Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online Page A

impulse,’ I’d say. I mean you take this afternoon, for instance. Take a while back. Accidents, bad timing, dumb guy pulling a piece … you get what I mean? I lack good luck. I am not a lucky man.”
    “Well, I don’t understand how you can say that,” I told him.
    “Huh?”
    “What if this car hadn’t started, for instance? Back at the service station. It
was
in for repairs, remember. What if it hadn’t started after you’d gone and chained the … and what if there’d been no key? Lots of places take better care than that, they keep the keys in the cash register or something. Or if the boy had been standing outside, what then?”
    “Why, I would get a car from somewheres else,” Jake said.
    “But—”
    “Like, you could go to a snorkel box. Ever hear of that? Snorkel mailbox. Jam the slot so a letter don’t properly fall inside it. Guy drives up in his car, tries to stuff a letter through, gets out to see what went wrong. Leaving his key in of course and engine running, door wide open. All you got to do is hop in. Simple. See?”
    “But then he would know right away,” I said. “He could be after you so fast.”
    “Now, there you got it,” Jake said. He snapped his fingers. “You caught it straight off. I wouldn’t never choose that method if I had other ways open to me.”
    “Right,” I said, and then remembered. “Yes, but what I mean is, how can you say you’re not lucky when it all went off so well?”
    He turned. I could feel him staring at me. He said, “Lucky? Is that what you call it? When some fool turns up armed and a camera flips on and you get this lady on your hands you never bargained for, it’s
lucky?”
    “Well …”
    “It’s circumstances, working against me,” said Jake. “Like I told Oliver: I surely don’t plan it like this. Events get out of my control. But Oliver, oh, he could be such a smart-ass. ‘Your whole life is out of your control,’ that’s what Oliver said. ‘Your whole life.’ Smart-ass.”
    I don’t know what time it was when we stopped. Around ten, maybe. We had been traveling through that deep, country dark that makes you feel too thin. The road was so raspy and patched, with so many curves, crossroads, stop signs—I kept nodding off to sleep, but every bump jarred my mind up to the surface again and I never really forgot where I was. So when we stopped I was awake in an instant, on guard. “What’s wrong?” I said.
    “Durn motor quit.”
    He flicked on the inside light, which made my eyes squinch up. “I knew from the start something like this was bound to happen,” he told me.
    “Maybe it’s out of gas.”
    He peered at the gas meter. He tapped it.
    “Is that what it is?”
    I could tell it was; he wouldn’t look at me. He got out ofthe car and said, “You steer, I’m going to push her to the side of the road.”
    “But I don’t drive,” I told him.
    “What’s that got to do with it? Just steer, is all I ask. Move over and steer.”
    He slammed the door shut. I moved over. A second later I felt his weight against the back of the car, inching it forward, and I steered as best I could though it was hard to see much with the inside light on. I guided it a few feet down the road, wondering what I would do if the engine roared up and took off. Freedom! I would leave him far behind, head for the nearest highway. Except that I really couldn’t drive at all and had just the vaguest notion where the brake pedal was. So I steered to the right, finally, onto a strip of dirt so narrow that some kind of scratchy bushes tore at the side of the car. I heard Jake give a yell. The car stopped. When he came around and opened the door he said, “Now there was no call whatsoever to run her on into the woods.”
    “Well, I told you I couldn’t drive.”
    He sighed. He reached in to turn off the lights; then he said, “Okay, come on.”
    “What are we doing now?”
    “Going to head for that service station we passed a ways