The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass

Author:Julia Glass [Glass, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-37943-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

The classroom auction project was so quintessentially Matlock that Ira could hardly keep a straight face when Tristan’s mother, the self-appointed Class Parent, explained it to him.

There remained in Matlock one working dairy farm—or, more accurately, a dormant dairy farm had been revived by a couple who made their fortune young, the husband having designed a suite of video games combining medieval warfare with intergalactic travel. He was now retired from the virtual mass-murder business and, with his wife, had rebuilt the derelict house and barn, sent himself to “farm school” in Vermont, and purchased a small herd of picture-perfect, Ben & Jerry’s–style Holsteins. They sold their premium products at a handful of boutique grocers, but their true claim to fame was their clandestine supply of raw milk, available to a select group of Matlock families sworn to secrecy (or relative discretion) in exchange for the assurance that their children would have the very best, bacterially robust immune systems imaginable.

There was a waiting list for this coterie, but Kendra’s mother had nobly donated her membership to E & F’s fund-raising efforts, sending herself back to the bottom of the list. She had procured from Farmer Xbox ten empty glass milk bottles, onto which she and two other crafty moms would decoupage self-portraits painted by the children. These bottles would be placed in a wooden carrying crate to be fashioned by Kendra’s dad, a weekend woodworker. This creation, along with the coveted dairy co-op membership, was expected to fetch a price higher even than the quartet of season tickets at Fenway or, possibly, the Fourth of July weekend at a seaside house-for-eight in Chilmark.

The mom committee had just left Ira’s classroom after delivering this wonderful news. And in fact, if all the children had to do was create oblong self-portraits suited to fit on an old-fashioned milk bottle (though associations with the milk-carton portraits of the missing gave him a momentary chill), Ira was getting off lucky. Joyce, who taught the Oak Leaves, had been roped into helping make a quilt. Each child’s square would be rendered in ikat, a technique that one of the Oak Leaf dads would be teaching the kids. It sounded complex and messy to Ira, who preferred simple art projects like hunting down autumn leaves and collaging them between waxed paper.

These were the projects he had stayed late to trim and pin on the wall that afternoon, following the auction project meeting. After he’d finished, he wandered outside to one of those flawless autumn afternoons when a low sun casts prismatic rays through naked trees. He walked down to the pond and sat on a log that functioned as a rustic bench. As he sat there, he heard noises in the undercarriage of the barn, the floor beneath the nursery school that still served as storage, which Percy Darling now shared with E & F.

He turned to see Arturo, Robert’s friend, emerging. They were mutually startled.

“Hola!” exclaimed Turo. “You’re a stealthy one.”

“Look who’s talking,” said Ira.

“Stowing the canoe.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.