They both picked at their food. The hash had smelled so enticing to Joanna as she cooked it, but in her mouth the food turned to tasteless sand.
Finally, giving up, she put down her fork. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Joanna ventured tentatively. “About what would happen to you if something happened to me.”
Jenny, too, put down her fork and regarded her mother through unblinking china-blue eyes. “You mean if you died?” she asked.
Joanna, dismayed by the child’s directness, struggled on.
“If a man has two eyes, he doesn’t have to worry that much about going blind. If he loses one, then he starts worrying about losing the other as well. If he worries about it too much; if he lets that fear of going blind become the whole focus of his life, he may stop enjoying the things he can still see with that one good eye. He ends up forgetting that even if the worst happens, even if he loses the sight in that second eye, it doesn’t mean his life is over.”
“He could always get a guide dog,” Jenny suggested helpfully. “Erin Wallace, one of the girls in my class, is training one of those. A golden retriever puppy. It’s her 4-H project.”
Joanna smiled. “It’s the same thing with us,” she continued. “You’re so scared about what might happen next, about what might happen to me, that it’s keeping you from enjoying life around you. I don’t think you’d be nearly as worried about me and my new job if you still had both parents. But you don’t. You only have one. It’s a problem, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Jenny agreed, almost in a whisper.
“So, I’ve been trying to find a solution; a way so that if something really did happen to me, you’d have a place to go and someone dependable to take care of you.”
“Not Grandma Lathrop,” Jenny protested at once, giving her long blond hair a defiant toss “She treats me like a baby. She still thinks I should be in bed by seven o’clock.”
“And not Grandma and Grandpa Brady, either,” Joanna added. “They’re wonderful, and they love you. But they’ve already raised one child, and that’s enough. They shouldn’t have to raise another. It’s a lot of work.”
Jenny nodded in agreement, chiming in with another surprisingly apt observation. “They’re nice but they’re too old.”
“What would you think about Jeff and Marianne?” Joanna asked carefully. “I haven’t spoken to them about it yet, because I wanted to check with you first, to see what you thought of the idea.”
“Do Jeff and Marianne even want kids?” Jenny asked.
“I’m sure they do.”
“Why don’t they have any, then?”
“Maybe they can’t,” Joanna replied, knowing from things Marianne had told her in confidence that it was the truth. “Maybe they’ve tried, and they just aren’t able to.”
“You could ask them,” Jenny suggested.
“No, that’s private, something to be discussed just between them.”
Jenny picked up her fork and began drawing aimless lines through the remaining hash that was turning to a ketchup-laden crust on her plate. For once, Joanna managed to stifle the overwhelming urge to tell Jenny not to play with her food.
“So what do you think of the idea?” Joanna asked. “Of asking Jeff and Marianne?”
“Would they let me keep my dogs?”
“I don’t know. That would be up to them when the time came, something you three would have to talk over and decide on.”
For some time, Jenny sat thinking. Finally, she shrugged. “I guess it would be okay. That way, I’d have parents to take care of me, and they’d have a child, even if I wasn’t their very own. We’d be like each other’s guide dog, right?”
“Right.” Joanna nodded.
Just then Sadie, the bluetick, sprang to her feet and hurried to the door, growling low in her throat while the hackles rose on the back of her neck. Tigger, the pit bull, whose hearing wasn’t as keen, quickly followed suit. It was several minutes before the vehicle Sadie had evidently heard crossing the cattle guard bounced into the yard.
Joanna was waiting on the back porch when Linda Kimball’s Jeep Cherokee stopped in front of the gate. Dressed in high heels, Linda climbed down and made her way over the uneven side walk to where Joanna was standing.
“I apologize for just showing up like this, but I couldn’t call before I left home,” Linda said as Joanna ushered her inside. “I told Burt I was going to a PTA officer’s planning meeting.”
It was one of the ironies of Joanna’s Craftsman home that most guests, even strangers, arrived through the side yard and back door while the front porch and official entryway remained virtually unused. Embarrassed by piles of unwashed laundry, Joanna led her visitor through the laundry room and kitchen and on into the living room. “Can I get you anything?” Joanna asked. “Coffee, tea?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any Postum, would you?”
“No.”
“Well, nothing then. I just need to talk to you.
I need to talk to somebody.”
“What about?”
