She bent over to dab sweat from her brow with the hem of her skirt. It was July-hot, but a bearable breeze lilted through the clearing where their house and barn and outbuildings had stood since long before her birth, a breeze hinting at something more from the large cumulus that seemed to grow by the minute, a towering mountain of billowing white to the south, its center like tarnished silver.
She heard what sounded like the doctor’s pickup coming down the main road, then its wheels bumbling across the bridge over the creek, beyond the trees between there and the house. Its engine churned it up the hill. She knelt and used her thumb and forefinger to pluck the worm from the leaf of the tomato plant — rolled it into her long narrow palm and cupped it there, feeling its weird little stumpy legs work against the tender skin, tickling, an odd stimulation. She snapped off the leaf stem where it had been dining and carried it to the edge of the yard, set it down, let the worm grapple back onto it. It set to eating again right away. For the worm, this stem and leaf were the whole world. Some bird would snatch it up directly. She walked quickly toward the house as the doctor’s pickup appeared around the corner of their long drive, a thin drift of red dust rising behind it. In the room she’d slept in growing up, she dabbed a bit of her best perfume onto her wrists, her neck, and dropped her soiled undergarment into a pail she kept covered in the corner, sprinkling in a bit of her cheaper perfume before replacing the lid. Washed herself with water and soap from the basin on the back porch and went back outside.
The blue pickup was parked there in front of the house. The doctor got out then, fanning himself with his hat. He spoke to her and joined her on the front porch, and she fetched them both glasses of sweet tea with chips of ice. A flicker sang its hard staccato song from a high limb in her mother’s beloved apple tree, singing against the softening light of the hot afternoon. The doctor sipped his tea, rocking, that closed-down expression on his noble but slightly birdlike face, eyes narrowed above his beak.
“You might as well tell me what it is on your mind,” she finally said.
He looked at her as if he’d been interrupted in thought, as if he’d been alone there on the porch with those thoughts. Not atypical. He smiled. He was a kindly man. Then he took on a serious look as if the thought in his mind had indeed become about her. He took a sip of his tea, ice chips tinkling against the glass, and set it down.
“All right.”
And he told her. He’d kept up with things, through his friend in Baltimore. There’d been a lot of progress since she was a little girl. He thought it was time they asked another specialist to examine her.
“The very best, so that you can know without doubt whether or not it’s possible to correct your condition. Or to do anything about it.”
“With surgery.”
“Yes.”
He said the work being done in Baltimore was remarkable. New developments every year. He didn’t think anyone in the country would be able to examine her with greater certainty than the men there.
“It may still not be possible yet. It may still be too complicated. You’ve been through this before. But they’ve made great advances in the last ten years, and I think the emotional risk is worth it. I think we should be aggressive. And if they cannot correct it now, they may at least know enough to give you a good idea of when they might.”
He spoke his words in a serious manner but still, as always, with the kind of gentle thoughtfulness that was his hallmark as a man and a doctor. His keen eyes in the squint they took on when he was talking seriously. As if he’d got a mote in his eye.
Her father’s eyes had seemed so haunted, there near the end. For years had, really.
She peered at the doctor a moment, then looked away, feeling strangely perturbed and not bothering to hide it.
“No doubt expensive,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course, now you have the money from your father’s insurance policy.”
She looked up.
“Did you speak to him about this?”
“I mentioned, years ago, when you were born, that he might put something away toward the possibility.”
“Recently, I mean.”
“I did tell him, when he asked a couple of years before his death — while you were living in town — that I thought the odds were getting better.”
After a moment of looking at him as if he’d said something incomprehensible, she stood up and walked to the edge of the porch.
“What are you saying?”
“Just what I’m saying.”
“About my father, I mean, and the insurance policy.”
“Just that I believe he would have wanted you to use the money for this, if you wanted.”
She turned to face him. He looked down, took out his pocketknife and a little piece of wood he was carving on. Trying to cut back on the pipe-smoking.
“I believe it’s what he had in mind,” he said.
“Had in mind,” she said.
She looked out over the yard, at the work shed, the now-empty hog pen and its ramshackle fencing, the pasture sloping down to the cattle pond, no cattle there in the midday sun. Hardly seeing it all, really.
“Jane,” he said. “You’re a hearty person, your condition has no real effect on that. You have no unhealthy habits that I know of. It is likely that you will outlive your sister and brothers, and be alone one day. Without family, if you were able to live a less restricted life—” He stopped there.
Jane said quietly, “This has come to feel pretty normal for me.”
It had come over her, some sense of what it would be like to be truly alone. Her mother had become someone who seemed barely there, anyway. The doctor was fading a bit, no denying it now. She felt a heaviness, an almost fluid infusion of a palpable isolation. She would always be the odd one, the one with the secret. Who hurried from company without a word, returned a while later as if nothing were unusual about it. Who had taken to wearing several slips beneath her skirts, and a bit of perfume, in a ridiculously vain attempt to mask the fact of her body, her embarrassment.
But did it matter, really, anymore? She had now lived nearly eight years since moving to town, since giving herself up to the truth of what her life would be. A year out here with her mother, alone, and half a year alone since her death. And she intended to stay. She was not unhappy, she wouldn’t put that word to it. In fact she would not know how, even at her young age of just twenty-four years, to start over. To become someone else entirely. But she took an oblique tack.
“Even if they could make it work, you know I cannot pay. I know my father left that money to me but it seems right that I would manage it, in case others need it in a bad time. For something practical.”
The doctor looked away and took a deep breath as if to calm himself. His right hand shook a bit and he placed his left hand there to still it. He closed his pocket knife and put it away in his vest pocket.
“I’ll pay,” he said.
“No.”
“I will,” he said. “You understand, Jane. You have always been more than just a patient, to me. Lett and I had no children. I have no one to leave anything to, when I go. I have no one in my life, not here anyway. And no close family left, no one I even really know among them anymore. If you would let me at least do this for you, I would feel as if I have someone in this world who might see me as more than an affable stranger.”
“You’ve never been a stranger.”
She looked at him. She thought that indeed he might love her, in some way. The love of one human being for another, which does not demand classification or mode.