Turn Signal Read Free Page B

committed.
    It should help that he is actually in the same house with his wife and daughter much of the time now. He wonders, though, if it isn’t worse, knowing he’s a closed door away, but that he might as well be in California, and that his mind is farther away than that sometimes.
    He’s tried to explain it to Gina, and she at least pretends to understand, although he knows she worries about money. He does, too.
    â€œThis is what I’m supposed to do,” he told her that first night, after he’d spent the rest of the trip out west and back again thinking about the old man and his story. “I’m as sure of that as I am of the sun rising. We’ll all be glad if I do this. Believe in me.”
    He’d gotten on his knees when he said that, like a suitor proposing.
    â€œWell,” Gina had said, shaking her head and smiling slightly, “it could be worse, I suppose. You could have gotten the call to forsake your earthly belongings, like Jimmy Tucker.”
    Jimmy Tucker had been one of their neighbors before he went to a revival at his Baptist church and heeded a call nobody else heard. According to the Bledsoes, three doors down, he and his family have moved somewhere in Southwest Virginia, where he is starting his own congregation.
    Jack hasn’t felt much magic in his life, and he is somewhat shocked himself at how self-indulgent he’s been lately, how un-Jack-like, as Milo Wainwright put it. And if people want to think it’s a mid-life crisis, well, it’s probably easier to explain it that way.
    But he knows he’s right. He doesn’t even know exactly why he’s so sure, but he is. Something in the old man’s voice maybe, something in the look he had right before he disappeared.
    Lovelady is more than 400 pages long now. Jack has rewritten it three times, aided by the computer he bought with some of the money he got for the rig.
    He hasn’t told too many people about what he’s doing, although most know it has something to do with a book. The ones who don’t subscribe to the concept of mid-life crises just think he’s had some kind of breakdown.

CHAPTER THREE
    The three of them rarely have breakfast together. Usually, Jack’s either already gone or upstairs writing when Gina comes tearing through, late for work. He and Shannon sometimes overlap, during the school year, but in the summer, Shannon sleeps as late as they’ll let her.
    This morning, though, Jack doesn’t have to leave just yet, Gina has the day off, and Shannon is going to Speakeasy Creek with two friends from the next cul-de-sac.
    Jack is sipping a cup of coffee and eating a bagel, Shannon is slurping cold cereal, and Gina is washing down a doughnut with a glass of orange juice. Jack regrets not anticipating this rare convergence. He could’ve made pancakes, fried up some sausage, had what his mother would have called a real breakfast.
    â€œSo what’re you doing today?” he asks his wife.
    Gina is wearing Levi’s and a sleeveless top. To Jack, she is approximately as attractive as she was 17 years ago, when they began dating. He looks at her as she concentrates on tearing out grocery coupons from the newspaper insert, and he wishes he didn’t have to go to work, either.
    Gina thinks of herself as tall, although she knows that she might be a guard instead of a center if she played high school basketball now. Even Shannon, at 13, has an inch on her. Gina weighs 20 pounds more than when she and Jack met, but she was too thin back then for his liking. Her hair is almost black, and she has lately begun hiding what little gray has crept in. She is, anyone in Speakeasy would tell you, a fine-looking woman, and hardly anyone adds “for her age” yet.
    Her eyes were what first hooked him. They seem to range in hue from emerald to forest green according to the mood and the illumination. They have a catlike quality to them. When she is