We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.
Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.
“Rhonda-” I settled down in the chair across from her. I didn’t know exactly how to put it. “What, ub, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?”
She took a long drink. “Good friends.” She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. “Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.”
I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?
“Listen,” she continued. “You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you’re stuck with it.”
She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. “William. . . look, I’m only two years older than you are-that is, I was born two years before-what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B-your mother understands too. It, our. . . relationship, wouldn’t be a secret to anybody else. It’s perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You’ve got to change too.”
I didn’t say anything.
She stood up and said firmly, “You think, because your mother is sixty, she’s outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.”
Accusation in her eyes. “Especially now with you coming back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How-old I am, twenty years younger.” Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.
I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.
A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.
It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.
“Who is it?” Voice muffled by thick wood.
“Stranger asking directions.”
“Ask.” I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child.
“I’m looking for the Potters’ farm.”
“Just a second.” Footsteps went away and came back.
“Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You’ll probably smell the chickens.”
“Thanks.”
“If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can’t let you in without my husband’s at home.”
“I understand. Thank you.” The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.
I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 and take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.
At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn’t strong.
Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.
“Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn’t want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.”