In Reach Read Free Page B

table. She’s given up on that. Oh, it’s amazing the things you can adjust to, like chipping ice to wash up mornings or eating nothing but eggs through a winter. Or Leland not touching her for years. She missed that at first, an awful fire claiming her sometimes, leaving her spun out, ragged and desperate, but slowly that faded, too. She still visits a tiny grave in the Oregon Trail Cemetery. Grief pinned her to the ground once, but that was a long time ago, and she got used to the emptiness. She could eat bugs or roasted mice if she had to.
    She sets the tray on the coffee table, two cereal bowls, two cups of coffee, cream and sugar for him, black for her. She can’t guess what’s in his head. He’s never been what you’d call a deep thinker, not like her. She can remember painting rooms with him when they were young, her head off and running against the monotony of dip-brush-dip, but he reported nothing. Blank slate. She can’t imagine that trick.
    She forces herself to eat in the den with him. It’s enough to make her puke, the way the air is stale and the darkness and his silence. “C’mon, Hon,” she says, and she puts the bowl in his hands, and like a robot, he eats. So far, so good. He won’t starve, and the judges won’t come and carry her away for neglect or whatever they call it when a wife refuses to feed her voluntarily comatose husband.
    He doesn’t bother with the TV anymore. She’s stopped trying to talk to him. The paper comes and she throws it out, but not before her eyes scan the headlines. Yesterday she saw that Ron Blake and Todd Birkham have declared bankruptcy. All those farmers getting foreclosed on, it’s like finding another rotten plank in the flooring. Nobody will believe them if they say that’s exactly what they tried to prevent. They only doctored the books to buy time. In the grain elevator business, things are never that exact. There’s always borrowing from one column to another. It’s just numbers, a few jagged lines on paper.
    She looks at Leland sitting there, empty bowl in his hand, his mouth gone slack, and worries how he’ll get through the preliminary hearing. She can’t imagine how he’ll pull it together to talk to a judge. She’s disgusted with him, look at the drool on his shirt, his thin hair greasy, plastered to his scalp. Most nights, he sleeps in the chair. She’s worried about him, but she thinks he could snap out of it. Where’s his famous sense of humor? After forty-three years, she’s surprised to find that she doesn’t know him. He does this to her, makes her hate him while she feels sorry for him. Mostly, she doesn’t know what to do.
    She tugs at the bowl in his hand. He hangs on, odd, he still has that strength. Is he trying to tell her something? Sad eyes, she’s seen enough of that. She plucks the bowl from his fingers and sets it on the tray. He hasn’t touched his coffee, hasn’t for days, but she brings it anyway, pours two cups as part of the daily ritual.
    She’s known Ron Blake and Todd Birkham all their lives. Once, they were snot-nosed kids in Sunday School. Todd was in Rosalee’s class at the high school, puffing his cheeks out playing tuba while Rosalee threw a baton. Their wives are probably frantic. And they have children, too. Todd’s oldest must be looking at college. She pictures Todd’s family sitting around a kitchen table, nothing on it but a bowl of boiled eggs, fingers drumming on the Formica top. She lingers over the picture too long and hears Todd sayingit’s her fault, hers and Leland’s. We raised a good crop, goddamnit, Todd says, and his boy, the one who might have to postpone his education, slaps the tabletop with open hands, and the eggs bounce out of the bowl, raw eggs now, splatting on the floor, and among broken eggshells and slimy yolks, the wife starts to cry.
    Esther stands abruptly. “Guess I’ll clean up, then, and go upstairs and do some sewing,” she tells Leland, like she does every day. He