Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page A

had through everything else. Instead I tried inserting the quarter again, and when it still didn’t work, I read the instructions, which didn’t makesense. The panic rose up, the feeling of being alone in a strange city and not knowing where I was. A feeling I’d had many times since Ezra’s stroke. Then the skipping, rapid-fire heartbeat. I gave the cart a good, swift shake.
    My mother put a hand on my arm. “Oh, honey, what is it?”
    I tried jamming the quarter in the cart again, and lowered my voice. “I just don’t know what else to do! How to deal with him.”
    “You haven’t been driving much lately, have you?” she asked.
    On the sidewalk just ahead of us a woman, beautifully dressed in an indigo jacket and skirt, rifled through the garbage can. A plastic bag filled with pop cans was slung over her arm. A widow, I imagined, in her early sixties, reduced by her husband’s passing to cashing in returnables.
    I looked up at her. “Not much, no.”
    “For years your father drove to town, and I didn’t. Gus liked driving, and he always got into the truck first, to wait for me, because I was always late getting ready. So when I came out, I just got into the passenger side. I never really thought anything of it. I just assumed that I would drive again. But then he got sick and when I tried to drive I found I couldn’t anymore.”
    “I suppose it was the same with Ezra and me. Just habit. I’ve never much liked driving.” I looked over at Ezra and he turned away. He knew as well as I that this wasn’t true. “Why can’t I figure this thing out?”
    The woman with the bag of pop cans turned to us and tapped the coin slot on my cart. “You push the key against the quarter,” she said, and showed me. “The key on the next cart pops out, see?”
    “Ah,” I said. “Thanks.”
    She patted my hand. “I’m forever helping people with these stupid carts. I don’t know why they don’t just get some ordinaryones and hire somebody like Marshall there to collect them.” She pointed at the brain-injured boy. “God knows there’s lots like him who need the work.”
    Marshall waved at her and she waved back. A man driving a Volkswagen Beetle honked at him. So Marshall had become a fixture in the town, a character everyone knew, a mascot.
    I lifted Jeremy into the cart and pushed him into the store as my mother held onto the side to steady herself. Ezra followed behind.
    “I’m going to gather a few things on my own,” he said. He put a coin in one of the carts inside the store and pulled it smoothly from the stack.
    My mother stood next to me as I watched him head down the aisle. “He’s not shopping with us?”
    “Where’s Daddy going?”
    I turned my cart to push it in the opposite direction. “I don’t know what he’s doing.”
    Mom followed Jeremy and me. “There were times when my father couldn’t drive,” she said, “and either my mother or I had to drive him to town. He hated that. He said it made him feel useless. A woman didn’t drive then if there was a man in the car.” She nodded back at Ezra. “I imagine this is all so very hard for him.”
    I turned the cart down the baking aisle and Mom picked up a small bag of pastry flour for the pie she wanted to make for Dad. “In any case, in a year or two none of this will seem so bad,” she said. “My mother always said that time was like a great flour sifter.”
    “Flour sifter?” I thought of my grandmother’s flour sifter that my mother still used, the handle that turned the flour over the screen.
    “You sift flour not only to get rid of lumps and impurities,” said Mom, “but to aerate the flour as well, so you can measure itaccurately. Measure unsifted flour and you’ll have a dense cake indeed. My mother used to say that time works like that: it not only sifts out the lumps—takes the sting out of events that seemed so painful at the time—but it allows you to measure those events properly, with some