The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (5 page)

Of course, she could probably get another job in a different bookshop, but there and then, during those endless summer days in the suburban shopping centre, with the countdown to closure relentlessly ticking, she had asked herself whether this life was really enough. And that had scared her, because what else was there other than books and work?

There really wasn't much else, except for Amy and her small town in Iowa, one which seemed to have come straight out of a Fannie Flagg or Annie Proulx novel. Sara had bought a book from Amy through an online second-hand bookshop, where private individuals could also sell books. When Amy had declined to take any payment for her book, Sara had plucked up the courage to send a book back in thanks, and things had continued from there. Amy wrote wonderful letters about books and about the people in her little town, and that summer, they were all Sara had to cling on to. The only lifeline in an existence which had otherwise started to seem overwhelmingly pointless.

So when Sara reached Broken Wheel, she naturally turned to books to help her. It was what she had always done.

That morning, Sara took
Bridget Jones
out onto the porch, together with her third cup of almost undrinkable instant coffee. She moved quickly down the hallway, keeping her eyes fixed on the front door. She was trying to avoid having to look at the little altar. She wished someone would at least take the flags away, but didn't think it was her place to do so.

It felt better outside. The rocking chairs were comfortable and the overgrown garden looked more charming than neglected. When she rocked back and forth, the chair creaked pleasingly beneath her.

As the sun inched slowly up above the treetops, she tried to imagine that everything was as it should be, as it should have been.

Maybe Amy wasn't dead? Maybe she was just busy with her flowers in the kitchen? Maybe she was upstairs somewhere, book in hand? It might have been true.

Sara sighed. It was like trying to change an unhappy ending in a book. However much you tried to convince yourself that things could end differently if only you could get rid of the sadistic bungler of an author, it was all still there in the back of your mind. Rhett Butler had dumped Scarlett just when she had started to deserve him. Against all sense, against his own personality, the nature of love and his word, against all rhyme and reason. Not even Charlotte Brontë's awful father had been able to prevent M. Paul from dying in
Villette
, however much Charlotte had tried to fool him by writing such an apparently ambiguous ending.

Incomprehensible.

That was just how things were. You simply had to try not to think about it. Margaret Mitchell was stupid and Charlotte Brontë was determined and Amy Harris was dead.

She picked
Bridget Jones
up from her lap and forced herself to keep reading. There was something so comforting in the fact that the book was just the same as it had been in Sweden. Bridget failed to keep her new year's resolutions in exactly the same way as she had before, Mr Darcy wore the same mad, festive sweater. By the time Daniel Cleaver finally appeared on the scene, Sara had disappeared into the safe haven of the book and would have stayed there if she hadn't been distracted by a car turning off towards Amy's house.

George was wearing the same checked shirt as on Saturday and it was just as crumpled. His hands were shaking more than before. She remembered how he had followed her into the wake after the funeral and smiled at him over the top of her book.

‘I came to tell you I'm your chauffeur.'

She lowered the book slowly.

‘I'll drive you,' he explained. ‘Wherever you want. Just give me a call.' He reeled off his telephone number. ‘If I'm not at home I'll be at Grace's.' He gave her that number too, without waiting for her to write either of them down.

‘But I can walk,' she said.

‘They told me I should drive you.'

‘They?'

‘Jen and Andy. Caroline too.'

That was presumably that.

‘So?' he said. ‘Can I give you a ride anywhere?'

‘There's not so much to see any more,' he said as they drove into town.

The only thing there seemed to be an abundance of was corn. At that time of year, the end of August, it towered up around them in enormous fields. The bright sunlight transformed these fields into a swirling sea of gold and green which dazzled Sara, blazing in her eyes until Broken Wheel appeared almost as a relief. As they reached the town, the corn gave way to a row of grey concrete houses and a trailer park.

