July Holiday

CHAPTER ONE
El­len Carver fol­ded the damp tea-towel once, hung it on the rack be­side the range, and reached for her lo­tion on the ledge above the sink. As she mas­saged the creamy li­quid into her hands, she gazed va­cantly out the kit­chen win­dow into a hot, early July af­ter­noon, un­de­cided whether to run a batch of Roy‘s work clothes through the auto­matic washer, or watch an af­ter­noon serial on tele­vi­sion. Neither pro­spect in­ter­ested her. Lately, after six­teen months of mar­riage, El­len was be­gin­ning to real­ize she was bored and moody most of the time. Roy, when he came home for lunch, talked with his mouth full of food, and she re­sen­ted this, as she did the things he talked about, like how well the new tractor ran, how eas­ily the South field plowed, and how the crops would go on look­ing good be­cause there was so much sub­soil mois­ture in the ground to coun­ter­act the ef­fects of hot, dry weather. None of this ap­pealed to El­len, al­though she real­ized the im­port­ance of plow­ing and rain and cul­tiv­a­tion and so on, be­cause farm­ing was Roy‘s busi­ness. What she didn‘t like was his in­ab­il­ity to dis­cuss any­thing else. Farm­ing was his sole in­terest. He couldn‘t dis­cuss top­ical things. Just farm­ing.