“You comfortable?” he asked her.
“Yes,” Kate said. “Thank you.”
“Because it’s going to be a long ride.”
“I’m comfortable,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You look very nice,” he said grudgingly.
“Thank you.”
End of conversation, he thought. How do you talk to a six-year-old kid, well, she’s almost seven, hell, she’s only six and a half, let’s face it. What do six-and-a-half-year-old kids think about, anyway?
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“What?”
“I said—”
“Oh, lots of things,” Kate said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
End of conversation, he thought. Ask a stupid question...
“Like my room,” Kate said.
“What about your room?”
“My bed had a quilt.”
“We’ve got quilts home,” he said.
“May I have one?”
“Sure.”
“I liked the quilt,” she said, and fell silent again. After a little while, she asked, “Will I have my own room?”
“Yes.”
“Where will it be?”
“Upstairs. Down the hall from us.”
“Is there a window?”
“Sure.” He paused. “It looks out over the orchard. It’s a very nice room.”
“An apple orchard?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good.” She paused again. “Is my mother crazy?” she asked.
He hesitated. He did not know what her grandparents had told her.
“Well,” he said, “she’s pretty sick.”
“Will she be in the hospital always?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Yes, I think so.”
“I feel sorry.”
“We all do, Kate.”
“Will I live with you always?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to?” He hesitated only for an instant, but she took her cue at once and said, “You don’t, do you?”
“Of course we do.”
“She cut off my hair,” Kate said. “My mother.” She paused. “But it’s all grown back now. Will you cut off my hair?”
“Only if you want us to.”
“I don’t want you to. I like long hair.”
“I do, too.”
“Do you think I have nice hair?”
“You have very pretty hair.”
“You do, too.” She looked at him carefully and then said, “When I get big, I’m going to grow a mustache.”
Matthew laughed. “Girls don’t grow mustaches,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Only men do.”
“Mrs. Schultz who has the grocery store in town has a mustache,” Kate said.
“Well...” Matthew pondered this one for a moment. “Maybe she’s a very special person. A woman can’t grow a mustache unless she’s very gifted.”
“Well, I’m very gifted,” Kate said. “I can play ‘Jingle Bells’ on the organ. Grandpa taught me. Do you have an organ?”
“No, but we have a piano.”
“I like organs better.” She paused. “But I like pianos, too,” she said quickly. “Do you play the piano?”
“No. But Amanda does.”
“Would she teach me, do you think?”
“If you ask her to. She plays beautifully. She went to music school, you know.”
“Maybe she’ll teach me,” Kate said. “If I ask her.”
“I’m sure she would.”
“Do you have any doll carriages?”
“No.”
“I should have brought my doll carriage. Grandma said there wasn’t room in the car, though.”
“Well, we’ll see about getting you a new carriage,” Matthew said.
“Grandma said I wasn’t to ask you for anything. She said taking me in was quite enough. That’s what she said. Quite enough.”
“You can ask for anything you want,” Matthew said. He grinned at her and added, “That doesn’t mean you’ll get it, of course.”
The child responded instantly to his joke. For the first time since she’d entered the car, a warm smile broke on her face. She relaxed immediately and said, “That’s the dairy up ahead. It’s got thousands of cows. Cows are the stupidest beasts in the world, did you know that?”
“I suspected as much.”
“It’s true. I read it in a comic book.”
“Well, then it must be true,” Matthew said seriously.
Kate giggled. “See them? All over the fields. All they do is chew grass and sleep.”
“And give milk.”
“They don’t really give it,” Kate said. “You have to take it from them.”
“That’s true. I never looked at it that way.”
“There’s where I went to school,” Kate said, pointing. “I’m in the first grade. Is there a school in Talmadge?”
“An elementary school, and a high school, and even a university,” Matthew said.
“What’s a university?”
“A... well, a collection of colleges.”
“College comes after the eighth grade,” Kate said.
“Yes, but a long way after.”
“Can I go to college?”
“Sure.”
“Mommy started college, but then she met Daddy. He was killed, you know. During the war. Were you in the war?”
“Yes.”
“Were you in the navy?”
“No. The army.”
“Daddy was in the navy. Did you ever hear of a place called Guadercanal? That’s where he was killed. It’s in the Pacific someplace. Did you ever hear of it?”
“Yes.”
“Were you ever there?”
“No.”
“Would you like to go there?”
“Not particularly.”
“Neither would I,” Kate said. “Are you going to be my stepfather?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said honestly.
“You don’t seem at all wicked.”
Matthew laughed. “Did you think I would be?”
“Stepfathers are supposed to be wicked. I read it in the Blue Fairy Book. Did you read that?”
“I think so. When I was a little boy.”
“I can read, you know,” Kate said.
“Yes, I can see that.”
“When did you get your mustache?”
“Oh, I don’t remember exactly. When I was nineteen or twenty, I think.”
“Are you gifted?”
“No, I’m not.”
“But you got a mustache.”
“I guess I was just lucky,” Matthew said.
Kate nodded. “Maybe I’ll be lucky too. Will we pass through Minneapolis?”
“Yes.”
“Grandma and Grandpa took me there once. We had lunch. Could we stop for lunch in Minneapolis?”
“Sure.”
They came out of the lake country and down along the banks of the Mississippi, past St. Cloud and into Minneapolis and the state university, and they had lunch in Charlie’s on Fourth Avenue South, and then drove through to St. Paul, the capitol building shining bright and white in the early afternoon sunshine. May was upon Minnesota and the roads were lined with lady’s-slipper and dandelion, stands of white pine, down through Winona, following the banks of the Mississippi, the river frothy green and white as it rushed to the sea, and across into Wisconsin with Lake Superior high above them now, into the real dairy country and the smell of good fresh cheese permeating the countryside, the glimpse of factories, the giant engines waiting to be shipped farther west and east, the Diesel engines, the turbines, the auto frames, pasteurizing machines, tractors, paper, crossing the Kickapoo, the Indian name sounding on the evening air with echoes of massacres and scalp-taking and the ghosts of pioneers, pushing on to Madison, the town still with the ebbing days of a university semester, twilight in the hills behind the school, and then across the state line into Illinois, hitting Rockford and then cutting over to Waukegan, and the sudden magnificent sight of Lake Michigan and the suburbs falling away one by one, Oak Park, Cicero, the national memory of gangsters of the twenties, bootleg whiskey and machine-gun chatter lingering in the fast-falling night, and then into Chicago itself and the giant buildings and the blood smell of the slaughterhouse, Kate’s eyes wide in her head. They devoured a steak in the Pump Room and went to sleep exhausted at ten.