A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online

calves rub his knees, her pants pushing above her ankles.
    â€œWhat’s-his-name’ll be to get you,” he said.
    â€œSure will,” she said. “You better hope he don’t find you here, or there’ll be shit to fly.”
    She kept smiling, and he had the impulse to get out the door and not stop until he had reached the line to Texas.
    â€œHe won’t find nobody but you,” he said.
    She pushed off her elbows and straddled him, her pantssqueezed up on her knees, her eyes wide. He set his hands along her calves and wedged them inside the material, and felt the cords in her thighs. She lay on the spread, breathing evenly and letting her head wag side to side.
    â€œHe won’t find me,” he said. His throat was dried up.
    She hummed in her throat and turned her face so that she stared at the metal uprights above the foot of the bed.
    He unbuttoned her pants and slid them around her thighs. Her skin was bluish. She hissed through her teeth as though it were a pain commencing. He laid her pants over the chair back and pushed his hands up her legs. She bridged her neck and sank her elbows in the ticking.
    â€œRobert?” she said, her arms laid out, her hands made into fists.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œDo you think I look thirty—I mean, with you looking at me?”
    The linoleum buckled. He tried to get himself onto the bed and pay attention to what she was saying all at the same time.
    â€œNo, sweet,” he said softly.
    She drew her legs up and eased his hand, faced down the bedspread and smiled.
    â€œYou don’t look twenty where I’m at,” he said.
    â€œI ain’t mad at you no more,” she said, her voice lost inside her throat.
    â€œThat’s sweet,” he said. “Now that’s real sweet.”

7
    At seven o’clock it had turned gray down in the east. The coons were against the wires, staring at the sun sagging by degrees. Leo lay quietly, eying the rabbit, who had dozed as the day cooled and was not awake, the breeze pushing back lightly against the hatch of his fur, laying bare a smooth white undercoat.
    He lay beside the woman in the brown light feeling the breeze draw through the room, pulling the curtains and plucking theflesh on his arms. The screen slammed and he could hear the girl move out in the yard, cooing at the raccoons. The woman shuddered and he looked at her expecting her eyes to open, but she lay still, breathing as if she were barely alive. He could smell the sage on the breeze, a faint burning aroma in his nostrils, and he could hear the raccoon claws clamber down the wires to the child.
    â€œYou make me feel kinder towards the world,” she had said, and he couldn’t figure out why, and lay with his chin in the pillow, listening.
    â€œDon’t you feel that way all the time?”
    â€œNo.” Her lips were to his ear. “I get contrary, get people in trouble.”
    â€œDon’t he make you feel good?”
    â€œLarry does. Sometimes.”
    â€œHow come you want to foul up with me?”
    She turned on her side and crossed her arms beneath her chin. “I don’t trust him,” she said, as if it were something she always knew, but had just realized.
    â€œYou’re up there every day,” he said. “What ain’t there to trust?”
    â€œIf I
wasn’t
up there, he’d be humpin some bar bitch like he is right now.”
    â€œBut you
are
up there,” he said.
    â€œAnd there’s a lot of tonk bars between Rag-land and Variadero, too—see?” she said.
    He graveled his chin in the pillow and tried to figure that out. “Looks like you got him jumpin the creek.”
    â€œYou’re sweet,” she said, and gave him a kiss on the shoulder. “I love him. But I can’t trust him not to wipe me out.”
    â€œSo what does that mean?” he said.
    â€œI got to cheat on him so he don’t have a chance to leave me like I was