Rock of Ages by Howard Owen Page A

she loved but who represented The Farm and thus must be escaped.
    But she couldn’t hear it, and she told him so.
    â€œI reckon you hear it or you don’t,” he’d said, speaking softly and looking across in the eastern distance to the Blue Sandhills. “It ain’t possible to make somebody hear something if their ears can’t pick it up.”
    They sat quietly for a few more minutes, hardly talking at all. After what seemed like a decent interval, she asked if they could go back to the house, that the bugs were eating her up.
    He started the old truck.
    When they returned, and before she could escape the great outdoors, he put his big, freckled right hand over her small, tan left one.
    â€œI know this isn’t what you want,” he said. “It’s probably good you’re going off to school and all. Some people’s got a life for themselves that’s somewhere else altogether, and they’ve got to go find it. I was lucky, I reckon. I didn’t have to move.
    â€œYou’re going to do just fine, whatever you do. But I want you to know, if things ever get tough, and sometimes they can, you’ve always got you a home, right here. Don’t forget that.”
    She said she wouldn’t, and she was moved to kiss his stubbly cheek. He already seemed so old to her, just turned 60, and this was his benediction. He’d hardly ever said so many words to her at one time. He tended to hoard them for special occasions.
    She understands now, and has for a painful while, what he meant about tough times, how they come to everyone. She’s always been proud, though, that she never did come limping back home, no matter what. She’s here now, she assures herself and everyone else, to sell the farm and get the hell out.
    So why does her son, so removed from all this, seem somehow drawn back to a world he only experienced peripherally, for one brief, needy summer?
    Maybe, she thinks, it skips a generation.
    Maybe East Geddie is just another foreign culture to absorb.
    Maybe, he just wants to drive me crazy.
    When you were down in Guatemala, she wants to ask him if the time is ever right, and you were helping those farmers keep the rats out of their grain, did you ever hear things growing?
    She’d like to know.
    The three of them, with Leeza opening doors and helping as much as she can, get the dresser moved into an unused back room. Georgia invites Kenny to stay for dinner, but he says he can’t, that he has to go somewhere.
    â€œI’m sure,” Georgia says with a smirk. He shakes his head, almost smiling.
    To Georgia’s relief, Leeza does decide that beef Wellington might be too ambitious, and she does let Georgia show her a tried-and-true recipe for roast beef that involves little more than opening a can of mushroom soup and slicing an onion.
    While they wait for the roast to cook, Georgia suggests that they play Scrabble. She and Justin have always enjoyed it and are well-matched rivals. Leeza has played with them on a couple of occasions, but not well. It will do her good, Georgia thinks, to be challenged, to expand her mind with something besides television and poorly written thrillers.
    Justin is lukewarm to her suggestion, and Leeza seems chilly to the idea.
    â€œCome on,” Georgia pleads. “Just a quick game. We’re not playing for money or anything.”
    â€œJust blood,” Leeza says, and then laughs nervously when Georgia looks at her.
    Justin and Leeza finally consent, and Georgia retrieves the faded set she found in the attic her first week down, the same one she and her mother once used. Littlejohn would play, too, on occasion, but he’d been illiterate for the first half of his life, and despite his late-quenched thirst for knowledge, he never was more than token opposition.
    She and her mother did play for blood, Georgia has to admit, challenging questionable words, sending each other to the dictionary, sometimes