Golden Age Read Free

back porch. From there she could see over the fields to the horizon, and she could imagine her favorite thing, which was flying. She didn’t know how this had started, but maybe from dreaming. Now the dreams and the made-up stuff were mixed up in her mind. She often thought about a myth they had read this year in her school, where a father figured out a way to fly (the book showed giant spreading wings, like eagle wings), but he put the wings together with wax, and when the son got too close to the sun, the wax melted, and the son fell into the ocean. Eli Grissom, who sat behind her in class, pointed out that the son—Icarus, his name was (Eli pronounced it “EYE-carus”)—could not have gotten ninety-three million miles in ten minutes, if at all, but in spite of Eli, Emily imagined it almost every day, the wings catching an updraft, the boy feeling himself lifted, the warmth and the brightness all around. It was too bad, Emily thought, that he didn’t remember how birds bend their necks and fold their wings and swoop downward—maybe he was so excited that, when the wax started melting and the feathers dropped away, he didn’t notice it in time. Emily rested her hands on the sill and leaned toward the window. The horizon was a beautiful thing, she thought.

    “ THERE SHE IS ,” said Joe. He cocked his head toward the second-story windows, and Janet looked up. She said, “I thought she was going to the bathroom!” She began to push her chair back, but Joe said, “She’ll be fine.” Janet looked up again, bit her lip. She said, “Uncle Joe, I should have done what Loretta’s done. Emily could have gotten lost in the crowd. She hates being an only child.”
    Joe shifted his position—his hip was bothering him a lot this year—and said, “Sweetheart, any number’s the wrong number.”
    “Do you really believe that?”
    “I really do.”
    Joe patted Janet on the knee. She gave him an uncertain look, then went back to staring at Emily. There wasn’t a time Joe could remember seeing Janet, even as a toddler, when she didn’t look like a face outside the window, exiled, staring at the warmth inside. According to Lois, this was all Andy’s fault; according to Minnie, it was all Frank’s fault. Joe hadn’t intended to say what he said—it just popped out. But it was true, and not only with regard to inheritances. He and Lois had agreed that Joe’s childhood on this farm, as Frank’s much-pummeled younger brother by two years, had been a nightmare, and so he and Lois had decided that Annie and Jesse were enough; but as a result, Annie and Jesse had never gotten a moment’s privacy. Joe’s always darling sister, Lillian, and her adored Arthur seemed to have hit on the right mix, but Debbie, their skeptical oldest, would not have agreed. Your hog had a big litter, and you were glad, but then there were always those runts consigned to the hind teats, who didn’t have much of a chance. Joe had bred his retrievers twice. Thirteen pups the first time, two pups the second time. You are never satisfied, said Lois. The corn crop was too big, the corn crop was too small. Impossible to know what to hope for.
    Well, it was Jesse’s problem now. Jesse was scientifically trained, and he sank all his dreams into predictive models. When he had gone to Frank and asked for some money to use to trade commodities futures, Frank was proud of him—playing both ends, good strategy, and why not—but Joe himself had been too dumb to think of it.
    Still, it made Joe uncomfortable when Jesse talked about “growth medium” and “inputs” and “upticks.” He spent his evenings on a computer, and when he walked the fields, it was with soil-moisture instruments and that sort of thing in his hand. If he wondered about the weather, he watched the news, not the western horizon, and he would never in a million years name a sheep or pat a cow. What you needed to do these days, just to survive, was to turn it into an equation. With