The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (25 page)

She didn't know whether it was because he actually seemed to be enjoying just sitting next to her, or because she suddenly didn't want to spend another evening alone, cooking for herself, but something made her ask: ‘Do you fancy coming for dinner tonight? At Amy's?'

She might not have been able to do anything else for him, but she could surely throw together a meal. He surprised her by answering: ‘Sure. Sevenish? I've got a couple of things to do first.'

‘OK,' she said, trying to control her panic. ‘Seven sounds good.'

She had been planning to close early and do some shopping at John's, so that she would have plenty of time to get everything sorted, but she was delayed by Gertrude and May who had come by on one of their book-buying trips. They had started coming in after the reading campaign.

To begin with, it had been obvious that Gertrude was just coming along to mock May's choice of books. The first thing she had said to Sara was: ‘Ha! Princes! Nothing but lies!' and then she had broken out into a fit of coughing that could just as easily have been laughter.

They came by a few times a week, when May picked up more books and Gertrude quizzed Sara on her literary taste.

‘Do you believe in all that? Romance and all that rubbish?' Or: ‘Why are they all so weirdly dressed? Would you sleep with a man with long hair and a silk shirt?
Lilac!
Silk! And it's not even buttoned up.'

Sara let May have her books free of charge, so long as she brought the others back. They had stopped by only the day before, when May had picked up five new Harlequin novels and Gertrude had even agreed to take something from the SEX, VIOLENCE AND WEAPONS shelf. ‘No romance,' she had said threateningly, and Sara had given her
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, just to be doubly sure there was no romantic love story even as a subplot.

Now, Gertrude was heading straight for the counter with quick, jerky movements. As she came closer, Sara could see that she had dark bags beneath her eyes and a desperate, haunted gaze.

‘Quick!' she said, gripping the counter. ‘The second part. I need the next book.' Then she seemed to come to her senses and reluctantly stood up straight before adding, more calmly and almost apologetically: ‘Lay awake half the night reading. Even forgot to smoke.'

May looked as though nothing surprised her when it came to Gertrude, but she still asked, nervously: ‘You've got it, haven't you? Part two, I mean?' as though her peace of mind too depended on it. It probably did, Sara thought. An incomplete series could be catastrophic, even for those around you.

She smiled reassuringly at them. ‘Of course,' she said. ‘Do you think I'd sell the first part to you if I didn't have the rest?' She left the counter and went to fetch
The Girl Who Played with Fire
and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.
In English, all of the titles began with
The Girl
… It might have made them sound a bit catchier, but Sara had always thought that
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
was a strange translation of the original Swedish title,
Men Who Hate Women
. She placed the two books on the counter in front of Gertrude. ‘You might as well take both,' she said, as she went back behind the counter.

‘Two
more?' May asked with something like dread in her voice.

‘Damn it,' said Gertrude. ‘I'm not going to be able to sleep for days.' As soon as Gertrude had paid – she refused to hand back the first part of the trilogy in exchange – Sara closed up the shop. She still had no idea what she was going to cook, though it was already past five. She quickly turned out the lights, locked the door behind her and walked over to John's.

Not much had changed in the hardware store since her first visit. This time, she automatically picked up one of the old baskets from the doorway. There wasn't enough choice to make improvised shopping appealing, but she had never bothered to ask George to take her to any of the bigger shops on the other side of Hope. Now she was wondering what she could cook for dinner.

The last week she had been on a mission to try some real American food, but so far she hadn't been very successful. Her mac and cheese had been, well, disappointing. It had tasted exactly like Swedish pasta with cheese. She'd googled traditional American food, but as far as she could see, there were no traditions to follow. No one seemed to want to cook American food the same way as anyone else.

She was doing her best not to keep glancing at John, or at least not so that he noticed. He was still distant every time she went in; not withdrawn exactly, just slightly … absent. Eventually, she decided upon an autumn-inspired meat stew, mostly because there were plenty of meat cuts and root vegetables in the shop. She paused at the limited selection of wine John stocked and picked a bottle of red. If nothing else, she could put it in the food.

When she paid, John went through all the necessary motions, but completely without feeling, without even looking at her. She held out the money, he gave her the change, and when she said ‘thanks a lot', he looked at her in confusion, as though he no longer knew what he was meant to say.

‘John,' she said spontaneously, ‘I'm so sorry … about Amy, I mean. She meant a lot to me.'

But he simply looked at her in alarm and so she retreated to safer ground, picking up her bag of food and saying another feeble ‘thanks' before fleeing.

 

 

 

 

Broken Wheel, Iowa

February 22, 2011

Sara Lindqvist

Kornvägen 7, 1 tr

136 38 Haninge

Sweden

It's not possible!

We've been exchanging letters and books for months and I still haven't sent you
Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World –
probably the most charming book about Iowa ever written, and a source of constant state pride for me. It's got to mean something, living in a state which has had a library cat. I'm enclosing it now, anyway. I think it says something about how much meaning books can bring to a community on its knees – or, in this case, what a cat in a library can bring.

I've always thought that books have some kind of healing power and that they can, if nothing else, provide a distraction. Tom tells me he's seen ‘For Sale' signs in Hope again. They used to be everywhere during the last crisis, both there and in Broken Wheel, but I suppose there isn't really anything left to sell here this time. How I hate those signs. During the crisis in the eighties, I developed a real rage toward them. They were always
there
. People being forced to sell their old homes, and then there was never anyone to buy; when they did manage to sell them, it didn't even cover their mortgage debt.

