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was hot enough for blood to boil in your veins, and they were sipping coffee, and John Blain took long, hot draws from his cigarette. Mom laughed idiotically at
everything he said.
After lunch I carried some crushed ice to my vegetables to revive them and to keep the milkforcats cold. I tied Jessie to a cement block nearby to graze. She had to
get away from her calf for a few hours in order to have any milk by evening. There wasn't any
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reason people couldn't drink her milk we did, after all but, according to Mr. VanderVeen who sold us straw and cheap hay that had been rained on in the field, it
was against the law to sell the milk for people. Jessie dragged her block behind her, tearing a line through the grass, and she swatted flies disinterestedly with her tail. I
looked through my newspaper again, though I had already read it front to back. Then I used it to fan myself.
It was hard to concentrate in the new summer heat, hard to remember things, hard to make plans. I walked around to investigate John Blain's car, which was rusty and
faded olive green. The back was folded down, and there was a mattress but no room for anyone to sleep with all that junk back there cables and loose rusty tools, a
chain saw, and even a bicycle with the wheels taken off. The front seat was full of food wrappers and Styrofoam cups, and across the passenger seat lay a green army
sleeping bag. A freezer bag held a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a plastic razor. The least he could do, I thought, was move this rusted hulk away from my stand so I
could earn a living.
I'd been cupping my hands at the passengerside window to get a better view, and when I stepped back, the figure of a man towered behind me in the reflection. I
screamed.
"Find anything interesting?" asked John Blain.
"You're a slob."
"And you're a nosey girl." John Blain walked around to the driver's side of the car and brushed his teeth in some water from a bottle, spitting foam onto the driveway.
Then he grinned into his sideview mirror, showing all his teeth. "You take care of your teeth, kiddo, and they'll take care of you." I let him see me roll my eyes. He
pulled a tool box out of the back of the car and carried it toward the house.
I yelled after him, "The price of the car is 250 bucks!"
Since my dad had left us, there'd been a river of nogood men running through our lives. I was glad when they didn't stay around, and they usually didn't. I knew Mom
wasn't happy without a man, but she didn't have to go for whatever guy showed up in our driveway. That's what I told her that night at supper.
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"How come every guy who comes around you're falling all over him?"
"I wasn't falling over him. He seemed like a nice man, didn't he? He stayed with his aunt in Alexander when he was a boy. That's why he came here. But his aunt's
dead."
"Well, I hate him."
"Why don't you want me to be happy?" She asked the question with a heaving of her chest, as though exhausted and beleaguered by a long history of cruel treatment
at my hands.
"Why can't you be happy without a stupid guy?"
"Reg, you're so young. You don't know how terrible it is to be alone."
"I'm alone all the time. I like being alone."
"Wait until you're grown up. Besides, this John Blain's not like the other men around here. I can tell." Mom lay on the couch, fitting herself into the imprint she'd made
in the cushions over the years. We'd brought it with us from the trailer.
"Well, I hope he doesn't come back."
"You're so mean." She sounded tired and sad. "You're every bit as mean as your daddy."
"Maybe Daddy had a reason to be mean. Some day I'm going to find him and ask him all about it."
Mom turned away from me and fell asleep.
When John Blain showed up the next evening with a pizza, Mom said he could stay the night, but he didn't end up sleeping on the couch like she'd suggested in front of
me. That next morning, he got up early and drove out for a box of doughnuts from the highway stop, getting back just as I finished chores. I sat in the kitchen and ate a
chocolate cake doughnut and a cruller without saying a word, even though John Blain kept going upstairs and returning and pacing. Finally, I overheard him in Mom's
room saying her name louder and louder. I carried a frosted long john upstairs and watched from the hallway while he shook her. He turned, panicstricken, his
forehead strained.
"Oh, God! What's the matter with her? Why won't she wake up?"
"She's got the sleeping sickness," I said.
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"Sleeping sickness? Encephalitis? She wasn't sick last night."
"She just sleeps a lot," I said. "Twelve hours a night. You can't wake her before eleven or even noon sometimes. And then she takes a nap in the afternoon."
John Blain collapsed in the chair by the bed. I noticed his blond hair was streaked with gray.
We'd only lived on the farm two years, ever since my grandpa J.T. had died. Mom had gotten pregnant at age sixteen, and J.T. had told her that if she ran off with my
dad, he'd never speak to her again, and because he was a man of his word, I never met him. Maybe the only reason he left her the farm was because he knew she
hated it. If it had been up to her, she would have gotten rid of Jessie and the chickens, but I argued until she let me keep them so long as I took care of them. For
weeks, then, Mrs. VanderVeen from next door had to come over and help me milk the cow until I could do it myself. When Mom was drunk, she'd say the house
was "a goddamn jail." Whenever something went wrong, like a roof needed fixing, she'd say that she ought to sell the place. A few days before John Blain came, I told
her I'd fix the roof over the porch, and she'd said accusingly, "You'd do anything to keep me here, wouldn't you?" That night I dreamed that we still lived in the trailer
and that Mom's exboyfriends were all with us, drinking canned beer and sucking the oxygen out of the air. I woke up twisted in my sheets, sweating.
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