Spare Change (Wyattsville #1)(16)

Susanna, certain she’d never get to New York if she took into account every negative thing Benjamin had to say, continued; “I’m thinking maybe late August, early September.”

“Well, I’m thinking a year or two down the road,” he growled back.

“I ain’t waiting no year or two! I got enough money saved to go now.”

“When are you gonna give this up, Susanna?” Benjamin dropped the wrench he’d been holding and glared at her in the most hateful way imaginable. “You’re a grown woman now; it’s high time you forgot about such foolishness.”

“Foolishness?” she answered. “Thinking I can be somebody is foolish? In case you haven’t noticed, I got a real good singing voice, everybody says so. ‘Susanna,’ they say, ‘you ought to be singing on the radio.’ But no,” she rambled on, “you want to keep me stuck on this farm, where I ain’t got the chance of a snowball in hell of being discovered.”

“You know what you got? Big tits.” He picked up the wrench and turned back to the tractor. “Big tits and not a speck of talent. I ain’t interested in going to New York to watch you parade around and make a jackass out of yourself.”

“You think you’re so smart don’t you, Benjamin? Well, you’re not. You’re stupider than me. Stupid and blind. If you wasn’t so blind, you’d see my singing is a way for us to get a better life, have more money, and live in an apartment building that ain’t run over with ground hogs and crickets!”

Benjamin twisted loose a bolt he’d been working on and said nothing.

“Well, I’m going to New York! Me and Ethan Allen, we’re going to New York and I don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not you come!” Susanna whirled on her heel and tromped out of the barn. She didn’t hear Benjamin mumble that such a thing would only happen over his dead body.

The very next day Susanna began making plans for the trip. “You start getting ready,” she told Ethan Allen, “Because we’re leaving here the first week of September.” Every morning when she got home from work, hours before the sun came up hot enough to burn a hole in a person’s head, she’d wake the boy and they’d swish back and forth on the porch swing, talking about what they were going to do in New York City.

“Can we climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty?” Ethan Allen would ask, “Ride the subway? Maybe go to Yankee Stadium?”

“We’ll do all those things and more!” Susanna answered gleefully. “Of course, I’ll have to get some auditions, first. But once I get a singing job, we’ll go hog wild, paint the town from one end to the other, do whatever we want!”

“You think maybe I could get Mickey Mantle’s autograph?”

“Sweetie, I’d bet on it!”

Such talk infuriated Benjamin and he turned nastier than ever. When the tractor broke down for the ninth time and refused to budge regardless of how many parts he replaced, it certainly didn’t help matters. Three weeks before they were to leave, on the very same day Susanna came home with the sequined dress she was planning to wear for auditions, he discovered the tiller was rusted through. “That’s it!” he screamed and kicked over the toolbox. Although it was well before noon, he marched himself into the house and sat down at the kitchen table with a full glass of whiskey.

“Ain’t it a bit early?” Susanna asked.

Benjamin glared at her like a man thinking of murder and poured himself another.

“Even if you could get the tractor fixed,” she said, “this heat’s already burnt those soy beans to a crisp.”

He drained the whiskey glass and then refilled it.

“Just give it up and come to New York with me and Ethan,” Susanna said, not noticing the way Benjamin’s left eye was twitching. “We’re gonna have the time of our lives! And, once I’ve got a singing job…”

Without a word of warning, Benjamin’s hand flew up and whacked Susanna across the face so hard she tumbled to the floor.

“No, Daddy!” Ethan Allen shouted and grabbed hold of his daddy’s arm.

“You thinking you can stop me, boy?” Benjamin growled as he shook his arm free. “Try it, and I’ll split your head open.”

“I didn’t mean nothing by it, Daddy. Mama didn’t neither. She was just hoping you’d come to New York with us.”

“Ain’t nobody going to New York—not me, not you, and most of all, not your mama!” Benjamin turned and stomped out the door.

Susanna got to her feet and slid her arm across Ethan’s shoulder, “Don’t worry,” she said with a nervous smile, “when the time comes, we’ll slip off without him knowing.”

After that incident, they avoided any outward talk of New York. Susanna whispered bits and pieces in Ethan Allen’s ear every so often and he kept imagining himself at Yankee Stadium, but other than that, very little was said. Benjamin remained in a foul mood for a week because of the broken tractor, then he finally went out and bought a brand new John Deere with four times the horsepower of his old tractor.

“This baby can do twice the work in half the time,” he told Susanna. “Next year I’ll be able to put in an extra field of soy beans, maybe even a crop of radishes.”