All I Have in This World Read Online Free Page B

the line, come home bone-tired, and have to deal with a screaming kid. She said, “I hate rubbers.” He didn’t say, I hate little babies. But he thought it. He thought, I hate mayonnaise but I’ll eat it rather than make a big deal out of some poor asshole taking it off if they screw up and put it on. He thought, I hate that about myself because mayonnaise really is disgusting. I hate how I am sometimes. Hate that she never asks me about work and would hate it if she did.
    Oddly enough, it was Cindy who asked him. Train tracks ran right behind the apartment they rented. They’d drag a bench from the picnic table someone had left behind one of the units and they’d get high and wait for the train. One night Cindy all of a sudden said, “So okay, Brant? When you’re putting the cars together, do you ever wonder, like, where they will end up? Like, who’s going to end up driving the one you’re working on at that moment?”
    Carmen was doing something to her fingernails. She was looking at them in the weak flood lamp some neighbor had turned on, probably to keep an eye on the kids in 9D. Carmen held her hand up close to her face, did something to her nails. Cindy was looking at him. Her question in the air was like the first faraway thrum of train in the night, coming closer. Brantley did not feel like her question would flash past and leave trails like the train always did when they got high and came outside to watch it. He felt like Carmen had pushed him on the tracks and instead of the train coming it was Cindy’s question.
    â€œNo,” he said.
    Carmen stopped looking at her hands and reached one down to the grass and picked up her wine cooler and sipped it and put it back down in the grass.
    â€œThat’s cool,” said Cindy. “I guess you got to keep your mind on what you’re doing.”
    But that wasn’t it, really. He could not say why. The next day at work Cindy’s question kept needling him. He even heard it. To hear anything in the plant was not possible over all the machines. The shift supervisor, when he wanted you to do something, came close in to your face and yelled in your ear. At home his ears rang for hours. Carmen loved to go see shows at the Checker Dome and he never did have the heart to tell her that was the last thing he wanted to do, go hear every band that came through town when his ears were already ringing. That day Cindy’s question kept rising from the noise. It reached him as he worked on a light blue Electra. They’d been running Electras all week. He didn’t want to think about her question because if he thought about it for this blue Electra he would have to think about every car on the line, and Brantley remembered this one time when high Cindy, all of a sudden not-so-dumb Cindy, said when they were watching something on TV, “Hey, do you guys think it’s possible to, like, not think? Because I was just thinking that if you knew you wanted to clean your head empty, then that wouldn’t really be like not thinking because you’d have to think, I’m not thinking, which isn’t that like a thought?” Then she said “I’m not thinking” again and then again louder until she was sitting on the couch during a commercial for nasal spray screaming, “I’m not thinking, I’m not thinking,” and Carmen was laughing so hard that later she claimed she wet her pants a little and then when they were in the bedroom with the door closed Carmen said, “I wanted to say to her, Yeah, girl, I think it is possible for you not to think.”
    Brantley remembered Cindy’s question as the Electra, at his signal, directing Arthur from above—I now pronounce you chassis and body—became a car. Or the shell of one. Down the line it would become more of a car until finally it was a car, washed and detailed and gleaming among hundreds of others of various colors on