The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (16 page)

‘Mrs Rohde – Caroline's mom – was even scarier than she is. Rumour is that her husband once lost their house in a poker game. Only he never dared tell Mrs Rohde. The man who'd won didn't either. Caroline's still living in that house. But Grace's grandmother, she loved to provoke her. She was probably the only one who dared to contradict her toward the end. She was never really the same once Mrs Rohde died.'

Sara choked on her coffee. Andy had to hit her on the back.

‘Exactly,' he said. ‘It was just after the town council moved. We were just meant to get a temporary representative. No one thought they'd have any influence, so as some kind of protest vote, people voted for Grace. She didn't take part in a single meeting. Honestly, I don't know who was angrier, Caroline or Grace. Though I wonder how much they really care about that old feud.' He thought for a moment. ‘They do share common ground. Both of them probably think the town could do with a few traditions.

‘So,' he said. ‘How's it going with you and Tom?'

He was forced to hit her on the back again.

 

 

 

 

Broken Wheel, Iowa

July 17, 2010

Sara Lindqvist

Kornvägen 7, 1 tr

136 38 Haninge

Sweden

Dear Sara,

When I said that Iowa isn't a state of great stories, that isn't altogether true. Stories abound here. We just don't seem to get around to actually writing them down. Before the railroad, it was impossible to travel in wintertime: the roads were too bad for the wagons, and the river froze so that the steamboats couldn't get through either. It is my belief that people who are stuck during cold, idle months will find their own ways of traveling in their minds to make time pass.

My brother Robert was a great storyteller. We all thought he'd grow up to be a journalist. That was about as far as it went for us, as far as dreams go. A novelist would have been far too impractical as a job, but a newspaper man was all right. At that time, the
Wallace Farmer
and the
Prairie Farmer
were a big part of our lives. Dad had a whole box of newspapers in the attic, and Robert would never let us use any of them for lighting fires. ‘Respect the words!' he cried every time we threatened to use them, and I think we did, in our own way. Just as we respected money and disapproved of people who wasted it.

When he was at high school he started his own paper, the
Bent Creek Farmer
, named after the only river in Broken Wheel. It quickly became known as the
Bent Farmer
, which was a more appropriate name, really. It was full of blood-dripping mysteries, dramatic love stories and false agricultural advice. He wrote all the articles himself, but he allowed other people to be the inspiration for them. Not the love stories. I'd like to think he made those up completely, but it was them that got him into trouble. A few stories were a little bit too close to home as it turned out, even though I'm sure he would never consciously have used real people. Perhaps he just couldn't imagine that reality could be found in his imagination.

Best,

Amy

TOM HAD OTHER
things to worry about. He wasn't interested in Sara, and he had absolutely no desire to ask her out as part of some absurd plan cooked up by Andy and Jen. He knew they were trying to pair them off with each other, of course. You'd have to be an idiot not to. Subtlety had never been one of Jen's or Andy's strengths. He tried simply to ignore the whole thing, but for some strange reason, he couldn't stop thinking about her.

Every time he passed Main Street he would see her, either reading or just standing behind the counter with a smile on her face, as though she thought customers might start flooding through the door at any moment.

Why the hell would anyone want to open a bookstore in Broken Wheel?

He knew he should be more polite to her. She was Amy's guest, a stubborn voice in his head kept telling him. But Amy was dead. It was funny how much that realisation still hurt. She had been the last link to his father and a world in which the adults knew exactly what was going on. A last piece of his safe, comfortable childhood.

Pull yourself together, Tom
, he thought, though he could feel Amy's loss like a physical pain in his chest, similar to the time he had cracked a rib playing football.

Amy is dead, he repeated to himself, more resolutely this time, and if her guest was selling her books in an attempt to pay back an imaginary debt, it wasn't his problem.

Oh hell.

‘Sorry?' His boss gave him a strange look.

Great. He was turning into a basket case. He really ought to stop thinking about her and start focusing on Mike, the office and a conversation he could really do without.

Mike continued: ‘They're mainly after our trucks and client list.'

‘Bullshit,' said Tom. ‘They've got newer cabs and hardly care about our unimportant little clients. What they want is to be the only freight company in the area.'

His boss shrugged.

Mike was a short, stout man; barely forty, but already thin-haired. The job of trying to keep the family business afloat had given him a sad, stooped posture. He resembled a nice old dog, afraid of being beaten, which made Tom feel all the more irritated at that moment.

‘Maybe they want to build up the livestock side,' said Mike.

They were sitting opposite one another at a cluttered desk. All around them were clear signs of a family business on its way out. The files full of information about the clients and their orders were few and far between, and those they had were old. The two computers were from the late nineties, already antiques when they were bought second-hand from the old local government offices.

‘I'm assuming the computers won't be going too,' Tom said with a faint smile.

Mike looked at him in confusion. ‘The computers? Why the heck do you care about the computers? You want them?'

Big grey monstrosities. The screens were practically half a metre thick. ‘No thanks,' Tom replied.

‘They're willing to offer anyone with qualifications a job.'

‘What about you? Are they willing to hire you, too?'

‘I'm moving to my sister's. Her husband needs help with his business. Home electronics. Not quite as exciting as freight, but their kids are nice and there's a room for me.'

There were yellowed news clippings hanging on the walls. They had been framed several years earlier in an attempt to make the office slightly more appealing to new customers.
Broken Wheel Truck and Transportation sponsor baseball team (1997). BTT voted Business of the Year for their involvement with the Broken Wheel Baptist Church.
And the most ominous:
BTT moves local government to new offices
, with a picture of smiling politicians on their way to Hope, surrounded by desks and office chairs and filing cabinets, standing alongside a less-smiley Mike.

