OLIVIA drove home from Tulsa in a driving rain. Hard, straight, gray rain that filled the valleys and woods with mist. Long trails of pale gray mist swirled upwards from the trees, mixed with the dark gray falling water. By the time she was ten miles down the road from Tulsa, it was dark from horizon to horizon. She turned off the radio, tightened her seat belt and tried to pay attention, remembering a night she and Mary Lily had turned the Pontiac around in the middle of the road coming back from a rodeo in Springdale. Goddamn this rain, Olivia was thinking. Now I’ll be late and Bobby will think it’s because his dad’s in jail. Well, I don’t have to solve his problems. That’s what Doctor Coder said. He said, Don’t try to solve other people’s problems. If you try to remove the impact, you’ll get shit all over you. He was talking about trying to fix a blocked intestine in a fat man when he was an intern. He said, Remember this, Olivia, if you try to remove the impact, you’ll get shit all over you. Well, I wonder if he’s going to tell me things like that all the time. I can’t stop thinking about it. God, it must be awful to be an intern. I’ll have to ask Georgia when I see her. I’ll go eat breakfast with her in the morning and tell her what he said. Look at this rain, will you. Look at all this goddamn rain.
Olivia slowed down even more and drove steadily down the curving highway. There was hardly another car on the road. I guess no one’s fool enough to drive in this, she decided. I’m getting off at the next exit and wait for it to slow down. Well, it’s Green Country and we’re in Tornado Alley. Weather gets together from the whole country here. Gets together and gets wilder. Powwow. Tornado Alley, that’s about par, that’s about what they would give the Cherokee when they ran them out of Carolina.
She pulled off the highway at Locust Grove and went to the doughnut shop and called Bobby. It took a long time for anyone to answer the phone but finally Sharrene answered it and said she’d look for him. In a few minutes she returned and said he wasn’t there. “What’s going on with Mr. Tree?” Olivia asked. “I’m stuck in Locust Grove, Sharrene. It’s pouring rain. Is it raining there?”
“It sure is. It’s been raining all day. Bud’s in big trouble, honey. I’m going to Oklahoma City to stay with my folks. He sounds okay, though. He sounds pretty good. I guess he’s in for a while, though. The plane was stolen, but no one told Bud about it. It had papers. He thought the papers was good.”
“Were good. Never mind. I don’t want to know about it. Listen, Sharrene, you have to leave Bobby a note and tell him I called. I wish you’d go find him, but I guess that’s too much trouble, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know where he’d be.”
“Try the pool hall. Call and see if you can find him. Anyway, leave him a note, okay? Tell him I’ll call when I get home.”
“Okay, honey. I’ll find him if I can.” Sharrene hung up the phone, got a beer out of the refrigerator, opened it, and sat down to write the note. She made a couple of beginnings but she couldn’t spell Olivia so she got frustrated and tore up the notes. She tried to call the pool hall but the line was busy so she went back to the note.
“Dear Bobby, your girl called and said she was in Locust Grove.” She looked at the note for a while but she still didn’t like the way it looked, so she tore it up and started one more time. “Dear Bobby, your girl said she would call you when she got home. Love, Sharrene.” She looked at that for a while and decided she liked it. She was searching for an envelope when her brother called from Oklahoma City to say they would come the next afternoon to help her move.
“You take plenty of furniture,” he was saying. “Don’t come out of this empty-handed like you always do, Sharrene. Me and Dad aren’t going to support you this time. We want you to come home but you got to carry your own weight. I got plenty of people to take care of without adding you to the list.”
By the time she finished talking to her brother, Sharrene was so mad she had forgotten all about the note. She opened a second beer and went downtown to go shopping, leaving the note still attached to the pad and lying on the table.
Olivia stayed at the doughnut shop long enough to drink two cups of coffee, then she got back into the car and pulled back out onto the turnpike. The rain was slacking but it was still falling.
It’s possible to be alone and not be lonely. That’s what Doctor Coder had said. She could love Bobby without needing him so much that she’d give her life to him. Nothing’s draining all the lifeblood out of me every two hours, she decided. Then what will we do? Be like Georgia and her boyfriend and never have the courage to live together? Why should it take courage if it’s such a good idea? Tell me that. Did I ever see anybody who was married who lived happily ever after? No. The minute they get married, the honeymoon is over.
So what do we do? I asked him. Get smart, he said. If you want to be happy you have to work for it. You have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and you have to take chances and you have to talk.
So when I get home we’re going to talk about it. I’ll say, Bobby, it bums me out that your dad’s in jail. I don’t want to be mixed up in that. If my dad finds out he’ll never speak to me again. No one in the Hand family will be mixed up with criminals. So then what? So go with me to North Carolina in the fall. Oh, yeah. Well, first you have to meet my dad.
She shook her head and drove on home. There weren’t any answers to any of this. Just problem after problem after problem.
It was late when she got home and she was tired of thinking. She kept meaning to pick up the phone and call Bobby but she couldn’t get herself to do it. Finally, at ten-thirty he called her. “I decided to call you,” he said. “I figured that shrink told you to get rid of me.”
“It bums me out that your dad’s in jail. I can’t be mixed up in that, Bobby. If my dad finds out he’ll never speak to me again. No one in the Hand family ever had to go to jail. My granddaddy is a lawyer. I don’t want to say this to you. Why’d you call me up? If you hadn’t called me, you wouldn’t be hearing this.”
“I knew that’s how you’d feel. What can I do about it, honey? I didn’t do it. Maybe I ought to go up to Montana and go back to work for Tom. Hell, I don’t know what to do.”
“What’d you do all day while I was gone?”
“I got a job, for one thing. Driving a bulldozer for Jay Knight. Three hundred a week and I can do it in my spare time.”
“Good. That’s good. I’m glad.”
“You want me to come out and talk to you?”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I have to think about it. I have to go to the shrink again tomorrow.”
“Twice in one week?”
“I’m going to go three times a week. Maybe four.”
The line was quiet. He’s a man, Olivia was thinking. He never whines. He knows how to wait. “We’ll go somewhere day after tomorrow,” she offered. “I have to think about all this. And I have to tell the truth about how I feel, Bobby. If we start lying we’ll never figure out what to do.”
“I know what to do. I don’t have any choice.”
“I’ll see you day after tomorrow in the afternoon. Maybe we can go to the lake.”
“I’m yours. Whatever you want to do.” He glanced down at the table. Saw Sherrill’s scribbled note. Thought about how poor and mean the world he lived in was. Looked off into the living room. He couldn’t love a thing he saw, and yet a huge strange thought was in his heart, the thought of Olivia in a home with him.
“I’m sorry I’m this way,” she said.
“The way you are is fine. I’ll see you in two days then.” He hung up the phone and went out into the yard and watched the last of the clouds moving across the moon. The trees were dark and wet, the world was saturated with water. The huge strange thought was in him still. It would carry him through the night.