This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

of her top lip with her bottom teeth. “Okay,” Daniel says, “that’s okay. Try again, just ease the gas on, and don’t get scared.” He’s taken his hand off the gearshift and has put it on the wheel, just above where her right hand is knotted around the rim.
    â€œAre you sure about this?” she says. That look on her face.
    â€œNo,” Daniel jokes. “I’m not sure about anything.” And he laughs a little, but she doesn’t, and then he feels stupid. “Except that”—he tries to rescue himself from the joke—“for the next five minutes, even with you at the wheel, we’re going to be ab-so-lute-ly fine.” He taps the rhythm of the word absolutely out on her hand on the wheel, which is gripped very tightly. Then he adds “kiddo”—after the fact. It was something that he used to call her. Not too long ago, though it must seem like a long time ago to her. He hasn’t used the word on her yet this visit, and isn’t sure, even as he says it, that he should. It’s okay, though, when he says it. It comes out okay.
    This time the car starts more smoothly. Daniel thinks with some surprise how easy it is to forget how many things get learned—and so quickly. Simple things. Like driving. Like riding a bike, or tying your shoes. Even that used to be a real effort , he remembers. How he had got it wrong so often, and how his father had shown him, taking his hands in his own, again and again.
    That was why he’d wanted a kid in the first place. Even when he was a kid himself, he’d always thought it would be nice to have someone, like that, to show things to. To say, Look, here’s how it works. I’ll show you.
    THE DAY THE BUFFALO ARRIVED , Daniel’s mother and her friend Cheryl, who worked at the meat-processing plant offthe main highway, took Daniel to watch them be unloaded at the Knutsens’ farm. Cheryl had delicate fingers and her nails were long and narrow at the tips. They were always a different colour each time Daniel saw them. When the buffalo came, and they went to watch, Cheryl kept her hands on the steering wheel, and he could see them from his position in the back seat. Sometimes she lit a cigarette, and he watched the way she did it. It seemed more complicated, and therefore more beautiful, when she did it, because her nails made everything seem difficult, and out of reach. Cheryl’s hands were different from his mother’s hands. It wasn’t that his mother’s hands weren’t nice—they were. It was just that they were—hands. With short pale nails, and medium-sized fingers. Cheryl’s hands didn’t look like hands at all—or if they did, they looked like they were meant to belong to someone else, who didn’t live where they lived, or didn’t work at the meat-processing plant near town. Once he’d heard his father say, “With those hands you oughta be a secretary or something, Cheryl—show ’em off,” and his mother had got mad and said, “She ought to be more than a secretary ,” but then she didn’t say anything else, or suggest what “more than a secretary” might be, which was something that Daniel, and maybe even his mother, didn’t know.
    Cheryl parked the car just a little ways up the road, at some distance from the house, and then she and Daniel and his mother sat there for most of an hour and waited. For a long time nothing happened. They saw all the Knutsen boysrunning around in circles in the yard. There was hollering, but they couldn’t tell what was being said because they were still some distance from the place, and they had the windows shut tight. His mother smoked a cigarette, which was something he’d never seen her do before, and the car filled up with so much smoke that his eyes stung. But he liked it that way. The way the smoke fogged everything up so that it seemed like a long