phone she said two things: I’m certainly proud of my son, and I don’t understand why they haven’t started a family.
“I know that. I just meant in terms of a course of study. You can’t go wrong with a teaching degree, Mimi. Debbie had more job offers than she knew what to do with. She’s working in her father’s office because he couldn’t get anyone reliable to answer the phones, but she’ll go back to teaching school someday.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. I was sure I wasn’t going to get an education degree or teach school, but I didn’t want to start a fight. Good morning, Miss Miller. I’m sorry I’m late, Miss Miller. I didn’t do the homework, Miss Miller. There was just no way. I’d told Steven about Mr. Bally’s offer of work, but he just waved it away like a fly at a picnic. “A government job? You’re better than that.” Of course I hadn’t said anything to my parents. My mother might have thought it was a good idea. My father might have beaten the man until his fists bled, and then where would we be? Four landowners had made deals with the state and four others had put their places on the market to see if someone who’d never heard of the water and the dam would be foolish enough to buy them. They kept lowering their prices but no one bit. In history class our teacher had talked about the domino theory because of Vietnam, which he stopped talking about after just one class, maybe because someone told him about Tommy or because he was afraid of getting in trouble with the principal, who had the tallest flagpole in town on his front lawn. But you could see the domino theory at work in the valley as the sales and the sale signs spread. And I was pretty sure I had seen the domino theory in the woods between our place and the river. A little more water in the reservoir made a little more in Miller’s Creek made a little more in the valley. Until soon it was a lot more.
“You could run this place, the way you work around here,” said my father, tapping his fork on the edge of my plate. “I should have known neither of your brothers were going to come around to farming.”
“Can I get a glass of milk, Mom?” Eddie said.
“There’s nothing wrong with nursing,” said my mother.
“No question,” said Eddie. “There’ll always be jobs for nurses.”
“Everybody wants to eat, but nobody wants to farm,” said my father. “Where the heck do they think beef comes from?”
“Did you see Aunt Ruth?” I asked Eddie.
“If she wants to see him she knows where he is,” my mother said. “She can come down here and sit at the table like the rest of us.”
Eddie looked sideways at me. No wonder he never showed up. He’d arrived in a Toyota and had to spend fifteen minutes standing outside discussing whether it had decent pickup and whether my father had fought the Japs so that they could take over the automobile business from the Americans. Eddie said it was a company car, but my father had been in a touchy mood ever since. I think deep down inside he didn’t know exactly how to feel about Eddie. He was proud of how well he’d done, but the way in which he’d done well made my father feel like Eddie was above the life he’d been raised in. I wondered if he’d feel the same about me if I went to college, especially if I didn’t become a teacher or a nurse. Sometimes LaRhonda said she was going to get a business degree, but I didn’t think she really knew what that meant. Maybe LaRhonda should go to work for Mr. Bally; she’d foreclose on a farm without thinking twice. Her father thought a girl going to college was a waste of time. “Look at this,” Mr. Venti would say, sweeping his arm out over the restaurant the way Ed Sullivan did when he introduced an act. “You’ll never want for anything. You’ll never even have to cook for your family.”
My mother had cleared the dinner plates—“don’t get up”—and was dishing out cake when the back door slammed and Tommy came in. The look on his face, and my mother’s face, made me realize right away that he hadn’t known anything about dinner and Eddie.