Chapters (17)
“Think of a price if you decide to sell it,” she said. “I don’t know how much a rock costs. If we could even have a few of them, that’d be great.”
“Well, maybe we can work out a trade,” Albert said to Clay.
“Sure,” Clay said, and he started down the steps.
“We’ll think of something good,” Susan called, one hand on the car door, the other shading her eyes from the low, evening sun.
Inside the station wagon, Clay started the old engine. “How am I gonna move those blocks,” he said. “Low flatbed trailer, I guess.”
“Easier on the chassis,” Susan said, and they both were silent. The car was hot, the light no longer pleasant but flat and oppressive. The engine seemed loud as they backed down the drive.
“You wanted it, too, right?” she asked.
“Sure,” Clay said. “Just don’t know how I’m going to move it.”
“You weren’t much help,” she said. But he’d done all right, and, anyway, they had the stone. “It almost didn’t feel worth it,” she said. “I thought he knew he wouldn’t use it.”
“You want to give it back?”
“No. Someone else would just take it.”
Clay turned the car around in the clearing by Albert’s toolshed, and the water sample in the back rolled again to the other side of the car, bumping against the door. Susan looked over her shoulder to wave good-bye, but Albert didn’t see her. He stood against the porch railing with his glasses in his hand, straight-shouldered in the brace and tilted forward, staring out at the spilled and overgrown jumble of stone, the peach trees beyond, the red bluffs across the river.
Susan took the water bottle in her lap to stop the irritating thumping, then looked out the windshield, away from Albert. “Are you sure he understood?” she asked.
Clay nodded and ran a hand over his rough beard.
“If we think of something really good to do with it,” she said, “then it won’t be so sad to take it.” She closed her eyes and found she couldn’t picture the stone as part of a building, only as freestanding monuments on their undeveloped lot, upright versions of the ruin in Albert’s yard. A bathroom wall with places for soap and plants but without a bathroom, a garden wall with no garden. With effort, she held those walls in her mind and added a framework around them, a roofed house between the shower wall and the garden. Windows and a door, stucco, visible beams; she constructed the house until they reached the two-lane highway, the stone turning corners and supporting ceilings in her mind.