“Getting her shop ready. She wants to open in two weeks. She called and told me she found a perforated veneer rocking chair. Out in someone’s barn, right beside an old Pierce-Arrow.”
“Say…” said Frank.
Joe stiffened.
“Can I borrow a couple of things?”
“Like what?”
“Pair of overalls, your truck.”
“You’re up to no good,” said Joe, but he said it jovially.
“Always,” said Frank.
“That’s what Pop said.”
Jesse looked back and forth between them.
The truth came out at supper — Frank was looking for farms to buy. He had a friend named Jim someone who had decided that farmland was going to appreciate now that grain prices were up. Jim was thinking of buying himself a farm in the south of France, growing lavender and poppies.
“Staples,” said Joe.
“There are farms in France that only grow plums. Or sunflowers. Or blond cows. You need a couple of those. Blonde d’Aquitaine. Beautiful cattle. Quiet as mice; bigger than Angus, too.”
“Now you tell me,” said Joe. His overalls were roomy on Frank. When Frank brought the truck back, he had put two hundred miles on it.
He left three days later. Joe thought they’d gotten along pretty well. They were certainly too old to wrestle, and maybe even to argue, and they had nothing to argue about. Frank had walked through the fields and looked in the barn. It wouldn’t be Joe telling him what the price of land was these days, it would be some appraiser in Usherton, or even in Des Moines. What made him sad was Jesse’s reaction. The first thing Jesse did was take the rifle out and shoot things — targets, jays, barn swallows, rabbits, squirrels — and the second thing he did was quiz Joe and Rosanna about all of Frank’s adventures. What did he do in the army? Was it true he shot some people? Where did he go besides Italy? Did he really live in a tent over in Ames? Did he really invent gunpowder? Did he really steal German documents at the end of the war? Joe could not set him straight, so Jesse started writing Frank letters, and Frank started writing back, and, sure enough, Jesse asked in August if it was too late to go to Iowa State. Minnie said no, it wasn’t, and that she was proud of him. To Joe she said, “I always thought he was a self-starter. That’s why I didn’t say a word about college. I wanted it to be his idea.” Joe just said, “Well, I’ll miss him.”
—
HENRY HAD NEVER ASKED himself where he got his methodical ways, but as the fall progressed and Rosanna crept toward Chicago bit by bit, he saw that she must have been the source. Her goal was to come in early October, when the trees would be at their peak — she wanted nothing fancy in the way of food or sightseeing, but she did want to go to the Sears Tower and look out at the lake, to walk around the campus and look at the changing leaves. Henry made a reservation at an inexpensive Italian place famous for meatballs, gave her a map with clear instructions for getting from 80 to 55 to Lake Shore Drive and then to his duplex. He scrubbed his kitchen sink, his bathtub, and his baseboards, and he laundered not only the sheets in the second bedroom, but also the bedspread. He walked around sniffing — he could smell nothing untoward. He bought some chrysanthemums (chrysanthema, really) for the hall table, and a nice coffee cake from the bakery. He pretended to himself that all of this was a pain in the neck, but it wasn’t. At what point would he decide that Rosanna had been forced off Lake Shore Drive into Lake Michigan and he needed to call the State Police?
But she was early; she knocked rather than rang the bell, and when he opened the door and saw her neat bun and happy face framed against his neighbors’ maple trees, he was pleased. She had a paper sack with her. She put it under her arm and carried it in. When Henry realized that her change of clothes was in that paper sack, he felt a slight pang that, even though they all knew she was extending her range, no one had bothered to buy her an overnight bag.
