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Though he would probably just shrug and then turn up after work to fix it.

She quickly washed her hair and stepped out of the shower before she had time to get cold. She wondered whether she should put something nicer on, but eventually just settled on a pair of jeans and a cotton blouse. She paused, contemplating what little make-up she had, and decided that a bit of mascara couldn't hurt.

Between friends, nothing else.

Down in the kitchen, the meat, onions and stock were simmering away nicely, and she moved on to the potatoes, carrots and thyme.

While it was all cooking, she rinsed two of the nicest plates in the cupboard – fine, cream-coloured porcelain with a thin ring of roses around the edge – and two wine glasses which seemed not to have been used for a long time.

She poured a glass for herself, mainly because it made her feel grown up and almost normal to be standing in the kitchen, waiting for a friend, with a stew cooking on the hob and a glass of wine next to it.

It was such a fine evening that she felt she had to take a quick walk in the garden. She still had to make the salad, but that could just as well wait until Tom arrived.

She pulled on the rubber boots which were always in the kitchen, went outside and left the kitchen door open behind her. The light from the window and the door illuminated the ground a few metres in front of her, but after that darkness began creeping into the grass.

It wasn't completely dark yet, but dark enough for the garden to seem cold and abandoned compared to the warmth of the house. Out of pure curiosity, she went over to the old potato patch and squatted down, digging a bit and pulling on a plant which gave her five small potatoes joined together by a web of thin, earthy stems.

She brushed the soil from them and carried them towards the house, but she didn't go straight in. She could smell cool, damp earth, so strongly that she could practically taste autumn with every breath she took. There was something so alive about the crisp air when you had been indoors all day.

In Sweden, she had never bothered growing anything. She had actually never even owned a potted plant. Now, though, she was thinking about tidying up the garden and restoring it to some of its former glory.

She had just started to shiver slightly when a jacketed figure appeared magically in her line of vision.

She held out the potatoes to show Tom how resourceful she was.

‘I knocked,' he said, ‘but when no one answered I just came in.'

She was glad they had met outside. She needed a moment or two to get used to having him around.

‘I brought a bottle of wine,' he said. ‘I left it in the kitchen.'

She glanced back at the kitchen and saw a bottle next to the one she had opened, exactly the same kind. She smiled.

‘There's not much to choose from at John's. They're normally OK.'

When they stepped into the light again, she could see that his hair was still damp from the shower and she could smell his aftershave like a third presence in the kitchen.

He seemed to belong there. He poured himself a glass of wine and topped hers up before he realised that she was still standing in the doorway with the tiny potatoes in her cupped hands. He held out a dish and she tipped them into it.

‘I hope that's not all we're having for dinner,' he said, putting the potatoes in the sink. She laughed and nodded at the stew.

‘I wanted to make something American,' she admitted, taking the glass he was holding out to her. ‘But I couldn't think of anything. A couple of days ago I realised that I've hardly eaten any American food at all, even though I've been here for weeks.'

He chuckled. ‘How have you managed to stay alive if you've been refusing anything American?'

‘You know what I mean.
Real
American food. The classics.'

She was in no rush to start preparing the salad. The stew was bubbling away. She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and was struck by how cosy the kitchen was, worn yellow cupboard doors and all. Tom glanced at the salad ingredients on the chopping board but didn't bother starting to cut them up either. Instead, he took a sip of wine and looked at her.

‘So what've you cooked so far?'

‘Mac and cheese,' she said. ‘But it just tasted of … well, pasta and cheese. Honestly, it was a bit of a disappointment.'

‘You can't have made it right in that case.'

‘I even put bacon in.'

‘Bacon?' He shook his head. ‘Blasphemy.'

‘But … I found a recipe with bacon.' A couple of them, actually.

‘I'm not sure that even counts as mac and cheese.'

‘It's wrong?'

‘Absolutely. I wouldn't tell anyone about the bacon if I were you. Un-American.'

‘Bacon can't be un-American. You have it in everything.'

‘There are probably as many different recipes for mac and cheese as there are mothers. My dad said that sausage was the only right way. But the real secret is the cheese. It's got to be Cheddar.'

