The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (12 page)

‘You'll need to need to buy the paint,' Caroline said disapprovingly. ‘Unless anyone has a couple of cans left over, that is.'

‘Cheerful yellow,' said Sara.

‘Cheerful, yellow paint,' Caroline said doggedly. ‘I guess John can help you with that,' she added reluctantly.

‘And I'll be in charge of the cleaning,' said George. The others stared at him for so long he blushed from the attention. ‘I know how to clean,' he said, though a hesitant note had entered his voice.

Andy, Jen and Caroline had clearly heard enough, because they disappeared, one after another, leaving Sara and George alone in the shop.

Suddenly, the whole idea seemed crazy again. She didn't know if it was because she no longer needed to act all confident in front of the others or because she was seeing the dirt more clearly now the shop was empty. She had been so caught up in her dream of a colourful, cosy bookshop she had managed to forget that the walls were brownish yellow and the floor grey.

She and George against years of dust and rubbish. Where would they even begin?

George, on the other hand, didn't seem to be nursing such doubts. ‘We'll start with the windows,' he said as soon as the others had gone. ‘That way, we can see how the rest looks when there's a bit more light.'

He wouldn't let Sara near the windows, even during the first wash. ‘It'll go streaky if it's not done properly,' he explained kindly. But she was allowed to change the water, at least.

He was tireless. Twice, he even cracked a joke, and later, he said: ‘You know,
Bridget Jones
?' He fell silent while he dealt with a tricky part of the window, and then continued. ‘Not a bad book, really. But do women really talk about men like that?'

Sara had no idea, now that she thought about it. ‘Maybe in London,' she suggested.

He nodded. ‘Yeah, maybe in London.'

When they paused for lunch, Sara's muscles were aching and George had become more soldierly in his instructions. He allowed her a lunch break only because Caroline had come by and suggested it. Faced with Caroline, his new-found authority became weak again, and when Andy and Jen arrived soon after her, he became Poor George once more.

They ate lunch outside the shop. The sun was still warm, when it actually decided to shine, and Sara was much too hot from the cleaning to care about the cool autumn breeze which had crept into the air.

Grace came over with hamburgers and loitered at the edge of the group.

‘You'll never be able to open a bookstore here,' she said. ‘It's madness.'

No one bothered to reply.

‘A bookstore,' said Grace, in the alarming narrative tone which usually meant there was yet another family anecdote on the way. Andy and Jen glanced nervously at her. Caroline froze. Sure enough, Grace carried on. ‘Have I told you about the time the Bible salesmen visited my grandmother?'

Everyone looked at Caroline. It was an exceptionally bad story to choose. Caroline had strong feelings about Bible salesmen.

‘What a lot you've got done,' said Jen, the first to recover. It was a pointless comment, but she had, at least, managed to change the subject.

‘A whole lot,' Andy added quickly. ‘And a whole lot left to do. Might as well get back to it.'

He and Jen bustled Caroline away, and George got Sara back to the cleaning.

Gradually, the dust inside the shop was replaced by the strong smell of cleaning products and artificial lemon.

The following evening, Sara caught a brief glimpse of the floor as it had once been – dark and stylish – before it was covered over again with paper and cans of paint.

As she walked back and forth, the floor creaked beneath her feet. It was past eight and George was still there, and eventually they both sat down in comfortable silence outside the shop, each clasping a coffee from Grace's and daydreaming about books and defeated dirt. It was still almost warm.

Sara smiled. The town felt more alive in the evening. It regained some of its dignity.

She could make out kilometre after kilometre of straight, dark road stretching out in both directions. During the day, the town was dominated by the road – threatened by it, too – but in the evening, the facades of the buildings stood out more in the shadowy light and became part of something bigger. During the day, you could drive right through the town in a minute, virtually missing it if you blinked; at night, it came creeping up to you and demanded your attention.

‘Do you like stars?' George asked, in the same tone he would have used to ask whether she liked spaghetti bolognese.

‘I think so,' said Sara, looking up at the night sky.

She didn't know any of the constellations. It felt liberating. It was tragic that people were so obsessed with patterns that they even tried to force the stars into them. Like the Great Bear – when she was younger, she had thought it sounded magical, like a fearsome, ferocious creature from a fairy tale, but when she finally learned to recognise it, it looked more like a saucepan. Seven stars, millions of miles apart, forced into the shape of a saucepan by people down on Earth. Or maybe it was more like a shopping trolley.

‘I don't really know what I think about them,' George admitted. ‘Sometimes they make me feel so small.' He smiled at her. ‘And I hardly need any help feeling insignificant. I like that sometimes, though. That we're so small that two people can be standing in two different towns, looking up at the very same sky.'

‘Are you thinking about anyone in particular?' Sara tentatively asked.

He surprised her by saying ‘yes' as though it was obvious. ‘Sophy,' he said.

‘Your wife?' Sara ventured.

‘God, no,' he said, laughing. ‘So you've heard about
her
, then. No, Sophy was my daughter. Did they tell you about her too?'

‘No.'

‘No? She wasn't
my
daughter, of course. That's what they would've told you, if they'd said anything.' He had been gazing up at the stars the whole time they had been talking, but now he looked at her. ‘Damn them,' he said. ‘She was mine.'

When he spoke again, his tone was completely different. ‘I like to think that sometime she'll look up at the stars at the exact same moment as me. If I look at them often enough, that is.' He grimaced. ‘Idiotic, right?'

She smiled at him. ‘It's a nice thought,' she said.

‘Yeah, it's almost like looking at them together,' he replied. ‘In any case,' he continued after a moment. ‘I started drinking after Sophy disappeared. They told you about that, I guess.'

‘Yeah.'

‘No sense pretending it didn't happen.'

‘They said you've been sober a while,' she said.

