A Regular Guy Read Online Free Page A

the walls, her circle shrunk to the size of a pineknot. She said her hands felt fizzy, hard to move. “I give up, you win,” she said, not to Jane.
    All day, they never left the cabin’s one room. But the outside lured Jane. Bright-colored insects ticked against the screens, high pines slowly waved.
    “Can we get something to eat? I’m hungry.”
    “Mom, do you want me to bring you a glass of water?”
    “When are you going to get up?”
    There was never any answer, only the breathing, the snagging torn breath that seemed to fill not only the space of the small cabin, but time itself, with hooks and debris.
    Jane watched the green day tempting, effervescent, behind the screen. But she couldn’t live without her mother. On the sheet, Mary’s saliva formed a coin. Jane touched it—it smelled metallic—and fell in.
    It seemed hours they lay there, turning on the sour sheets. The busy optimism of the world passed. They heard the habits of civilization roll by, the important weight of semis, rushing the highway, delivering food and milk to apartment dwellers on patios in distant cities, and the whistles and confetti shouts of children outside.
    Mary and Jane had always been different anyway. They never read the newspaper or heard radio—they couldn’t keep the daily habits when they tried, and often were slow and late.
    As the noises outside leapt and grew, Jane discovered the suspended pleasure of resignation.
    Her mother woke, rubbing her own head. “I can’t anymore,” she said, smiling down haplessly, the way the man had said to her, on his hands and knees when their affair was young, “I can’t help it,” and the same way he had said, the night before, “She knows everything and she’s forgiven me.”
    “Do you want me to go outside?” Jane asked.
    The mother nodded, her eyes wise now as miles of travel.

The Driving Child

    B ixter owned an old black pail she used for everything. While Mary took the Greyhound bus to her mother’s funeral, Bixter and Jane scoured the woods with it for wildflowers to make a pie.
    “Won’t it be bitter?” Bixter asked.
    “We sugar them,” Jane explained.
    They washed the frail petals in rainwater, let them dry on a screen in the breeze. Then they mixed them with eggs, milk and a dust of nutmeg, and poured it all into the crust. This was the first time Jane had ever been away from her mother.
    When the smell from the tiny oven rose, Bixter said, enigmatically, “A crust must be made in the morning.”
    “Why. Why can’t it be made in the afternoon?”
    Bixter frowned. “Because of the air.”
    Jane would remember that all her life. While somewhere in cities children were chanting the names of all the presidents in order, the collected odd convictions of solitaries became Jane’s education.
    Two days later, they heard Mack’s car outside. Mary burst in thedoor just as the sky cracked and rain started. Mack had cried, she told Jane. “He was so big and he cried.”
    “If it wasn’t for the kids,” he’d said.
    Sunday, Mary stayed in bed and a pink cup of coffee floated before her. They hadn’t eaten anything for days now, since the tart pie of flowers. Jane stood in the cool air like a statue, holding the cup. Clouds outside meant evening. Mary sat up on the bed and sipped, then began to move. The world was soft, as it always was when she first rose late in the day. Perhaps here hid the lush secrets of indolence, but that was knowledge she couldn’t use. She collected the candles, saving the wax in an old milk carton.
    They drove out to Tastee-Freez, half an hour away. Back at the wintercamp, women were boiling root vegetables with seaweed, but they sat at a table on the tar lot, cluttered with dry spills and autumn flies. The highway spread serene, lavender, the land quieting, tall grass blurry at the top. They ate hamburgers, warm grease darkening their yellow wrappers, and drank malteds, thick and hard to suck through flimsy straws. Jane stuck her