This is Just Exactly Like You Read Online Free PDF

knows it isn’t the house, the money, nothing easy like that. It’s no one thing. They eat well enough together, sleep well enough, talk about school and the mulch yard. I had another one today, she’ll say, walking in the door, hanging her bag over the back of one of the dining room chairs, a paper in her left hand. Listen to this: “Our father, who art in heaven, hollowed by thy name.” Hollowed! Can you believe these kids? Or: He’ll come home late on a Tuesday, pine needles in his boots and sleeves, and they’ll sit on the front porch until dark, watching the hummingbirds come to the feeders. Her hobby. She brews sugar syrup, has all these red plastic flower-shaped feeders strung from the trees. If they can get Hen set up in front of The Weather Channel, they have an hour or two to themselves.
    But something underneath all that got wrinkled. The small, stupid fights had been getting a little more frequent, a little higher-pitched, the both of them at each other too often about whose turn it was to run out to the store for dog food, for yogurt for Hendrick. At first he’d pegged that to her tendency to drift away from him at the end of semesters anyway, to shrink back into herself, into her job, papers piling up, the whiny GPA kids wanting to know what they could do for extra credit. He’d had all that, too, knew what November and April could look like. Jack had taught at Kinnett as an adjunct, taught the freshman humanities series all the students have to take. General Humanities—GenHum—I & II. Fall: Mesopotamia to the Renaissance. Spring: DaVinci to Nixon. The real job was hers. They hired her right out of Carolina, tenure-track, and the dean found an adjunct gig for Jack. She negotiated it for him. But he timed out after his four full years—a college rule that got bent for some adjuncts, and not for others—and with no permanent slot in history opening for him, that was it. It was Canavan, actually, one night over enough beers, who suggested something like a landscaping service. It’d be easy, he said. Couple of pickup trucks and an ad in the Yellow Pages . We could work together. Rena was all for it, said it was such a good idea . Try it for a year , they all said. Even Beth. He’d done it in high school and college, but Jack didn’t want to mow lawns again, didn’t want to rake leaves. Then they hit on the mulch yard. Plants for sale out front, like a little nursery. You know, Canavan said, people do want cheap pine nuggets . There was the vacant lot out on 70 between Burlington and Greensboro. Beth could stop in afternoons on her way home from the college. It all seemed almost romantic. He had to do something . Why not this? He liked the idea of watering pansies and petunias and azalea bushes. Liked the idea of selling people dirt. He got his loans, bought his yellow loaders, bought a sign.
    And once he hired Butner, and once Butner was all but running the show, on the slow days he could be home with Hendrick. In a lot of ways it was easier than teaching. When he was at Kinnett, Jack had drawn all the time slots nobody else wanted, eight in the morning and five-thirty in the afternoon. This was better. This was people pulling up in trucks wanting a few dogwoods, wanting four yards of mini-bark. He could do this. In two years he was making what he’d made as an adjunct, and after three, last year, they moved, bought the little house in Greensboro. Good school district for Hendrick, an elementary school with a fully integrated curriculum. Hen in with all the other kids. Jack was for this. Beth wasn’t sure, wasn’t sure he was ready to be with everyone else. But she went along. The water heater failed the first week, flooded the den. They knocked the couple of walls through. He’s got his plans for the attic, for the kitchen. The A/C doesn’t work so well. The house is a plain rectangle. He’s working on that. She wants him to work faster.
    What she really wants more than anything, she says, is