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The Measure of a Man
A certain feeling coood life away, and it is one part rapture Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise Innocence was no part of this She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating afterrace The shame and loss would infect her children too, that was the worst of it, in a tohere everyone knew thee with her after this, clicking painted fingernails on the counter while she wrote her check, eyeing the oat looks with the bag boy: She’s that one How they adht up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummy discount brands, and the heart had just one instruction left: run Like a hunted ani felt exactly alike at this stage, with the sa of blood and shortness of breath She smoked too much, that was another mortification to throith the others But she had cast her lot Plenty of people took this way out, looking future da else Noas her turn She could claihtness in her chest and call it bliss, rather than the saht nohile toting a heavy laundry basket, behaving like a sensible mother of two
The children ith heron barely sufficient grounds, and it ht just kill her to dwell on that now Their little faces turned up to her like the round hearts of two daisies: She loves me, loves me not All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel Realistically, the family could be totaled That was the word, like a wrecked car wrapped around a telephone pole, no salvageable parts No husband worth having is going to forgive adultery if it comes to that And still she felt pulled up this incline by the hand whose touchdown all she knew Maybe she even craved the collapse, with an appetite larger than sense
At the top of the pasture she leaned against the fence to catch up on oxygen, feeling the slight give of the netted woven wire against her back No safety net Unsnapped her purse, counted her cigarettes, discovered she’d have to ration the-ahead kind of day The suede jacket rong, too warm, and what if it rained? She frowned at the Nove that had been up there last week, last e of weather had put a recall on blue and nailed up this mess of dirty white sky like a lousy drywall job The pasture pond seeht off its surface than the sky itself had to offer The sheep huddled close around its shine as if they too had given up on the sun and settled for second best Little puddles winked all the way down Highway 7 toward Feathertown and out the other side of it, toward Cleary, a long trail of potholes glinting atery light
The sheep in the field below, the Turnbow family land, the white fraht in ten-plus years of e: that was pretty e seventeen Not including the brief hospital excursions, childbirth-related Apparently, today was the day she walked out of the picture Distinguishing herself from the luckless sheep that stood down there in the mud surrounded by the deep stiletto holes of their footprints, enduring life’s bad deals They’d worn their heavy wool through the y summer, and now that winter was al proposition they never saw co Their pasture looked drowned In the next field over, the orchard painstakingly planted by the neighbors last year was now dying under the rain Froe, even her house, probably due to the angle She only looked out those s, never into theiven the company she kept with people who rolled plastic trucks on the floor Certainly she never clie
Her car was parked in the only spot in the county that wouldn’t incite gossip, her own driveway People knew that station wagon and still tended to think of it as belonging to herfrom her mother’s death, an unreliable set of wheels adequate for short errands with kids in tow The price of that was a disquieting sense of Maed between the kids’ car seats, reaching across thehts today Thisthe kids at Hester’s she had floored it for the half-h and wobbly as a kite Went back into the house only to brush her teeth, shed her glasses, and put on eyeliner, no other preparations necessary prior to lighting out her own back door to wreck her reputation The electric pulse of desire buzzed through her body like an alar in s in a day that can’t be stopped
She picked her way now through churned-up ate, and slipped through Beyond the fence an ordinary wildness of ironweed and briar thickets began An old road cut through it, long unused, crisscrossed by wild raspberries bending across in tall arcs In recent ti with her husband Cub and soo, and it definitely wasn’t her idea She’d been barrel-round pregnant with Cordelia and thinking she ht there in the brambles, that’s how she knehich June that was So Preston would have been four She re friends scared them half to death about snakes These raspberry canes were a weird color for a plant, she noticed now, not that she would know nature if it bit her But bright pink? The color of a frosted lipstick soht want to wear She had probably skipped that phase, heading straight for Iave way to a forest The trees clenched the last of su made her think of Lot’s wife in the Bible, who turned back for one last look at home Poor woman, struck into a pile of salt for such a small disobedience She did not look back, but headed into the woods on the rutted track her husband’s faht Taking the High Road to damnation; the irony had failed to cross her mind when she devised this plan The road up the , in the old days The woods had grown back Cub and his dad drove the all-terrain up this way soe they used for turkey hunting Or they used to do that, once upon a tiht of the Turnbow men senior and junior was about sixty pounds less than the present day Back when they used their feet for so the view of the television set The road must have been poorlythe chain saw for clearing windfall