Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,21
mother turned the doll over in her very clean, very large hands. My mother had a nurse’s hands. You could eat off her palms. They were almost big enough to hold a full meal, too.
“Cis, I could be stating the obvious, but this is a pig.”
It actually was pretty clever, how she’d done that. Cissy usually made a doll face with a soft white sock, and somehow she’d puckered and pulled with thread so the doll had a little snout with pink floss nostrils and lips. The pig had pigtail hair and shoes that looked like little hooves with black felt triangles. Cissy sure knew how to make a cute doll. My mother said that if you figured how long she worked on each one, she was making about a dollar an hour. I was still young enough that a dollar an hour sounded like real money to me. I made that selling corn.
“I think people will like them. The three little pigs, but girl pigs.”
“Hmmm,” my mother said, like she did when I gave her a composition to read and she was going to tell me to take another shot at it.
I went back to the living room. I could tell by the television sound it was halftime. “It’s not going to amount to a hill of beans,” my father said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Bud,” Mr. Langer said. “We been down this road before. They can come right in and take your place. Imminent domain.”
“They still working on that water deal?” I heard Tommy say.
“It’s the damn dam,” said Mr. Langer.
Tommy laughed.
“What’s so funny, son?” said my father.
“Nothing, sir.”
“He calls me sir now that he’s in the service,” my father said to Mr. Langer. “I’m his superior officer.” I didn’t need to see my father’s face to know he was smiling.
I’m not sure I’d ever seen my mother happier, either, but it didn’t last. After a few days Tommy didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. My father would say things like “I guess they work you men pretty hard,” and Tom would say, “They sure do,” and then they would read the newspaper until my father said, “There must be men there who don’t have the kind of firearms experience you have,” and Tom said, “Some, that’s for sure.” Tommy had never been a hunting fanatic the way my father and Mr. Langer were, mainly because it required being up at dawn, which Tommy only managed when he’d been out all night the night before. Then he never got a deer anyway. I think half the time he fell asleep waiting in the blind.
It was funny: before my parents had been upset that Tommy went out so much, but when he was home for those ten days they were worried that he didn’t go out enough. I could hear them through the heating vent. My father wouldn’t stand for the heat going on until after Thanksgiving, as though no one got cold until they’d had turkey and stuffing.
“I wish he’d have some fun, maybe take out that Jansson girl he used to like,” my mother said. I lay in bed and shook my head. Tom hadn’t had anything to do with Meggie Jansson since tenth grade, when she gained all that weight. He liked small girls.
“Leave him be,” my father said.
My father liked the notion that Tommy spent afternoons walking the property, although it seemed pretty sad to me. One day I followed him up to the ridge. He was sitting on a big rock, smoking a cigarette. Even though the rock was cold and hurt my butt I sat and leaned into him a little bit. It felt like his whole body was hard. My father said that’s what basic training did to a man.
Tommy held his cigarette toward me, but I shook my head. “Mom’d kill me,” I said.
“I’d say she wouldn’t need to know, but she’d know. She’d kill me, not you.”
“Not now she wouldn’t. She’s so happy you’re home.”
He inhaled smoke, blew it out, then said, “You like it here?”
I looked around. “Where?”
“The valley. I was just wondering if you like it here.”
“I guess.”
The truth was, I never thought much about it. My name was Mimi Miller. I lived in Miller’s Valley. Everyone I knew lived in Miller’s Valley. I wasn’t ignorant; I knew there was a world outside. I just had a hard time imagining it. We went on a field trip to Washington, D.C., but between the museums, the