‘That's where I live,' said George. She hoped he meant the row of houses, because the trailer park looked completely abandoned. They drove past a broken fence and a parking lot and a few solitary trees on a strip of useless land. The only thing between where George lived and the heart of Broken Wheel was a disused gas station consisting of a white corrugated-iron shed, beside which someone had dumped a couple of tractor tyres and a broken pram.

The road grew wider and more buildings appeared. ‘There used to be more shops,' George said apologetically, as though the town was his fault, ‘but most of them closed sometime after the crisis. Not enough people for them to break even.'

At least she would get to see Jimmie Coogan Street, she reminded herself. That was something. Still, she was struggling to work up any enthusiasm. Now that she was rested and showered and seeing the town properly, it looked, if possible, even more depressing than when she had arrived.

The flat, expansive landscape of the Great Plains had inspired its own architecture, with low, sweeping houses that blended into the surrounding prairie and town centres lined with pretty wooden covered walkways, a kind of hybrid of porch and promenade for wandering up and down while looking in the shop windows. In many towns it had worked, and created a calm, cosy mood.

Broken Wheel, however, was a complete waste of brick, asphalt and concrete. The buildings were certainly low, but that was because there had never been any need for more than two storeys. Nowadays, there wasn't even the need for one. Instead of windswept prairie, the crude brick buildings blended into an unnecessarily wide road. It was hardly used any more, since it had long ago been made redundant by the nearby interstate.

Once George had dropped her off and disappeared into Grace's, Sara walked at random. Before long, she stopped, as though she had been overpowered by the atmosphere. There was something sad about the town, as though generations of problems and disappointments had rubbed off onto its bricks and its roads. A group of men were standing on a street corner. They must have been over fifty, maybe even sixty, it was hard to tell from their worn-out T-shirts and tired-looking faces, but they were radiating the same kind of restless idleness as the teenagers had in the shopping centre where she had worked. Like the days no longer had anything to offer them and the future would never arrive.

Could this really be Amy's Broken Wheel? The same town in which her brother had run a newspaper called the
Bent Farmer
and where one of the schoolteachers had started an improvised mobile library using a cargo moped?

She continued down the street anyway, mostly to get away from the looks the men were giving her. Not hostile, exactly, just very focused on her, perhaps because there was nothing else to look at. If she could just find Jimmie Coogan Street, she thought, then Amy's town might magically reveal itself, complete with wooden facades and women in skirts and the kind of timeless Amish-esque existence she had imagined when she read Amy's letters.

The midday sun was bearing down mercilessly on one empty shop after another. Many of them did actually have beautiful old wooden fronts, suggesting the town had, once, been charming and lively. But this impression was ruined by the shops themselves. Some of them had badly covered windows, others had broken windows no one had bothered fixing or boarding up.

Slender trees which didn't seem to have ever taken root properly had, at some point, been planted outside some of the shops, and there was something which looked like an attempt at a park at the end of one of the crossroads. The town didn't get any more charming than that.

It took her twenty minutes to walk the length of Broken Wheel, and she hadn't even caught a glimpse of a Jimmie Coogan Street.

On the other side of the road there was an advert for a pesticide:
Control corn root worm!
it shouted to the world, two by three metres in size and at least twenty years old.
With Dyfonate 20-G Intersectitude. Ideal for the big corn grower!

Underneath it was a smaller sign announcing that this was Broken Wheel. That was all. They hadn't even bothered to add the ‘Heart of Iowa' or ‘Garden of Iowa' or any other attempt at civic pride. The sign was so small that it seemed to Sara almost to be apologising for intruding.

It took two trips back and forth before she finally found Jimmie Coogan Street, and then only by a process of elimination. There was no sign and the street itself was nothing more than a dark alley with high brick walls on each side.

After that, she felt completely deflated. She stopped in front of the diner. Above the door, she could make out faint gold lettering on the washed-out red background.
Amazing Grace
. When Grace herself waved her in, she was almost thankful to let someone else decide what she should do.

