Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Read Online Free PDF Page A

a high energy level and tended to be bossy. “Her cooperative-play attributes need attention,” the woman said. At a table alone, Tobrah was engrossed in coloring a Xeroxed pig red. Her jeans and T-shirt were dirty and her hair was tangled.
    When they arrived at the house, Tobrah ran straight to her room. Jackie could hear her from the kitchen, where she was unloading the groceries. Tobrah was talking to her toys. “I told you to stay right there! But you’ve been up dancing. I said you couldn’t dance. But all you want to do is dance!”
    In the doorway, Jackie watched Tobrah dash the doll and the bear around, banging them together until the doll’s hat fell off. After she had whipped their behinds and threatened them with no supper, she placed them back on the pillow and gave them new orders.
    â€œNo dancing. No walking around!”
    Jackie had been married twice, once in her twenties and once in her thirties. The husbands were a blur. The first, Carl, was generous but immature. He saw Jackie and himself as a “fun couple.” Her second husband, Jerry, was quiet and sweet, but he hid too much—an attachment to his mother, his secret drawer, even lapses of memory. He frightened her when he began locking himself in the bathroom for hours. She still saw him around town, and they spoke cordially, much the way they had done when they lived together. For the past several years now, she had been going with Bob Burns. They had an understanding. They knew their relationship was wrong according to the church they attended together, but they decided that the legality of marriage was really just a piece of paper. They had worked that out in their minds, and it left them free to love each other, Jackie thought. She wanted to keep up with the times, within reason.
    â€œI can’t spend the weekend at your apartment,” she told Bob on the telephone a couple of weeks after Tobrah’s arrival. “You’ll have to come here. I can’t drag her around everywhere. I want her to know where she lives.”
    â€œAre you sure you want me there? I might just confuse her.”
    â€œNo. Come on over. I need you.”
    Bob still wore the same size jeans he wore in high school and even had an old pair to prove it. He golfed and didn’t drink. He was divorced and had two grown daughters, one in the Air Force and the other in Louisville, pregnant. He seemed to find becoming a grandfather a spooky idea, and Jackie had been nervous about how he would adjust to her new situation. As they spoke on the phone now, she gazed at the decal of a brightly colored unicorn she had put low on a window for Tobrah. Nowadays, Jackie seemed to dwell on things she hadn’t noticed before—small things at a child’s eye level, like the napkin holder and the cabinet-door handles. She tried to tell Bob about this. She said, “It makes me think about Jack Frost. Remember those beautiful designs in the windows? Is that something only kids see? I used to see them at my grandmother’s.”
    â€œJack Frost doesn’t come around anymore.”
    â€œHow come? Pollution?”
    â€œNo. Double-glazed windows and central heating. You saw Jack Frost in old, uninsulated houses where the windows were a single layer of glass. The frost was moisture condensed on the inside.”
    â€œI’m amazed. Is that supposed to be progress?”
    She always counted on Bob to know things.
    When he came over that Friday, he was anxious, fuming over something that had happened on the job. He said, “I waited at the loading platform for an hour and a half for this bozo to show up and then come to find out he’s with his girlfriend at the mall picking out a china pattern. He forgot to bring the shipment over.”
    â€œI imagine he had more important things on his mind than a load of cement,” said Jackie, taking his cap from his hand. He always took it off indoors, a fact she found