Q Road Read Free Page A

gesture. Women of all ages liked Steve, and he didn’t see why Rachel should be any different. He’d been thinking he might buy a pair of binoculars to get a better look at her—he would tell Nicole they were for bird-watching. Steve was glad to see the woolly bears out in full force this morning. Over the last few days he’d found the caterpillars to be a good conversation starter with folks in the township, a few of whom had purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of insulated windows from his company. Each time Steve smiled and said to a new woman, “Where the heck are those little fellows going?” he felt as though he were saying it for the first time.
    As Steve watched through the sliding glass door, the curly-haired neighbor boy nearly careened into Rachel and then crashed his bike into the ditch beside her. Steve wondered if that was what it took to get her attention.
    â€œI suppose you’re going to work this morning.” Nicole sat down across the table from Steve wearing a plush bathrobe and a steaming towel, which she’d wrapped around her hair and adjusted in the bathroom mirror to make sure it framed her face attractively.
    â€œDid you take a shower already?” Steve said. “I didn’t hear the water.”
    â€œI’m preconditioning,” Nicole said. She wondered if Steve still believed she was a natural blonde. Way back when her hair was medium brown, the strands had been as soft and fine as spun silk, but bleaching had made her hair brittle, in need of special treatment.
    â€œWhat’s preconditioning?” Steve asked.
    â€œIt’s an oil treatment you use before your regular shampoo and conditioner.”
    â€œSo after all that, I guess you use a
post
conditioner.”
    Nicole used to think her husband charming, but now she wondered which of the six knives in the knife holder above the sink would most easily slice the fabric of his sport shirt and the connective tissue between two of his ribs before penetrating his heart. She said, “Isn’t this bedroom cute?” and turned her
Beautiful Home
magazine around and pointed a flowery, ruffled bedroom scene at her husband.
    Steve knew that no man could sleep in such a room. He said, “Look next door. Mrs. Shore is still watching us.”
    â€œShe is such a freak,” Nicole said. “She should get a life.”
    â€œSpeaking of neighbors,” Steve said, “I stopped in yesterday to check on a bay window I sold to April May Rathburn right down Queer Road.”
    â€œI wish you wouldn’t call it that.”
    â€œShe’s the lady who told me people here really call it ‘Queer.’ She’s got to be seventy years old and she calls it ‘Queer.’”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with
Q Road?
Just because some kid sprays graffiti on the street signs doesn’t mean you go and change the name.”
    â€œAnyway, she said the original house next to the barn down there was destroyed by a tornado a long time ago, and nobody has ever rebuilt. Wouldn’t that be the perfect place for a new house, right beside an old barn? There’s even a creek that runs behind it.”
    â€œI never noticed a creek there.” Nicole imagined a two-story white house with a wraparound porch rising out of the cornfield, a house as perfect as a wedding cake. She’d seen a plan for such a house in the
Kalamazoo Gazette
two Sundays ago.
    â€œThe creek runs under the road, then down to the river.”
    â€œMaybe we could put a little arched bridge across it.”
    â€œBe nice to have an office in an old barn like that,” Steve said. “Maybe if Harland has a bad year he’ll be willing to sell us a plot of land there.”
    The promise of a new house and an arched bridge made Nicolethink that there was hope for her and her husband. Maybe everything would be fine if they could get themselves out of this preowned prefab and into a real house