A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford

behind her head and lay so that the ellipses of her underarms shone in the darkness.
    â€œThat’s a good question, too.”
    â€œI really don’t think it matters, though, do you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell, I don’t. I couldn’t care less. You’re such a serious boy, Newel, and you’re only twenty-eight.” She reached her fingers back until they touched the chill window glass and her body shone luminously in the vacant moonlight.

3
    In 1947 they had had a black Mercury and his father had a heart attack and couldn’t call on his accounts alone in the summer months. So his mother drove them. And in the black hot summer
they had gone into Louisiana and spent a July day across the river in Vidalia, the first day. And when they had worked as far as Ville Platte the Mercury broke down and they had stayed in the Menges Hotel that had ceiling fans and snake doctors in the rooms. He remembered walking out of the hotel into the still street at noon and going with his father to the agency building, and a woman behind the glass cashier’s in a beaded dress and red lips and short hair, and then back to the room holding his father’s hand. The ceiling had covered over with grease that came out of the still air, and over that a covering of fluffy dust like a sycamore leaf. And the whole time the nine days they were in Ville Platte, he was afraid of the snake doctors and believed they would sting him and kill him though his mother told him again and again that they wouldn’t
.

4
    She lay against the window wall, moistening the hairs of his belly with her lips.
    â€œYou’re very happy with yourself,” he said.
    â€œOf course,” she hummed. “Aren’t you pleased?” She turned on her stomach and smiled at him.
    He was quiet.
    â€œThat’s good enough,” she said softly, examining his stomach more closely, as if she had discovered something unnatural. “It wouldn’t damage you to be pleased. I don’t punish myself with things I can’t remember.”
    â€œWhat do you do?”
    â€œI don’t let myself become bothered.” She smiled again over the horizon of his stomach. “You have a stevedore’s chest, Newel. How did you make it so big? I admired it from afar when we were children.” She piloted her finger along his ribs until his flesh drew.
    â€œI’m cold,” he said irritably.
    â€œOf course you are.” She laughed out loud. “You don’t have any dirt on you. Get under the covers.”
    â€œI want to tell you a story.”
    â€œIf you’ll get warm. You need some dirt on you. I’m sorry, I don’t tell jokes very well.”
    â€œDo you want to hear it?”
    â€œOf course.”
    He sat up straighter and rolled his head against the invisible window. “I went out one time, when I was seventeen, rabbit hunting with Edgar Boynton, out the other side of Edwards, Mississippi, in a silage field he knew about. And we’d been out for about an hour and hadn’t seen a rabbit, and I went off by myself walking down the back of a hedge fence, and just kept walking until I heard somebody shoot. And quick as I heard it, I ran back up and around the hedge fence to where he was. And he was standing there looking at something I couldn’t see until I got close up to him. He wasn’t saying anything, just standing gaping. And when I got to where he was, I looked down in the grass and there was a big barn owl, pushed back up in the silage weeds staring at me and Edgar with his big heart-shaped face and some kind of awful fear in his eyes, and his talons bared and his beak stretched open like he was about to claw us to bits. And Edgar never said a word, he just stared at the owl like the owl had a grip on him, though he had shot one wing off completely and it was lying on the ground between us and him, all white on the bottom without any blood showing. And he had such