Read Online Waiting for Joe by Sandra Birdsell - Free Book Online Page B

Walmart, a small frizzy-white-haired woman whose sore-looking eyes are too large for her face, and weepy looking, like the eyes of an aging cocker spaniel.
    She sees herself on the video screen, a tall woman with tangled hair on top of her head, walking with purpose, a tote bag swinging at her side. A woman with anxious eyes.
    She goes across the parking lot, thinking of Joe. She hurries across a traffic lane, aware of a red car with a crumpled front fender coming toward her, thinking vaguely that she’s seen it before, that she is beginning to see the same people over and over. The entire city of two hundred thousandcheerful people must pass through the doors of Walmart each and every day of the week.
    She locks the door of the motorhome behind her, knowing immediately that Joe hasn’t been there in her absence. The premonition she had in Clara’s Boutique was real. Joe’s gone.

Four
    J OE STOPS TO UNZIP HIS JACKET and in that brief pause brings his eyes up from the ground to the far distance where the ridge of blue hills begins to take shape. It’s almost noon and warm now, the morning cloud cover having moved off to the northeast where it rims the horizon in a band of pearl white. Released by the rush of air against his body, he continues to walk, keeping that faint elevation of land in sight.
    When he’d hailed a taxi going past Home Depot, he’d felt as though he’d just punched his way out of a box. He paid the driver twenty dollars to take him as far as the money would go and after the taxi dropped him, he began to walk, needing to move, to wear himself down. Although his frustration is almost spent, he hasn’t yet reached the point where he feels he has no choice but to turn round. He keeps close to the rim of the ditch, a trough of moisture greening with vegetation, and away from the sporadic charge of traffic whose drivers speed up as they pass by, asthough to point out that he is on foot and they are not.
    Moments later his thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a motor and he becomes aware of the farmhouse in the near distance, a well-kept two-storey house where a woman struggles to rototill a strip of earth that borders the gravel lane leading to the highway. He notes her awkwardness; the khaki parka that reaches her knees, likely a man’s, and too large, judging from the way the sleeves are bunched up. It makes her look like a kid who’s taken on a job beyond her capabilities.
    She sees him now and stops working, then stoops over the machine and shuts it off. She straightens and pushes the parka hood down onto her shoulders, as though this will give her a better look at him. When he sees the wedge of dark bangs on her forehead, the way her short hair sticks out at the sides, he can’t take his eyes from her. Grim determination, Alfred sometimes said when Verna tore into a job a man usually did to keep a house and yard going, including turning over the earth in the small backyard garden every autumn and again in spring. Alfred’s faulty Hong Kong heart, the result of incarceration in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, prevented him from doing anything strenuous. At any moment it might stop ticking. But Alfred was into his ninety-fifth year now, while Verna had been the one to die.
    He guesses the woman is calculating the distance between them, the amount of time she has to get to the house, should she need to. If he hesitated in his pace, she’d turn and run for it. There’s no traffic and the silence is so complete, it’s a ringing in his ears. As he crosses the lane, the loose gravel shifts beneath his feet and he has to workto keep his balance, and he sees himself as the woman might see him, a middle-aged man walking along the highway, someone who has likely gone looking for trouble and found it. A moment later the Rototiller starts up; its whine follows him along the ditch like a dog sniffing at his pant legs.
    He passes by a dug-out pond at the edge of the next field, its viscous surface