Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (most life changing books txt) 📗

back porch, depending on whether she or July was addressing it). “In there.” And she pointed to a large cardboard box.

July opened the top and jumped back, surprised by an unexpected activity down inside it. Then going toward it again and looking down, he stooped and lifted a white-and-brown puppy, larger than Butch, out of the box. The dog squirmed and barked once. July set it on the floor and it scampered around in a circle and attacked a pile of paint rags in the corner, growling and shaking its furry head. July immediately sank down to the wooden floor and began talking and playing with it, almost as though Mal weren’t there at all.

“Her one leg is shorter,” she said. “The man at the pound said nobody was likely to take a dog with a deformity and she’d probably have to be put to sleep. But he said she’d be a big dog.”

July didn’t seem to be listening. “Hey there,” he said to the puppy. “Keep away from those rags. They have turpentine on them. Here, look at this, look at this. Whoa, what a bite. Look out there.”

Mal stood back in the warmth of the kitchen, reviewing for herself the decision she’d made before getting the pup. She was well aware of July’s devotional love of animals, so much so that in Philadelphia and sometimes here in Iowa she had felt herself hating the relationship he had with his cat because she was so completely shut out of it, and sometimes when she returned from work her jealousy would rise up because of the knowledge that for the whole day Butch had shared July’s company and in the course of fixing up the house little dramas had been played out that she was doomed forever to have no knowledge of. So her decision to get the dog had been made understanding that she’d be in some way tested. There wasnever a chance that the short leg would make any difference. She might have brought a blind rat home (or up from the basement, for that matter, as July’d trap them but wouldn’t put poison down, and very soon they were too smart to be trapped). And now she checked herself to see how her decision was working out—if she was going to be able to feel safe enough with this relationship which had been of her own creating.

At first it seemed as if she’d failed and the threshold of her jealousy was being tried. But it was tried with the wrong key and held fast. She watched him pick up the dog, put it on his lap and hold its shortened foot—“Getting a little hungry no doubt”—and she could see that she’d made the right choice. She had the safety of the onlooker. She knew he would be safe from her jealousy, and she could also hear herself in the tone of his voice as he talked. Usually the beloved, now she held the power of the lover. And more than that. In several minutes, when he did look up at her, he knew right away what’d been dared by the gift, stood up and rushed over to her.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know,” she answered, and realized only then that the art book had been the same kind of decision for him and she hadn’t known it, and felt a great admiration and love for his understanding.

Her next present—the small one—enclosed a little card on which he’d written To Mal from the selfish fool and contained the old photographs from inside the fat Bible.

Such a symbolic gift was hard to respond to properly, as are all symbolic things, which seem to demand a particular kind of emotional response for which no physical expression is possible. To embrace him would deny the seriousness of the feeling, and to embrace him “seriously” or to try to explain that she understood the importance of it would be both melodramatic and pedestrian. Also, everything she might want to express was already assumed in the very act of giving the gift. Itwas unnecessary. But still a response seemed to be demanded and she was left hoping only that he would know exactly what she was feeling.

Despite the importance of the situation, she felt her skin beneath her pajamas flush in expectation of being touched.

The last was the large, weightless package for July, and with the help of the puppy July tore into it, only to find it empty but for a small piece of paper on which she’d written in crayon with large, clumsy letters, making it look as though a second-grader had made it at school, Will you marry me?

Whatever might have been Mal’s confusion over the proper response to the pictures was magnified and confounded a thousand times now for July. He’d wished for nothing more ever since the museum in Philadelphia, but had resigned himself to living with the possibility of her eventual departure; and because they’d grown closer, that possibility had become small, and he’d found it easier to live with and almost never thought about it at all. But now he realized how real those old desires still were, and the sensation of seeing them come true—to possess her forever and never fear living even a single day without her—was something he would’ve traded a lifetime for, if that choice could have been clearly stated so that he understood it.

Surprisingly, he was also a little afraid, and curled back from such a total bond, as it seemed to imply more than he could fully grasp. Maybe I’m not ready for this, he thought. Really. It was always a kind of fantasy before. But as he looked up at her, he knew that the same fear was in her eyes, perhaps more so, and that in reality it was only the containing, protective shell of an experience so much more vital than either of them had any comprehension of that to attempt to explain it was foolish.

“Soon?” he