Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

their not coming in was a scandalous joke. “You come in and rest yourself.”
    “We wouldn’t like to disturb your supper,” Neal said.
    “We had it already,” said Matt. “We eat early.”
    “But all kinds of chili left,” said June. “You have to come in and help clean up that chili.”
    Jinny said, “Oh, thank you. But I don’t think I could eat anything. I don’t feel like eating anything when it’s this hot.”
    “Then you better drink something instead,” June said. “We got ginger ale, Coke. We got peach schnapps.”
    “Beer,” Matt said to Neal. “You like a Blue?”
    Jinny waved Neal to come close to her window.
    “I can’t do it,” she said. “Just tell them I can’t.”
    “You know you’ll hurt their feelings,” he whispered.
    “They’re trying to be nice.”
    “But I can’t. Maybe you could go.”
    He bent closer. “You know what it looks like if you don’t. It looks like you think you’re too good for them.”
    “You go.”
    “You’d be okay once you got inside. The air-conditioning really would do you good.”
    Jinny shook her head.
    Neal straightened up.
    “Jinny thinks she better just stay and rest here where it’s in the shade.”
    June said, “But she’s welcome to rest in the house—”
    “I wouldn’t mind a Blue, actually,” Neal said. He turned back to Jinny with a hard smile. He seemed to her desolate and angry.
    “You sure you’ll be okay?” he said for them to hear. “Sure? You don’t mind if I go in for a little while?”
    “I’ll be fine,” said Jinny.
    He put one hand on Helen’s shoulder and one on June’s shoulder, walking them companionably towards the trailer. Matt smiled at Jinny curiously, and followed.
    This time when he called the dogs to come after him Jinny could make out their names.
    Goober. Sally. Pinto.

    The van was parked under a row of willow trees. These trees were big and old, but their leaves were thin and gave a wavering shade. But to be alone was a great relief.
    Earlier today, driving along the highway from the town where they lived, they had stopped at a roadside stand and bought some early apples. Jinny got one out of the bag at her feet and took a small bite—more or less to see if she could taste and swallow and hold it in her stomach. She needed something to counteract the thought of chili, and Matt’s prodigious navel.
    It was all right. The apple was firm and tart, but not too tart, and if she took small bites and chewed seriously she could manage it. She’d seen Neal like this—or something like this—a few times before. It would be over some boy at the school. A mention of the name in an offhand, even belittling way. A mushy look, an apologetic yet somehow defiant bit of giggling.
    But that was never anybody she had to have around the house, and it could never come to anything. The boy’s time would be up, he’d go away.
    So would this time be up. It shouldn’t matter.
    She had to wonder if it would have mattered less yesterday than it did today.
    She got out of the van, leaving the door open so that she could hang on to the inside handle. Anything on the outside was too hot to hang on to for any length of time. She had to see if she was steady. Then she walked a little in the shade. Some of the willow leaves were already going yellow. Some were lying on the ground. She looked out from the shade at all the things there were around the yard.
    A dented delivery truck with both headlights gone and the name on the side painted out. A baby’s stroller that the dogs had chewed the seat out of, a load of firewood dumped but not stacked, a pile of huge tires, a great number of plastic jugs and some oil cans and pieces of old lumber and a couple of orange plastic tarpaulins crumpled up by the wall of the shed. In the shed itself there was a heavy GM truck and a small beat-up Mazda truck and a garden tractor, as well as implements whole or broken and loose wheels, handles, rods that would be useful or not useful depending on the uses you could imagine. What a lot of things people could find themselves in charge of. As she had been in charge of all those photographs, official letters, minutes of meetings, newspaper clippings, a thousand categories that she had devised and was putting on disk when she had to go into chemo and everything got taken away. It might end up being thrown out. As all this might, if Matt died.
    The cornfield was the place she wanted to get to. The corn was higher than her head now,