‘A month and a half now. Some days are still tough.'

GEORGE DIDN'T MENTION
anything when he gave Sara a ride home, but he was determined to do a good job of the cleaning and prove himself worthy of her trust.

He was, in his own way, neither more nor less strange than anyone else who had stayed in Broken Wheel and survived. Like most of the others, the town's history had left an impression on him, though it was also true that he had been badly affected by life's small catastrophes and become Poor George – a good man, ‘all things considered' – relatively early on.

The American countryside had, at one point in time, been tamed by brave, tenacious, resilient pioneers; farmers searching for fertile earth, prepared to weather the trials and tribulations involved in cultivating it. And in reaching it in the first place.

Those who had attempted to tame the area around the Great Plains were, according to legend, particularly crazy. Mad enough to choose a place right in the middle of nowhere to settle down. And crazy enough to manage to live there.

Surviving became a kind of warped Darwinian test in many areas of the Midwest, with only the maddest surviving. That which didn't kill them made them stranger.

Just over 150 years ago, groups of courageous settlers travelled in convoy, achieving an early (and less materialistic) version of the American dream.

In one of these convoys, a wheel had broken: the town of Broken Wheel was founded as a result of, and named after, a mistake, and it seemed as though the town had been doing its best to live up to its name ever since.

Nothing was ever simple in Broken Wheel. Even during the good years when farming was booming in Iowa, when the family farms were still going strong, when there was enough corn and money and apple pie to go around, the inhabitants of the town had been forced to fight. The odds were always ever so slightly against them, they were always trailing slightly – still playing the game but always a few points behind. They had to keep chasing.

Those were the years people remembered as the town's golden era. But George had been Poor George even then. Though he was the eldest, his siblings had taken over the family farm. His father hadn't trusted him with it, said you had to be aggressive to succeed with a family farm nowadays. Pushy. And George wasn't, even George knew that. Then for quite some time, he remained single in a place where no one even used the word. That hadn't helped either.

Then the wheels of Iowa's family-centric agricultural economy really did come off, and everything started to go downhill.

George could remember that time and he had his own explanation for the crisis. He knew that everything had started when he lost Sophy.

That was also when he had started drinking.

When his wife married him, he hadn't really understood why. Then it became all too obvious: after seven months of marriage, she gave birth to a baby girl. George knew that Sophy wasn't his; he had been a virgin on his wedding night.

But it hadn't mattered. He had a wife and a wonderful daughter, and people looked at him with respect. All of a sudden, he was no longer Poor George. He was a husband and a father, a grown man.

His daughter was the first person he had really been good with. Others noticed it too: ‘What a great father you are, George,' they said, as he carried the baby girl around with him. There was no mention of his not having taken over the farm despite being the eldest, or about his having worked in the slaughterhouse for ten years without ever supervising a shift, not even during the period when there had been jobs available and only Mexicans wanting to do them.

Now that he was Poor George again, he sometimes struggled to remember how it had been back then, when he had almost been respected. He could still remember Sophy though. It didn't matter that Michelle had left him, but she had taken Sophy with her. His Sophy. He could still remember each expression on her little face, and how soft her skin had felt against his. Like velvet on sandpaper, he had once thought to himself, though he wasn't normally particularly poetic. And her laugh. The way she smelled when she slept, and how gentle he had been when he – carefully, so Michelle didn't see and mock him for it – buried his nose in her hair. He couldn't remember what Michelle had smelled like.

Regardless, the whole wretched state of affairs had begun when Sophy disappeared. Others said that the crisis was the result of oil prices and interest rates and overenthusiastic bankers lending too much money and politicians in Washington making decisions over things they had no idea about, and God knows what else. But George knew that those things weren't the real cause.

Sophy disappeared, and after that single, impossible, inexplicable event, nothing made sense. The town was left defenceless and suddenly anything at all could happen. The price of goods had nothing to do with the cost of machines or loans, interest rates didn't indicate anything, and the banks, which had previously been more like friends to them, showering George and all the others with money, now behaved as though they had never seen him before, even though the man at the bank was from the area.

Their houses were levelled to make room for more corn. All that damn corn, he thought. The familiar old crop became greedy and unpredictable.

Before his wife left him, she had told everyone that he wasn't Sophy's father. He became Poor George again immediately. He started drinking.

Then, when more and more people were being forced to sell their farms and no one could fill the role of good husband or father any longer, more and more of them became Poor Someone, keeping him company in his drinking.

The others never quite believed him when he explained that the darkness had started with Sophy. Maybe everyone had their own source of darkness, he thought now that he had been sober for a while.

And sober he was; he hadn't had anything to drink for a month and a half. It was true that there had been periods during the fifteen years which had passed since Sophy had gone, when he hadn't drunk very much, but there was a difference between not drinking and being sober, and now George was sober.

He would find something useful to do. He would help Sara, and he would manage.

‘I'm taking it a day at a time,' he often said to Sophy. He didn't promise he would never drink again, he had no intention of making promises that he might not be able to keep. Not to Sophy.

‘A good woman, Sara,' he said to Sophy instead, as he drove home, his head full of thoughts of cleaning.

IT WAS HALF
past one in the afternoon and Caroline had visited five houses so far. She had taken it upon herself to find the furniture Sara said she would need. She couldn't help but wonder what kind of bookstore needed armchairs, standard lamps and old-fashioned table lamps, but this was Sara's project. What she wanted, she would get. Unusual decoration was a small price to pay for a newly cleaned shop in town.

Caroline rarely had trouble getting people to donate things. The trick was to keep moving. Go and see everyone. Talk to everyone. Keep it short but sweet and make sure they all understood what was expected of them. But for some reason, she felt tired today, as though she was suddenly finding it exhausting to put pressure on those around her.