Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail Read Online Free PDF Page B

to do was play with Tobrah. They had been reading—stacks and stacks of storybooks from the library. Tobrah was rapidly learning to recognize words. They watched videotapes together. They made paper villages and building-block malls, with paper dolls as shoppers. They were collecting stuffed animals, yard-sale bargains. Yesterday they had a tea party. Tobrah had wrapped a ball of yarn around the table and chairs, making a large green spiderweb. Jackie had to cut it apart, and the yarn—five dollars’ worth—was ruined. When Jackie was a child, she would have been punished for wasting yarn, but now she couldn’t even scold Tobrah. Jackie was too much amazed that anyone would have thought of draping yarn in that fashion. It was a creation.
    Now Tobrah was coming toward her, where Jackie was working her hands through strawberry plants. A spider jumped off a leaf. Jackie looked up. Tobrah, clutching several red berries, had red stains on her mouth. Her hair was bright in the loud sun.
    â€œI want to go,” she whined. “I’m hot.”
    â€œI’m ready,” Annabelle said. “My handy’s full.”
    After they took their handies of strawberries to the owner’s house to pay, they poured the berries into large metal pots and plastic dishpans they had brought. Carefully, Jackie set the pans of berries in the back seat of the car, next to Tobrah. Jackie fastened the seat belt for her. As she clasped the buckle and pulled the belt tight, Tobrah’s fingernail accidentally scratched against Jackie’s wrist, drawing blood. It had never occurred to Jackie that a child’s fingernails would need to be trimmed. She stared at the little nails, transparent as fish scales.
    â€œDoes she remind you of when I was little?” Jackie asked her mother.
    â€œYou weren’t that sure of yourself.”
    â€œDo you think I looked like her?”
    â€œI can’t see you in her. Maybe I don’t want to. All I see is him.”
    Lorraine paused from glazing a cake to light a cigarette. She tapped it on the counter the way Jackie remembered her father doing his unfiltered Luckies. Lucky Strikes. LSMFT, she recalled, from out of nowhere. Lorraine, in a voice hoarse from smoking, said, “Believe me, she’s better off without her daddy.”
    â€œWhy are you still so bitter?”
    â€œI reckon I want to be. It’s my privilege.”
    Jackie ducked her mother’s smoke stream. “Did you hate Daddy?”
    â€œI guess I did, finally. I made him go. I couldn’t stand it anymore. He was always complaining, never enjoying anything.” Lorraine shuddered. “That was the worst part. He was such a sourpuss. He thought he was better than anybody else. He was always growling about the way the world was going to hell. You can’t put up with people like that.”
    Jackie stood over Tobrah, searching for resemblances between herself and the sleeping child. She could see a faint repetition of her own upper lip, the narrow forehead, a certain dark shadow under her eyes. Jackie had heard that computers could create new faces by combining photographs. It amused her to imagine Meg Ryan crossed with Sylvester Stallone; Newt Gingrich and Monica Lewinsky. Sensations from her own childhood floated forth; the taste of grapes from the trellis in the backyard, the sour green tang of the pulp set off by the sweet purple lining of the skin; the sandy texture of a pink marshmallow bunny squatting in Easter grass; the distasteful odor of sloppy joes in the first-grade lunchroom.
    Bob was supposed to visit, but he was late and Tobrah had fallen asleep. He had taken his mother to town. It was Social-Security-check day. His mother didn’t drive, and since his father’s death, Bob ran errands for her and took her places. His mother kept asking them what his arrangement with Jackie was called. She said she couldn’t keep track of the new alternatives to