Read A Regular Guy for Free Online

she did not do them, it could be worse.
    She drove that night in a straight line, through storm, the crack of lightning, trees of white, sheets of water dividing, spray on both sides,and it came to her that she had passed into the other world, where her mother was dead. Jane felt sure her mother was going to die, because that was the only reason she could imagine they had to be apart: her mother so pretty and, everyone always said, so young. “Yeah?” Mary questioned, with a strange expression, whenever Jane reported a compliment. Mary didn’t trust people talking about them. She felt always alert to the possibility that they were making fun of her.
    Jane had never had a death yet. Mary had told how she’d leaned down and kissed her mother in the coffin. And Jane had the picture now of her mother dead. She would be dead the same way she had been a thousand times on the bed, sleeping, the way her face went, lying down, everything draped from her nose. Jane started crying for herself because she didn’t even get to kiss her mother.
    In the beginning, more things were alive: plants felt, something commanded, creatures lived in the sky. The morning after her trip to her father, she woke up in a hole of dirt, her mouth full of stones, her hands smelling for a long time of gasoline.
    The most terrible and wondrous experience in Jane di Natali’s life was over by the time she was ten, before she’d truly mastered the art of riding a bicycle.
    Dawn began long before light. There was less in the air. Sooner than she expected, the first turn came.
    She thought again of her acorns and what she’d forgotten. She was supposed to glue the caps back on over the salt, but they had no glue. This was to be sure Mack Soto helped her mother in time. Last night, this lapse made her wince, but now it seemed nothing, a breath on air. She understood she would never believe in her childish powers again.
    The sky was lightening in thick bands of color. Highway signs worked. She would find his house today. And she would discover the town she had been promised since she was born. She would use signs and numbers and songs of outside now. But she would have to learn them, system by system, in a new school.
    For the first time, Jane wondered who built the roads and if there was one person sprawled somewhere, as she had on the floor with hercrayons, and drawn the whole world, plotting the highways, and then how that one person got the people to build them and where would the money come from and was that person God when he made the lakes and the dry land or was it the President. They were still building new highways all the time. That was what those striped mixing trucks were that you sometimes got stuck in back of at a traffic light. One of them had dropped a glop on the road where she went to school and kids ran up to write their names with sticks and put their handprints forever in the sidewalk. There in the mountains was an uneven corner with the imprint of Jane’s smaller hand.
    When she finally saw the town, it was alive with order. A flock of children walked in sunlight to their everyday school. Men sat outside a tobacco shop, reading newspapers. It had all been going on without them.
    Then, at a corner, she saw the man she recognized from the picture long ago, wearing a brown uniform. Against all orders, she stopped the truck and jumped out.
    He seemed to be delivering a dolly of milk crates, cartons of different whites and a few chocolate.
    “Do you know me?” she said.
    He shrugged, smiled and said, “No hablo inglés,” then walked on.
    After her drive, when she became a passenger again, she always buckled her seat belt without being asked. Danger had little allure for her, no music. In fact, she seemed to retain almost no desire for her earlier life: the whisper of a dawn wind, the cold promise of an autumn moon over the High Sierra, when all the tourists have gone home and woodsmoke spikes the air and the ones who are left are those