I think that towns in crisis need something to rally around, and in Spencer that was Dewey, the library cat. They found him in their book deposit box one icy January morning and named him after the Dewey classification system. They had a proper naming competition for him some time after that, but by that point people were already accustomed to Dewey. They often used to have competitions there, but they were never really very interesting. A competition with a prize might attract fifty entries, and if the prize was really expensive, like a TV, then they might get seventy. In the ‘Give the cat a name' competition, there were 397 entries. Most of them wanted to keep the name Dewey, but they added ‘Readmore Books' to make it worthy of him.

Dewey used to take naps in the box of library cards, in the box of return forms and in the box of tissues, on visitors' laps or in their briefcases. When people started turning up to use the library's computer to look for jobs which didn't exist, he sat on their knees.

I want to think that it helped.

Best,

Amy

IT WASN'T A
date, of course.

Tom was just hoping Sara knew that too. If he was honest, he wasn't quite sure why he had said yes. He had been planning to go home, maybe have a beer, and drop the planks off later that evening, when Pete was back from work. It struck him that he didn't know whether Pete was working nights that week, so maybe it didn't matter when he dropped them off.

Tom headed over there right away to get it over and done with, and stacked the planks in a neat pile against one of the walls.

It was probably just as well if Pete wasn't in. He would have insisted on paying, but Tom had no intention of taking his money. Like always, it would end with Pete's wife giving him more food and home-made jelly than he could eat.

When Tom first got to know him, Pete had been a furniture maker. The exclusive kind. His business had been successful and he had often made use of Mike's for moving the furniture; he had a sweet wife and a house big enough to impress others in a town like Broken Wheel.

But he had been forced to close the business because of the recession, when people could no longer afford to spend their money on luxurious dressers, or didn't even have homes in which to put them. There were bigger towns out there, of course, and even more exclusive businesses which catered to richer customers who still had money. Tom had been round for long enough to know that no matter how deep a crisis was, there would always be people still earning money. Sometimes despite the crisis, sometimes because of it. He had also been round long enough to know that those still earning money would have no problem at all buying expensive, handmade furniture while the rest of the country could barely afford a good square meal a day.

But Pete's furniture hadn't been lavish enough for those luxurious companies or for the big towns, and so he had found work in two different superstores and was grateful for all the extra shifts he could get. It wasn't possible to live on six dollars an hour, however many hours you worked. The bank had taken the house and Pete and his wife had moved here, to a barely inhabitable cabin.

Three of the window frames were coming loose, the paint had long since flaked from the walls, and Tom was sure that it must leak when it rained, or at the very least during the worst of the autumn storms. The cabin itself consisted of a living room, small; a kitchen, even smaller; and a box room masquerading as a bedroom, in which you could barely fit a bed.

The planks were for fixing the porch. It was only a couple of yards long, but it acted as an extra room during the summer. Half of the existing planks were rotten, meaning it was only possible to enter the house if you knew where it was safe to stand. Maybe Tom could get them enough wood to turn it into a proper room.

He thought about leaving a note, but it was almost six and, date or not, he still needed to take a shower first.

He had almost made it back to the car when he heard the unmistakable sound of the inner door opening, followed by the sound of one of the planks creaking.

‘Tom?' Pete's wife said, and he forced himself to smile before he turned around. She was wearing a pale blue cotton dress, thick socks and a knitted sweater, with one of Pete's jackets over the top. It must have been impossible to heat their cabin.

‘Katie,' he said, waving awkwardly. ‘I was just dropping off the planks.'

She glanced at the neat pile by the side of the house. ‘Have you and Pete … straightened it all out?'

‘We'll work it out later.' He prayed silently that she would take that to mean her husband would pay later and wouldn't force anything edible on him.

She looked hesitant. ‘I don't know … he thought he'd be here when you came by.'

‘I had to change my plans. I'll stop by later this week.'

‘OK … But please, wait a minute.' She disappeared indoors and he fought the impulse to run. Just not the apple sauce, he thought. He already had a full shelf of it in his kitchen at home. He hadn't yet come up with anything he could cook which would go with it.

The cabin came with a small patch of land, and Pete's wife spent most of her time growing a kitchen garden that provided something to eat for as much of the year as possible. Whenever something was in season, she always managed to create new dishes with it, preserve some of it and give plenty of it away to neighbours who didn't have the time or space to grow their own.

Tom knew that Pete often took home food when its best-before date had passed, and when things were really bad, Katie would queue up for food stamps behind Pete's back. Somehow, they survived, and they never complained. Whenever Tom helped Pete or Katie, they would always offer him food, though he suspected that they themselves got by on one meal a day.

She came out again with a jar in her hand.

‘Here,' she said. ‘Some apple sauce.'

He nodded. ‘Thanks a lot.' Then he smiled at her and, without hesitating, lied. ‘I just finished the last of the previous batch,' and she smiled back, relieved to have managed to give him something.

When he finally made it home, it was almost half past six, but he still allowed himself a shower. As the hot water massaged his shoulders and back, he could feel the day's and life's tensions washing away. He took his time, closing his eyes and raising his face towards the water. It was his favourite moment of the day.

It wasn't a date, of course.

Sara was just hoping Tom didn't think that was what she had meant. Just a simple dinner between friends.

Not that it made things any easier, because she had about as much knowledge of how to host a dinner between friends as she did of going on a date.

When she had got home, she had unpacked all of the food onto the kitchen bench, taken out one of Amy's big iron saucepans and then stopped. Should she start with the food, so it would be ready when he arrived? Or was it more important that she had at least showered before he turned up?

She compromised, browning the pieces of meat with the onions before heating the stock and putting it all on the stove to simmer away while she got herself ready. The shower still wasn't anything more than lukewarm and the pipes were still giving out worrying sounds. She hoped that the boiler wouldn't give up. She still had some of her money left, but she would rather not spend it on a new boiler, and she had no idea about how to fix one. She smiled to herself as she imagined Tom's face if she asked him for help with it.