Windfall A Novel

On a long hill just outside of Corsicana, Ben first noticed that he was losing power. Stepping on the accelerator felt like stepping on air. His speed dropped from sixty-five to fifty-five and then to fifty. Two pickups and a small Accord with an A&M sticker in the rear window zoomed past him. Once he got to the top of the rise, everything kicked in again; there wasn't a trace of a problem. The moon shone over empty winter pastures and the drained swampland along the Trinity River. Katy and both children were asleep. He'd hoped to get back to Austin early enough to at least look over his lecture notes for the next day, but saying good-bye to Katy's family after a long vacation was not a simple thing. For years they'd been spending Christmases on Katy's family's farm in Mississippi. There was no place in the world where Katy felt freer. The kids took care of themselves, roaming with their cousins, riding horses, going on long Jeep rides over the fields. The family all gathered for the holiday--brothers, sisters, relatives from Boston and Chicago. Contrary to the nearly universally held opinion of Mississippi as a bastion of the unenlightened, these gatherings were as cosmopolitan as any Ben had ever experienced; there were folklorists and screenwriters, Harvard cardiologists and painters from Venice Beach. Sometimes it seemed as if meals for twenty were being prepared nonstop, but Katy loved it, working in the kitchen with her mother, organizing a pinata party in the garage for all the kids, black and white, who lived along the road, taking long walks through the pastures with her sister. Their life in Austin seemed so small in comparison. On the long ride through Louisiana and East Texas, a quietness would settle over Katy, and Ben always felt an unacknowledged reproach in that quietness. He heard someone stir. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw Matt shift under his quilt and throw his arm across his eyes, trying to go back to sleep. The headlights flashed across a shack with a hand-painted sign for barbecue tacked above the door; the place looked as if it had been closed for years. The van's tires hummed on the asphalt. He reached down into the sack next to his seat and fished out a couple of stale gingersnaps. He turned on the radio and flipped through the evangelists and the oldies stations, trying to keep himself alert. Then, on a long incline ten miles east of Mount Calm, it happened again: the accelerator suddenly going soft as a beanbag chair, the van slowing down--sixty, fifty, forty--and this time the motor began to backfire. Katy woke up and turned sleepily to him. "Is everything okay?" "Everything's fine," he said. Ben was a man who kept his worries to himself. As soon as they hit the top of the hill all difficulties vanished; once again the van was running like a top. Katy was asleep in another minute, but Ben was utterly awake. This was all they needed. Maybe it was something small, a dirty carburetor filter, but when was it ever small? The van had 105,000 miles on it and they couldn't afford a new one, but the truth was, they couldn't afford a three-hundred-dollar repair bill either. Every time something like this happened, it seemed to push them to the brink. In his twenties and thirties, Ben had never thought about money--more or less what you'd expect from a scholar whose specialty was the transcendentalists--but now, in his forties, trying to raise two children on a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary, it was all he thought about. There wasn't an ounce of trouble the rest of the way. In the blackest of moods, Ben sped up the ramp onto I-35 at Waco, merging fearlessly with the thundering trucks and the shiny-bright sedans of returning college students. They pulled up in front of their yellow two-story house in South Austin a little after ten and roused the sleeping children. As he shoved open theCronin, Isaac is the author of 'Windfall A Novel' with ISBN 9780812992267 and ISBN 0812992261.