Ticket to Ride Read Free Page B

times over the past four years that he was about to die. But this time it felt different. It felt scary.
    I’d come in the back door and stood in the darkness of the dining room just watching them sit there together. She had his hand in her lap. She’d told me a few days ago that she spent most of her time thinking back over their lives. How they’d grown up in the Hills and how they’d gone dancing every weekend and won prizes they were so good, and how my father doted on the three of us kids and stood crying outside our bedrooms the night he got his draft notice five weeks after Pearl Harbor. She said he wasn’t worried about dying; he was worried that something would happen to us while he was gone. And then after the war getting a job so good at the plant that they were able to buy a modest house in a respectable neighborhood and live out at least a few of those American dreams the politicians were always bragging about. The most devout dream of all in Black River Falls was to escape the poverty of the Hills.
    He’d lost nearly twenty-five pounds and he’d never been a big man anyway, a scrappy Irisher whose two favorite pastimes were bowling and reading Westerns. Watching him now, how even the slightest move either caused him to gasp or wince, I was afraid I was going to cry. I was a child again facing the unthinkable. I’d come here after seeing Lou Bennett fall apart. I suppose I wanted to reassure myself that my own dad was all right.
    When I walked into the room, my mom smiled. In the flashing colors from the TV screen I was able to see my father’s face clearly now. He was asleep. My mom put a finger to her lips. I sat down next to my dad and slid my arm around him. Part of the time I watched the screen, though none of the frantic storyline registered. But mostly I looked at my dad, the TV beam tinting his bald pate, the white werewolf hair sprouting from his ear and the scents of him I’d known since my earliest days. I remembered him when he came home from the war. I’d never felt more loved or doted on, nor had my sister or brother. We were a family again. The years the war had put on my mother vanished. She was a young woman again.
    I started fighting tears then, couldn’t help it. The old Verlaine line always came back to me like a bitter plea: Why are we born to suffer and die? There was no explanation for life, let alone for death.
    I reached across the back of my father and took my mother’s hand. She nodded. She’d given up her own reluctance to cry. Her eyes gleamed.
    I left to the sounds of a gunfight and then horses riding fast out of town.

3
    â€œI GET REAL NERVOUS .”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œYou know, maybe this time they won’t get together at all.”
    â€œUmm-hmm.”
    â€œTurk says my breasts aren’t as big as hers.”
    That got my attention. Mention of Turk always gets my attention.
    â€œHe told you that?”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œDid you slap him?”
    â€œNo. It kind of hurt my feelings, but then Turk always says he’s just being honest when he says stuff like that.”
    Well, I thought, then maybe it’s time I laid a little truth on Turk.
    Jamie Newton became my secretary in a version of a slave auction. I’d represented her father in a boundary dispute. It was a long shot and we lost. He couldn’t afford to pay me, so he gave me his teenaged daughter as a part-time secretary. She was quite a looker. She could have modeled for half of those paperback covers depicting ripe young teenage girls who used their jailbait wiles to seduce men into killing people for them. But that was only how she looked. She was actually sweet and considerate. The problem was that she was also sort of dumb. She couldn’t type, file, or take telephone messages with any precision. Twice a day I want to fire her, but I know that she would never understand. All her life, people have told her how stupid