Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,32
her more than hearing a knock at the door, which had to mean a stranger because all the rest of us just walked in.
“Can I speak to you for a moment, ma’am?” Winston Bally apparently said, and Ruth replied, “Not on your life,” although when she told me that, it sounded like the kind of thing you wish you had said at the time but dreamt up afterward.
The screening on Ruth’s front door was thick and a little dusty. Looking through it was sort of like looking at something through a sheet of heavy rain, so Ruth said all she knew was that Mr. Bally suddenly backed up off her steps. That was because my father had grabbed him by one shoulder and pulled him down to the scrubby patch of dirt and struggling lawn in front of the little house behind our bigger one.
“I’ve been as polite as I know how to be,” he said—“hollered,” said Ruth later—“but I’m not going to tell you again to stay away from this property. And if you ever bother this lady again I will be doing more than telling you.”
“You’d better be careful, assaulting a government agent,” Mr. Bally had said, straightening the front of his white shirt.
“You are trespassing, mister, and you’re upsetting this lady and I won’t have this lady upset.”
“The law says I am allowed to visit citizens at their homes for this purpose.”
“I don’t care what the law says, I want you off,” my father told him.
The story made the rounds in town in the next week. I heard people tell it at the diner, but it got bigger and better in the telling, the way things do. One man said my father had punched Winston Bally, and another said Winston Bally had threatened to have my father arrested. When Winston Bally came in and ordered the lunch special on Saturday, a bowl of Scotch broth and an egg salad sandwich, the place got real quiet for a minute. It so happened that he was at my station at the counter. He left me a two-dollar tip but I didn’t know whether he was a good tipper because he wasn’t from around here, or whether it had something to do with the fight with my father.
“You can’t stop progress,” one of the other men at the counter said after he was gone. It was the first time I’d heard that sentence in the conversation about the water, but it sure wouldn’t be the last, or the last time I heard the sound of my mother’s voice through the vent at night as I fell into a deep and exhausted sleep: Face facts, Buddy. Just face facts.
Four months into junior year Mrs. Farrell, the chemistry teacher, asked to see me after school. “Ooooh,” one of the boys said, but I knew it was nothing bad.
“You’re Eddie Miller’s sister?” Mrs. Farrell said, and I nodded. “And Tommy Miller’s, too, then, I imagine.”
They must have had some time figuring that out, all the teachers at the high school. The boy who gets straight A’s and the boy who can barely read. The boy with the slide rule in his shirt pocket and the one who has the circle of a rubber permanently imprinted on the leather of his wallet. They all probably thought little sister was going to wind up somewhere in the middle, but by junior year they knew different.
“There’s a summer science program at the university that I’d love to see you enroll in. You’ve got a real natural facility for the subject.”
“I can’t, Mrs. Farrell. I work at the diner full-time during the summers. I’m saving money for college.”
“Well, I guess I have to respect that. Where are you thinking?”
“State, I guess. It’s cheaper than anyplace else except the community college.”
She nodded. “I don’t think you need to think about the community college, although I’ve had some fine students spend a year or two there. I’ve got some thoughts about other places and about scholarship opportunities, but it’s early yet. You want to take physics next year?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The advanced section? It’ll be pretty small, and it won’t be easy, even for you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can I talk to your mother?”
“I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know anything about physics,” I said, and Mrs. Farrell smiled.
“I wouldn’t put anything past your mother,” she said. “When your brother was struggling with bio she came in here one day, sat down, and said, ‘Tell me how we fix this.’ And we did. He wound