Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (1993) by Robert James Waller

Author:Robert James Waller [Waller, Robert James]
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-12-19T00:41:03.296000+00:00

"I call it Butterfly Gone

Jellie tipped her glass and took a serious drink of Jack Daniel's. She turned and looked at him, then out the window. In the hard, south light of November, he noticed for the first time the early lines of age coming to her face.

"This seems very strange, Michael. All our talks, our resolutions about right and wrong ... all of that." The university band was marching down the street a block away, playing the fight song, "We will go undaunted, hear our cry, hear our cry.^ Jellie Braden watched the dark curling leaves of late autumn stir and begin to tumble across the grass as a light breeze came in from the west.

Michael always remembered how she had looked that morning in Cedar Bend, staring outside at the things of autumn. Still looking out the window, she'd reached up and taken the elastic band from her pony-tail, shaking the thick black hair loose and long. She'd looked over at him then, the gray eyes soft and no longer like an arrow in flight, saying, "I'm a little shaky. It's been a long time since . . . well, a long time."

"When are you expected home?"

"I have the day. Jimmy's attending a reunion of his fraternity on campus. They're all going to the game and out to dinner after that. All that arm punching and male bonding was more than I could think about tolerating. Besides"-she smiled-"there were the ducks."

In midafternoon they heard the roar of the football crowd from the stadium. The sound of it came faintly over tapes of Cleo Laine ballads and sweet obscurities whispered in Tamil by Jellie Braden on an autumn afternoon in the high latitudes.

"If God lives at all, God lives in moments like these," a man had once said to her. And she had said that to Michael Tillman in English, looking up at him, touching his face with her hands, loving him and missing that other man and sometimes confusing the two of them even though she didn't want to on that afternoon.

Michael looked down at the pulse of blood in her throat, at her eyes widening as she arched her breasts and belly toward him, eyes looking first at him and then straight upward as India rolled within her and time went back to the high country of an older land where dark hands had moved over those same breasts and a voice had commanded her, "Wider now, Jellie, wider still, everything, Jellie. Give me all of you, and I'll give you back yourself when we have finished." And in the high country she had screamed aloud in some combination of fear and pleasure. And she had done that once more in a bed in Iowa, then turned the scream into a dwindling, involuntary cry for all the things she had once felt and now felt again with another strange man who lived in his own far places.

Michael had a sense that day she was feeling and doing things not attributable to her life with Jimmy Braden.

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