Grace poured her a cup of coffee without waiting for her to order and slapped a lump of pink minced meat on to the griddle behind her.

The diner was practically empty. Only three cars were parked outside: two dusty, faded blue pickups, and a white van used to repair the roads. Three men wearing yellow reflective jackets were sitting around a table eating eggs and bacon and drinking coffee, an early dinner rather than a late lunch or very late breakfast. George was sitting in the far corner at a table on his own.

‘Not much town to explore, right?' said Grace, her enormous arms resting on the counter again.

‘A pretty town,' Sara said, without quite believing it herself.

‘A damn hole, that's what it is. If I were you, I wouldn't stay.' She paused for effect. ‘Run while you can, that's all I'm saying. I've never understood why Grandma chose to stay.' She lit a cigarette and continued in almost the same breath: ‘So George is your driver? I'm not one to gossip, but he's had a rough time of it. Might need a little support. Wife left him. It was after that he started drinking. Not constantly, you know. Periodically. Managed to keep his job at the slaughterhouse for a few years.'

Grace hadn't bothered to lower her voice, but George showed no sign of having heard what she said. Perhaps selective hearing was a talent he had been forced to develop.

‘Good thing he got the boot, really. Not exactly the best job for a man who doesn't have the steadiest of hands.' She winked at Sara. ‘Could so easily end up with him having none.' She quickly added: ‘But he's sober now. Been on the wagon for over a month. A good man.'

Sara forced herself to take a sip of coffee. It was much too weak and had the faintly burnt taste of coffee that has been standing on a hot plate for too long.

‘Why do you call yourself Grace?'

‘My mom's name was Grace. Her mother's name was Grace. Her mother's mother's name was Grace.' Sara was worried that this would continue for some time. ‘But me? Madeleine. That's a name for proper, old-fashioned ladies. The kind of women who faint if you touch them. Women who get married and embroider handkerchiefs with their initials on them. Their married initials, that is. It's hardly a name for a woman who flips burgers or keeps drunk labourers at a distance with a sawn-off shotgun.'

‘Maybe she was thinking of a different line of work for you?' Sara suggested. She glanced nervously at Grace over her coffee cup to check whether she had gone too far.

Grace looked happy enough.

‘It's not a line of work. It's a family tradition,' she said. ‘The women in my family have always been tough, they've always served liquor, they've always been called Grace.'

She slapped the hamburger onto the bun with such force that Sara thought it was going to jump right off again. Then she scooped a serving of French fries onto the plate and pushed the whole lot across the counter. It rattled, but made it safely over to Sara.

‘My mom fell in love with a man with a little farm just outside of town,' Grace continued. ‘And what do you think the stupid woman did?'

Sara didn't care to guess, but Grace continued immediately.

‘She got married. I was born a good two years into the relationship. A Grace who wasn't illegitimate. That set the rumour mill on fire, I can tell you. Grandma was still living then, taking care of the bar, so my mother and her husband were never really accepted. Just as well, if you ask me.'

Grace lit a cigarette. Sara carefully took a bite of her hamburger.

‘Mom, she tried to get them to accept her. Have you ever tried that?'

Sara thought for a moment before she answered. ‘I don't know,' she said, though she assumed that everyone had faced that problem at some stage.

‘It's pointless,' said Grace. ‘If you play by their rules, they'll beat you every time. It's like the saying, don't ever argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and then beat you with their experience. The same applies to the way you should live your life.' She tapped the ash from her cigarette into the already overflowing ashtray. ‘Never live your life according to the idiots' rules. Because they'll drag you down to their level, they'll win, and you'll have a damned awful time in the process.'

She looked closely at Sara. ‘Just look at Caroline. She's even more boring than her mother, and that says a whole lot. Old Mrs Rohde was damned dull, but at least she had some attitude. Cockiness. Caroline's been bowing to other people's expectations her entire life and now she spends her time trying to force her own onto everyone else.'