Jane Smiley - Some Luck

“And the window of my room looked over an airshaft. I was suffocating.”

“There are worse things than airshafts,” said Minnie.

“Yes!” asserted Lois. “Crowds!”

Minnie turned to Joe and said, “She thinks ten people is a crowd.”

“Isn’t it?” said Joe.

Lois walked into the dining room. It was cleared now of Mrs. Frederick’s bed and sickroom paraphernalia. Joe and Rosanna had tried to remember how it had once been, and pushed the table and chairs back into some semblance of that. Rosanna had actually waxed the floor. The dining room had always been the nicest room in the house, a paneled and glass-cased showplace where parties were meant to be lit by candles. The house, as Walter pointed out, was a city house shipped to the country for some reason. Lois came back joyful, and said, “Home, sweet home.”

Minnie unpinned her hat and set it on a shelf beside the fireplace. She said, “Well, my girl, you’d better figure out something to do here, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Mama canned and baked and made brandy-soaked peaches and sewed and knitted and embroidered pillowcases. She was always singing to herself and trying things out.”

“Sweetheart, you don’t know how to do any of those things.”

“So I’ll learn. Better than bookkeeping.”

When Minnie wasn’t looking, Lois took Joe’s hand and kissed him on the cheek. She also invited Nat in, and let him up on the sofa. Joe didn’t get home until after nine, and when he did get home, he washed his dishes and put them away.

ON THE FIRST OF MAY, Andy got a letter from her mother saying that her mother’s uncle Eugen had died, the last person alive during the life of her great-great-uncle Jens. Jens had died in 1890, and had hated all of his living relatives so much that he designated in his will that his estate was to be preserved until they were all “out of the way and could do no further harm,” even the babies. The estate, invested in bonds of some sort, had grown as prolifically as the family, and each member of each generation was to get the same amount, twenty-five hundred dollars. Two days after that, Alex Rubino called Frank and asked if he wanted to buy into a house for sale in Elizabeth, New Jersey — well, not really a house, but a whole block. Frank, remembering all those knickknacks that Rubino had picked up in Germany and sent home, conscious of Patty’s mouton coat and of Rubino’s blue Pontiac, said, “Maybe.” Rubino laughed.

It was a drop-dead perfect deal. This guy Rubino knew was getting together a group of investors to buy up a block of Bond Street in Elizabeth. They had maybe four weeks to do it before the state got there. Governor Driscoll had sworn to get that turnpike done by November ’51, eighteen months. Because he had given himself such a short deadline, the state didn’t have enough manpower to get to every farmer and every shop owner and every home owner in the right of way, so a guy with some pull could get there ahead of time, make a deal or two, and then turn it around. Some of those home owners on Bond Street had expected to be bought out when they expanded Newark Airport, and were a little ticked off when the thing stopped and went the other way, so they had the planes coming in and going out all day and now all night, and no way to get out of there. That irritation was gold to an investor. All those folks, at least the ones who weren’t deaf, would take cash and be glad of it.

“How much do you want?” said Frank.

“How much you got?” said Rubino. Frank gave him twenty-two hundred, not without thinking that Walter might have sold the farm for that twelve years earlier.

ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, Joe gave a party. When Rosanna got the invitation — in her mailbox (“Mr. and Mrs. Walter Langdon, Box 32, RR 2, Denby, Iowa”), she didn’t at first recognize the handwriting on the envelope, it was so neat, and when they got to Joe’s house at the designated time, 2:00 p.m. (“Claire, stop kicking the back of my seat, please. You girls are very giggly”), she didn’t at first recognize the place — Joe had put up a fence that confined the heretofore wandering driveway, and planted grass along it. The main part of the driveway went back to the barn, as always wide enough for a tractor and whatever implement it might be pulling, but the branch went off at a right angle now, crossed the front of the house, and stopped at the stand of lilacs that had been out of control but was now cut back. The effect of the fence was to turn the slope in front of Rolf’s old house, which had once dribbled down to the drainage ditch beside the road, into a front yard. Sure enough, there was some lawn growing there, and not just the same old bunchgrass and foxtails. Well, he had planted fescue, it looked like.

Walter stopped the car and came around to open her door. She got right out with the peach pie and said, “You bring the rolls, Claire. Girls, Joe must be around somewhere. Go say hi.”

And the porch was cleared of junk; you could walk right into the house, which was also cleared of junk, and somewhere he had bought a piece of green flowered carpet that he had laid over the linoleum in the living room — covered it almost to the four walls. No curtains on the windows, of course, but the shades were straight and half drawn, and the place was cool and dim. The two cats were lying around when Rosanna walked in, the one on the back of the sofa and the other one on the heat register, but they skittered past Joe as he came through the kitchen door. Rosanna said, “My, my, the place looks better than it ever has, Joey, and you …” Well, she couldn’t say that, but he did look handsome at last. Tall, and dark, and with a nice haircut, his cuffs straight, and his nails trimmed. He looked, in fact, like Walter had when she met him so many years ago and decided that she was going to show her mother and all the others how to be a real farm wife. She kissed Joe on the cheek. Oh, he did look happy. She walked through into the kitchen. And why not? Through the screen door, you could really get a look at his seed-corn field, and it was the best she had ever seen. Knee-high by the Fourth of July, except not here — the corn was hip-high, and the field was as flat and neat as a patchwork quilt. There was one Oma had made — where was that? — called “rail fence,” a simple pattern, green and blue with black accents, as Rosanna remembered. Anyway, Joey’s back field somehow brought that to mind. Between the cornfield and the house (the yard was also cleared, and even the doghouse looked as though it had been painted) he had set two picnic tables, and put cloths on them, and tacked the ends under the tabletops so they wouldn’t flap in the wind.

And then the others started coming in, Mama, and then Minnie and Lois, who was wearing a very handsome black-and-white-checked skirt, and a red scarf around her neck. Minnie was carrying a pan of something covered in a dish towel, which she set on the table, and Lois had a chocolate cake, which she set beside Rosanna’s peach pie, and it was a fine cake, only a little dip on one side.

Rosanna stepped out onto the back porch, and nearly fell over her own ice-cream maker, filled with ice and covered with a towel, which she lifted. Strawberry. He would have bought the strawberries in Usherton, since strawberry season was over. She stuck in her finger, just the tiniest bit, and put it in her mouth. Delicious. Well, he was full of surprises, and it was about time. Claire was right beside her. She said, “Can I have a taste?”

After a moment, Rosanna said, “Well, okay, but go get yourself a teaspoon.”

Claire came back with a spoon, and Rosanna dipped it into the pale-pink coolness. She said, “Don’t tell anyone.”