A Regular Guy Read Online Free Page B

fingers in and licked off the sweetness. She never used knives and forks, and Mary blamed the long-ago violin maker, who’d let her eat with her hands.
    Time returned to Jane’s body, drop by drop, through the straw. Tomorrow would be school again, the bus. She put one hand between her rump and the metal bench. Her mother would write a note. The teacher would nod once and take the scrap of paper without reading it, put it in her left top drawer. The teacher was used to children from the camp; most of them fared poorly in school and, like Jane, came for the chocolate milk they gave out. Jane had never met her grandmother, but now it was as if some clock far away that was always ticking for her had stopped. Even as long as she’d been gone, ten days, going back to school didn’t frighten Jane. They did the same things every day anyway. The minutes passed slowly, as if they were sorting sand into its constituent elements: granite, crystal, lava.
    When her hand fell asleep, she blew on it.
    Mary watched her daughter with exhausted relief. Jane was not a sensitive child, she was not. She was mainly this—eating with her fingers,slowly, after thirty hours of dizzy hunger, without regular days or school. This was the way she knew happiness, her foot on the bench, the other heel kicking metal, the bite of wet gold-brown meat against the cold.
    Mary’s own childhood had been all rules: napkins at table, a dessert served on flowered china, with her glass of milk. She’d wanted anything but the sameness of that house, though now when her mother was gone she missed it.
    A highway-side wind slipped in her sleeves and touched her ribs, shivering her. They both wore old soft clothes. “Honey, I’m going to send you to your dad,” she said. “I’d take you myself, but I can’t. I just don’t think I can.”
    Her daughter knew when not to say anything. But she pulled her knee closer, softening a scab with her tongue. “I don’t even know him,” she finally said.
    A train horn started too far away to see. Her mother’s round face looked out into distance. “You met him that once.”
    “Was at night. I don’t remember.”
    “He’s got a house and all now. And a lotta lotta money. He’s an important man down there. He might even be governor someday. Governor. Wouldn’t you like to be the governor’s daughter?”
    Jane tried to keep her top lip straight. “No.”
    “Yes you would. Later, you would.” Mary sighed. She unclasped her purse and gave Jane final money for two swirled ice cream sundaes with nuts. “I’m going to teach you to drive.”
    The only car they had was a truck and it was old.
    Teaching Jane to drive took a long time. She stopped going to school. As the fall progressed, they absorbed themselves in the nesting of the truck. Mary fitted pillows to the seat, sewing telephone books in between padding and basting on a slipcover, so Jane sat fifteen inches above the cracked vinyl. They had to strap wood blocks to the brake and gas and clutch pedals, so Jane’s feet could reach. But the blocks slid and they couldn’t trust the straps and they finally borrowed a drill from the Shell station and attached the wood with deep barnum screws. Never once did Mary call Mack, although his long letters arrivedevery day, small forlorn script in blue ink on yellow lined paper.
    “They’re probably having some bad times,” Mary said, “but little contentments too, I suppose.” The two of them were silent, reverent to the idea of marriage, the boys, Mack and the fat, displeased wife sitting down to supper around one table. They perched high in the truck eating Arby’s, down the block from his house, where a strangled tricycle waited in the driveway.
    “He says she’s on a diet.” Mary read from the letter. Mack used to tell them stories about his wife’s weight. When I married her she was a wisp of a thing , he’d said softly.
    “Remember the time she ate the big zucchini?” Jane said. Once, he’d made a