Dale knows the route by heart–Illinois 33, angling across farmland to Mattoon, where I-57 stretches north to Chicago. “I can drive it with my eyes closed,” he tells his wife, Cassie.
The caterpillars eat the cabbage leaves. Cassie intends to dust the plants this morning while the wind is calm. Then she’ll stake the pole beans–the Kentucky Wonders–and till up the patch where the last lettuce has gone to seed, work the soil until it’s loose and fine, and then set out some more tomato plants. The first ones, the Better Boys, are growing nicely, the sucker leaves between the main stems and the branches ready to be pinched.
“I don’t know what I’ll say,” he tells Cassie. “This Frankie Spears. How do I even start?”
The couple who adopted him, both dead now, cut out all the references to his birth parents from the adoption papers so when he started looking for his story all he saw was a collection of holes.
Dale knows that’s what drew her to him. Her first husband used to beat on her. He broke her arm once. He dislocated her shoulder. Dale knows all about this, and it amazes him that she’s survived it all and can be so full of goodwill. His entire life is sometimes a wonder to him, such a miracle it seems that the two of them found each other. He comes home from work and eases into bed beside her, thankful for the feel of her legs against his, for the gentle rise and fall of her breathing. Sometimes he wakes toward morning and finds her leaning over him, touching his face, his arm, his chest–touching him ever so lightly. “Go back to sleep, baby,” he tells her. “I’m here.” She falls asleep, holding fiercely to him.
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Frankie Spears’s house is near the train yard, where the air smells of cinders and the freight cars clang and squeal as their couplings join. Dale parks his truck in the shade of a maple tree and listens to the leaves rattle about in the breeze that’s rising. There’s a set of wind chimes on Frankie Spears’s porch, the kind with thin cylinders that make a delicate tinkling, and Dale closes his eyes a moment and thinks how pretty the sound is, how cheery. Then it stops. He opens his eyes and sees that the strings of the chimes have tangled and now the cylinders are wound into a clump that sways, leaden and mute.