‘Mmm,' said Sara. She was sceptical. It sounded like a pasta bake. Hardly very exotic. She moved over to the sink and scrubbed and peeled the extra potatoes and threw them into the stew.

‘What else have you tried?'

‘I thought about making corn dogs tonight,' she said, and laughed when he spluttered into his wine.

‘Corn dogs and mac and cheese,' he said. ‘What an evening that would've been.'

‘Except that I don't really know how to do it. Can you even make them at home?'

‘Sure,' said Tom. ‘If you wanted to. You can buy them frozen too, to heat up in the microwave, but I wouldn't recommend it.'

‘Just as well, since I don't have one.'

He glanced around, as though he hadn't realised that before.

‘Sloppy Joes,' she said. ‘But I don't even know what they are.'

‘Ah, an Iowa specialty. Created by Sloppy Joe in Sioux City.'

‘I'll have to keep googling,' she said gloomily.

‘I'll have to take you on a culinary excursion sometime,' he said, but she could see that he regretted it the moment he had said it. She smiled faintly and shook her head as though to reassure him that she wouldn't take him up on his offer.

Some of the relaxed atmosphere had disappeared. When he wasn't talking, Tom's face looked worn and tired. The lines around his eyes seemed deeper, and he looked paler than he had that morning. She suspected that this was what he looked like when he was on his own.

‘Tom,' she said, ‘do you ever relax?'

‘I'm relaxed now,' he said in surprise.

‘No, I mean … just not do anything. Just sleep in or read a good book in bed, or keep your pyjamas on all day?'

‘I don't wear pyjamas,' he said, and for a moment she could think of nothing other than his naked body, warm and heavy with sleep on a sunny Saturday afternoon … She forced herself to think about the food and setting the table.

‘And what would I do with a book, anyway?' His eyes shone in that devastating way that made her think of the way Amy had described him. Not quite a laugh, but nearly. ‘Being forced to read one would hardly make me relax.'

‘Coffee in bed, then,' she said, and wished she would stop talking about him being in bed. ‘Watching TV on the sofa,' she said instead. ‘You know … relaxed.'

He shrugged. ‘Sometimes,' he said, but she strongly suspected it had been a long time.

He half turned away from her and started on the salad, and she went over to the hob to check the stew. A few more minutes, she decided. Tom assembled the salad and improvised a dressing, Sara set the table. It was big enough for four or five people, but small enough that it was fit for two.

While they ate, they made small talk about how their day had been, as though they were completely normal friends who just happened to be having dinner. Sara found that she wasn't even nervous. She told him about Gertrude and Stieg Larsson, and he talked about his friend Pete and the apple sauce. Just then, she noticed that there was a jar on the counter, next to the wine bottles. He raised an eyebrow. ‘A gift.'

They helped one another with the dishes afterwards. She washed, he dried, in comfortable silence. The only sound was the occasional clinking of cutlery or the noise of a sudden gust of wind rustling the trees outside. It was in no way a magical evening, and she knew that it probably meant little to him. But for her … For her, it was an evening when she had joked and laughed, been relaxed with a man, an evening where she had somehow …
lived
.

Just lived.

It would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. She thought about what the girls in the bookshop would have said if they knew that she,
she
, had invited a handsome American to dinner.

Or if they knew she had stepped in as a bartender to help out an even more handsome American. If the bookshop at home had still been open, she would have sent them a postcard with Carl on the front.

Tom raised an eyebrow at her again, and she shook her head, smiling.

Then she turned to him with a half-washed plate in her hand. ‘Were Amy and John ever … together?'

He looked straight at her. ‘Are you asking whether they slept together?'

‘No … Well, maybe.'

‘Not as far as I know, but I never asked either of them.'

‘But … were they, you know, in love?'

‘Yeah.'

‘From the very beginning?'

‘I should think so.'

She couldn't help but feel disappointed in Amy. She started scrubbing the plate more forcefully than was strictly necessary, until he carefully took it from her, rinsed it and dried it off.

