A Thousand Acres: A Novel by Jane Smiley

fencerow next to the road.”
    “I’m sure Daddy’s watching him. I’m sure there’s some fight going on. He was mad about something and didn’t pay any attention to me when I stopped there.”
    “Well, lucky for you. He didn’t ask you to do anything for him.”
    “Don’t you think this is weird?”
    “Well, guess what. This is what his retirement is going to be, him eyeballing Pete or Ty, second-guessing whatever they do. You didn’t think he was going to go fishing, did you? Or move to Florida?”
    “I didn’t think that far ahead.”
    “Perfecting that death’s-head stare will be his lifework from now on, so we’d better get used to it.”
    She hung up.
    I had to smile at the thought of her stopping the car and watchinghim. She would stand at the foot of the hill, her fists on her hips, her own stare roaring up to meet his. Neither would acknowledge the other. They were two of a kind, that was for sure.
    I pressed down the telephone button and let it up again, ready to dial Caroline’s work number, except that suddenly I felt a shyness, as if there were a breach between the two of us that I had to brave. Here it was Thursday, and I should have called her Sunday night, that was suddenly clear. Rose, I would have called Sunday afternoon, trying her until she got home, but Caroline I had let slide, Caroline I had hardly thought of in the rush of Daddy and Rose and, well, to be frank, thoughts about Jess Clark. It was true that Caroline and I didn’t have a close, gossipy relationship. Her visits home every third weekend, when she stayed with Daddy and cooked for him, were generally the only times I spoke with her. For one thing, country people, even in 1979, were more suspicious of long-distance calls, and not in the habit of talking on the phone much—we’d been on a party line until 1973, so visiting about private things on the telephone was still considered risky. For another, Rose and I had been so long in the habit of conferring about Daddy and Caroline that it seemed a touch unfamiliar, even scary, to confer with her. Nosy. Interfering. Asking for something, though I didn’t know what. And then her office didn’t like her to get personal calls. The phones were monitored because clients were billed for telephone consultations. I pushed the phone button down again, then put the receiver on the cradle. Sunday would be my deadline. If I didn’t hear from her by Sunday, then I really would call.

11
    I DISCOVERED THAT I WAS KEEPING an eye out for Jess Clark. Runners, I understood, liked routine, and I would watch, in the cool of the morning, for him to pass our house on his circuit. Except that I didn’t know what his circuit was. It might also be true that Harold would insist on Jess’s doing some of the farm work, or even that Jess himself would want to do some of the farm work. Running, and conversing, for that matter, could turn out to be city habits that Jess would quickly shuck. Certainly the talks we had then shared, especially the last one, were unique in my experience, and maybe that was why I kept thinking about them.
    I would work in the garden, or water my tomato plants, or even realize that it was that midmorning time of day, and Jess’s anguish would recur to me, and I would feel something physical, a shiver, a kind of shrinking of my diaphragm. I realized that some of the worst things I had feared and imagined had actually happened to him—the sudden death of his fiancée, but also the death of his mother while he was out of touch. For that matter, hadn’t he been damned and repudiated, worse than abandoned—cast out—by his father as the opening event of his adult life? Possibly it appeared on the surface that we had nothing in common except childhoods on the farm, but I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn. Even so, I was not exactly eager to see him. It was more like I knew I had something important to wait for, something