Taking Care by Joy Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

tires in the middle of the woods. There was a river fifty feet away but after what it had done to her, she hardly ever looked at it.
    The day after they moved in, she had walked down there and stood on the little dock, looking up and down as though she were waiting for a bus. The woods were thick and purplish and ran right into the water. There wasn’t any shore. There was the high land and then a line of ropy contorted trees with all the roots exposed like the tendons in an arm, and then the water. And there wasn’t any sun. Although it was noon, the light was second-hand and shabby. The sun was enmeshed in a high tree, tangled in the hanging moss, beating feebly or not at all, like something subject to wind or exhaustion. She looked upstream and there was a gentle wide turn to the river and the woods turned black and flaky. White birds were milling, falling down to the water and then being sucked up again, as though by a draft, with no wingbeat and no cry.
    Nothing looked as though it were about to change from one week to the next. She bent slightly at the waist and looked straight down. The river bottom was red and the water was different colors at different depths—saffron, red, black. Fish hung ornamentally above a rusting can. A steering wheel from a car was wedged between two logs. She lay down on her stomach and poked at the water with her hand. Bored, she splashed and patted the surface. Two otters erupted for air afoot beyond her lowered head, sleek and toothy with a sound like escaping gas. She shrieked, and ran back to the trailer.
    She flung herself on the bed and wept for an hour, and nothing her husband could do would stop her. Finally, she took a hot bath and drank three martinis. The otters were the same otters which had terrified her as a child when they were in a color plate, swimming in the
Book of Knowledge.
She had never been able to remember what volume they were in and was therefore always coming across them. It became a dangerous thing to do her homework. Even when her father had cut the picture out, she would see other things that resembled the otters and she felt that her entire childhood had been ruined. She told this all to her husband. He didn’t know what to say. He kissed her and held her on his lap and covered them both with a quilt.
    Her name was Lola and she was young and had a pretty face. Her husband Jim had a pretty face too, which was why he was a television newscaster rather than being just another newsman. He had brown heavy hair, carefully cut and combed, and was tall and thirty years old. He would look thirty for the next two decades, which worried Lola.
    Jim worked in the capital. It wasn’t much of a town but it was crowded with state office buildings and two colleges and an agricultural school, and when he had started to look for a house late in the summer, there wasn’t anything to rent. Each day he drove further and further from the town on some realtor’s suggestion, Lola by his side, biting her nails and occasionally giving a little cry as though she had been pinched. All they passed were pines and careless farms and an occasional house with a dirt yard and a sign advertising yard eggs and crickets and rabbits. Lola wouldn’t look any more. She put her head on his lap and listened to the radio.
    The day he finally found the trailer and paid the rent, she wasn’t with him. She had a headache pain and was staying behind in the motel room, calling all their friends in the town they had left behind, remembering good times together. The trailer was thirty miles from the capital on blacktop and thenanother four down a logging road, and was in the next state. He told her that it didn’t have a phone but it had a CB radio and an air-conditioner, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, conversation pit and wall-to-wall carpeting. When she arrived, there was half a watermelon in the refrigerator, two jars of cane syrup beneath the sink, and an unflushed toilet. There was a little