Machine Dreams

car pulled into the driveway, Billy saw Danner outside with the dog. Danner was out without her shirt, like a boy, and her long hair obscured her face as she whirled in a circle,holding a stick for Polly. The dog leapt in place again and again; they kept a sort of time.
    Clayton died that night in the hospital. They dressed up to go to the funeral home. Billy didn’t tell anyone about the dream, and he couldn’t see in the office again because his father wouldn’t take him to the plant. In two weeks the concrete company was sold, though the cement mixers stayed the same bright yellow and continued to bear the legend of his father’s name through the town. Radabaugh stayed on to work for the new owners, but Pulaski quit. And now Mitch was going to work for Euclid and sell big machines, like the ones sealed away in the Prison Labor buildings. He would sell dozers and cranes and trucks to construction companies, and to Prison Labor. But why would Prison Labor buy machines when they had so many in their closed stone buildings? Those were scrap machines, Mitch told Billy, used ones saved up for auction. Billy imagined the rows of old machines shut away in the dark, the way they would look from the door of one of the cool stone garages. Giant wound-down toys smelling of aged dust and rock, their separate shapes merged in the twilit far end of the long building. They sat like big, sleeping things. Billy didn’t ask to go there and see them. But he still saw the mixers around town that summer; once he was in the car with his mother and they passed a parked MITCH CONCRETE truck. The truck blocked a small side street, and sawhorses had been set up to keep anyone from driving over a strip of newly poured surface. Radabaugh had patched the road where gas lines had been dug up; now he sat on an overturned bucket, low to the ground. He kept his elbows on his knees and hunched over himself, smoking. What was he waiting for? He looked small sitting there and kept the cigarette close his lips. The sawhorses were bright yellow like the still drum of the parked mixer, and they formed a crooked line of demarcation. Radabaugh sat behind them, guardian of a territory under repair.

REMINISCENCE TO A DAUGHTER
Jean

1962
    I can’t reconstruct things enough to know when I decided. I guess it seems I was working toward the divorce for years, but I was only trying to get to the point where I could support myself. I never even considered divorce—not with kids at home. Maybe I stopped thinking on purpose during those years and lived in the day-to-day. No struggle because every minute was filled.
    I try to remember. A few separate days, isolated from each other by months or years, swim up. Then I have to think hard to know what years those were. I know immediately how they
felt
, the weather, the news. How old you and Billy were, your teachers in school, clothes you wore. Your face and Billy’s face—exactly how you looked.
    You know, I don’t remember my own face then. I didn’t really see myself. Just the slash of red lipstick and a comb through my hair. There are no photographs of me with you kids from the time you were old enough to be photographed without me. Every yearthere were school pictures with my first-grade classes, and I always threw them away.
    I went back to college when Billy was in kindergarten and took a full course load, but nothing changed at home. I did all the housework and meals and put you kids to bed with stories, then stayed up till two or three reading and memorizing. Long nights, with all the house in darkness and one light burning over the kitchen table. I’d hear sounds outside and the breathing of sleepers.
    I’d always been afraid of being alone, but now there was no fear or wondering. I
was
alone, though not surprised, not bitter. My mother had been alone, hadn’t she, except for me? I’d borrowed the money to pay for classes and wanted to get straight A’s, a perfect record. The one time I got a C on a mid-term, I sat in the rocker in my bedroom and wept. I remember you standing there, trying to reason with me, being very grown-up at eight years old. I suppose my nerves stayed frayed until the degree was finished, and never a word of encouragement from Mitch. No blowups, no fights; he knew it was important I start earning an income, but he grew more silent.
    We never fought much. Once, I remember having to stand up to him.
    What year was it? The news was full of scary headlines about Cuba, and