‘When they first met, it wasn't exactly the right time for a black man to be chasing a white woman,' said Tom. ‘I don't think John had any problems here, not like in Alabama, and Amy could be friends with him. But getting married … How could they even go on a date?'

‘And then she got married?' she asked.

‘Yeah.'

‘But not to John?'

‘No.'

‘I hope she was unfaithful,' she said suddenly, making Tom laugh. He didn't argue. ‘I know you can't always leave someone, but you can surely meet on the side. Just look at
The Horse Whisperer
. Sure, she couldn't exactly get divorced when her daughter had had her leg amputated and had only just recovered, but she could have gone there a couple of weeks a year just to sleep with him a bit?'

‘Um, sure,' said Tom.

Sara shook her head. ‘I mean, a couple of weeks with Robert Redford should be enough for anyone.'

‘I'd rather not, myself,' he said.

‘You know what I mean.'

The book was, of course, as bad as the film. It was a mystery to her how you could take one story and create two unhappy endings. At least in the book, they got together in the end, but on the other hand he was killed by wild horses. In the film, they had to make do with a platonic dance, but he survived. A typically American kind of moral, she thought.

She returned to the subject at hand. ‘But why didn't they get married when her husband died?'

‘Honestly, I don't think they thought it was necessary by then. They were already friends. I think they loved one another in a way that was bigger than just being married. Somehow John always seemed to know what she wanted, or at least that's what I always thought growing up. He might not always have been able to give it to her, but he always knew.'

She nodded.

‘You know when you asked about whether Amy was a dreamer?'

‘Yes.'

‘I think she was, but Amy wasn't someone whose dreams ever came true. On the other hand, she was someone who was content with very little, and I don't know which is best. She never complained.'

When Tom was about to leave, Sara followed him out into the hallway, and for some reason they paused, Sara leaning against one wall with her arms folded, Tom facing the door and on his way out, but clearly in no hurry to do so.

‘Tom,' she said, ‘what are your dreams?'

‘I don't have any,' he replied.

‘Seriously.'

‘I am being serious.'

She didn't feel she was in any position to push him, given her own measly ambitions. Or rather, her total lack of them.

Hesitantly, she said: ‘Don't you ever get tired of it? Just working, I mean.'

‘All the time.' The admission seemed to surprise him, but he didn't make any attempt to take it back or qualify it.

‘But maybe it's worse if you do relax,' he said. ‘The trick is to just keep working. It's when you stop and think too much that you run into problems.'

‘Yeah,' she said. That was definitely true, but she couldn't agree that working was the key, not now that she had experienced something else.

 

 

 

 

Broken Wheel, Iowa

March 9, 2011

Sara Lindqvist

Kornvägen 7, 1 tr

136 38 Haninge

Sweden

Dear Sara,

John's family never really fit in here in Broken Wheel. His mother was a formidable woman who brought her entire family with her. I remember she always appeared to move with the strength of a woman so used to surviving catastrophes that calmness bored her. She didn't seem to know what to do with that strength if it wasn't in constant demand. Aside from John, all of her children – another son and three daughters – had that very same strength. They lived and breathed political struggle, but once they found themselves here, in a sleepy little town which wasn't interesting enough even to keep up with current racial antagonisms, they seemed to be almost disappointed, and slightly disoriented too. Gradually they all moved on to Chicago. One of them became a judge, another a lawyer, one an author and one a doctor. It was that kind of family.

John, on the other hand, wandered around Broken Wheel as though all his dreams had suddenly, miraculously, come true; as though he couldn't quite believe his good luck. To him, the sleepiness was a kind of harmonious peace. The first time I saw him, he was sitting stock-still on a park bench. The leaves on the trees were moving more than he was, and it was an almost breathless day. When he saw me he seemed alarmed, as if life had already taught him, by the age of sixteen, that white people meant trouble, even when they came in the unlikely form of a scrawny fifteen-year-old with a faded cotton dress and thin, unruly hair that never seemed to want to stay in a braid. I think that must have been the moment I decided to be his friend, but it took years to convince him it was possible. Of course … at that time, he might have been right about white people. And there have definitely been moments in our friendship since when he has been the braver of us.