Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Read Online Free

baby’s father didn’t enter into the vision.
    It occurred to me that it takes so long to know another person. No wonder you can run through several, like trying on clothes that don’t fit. There are so many to choose from, after all, but when I married Jim Ed it was like an impulse buy, buying the first thing you see. And yet I’ve learned to trust my intuition on that. Jim Ed was the right one all along, I thought recklessly. And I wasn’t ever nice to Jim Ed. I was too young then to put myself in another person’s place. Call it ignorance of the imagination. Back then I had looked down on him for being country, for eating with his arms anchored on the table and for wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. I’d get mad at him for just being himself at times when I thought he should act civilized. Now I’ve learned you can’t change men, and sometimes those airs I’d looked for turn out to be so phony. Guys like Jim Ed always seemed to just be themselves, regardless of the situation. That’s why I still loved him, I decided, as I realized I was staring at Jazz’s reflection in the mirror—the lime green against the shimmering gold of his skin and the blips of the track lighting above.
    Jazz followed me into the bedroom, where we worked at getting rid of our French togs. I was aware that Jazz was talking, aware that he was aware that I might not be listening closely. It was like hearing a story at my little neighborhood talk show. He was saying, “In France, there’s this street, rue du Bac. They call streets
rues.
The last time I left Monique and the two kids, it was on that street, a crowded shopping street. The people over there are all pretty small compared to us, and they have this blue-black hair and deep dark eyes and real light skin, like a hen’s egg. I waved good-bye and the three of them just blended right into that crowd and disappeared. That’s where they belong, and so I’m here. I guess you might say I just couldn’t
parlez-vous.
”
    â€œTake me to France, Jazz. We could have a great time.”
    â€œSure, babe. In the morning.” Jazz turned toward me and smoothed the cover over my shoulders.
    â€œI love you,” Jazz said.
    When I woke up at daylight, Jazz was still holding me, curled around me like a mother protecting her baby. The music was still playing, on infinite repeat.

Tobrah
    Jackie Holmes had taken two trips by airplane. The first, in 1980, from Kentucky to California, included dinner—a choice between short ribs and cannelloni. Jackie ordered cannelloni because she didn’t know what it was. Floating up there above the clouds seemed so unreal—as a child she had imagined God lived there. In Los Angeles, her cousin took her to Disneyland, the stars’ homes, and Universal Studios. They drove down Sunset Boulevard, where the palm trees were tall and majestic. Jackie felt privileged, as if all her life, until then, she had never been allowed anything grand.
    The second trip, to Oklahoma, not long ago, was different. In Tulsa, Jackie arranged her father’s funeral. She hadn’t heard from him in more than thirty-five years, since her parents divorced and he left for the West. She hardly recognized the man lying in the casket. Her father’s eyes had been his most memorable feature—dark and deep-set, like her own. But now his eyes were shut, impervious to her questions. The mourners, men he had worked with at a meatpacking plant, didn’t tell her much. Joe had been drinking, and his pickup slid down an embankment. No one seemed surprised. He left no money or possessions of worth. She brought home a tattered Army blanket she remembered from her childhood and had not thought of since.
    But there was something else. Her father had left a child. The little girl was being cared for by a neighbor, a woman with three children of her own. She told Jackie that the child’s mother had