Ansel laughed, and they skated on.
“How about you? Do want to live in some faraway place?”
He chuckled at that and said, “No, no, I don’t think so.”
“What then?”
He started out with his own version of her funny foreign accent: “I zee you in za house where you were born. I zee za wheat growing as far as I can zee.” But as he gracefully crossed one foot over the other on the curves (she still bent her ankles painfully to steer herself), he started to sound more like himself. “A beautiful girl comes home for dinner even though she doesn’t trust you, even though she thinks you’re a bit of a show-off. She watches you with your parents and she thinks maybe you aren’t so bad. She allows one kiss, maybe two. The two of you go for a ride alone in your father’s car—”
It sounded like Monty Pike on wheels, and Ellie stopped skating, pulling her arm from his so she could sit down on a crate.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Maybe the fortune-teller got a little carried away,” he said.
Ellie said she wondered where Flora had gone, and Ansel hardly said a word while she unbuckled the skates.
One day not long after the skating, the lunchroom was nearly empty except for a crippled man and his elderly mother. The crippled man was trying to open the ketchup bottle Ellie had brought him, but he couldn’t because his hands didn’t work right, and Ellie didn’t know what she ought to do. While she was standing behind the counter, trying to watch without seeming to watch, wondering if she ought to just take him a different bottle, Ansel came out of the kitchen and she blurted it out to him. He didn’t say anything, but he walked right up to the man’s table. “May I?” he asked. He took the bottle and tried the lid, then tried it again. He shook his head and then took it back to the kitchen. When he came back, Ellie heard him say that he’d had to use the pliers on it.
“Where are those pliers again?” she asked him a few hours later in the kitchen.
He looked at her in confusion. “What pliers?”
She felt herself leaning slightly toward him. “The ones you used to open that man’s ketchup.”
He relaxed then, and his smile made his handsome face handsomer. “Oh, those,” he said. “Well, those pliers might be hard to find.”
The next time he asked her to do something, he made sure Flora and Ernie went along. They had to be careful because you could get fired for dating an employee, but Ansel was so aloof she began to wonder if he didn’t care for her in that way. Once when Flora and Ernie were necking in the backseat, she took his hand and said, “So this house you grew up in. What is it like?”
He told her about his mother, who liked poetry and plays, and who had planned to have a great big family that could put on plays with her and sew the costumes and paint scenery, but he was the only child who survived longer than one year so he played all the male parts and she played all the female ones. She taught him to sing, and his father bought him his fretted dulcimer one time on a trip to Wichita. He didn’t mention that his mother was dead and that his father was losing the use of his arms and legs to some kind of illness. That she saw on her first visit and her second, and the third was for his funeral.
She liked watching Ansel stand at the edge of his fields, planting his legs and nodding at whatever she might be saying as he stared off, but then she would fall respectfully silent because she could see his thoughts had floated away like leaves from an autumn tree. He loved the place and she married him because she loved him, and because she thought that was enough. She thought she could enjoy as he did the solitude and simple beauty of a white house and a red barn amidst green fields. She liked the fact that his own child hands had hammered together the gray pieces of wood that formed a ladder up the cottonwood tree, a ladder that she hoped their own children would one day climb. It seemed silly to want money more than she wanted those things, silly to want a big house and mahogany furniture and sterling silver pickle forks.
Her father tried to intervene. He told her that this would be work. Very difficult work.
He told her that he knew she wanted mildness and beauty in her life. “You’ve never made your own butter, or milked a cow, or cooked for farmhands. It will not kill you, Eleanor. It will be worse than killing you. I know this. I know that it will.”
She said, “That’s what you said about being a Harvey Girl, you forget.”
“I do not forget. It is not the same. That was a job you could quit. A marriage is not that way. Do not marry him now, Eleanor. Please, for me, do not. Give it the time such things need. Let yourself breathe again like a normal person. If in a year you feel the same way, then yes, yes, do what you will. But not now.”