‘Are the others going to Hope as well?' Tom asked. He didn't actually care. It was hard to care about much nowadays.

‘Who knows. They're both young guys, they'll be all right.'

There was a silent ‘but' in there somewhere.

Mike continued, sounding more troubled: ‘They're offering you a driver's job. You don't have the qualifications for management and they've already got all the admin staff they need. You know how it is. Maybe if you'd kept studying –'

‘I needed this job, Mike, you know that.'

‘Maybe you should've taken that job in Iowa City.'

‘It was too late by then, I needed to stay –'

‘I'm sorry, Tom. It was the best I could do.'

‘Sure, sure. You did your best. Not your fault.' He stood up. ‘Back on the road, then.' He smiled. ‘I guess they don't have your approach to weekends and long-haul shifts?'

Mike said nothing.

‘No worries. I get it. I'll be the new guy. It's not like I've got much keeping me here.'

‘Hell, I'm sorry about your aunt Amy, Tom. Nice lady.'

‘Yeah.' He paused by the door. ‘How long do I have to think about it?'

‘They need your answer within two weeks. It was –'

‘Yeah, I know. The best you could do.'

He walked out into the hallway and closed the door softly behind him. The hallway was quiet and so he allowed himself a few moments just standing there. He was thinking about his father and about Amy, about the years working two jobs, on the farm and for Mike, and how everything seemed to be disappearing. Seventeen years.

What the hell would he do now?

After a quick trip to John's, he was just on his way back to the car when the other two drivers from Mike's appeared on either side of him.

They positioned themselves demonstratively between him and his car. Both looked angry, and terribly young. As though they still expected life to be fair.

‘You going to Hope?' one of them asked. Local boys, the next generation.

‘I just don't get how Mike can sell up like that,' the other said. ‘The business has been in his family for generations.'

‘Only two generations,' said Tom. ‘His dad started it.'

‘Still. Just giving up like that.'

‘And selling it to Hope. When the school moved, none of us got to play.'

Tom didn't really know what baseball had to do with Mike selling his business, but to them, everything was probably still linked to baseball.

‘It would've been better to just close down.'

‘Better for who?' Tom asked wearily.

They were blocking the way to his car. Furious, they expected him to feel the same way.

He spotted Jen heading over to him with determined steps, a backdrop of empty shops and road behind her. Elsewhere, more asphalt was being laid at high speed as towns and suburbs grew, even though there was already so much of it going spare in Broken Wheel.

‘I'm going to say yes to the job,' he said. ‘It's a decent offer.'

‘Decent?'

‘Don't be such damn idiots.' He pushed between them and had almost reached the safety of his car when Jen caught up with him.

‘How's it going with Sara?' she asked. She sounded out of breath.

Tom didn't bother answering. One of the boys did it for him: ‘He's gonna move to Hope.'

‘I'm going to
work
in Hope,' he corrected, though when he thought about it maybe he would just move. Where was the sense in living in Broken Wheel if he was working in Hope?

‘Hope!' Jen stared at him.

He shrugged and wished they would all just leave him in peace.

Ironically, Sara seemed to be the only one doing that. She was standing behind the counter in her bookstore, staring stubbornly outwards. At least
she
wouldn't care if he moved to Hope.

‘I know you're upset about Amy and … everything, but you can't grieve forever,' Jen said loudly.

‘Or at all,' he said. ‘And what the hell does that have to do with it?'

‘You wouldn't be moving away if Amy were still alive.'

That was probably true, though he would still have taken the job. He was an adult.

He walked around his car and opened the door.

‘Ask her out to dinner!' Jen shouted after him.

Tom had no intention of asking Sara out for dinner, or doing anything else which might encourage Jen's scheme. Despite that, when he passed the bookstore a few days later, something made him pause in front of it.

Sara was sitting alone in one of the armchairs, her big eyes wide and tears flowing silently down her cheeks. She was gazing solemnly down, her eyes fixed on her lap, and she didn't seem to care that the whole world could see her crying.

Jesus Christ, he thought. He hesitated outside the door, wondering what he should do. Go in? Leave? Pretend nothing had happened? For some reason he felt like he should say something comforting, something friendly, but who sat crying out in the open in the middle of the day?

He cautiously opened the door.

‘Hi,' he eventually said.

She looked up, and as she did so her eyes seemed to fill with tears again. He towered above her like a mute shadow rather than a supportive friend. ‘Is everything OK?' he asked stupidly.

‘What?' Then she suddenly seemed to notice the tears still glistening on her cheeks, and wiped them away self-consciously. ‘Sad book,' she said, sniffing.

‘Am I intruding?' He was definitely out of his depth now, but for some reason he couldn't explain, he sat down in the armchair next to her.

She placed the book on the table between them. ‘
Jane Eyre
,' she explained. ‘I'd forgotten how intense it was. The first time I read it, I sat up half the night, curled up on the floor.'

He glanced at the cover, at the picture of an old-fashioned, ordinary-looking woman in profile. Grey and boring.

‘Stupid, really, crying when you know it's going to end happily. But it's so sad, when she finds out he's already married, that his wife is locked in the attic, and she has to force herself to get away from him, and then her idiot of a cousin tries to convince her to marry
him
instead, even though he doesn't love her and even though he knows she's not strong enough for missionary work. And his hypocritical Christian argument, even though it's pure
ambition
making him want to take her to India or wherever the hell it is he wants to convert people.'

‘As long as it ends happily,' said Tom, casting around for safe ground.

‘Yeah,' Sara said gravely. ‘Or, happily for her. He goes blind and loses a hand.'

Tom shifted in the armchair.

‘But happy,' she reassured him quickly. ‘He got his Jane.'

‘Jesus,' Tom said involuntarily.

 

 

 

 

Broken Wheel, Iowa