She knew people who thought of the book as depressing, but she was not one of them. It was sad, jarring in some of the passages, yet she had always found something revealing burrowed in its pages. She accepted the Joads and all of the other families as survivors, some better than others, and the way Steinbeck gave them such delicate shadings of change, they were as real to her as her own life had been.

She, too, had been a migrant of sorts, going after dreams because they seemed to hold promise.

It had lasted almost a dozen years, her migration, and what she had to show for it was a farm littered with rocks and a husband in a coffin.

No child. Only the memory of an almost-child, one lost in miscarriage, one so briefly carried she had never mentioned it to her husband. There was no reason. The pregnancy had occurred in the last days of his furlough before he shipped off to war, and when the miscarriage came—before she had even written to him of the pregnancy—he had been in battle, with enough to worry about.

The doctor had called the miscarriage a blessing. Had said something must have been wrong with the pregnancy, or her body would not have rejected the fetus.

“A lot of women have miscarriages,” the doctor had explained in a voice so bland he might have been describing a chest cold. “Some of them probably don’t even know what’s happened. They just think it’s their time of the month, after they’ve missed it once or twice.”

The way he made it sound, it was nothing compared to the suffering of the Joads.

And that was probably true.

The Joads had no choice in doing what they did. She could have become pregnant after the war, if Boyd had agreed to it. He had not. Was not ready for children, he had said. Maybe later. Maybe.

If she had a child it would be late in life, she thought, and most likely with a man she had not yet met.

She marked the book and closed it, knowing what would be waiting for her when she opened it again.

Chapter 15.

The chapter beginning with the description of hamburger stands along Route 66—writing so rich and rhythmic it needed the snappy sound of a wire-brush drumstick over a snare drum if someone wanted to say the words aloud. You could read the words and close your eyes and see everything the eyes of Steinbeck’s fingers had seen as he typed out the lines.

It was the reading of such lines that made her want to become a writer, and it was also the reason she had never made a serious effort to do it; she believed she would never be good enough to match the worst sentence John Steinbeck would ever write.

She put the book on the side table next to her reading chair and sat thinking how it would be to get in a car loaded with everything you could carry and then drive away, following the wiggling, pencil-thin mark of a road on a map, not knowing where you might be in a day or a week, or who you might meet along the way.