A Regular Guy Read Online Free PDF Page A

week’s worth of stuffed zucchini, a huge oversized squash as big as an arm, and she’d come in after her book group and scarfed it all down.
    “She tries to diet and then gets mad at herself.” Mary pondered. “She should just accept that’s the way she is.”
    The fixing of the seat took six days, sewing, adjusting the padding so the phone books wouldn’t slip and the sides rose up to enclose Jane. Fortunately, the truck’s long stick shift was easy for her to reach. Mary taught a little every day and tested Jane. Where is the choke? Okay, do it. Lights, brights, wipers, emergency brake. They fixed the broken back window with tape and a piece of cardboard. Mary sealed the seams with clear nail polish.
    Then the real lessons started. They went on an old road, columns of trees on both sides, straight as far as they could see. They practiced starting, the gradual relay of clutch and gas. Jane found the brake again and again until it was easy. When the car sputtered and died on the late-afternoon road, no one knew.
    Clouds bagged huge and magnificent.
    In the rosy, cricket-loud dusk, Jane pedaled and shifted, as naturally as the woman they’d seen once playing the organ in an empty church.
    Mary made her do it all again with her eyes closed, which was like swimming in rain.

    Braids, piecrusts, flowers in a vase, require talents that yield only themselves, nothing more than those passing pleasures. But Mary didn’t have the knack. She’d asked people fifty times to show her how to braid, and she still couldn’t do it deftly. Jane’s braids always looked uneven, at once too loose and too tight. Girls who lived in town with their grandparents came to school with braids like this, to keep the hair off the face. Only the young mothers seemed to understand that girls need a little flair, like the girls far away on television.
    On Thanksgiving, Jane sat on the end of the mattress while her mother brushed her hair straight up from her head, pulling it tight, then braided it into a basket around her ears. She dressed Jane warmly, with two pair of socks in her new shoes. The truck seat was packed with a grocery bag, Jane’s clothes, her bear and her old shoes. They’d quarreled over those shoes; they had holes in the soles, and Mary wondered what people would think of her, sending a child with shoes like that, as if these same people would accept it as perfectly normal to send her in a truck over mountains.
    “What do you care?” Jane had argued. “I need them.”
    Mary rolled down the top of the grocery bag, with Jane’s four Twinkies, Fig Newtons, an apple and a banana.
    Then everything was done. Jane’s braids were tight and her scalp still felt as if someone were pulling her up by the hair. She sat on the bed, hands clutching under the mattress.
    Her mother knelt on the floor. She slid off Jane’s left shoe and rolled down the double sock. Then she took a breath and lined her words along one edge, her attempt to be firm. She felt it was necessary to warn Jane about life’s dangers.
    “Now, I’m giving you money,” she said without smiling. “That’s twenty, forty, seventy. And one, two, three, four, five ones. That’s a lot of money, do you hear?”
    Jane noticed that her mother kept no dollars for herself, and this frightened her.
    “Don’t, whatever you do, let anyone see you when you take that out.” Her mother folded each bill into a small triangle, like a flag, andput them in the bottom of her sock. She pushed the shoe on over Jane’s heel, tied the laces and patted it finished.
    “Get just what you need. Because it was hard to save that. And here.” She pulled the special undershirt over Jane’s chest. She’d sewn in a pocket to hide her ring—as proof. Years ago, Owens had given her the ring, hidden inside a cherry pie. She’d sent him pictures of Jane every season, but he had never acknowledged them so they couldn’t be sure.
    They watched the sky change, waiting. Finally, stars