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

in Salt Lake.”
    â€œThat don’t make sense,” he said.
    She smiled. “If I cheat on him a
little
, and he knows I’m liable to anytime, then it balances me—see? He can’t feel like he’s put nothin on me, cause he knows I’m probably putting somethingon him already. It gets dangerous when you feel like you can fool the other one anytime you get ready and not pay for it. Everything starts splitting. You got to stay balanced.”
    She ran her fingers through the hair on his belly. “I want you,” she said in a queer high voice.
    â€œWait now,” he said, picturing Larry laying bricks in Variadero and wondering where his wife was while the sun was going and whether or not she was liable to show up, or whether she was stopping over in some tonk bar and not making it in until tomorrow. “Does he know that’s how you’re playing it?”
    â€œLet’s don’t us talk,” she said, grabbing him up in her tight little fist and rolling her eyes back. “I need it right now, understand?”
    â€œBut wait a minute,” he said.
    â€œNo waits,” she said. “No waits.”
    When she had gone to sleep he lay and stared at the ceiling, spattered with the gold tinsel of water seepage. He understood that when it rained, it rained until the boards soaked and the water shot the walls and set the house floating like an ark. He dozed and felt himself drawn to a powerful commotion as though the sky were driving through the cages, drowning animals, filling the truck bed, and buoying him inside until it was necessary to hold the bed staves to be saved from drowning. There were lights in the yard, flashing through the panes across the wall in his room, revolving rectangles of light across the wall, and he had sat up startled and faced them and heard the groan of someone’s pickup and two doors slamming and the soft lilt of voices in the yard. He walked out on the low plank porch and stood where his mother was watching the two men angrily while they talked one at a time in quick low tones, trying to avoid her eyes and get the story told and get gone. They stood silhouetted in the truck lights that fanned the grassy spiderwebs, and for a while his mother stared at them while they talked, watching them intently, snapping her eyes over one and to the other, holding them unmovable until they finally talked so fast the words ran together into gibberish.And after a while she just stared past them into the headlights, and they finished and left. The way the woman told it, his father had gone up into the hills early in the evening to attend a service, and took the woman with him in his car. And three-quarters of the way up the long grade, full of roots and chuck holes, winding up the Bostons toward the top of Mount Skylight, where the tent was supposedly staked on a high knob, the old car had failed where they forded a creek, a ribbon of spring water squirreling down the mountain toward the Illinois River. The woman said she got out and went into the bushes while his father stayed and monkeyed with the dashboard wires, trying to get the car going before it got night. And when the woman came back from the bushes, it had begun to rain, “an unimaginable rain,” she said, that smacked the sides of the car like a lanyard, and the water rose over the bottoms of the doors and swirled and shot past the car so that a strong man couldn’t have walked through it without falling. And she said she could see him inside humped over the dashboard studying the wires and fuses, unaware, she guessed, that the creek was up or that it might not do to be out in it. She herself, a plump, slope-eyed woman from Tonitown, said she never imagined what the outcome would be, and went up and squatted underneath a plum bush to wait for the rain to stop and the creek to subside so they could go on to the church, which turned out to be accessible by some other road. And as she