’t this big. It seemed to take up all the farmland that stretched before our eyes. For the first time I saw the land as he did—wide and empty and flat. Every Monday he drove out this way and every Thursday he came home. “Get a whiff of this, kids.” He rolled down his window as we passed a pig farm. We held our noses, groaning, and our father laughed.
    There were dozens of things my father could have done with his life besides sell insurance and settle claims. He had a keen sense for business and as he grew older, he constantly chastised himself for the mistakes he’d made. He was always kicking himself for not giving a few thousand bucks to the friend who came to him with a new invention—a little spray gadget you put on the top of bottles for hair spray and household cleaners. He and Lily had sat, watching the little demonstration. “No,” she’d said afterward, “we can’t take the risk.” Aerosol cans. My father missed his opportunity to invest in aerosol cans. “I could’ve made millions,” he muttered as he patched the roof or fixed the plumbing on Saturday afternoons.
    His ambition once had been money—to make lots of it and get rich, then do what he wanted with his life. But he fell into the insurance line through a distant relative of my mother’s, a man