The breakfast table was in the kitchen; it was a two-seater with a Formica top in turquoise riddled with looping white squiggles all over. It looked like it had enjoyed a quiet life at a diner; it was an antique, but not a showpiece. People pay a lot of money now for reproductions of tables like these, but plenty of them are gathering dust at auction houses if you know where to look. Raise up the two leaves that hang down on either side of it and it’ll seat four.
Centered on the wall above it was an old black-and-white photograph in an oval frame: a carhop at a drive-in, somewhere in the Midwest in a bygone era, her uniform crisp, square hat set neatly atop her hair worn in a bun. The picture had been personalized in gloriously legible cursive script: You’re always welcome back at Henry’s! Love, Irene.
“I don’t really know why I put the guest room in the attic,” she said after a moment. “The view, maybe.”
“That view in the morning is really something,” Sarah Jane offered.
“It’s nice at night, too. The window faces the moon as it rises.”
“I’ll watch for it.”
She cleared their plates and stood at the sink, rinsing. The air smelled like sausage.
“Are you going back in today?”
Sarah Jane blinked. “Of course.”
“Are you going to get your things?”
Another blink, and a breath. “Am I moving in?”
“I have a lot of work to do around here,” Lisa said. “You already know a little about the business.” The kitchen window faced the east; the whole room was flooded with sunlight, clean and summery.
“I’ll bring some things,” said Sarah Jane.
*
The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It’s the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago, it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can’t usually see it in paintings, but it’s an important part of the scenery.
Every spring it’s like a puppy: always more energy than you remembered, leaping to life from an afternoon nap. You can feel it battering the windshield if you’re driving into it, and at night it might make you worry, but in the daytime it’s bracing. It felt, today, in Jeremy’s body as he drove down Highway 65, like a validation of his course, like the world responding to his choices with a palpable yes. Yes, it was time to launch out into the world, to set a course for the future. Yes, it was all right that he’d called Stephanie Parsons to tell her he’d been wrong, that he did actually want to know the address of the house; it was all right, when she teased him a little about it, to enjoy it. Was it all right to go try to find Sarah Jane instead of just waiting for her to show up at work? Yes, even if it wasn’t really in his character to just get in the car and head south. But yes decisively to all of this, driving out to Collins.
He turned the radio up when the signal from Des Moines shrugged off the last of the static, and he let the window down a little. The air rushed in. He was leaning his head into the wind when he saw the blue Chevrolet in the ditch to the side of the road, clumps of long grass out on the blacktop ahead of it.
There was broken glass arcing out in a half-moon from its front end, and a big greenish pool from where the radiator’d burst or been punctured. All four wheels were still. It looked like a great dead insect on its back. It was Ezra’s car, and it was upside down.
In later years he could find nothing in the gap between seeing the wreck and finding himself outside the car, on his knees, lifting Ezra’s body by the shoulders even though he’d been told in Health and Safety class just a few years ago not to touch anything at the scene of an accident unless you meant to begin CPR. On the asphalt were dozens of VHS tapes without their cases, some crushed, either by impact with the road when they’d been thrown from the car or by the car rolling over them. Loose tape rippled in the wind.
Jeremy wasn’t yelling; he wasn’t the kind of person to just start yelling. But he could hear his voice rising in pitch. “What are you doing all the way out here?” The sound of it in his own ears unnerved him: that loss of control, the first tentative steps toward panic. “Are you lost, are you lost?” he kept asking, repeating himself each time he got no answer. Ezra’s house was clear over on the other side of Ames toward Boone. It was as if he’d meant to head out toward where he lived but gone in the wrong direction.
Ezra was in no position to explain himself. He had lost a lot of blood. His eyes were half-open, and he seemed to recognize that somebody he knew was with him, but he said nothing. He drew great, deep breaths at intervals. The sky above was showing early afternoon flashes of orange, its constant variations flooding the horizon in changing color bars like on the title screen from that weird Charles Bronson movie, the one where he steals a sword from Toshiro Mifune on a train. Red Sun.
PART TWO