Roseborough

Chapter One1MARY LOU works at the Dairy Queen. Maudie is the manager and she said it was a computer course that made her marketable. She took it on Monday and Wednesday nights at the Lone Oak Community College right here in Lone Oak, Texas. Well, what with Gundren dead and Echo run away, Mary Lou is just about crazy, but the way Maudie talks about college makes it seem like something to hold to. So on her next day off (she has Mondays), Mary Lou takes the pickup, stained with the blood of the horse that killed Gundren, out to the Lone Oak Community College to sign up for CIS-I. The Lone Oak Community College is big. All of it's in two huge buildings that are separated by a creek. Mary Lou parks on the wrong side of the creek, and she has to walk through a glass-enclosed walkway over the creek to get to the right building. It's a nice walk because the middle of August is hot. The registration is in a big gymnasium with basketball hoops at each end. There are tables all around and people behind the tables and lines in front of the tables and people moving around like they're lost. There are all kinds of people, like everybody at the Lone Oak Mall just picked up and decided to go to college-fat and thin, high school students and grandmothers, and some not even speaking English-all looking lost. Somebody needs to get it organized. This is what Mary Lou thinks. She finds a registration line, A through G, and gets in it. While she is in the line she reads the fall schedule. She has always loved to read, and she reads all the courses they have there, courses in stress management and family relationships, and then she sees Single Parenting and she says to herself, "Well, now. Here's the answer for Echo and me," and she writes it down. When she stops at the table marked Counseling a lady asks, "Are you a single parent?" Mary Lou says, "Yes, since Gundren is dead." A slight frown appears on her forehead. "Well, most of the time he doesn't seem dead. It just seems like he's off somewhere, driving his truck," she adds. The lady-thick glasses, a purple swatch of hair on one side, eyes like a grasshopper's-laces her fingers together and stares at Mary Lou. Then she glances at the table next to hers, which has a longer line in front of it than her table has. "I'm not a counselor," she says and blinks. She blinks, maybe ten or twenty times. Then she says, "Are you aware that this is a noncredit course?" "I don't need credit," Mary Lou says. "I've got the money for it." The lady frowns down at the card in her hand, looks at Mary Lou, and blinks. Then the lady coughs and takes a tissue from her green purse and dabs at her nose and puts the tissue back. She snaps her purse shut. Taking Single Parenting is not going to be easy. Mary Lou can see that. Maybe she's already failed some kind of a test. "Is your husband dead or not?" Mary Lou leans forward. "Dead," she whispers. "Well, I'm just filling in here," the lady says. "But I guess you know what you're doing." Then she puts initials by Mary Lou's name and nods toward the table that is registering the single parents. A man signs her up quick and easy. So on a Monday evening in late August here she is in a classroom with three windows and a green chalkboard and six single parents, not looking at anything or anybody. Despite her blue jeans and yellow shirt, Mary Lou has the look of an old-fashioned girl. The cloud of hair pulled loosely up on top of her head is reminiscent, perhaps, of a Gibson girl, and, too, there are those green eyes, their gaze direct yet dreamy, like a cat's. She sits straight, her hands carefully folded on the desk. Her hair is gold or brown or russet, a blend so fine that at any given moment the color depends on the light. At this moment her hair is a fiery russet. A wash of freckles over her nose and a mouth inclined toward a smile give the impreWood, Jane Roberts is the author of 'Roseborough' with ISBN 9780525947158 and ISBN 0525947159.