by Larry Watson
Roy Linderman pauses and clears his throat. “Dean asked me to call you. He’s got cancer. Prostate. Mom and I took him to Billings to see a specialist. They operated but it had already spread. His chances don’t look good. What the hell am I saying. Chances. He doesn’t have any. It’s just a question of when. Six months maybe at the outside.”
“Oh no, I’m sorry. How’s he doing?”
“You know. Good days and bad days. And now the bad days are pushing out the good.”
“How about your mom? How’s she taking it?”
“You know Mom. This can’t happen to her boy. She thinks maybe the doctors made a mistake. Or they’ll find a drug or something.”
“I’m so sorry. Please tell Dean how sorry I am.”
“Like I say. He wanted you to know. And Edie? Something more—”
She pushes away from the wall and opens her eyes. The lunch dishes in the sink. The radio on the counter. The empty coffee cup. The mail on the kitchen table. Sunlight’s bright geometry on the floor. The sound of water from the lawn sprinkler pattering against the side of the house. Nothing says that her life is changed from what it was before she picked up the telephone. Nothing but the voice in her ear.
“He wants to see you. One more time.”
“But he didn’t call me.”
“You know how hard it would have been for him. I told him I’d do it.”
“Still wheeling and dealing, Roy?”
“That’s not fair, Edie. He’s dying.”
“And I said I’m sorry. But there’s nothing I can do. He’s there and I’m here. Good-bye, Roy. You can tell Dean I said good-bye too. Or not. That’s up to you.”
As she hangs up the phone, she hears his voice, still pleading, still trying—“Wait, Edie, wait—”
She walks quickly away from the telephone, but why flee its silence? She turns on the radio: “Ain’t got time to take a fast train . . .”
The oldies station.
Her husband says that in this heat, they should leave the curtains drawn, but Edie usually opens them once he leaves for work. She closes them now.
She goes to the sink and turns on the hot water, lifts a plate, rinses it, and places it in the dishwasher.
A letter. Yes, she could have received this news in a letter: Dear Edie, I’m writing to let you know I have cancer. Just the way he might have phrased it in high school when they passed notes in study hall. And his brother would have written it the same way: Dear Edie, I’m writing to let you know Dean has cancer. As different as they are, as easy as it is—and was—to forget they’re twins, the fact could still assert itself in surprising ways. Or the news might have come after the fact: Dear Edie, I’m sorry to say Dean passed away. She could have seen the name and return address on the envelope—or recognized the loopy handwriting—and decided whether to allow this news to come any closer. She could have thrown a letter away unopened. Why would she think it held news she needed or wanted to know?
Even if she began to read she could decide at any time to stop—after the greeting perhaps, before the crucial information. But once someone speaks into your ear, you can’t decide not to hear it.
The back door faces west, and opening it today is like opening an oven door. This part of Montana, in the lee of mountains always cold at their heights, never has heat like this, never until this summer, and now it has gone on for eight days, creating its own suspense. Edie walks across the grass, as dry and prickly under her bare feet as wheat stubble. At the far end of the yard, out of the reach of the shade of the cottonwoods that mark their property line, her daughter is lying in an aluminum-and-plastic lawn chair, her taut, trim teenage body glistening with sweat. Jennifer is wearing a two-piece red bathing suit, and she’s adjusted it to allow the sun access to parts of her body usually covered, the straps off her shoulders and the bra top pushed down an extra inch.
Her eyes are closed, but she must hear her mother’s approach. “Who called?” she asks.
“You’ll have to move,” Edie says. “I need to pull the sprinkler over here.”
“Was it for me?”
“I would have let you know. I’m not intercepting your calls.”
Edie maneuvers around so she’s standing between her daughter and the sun’s rays. “I don’t know how you can do it,” she says.
Suddenly shadowed, Jennifer opens her eyes. “Do what?”
“Just lay out here.”
“You should try it. It feels good.”
“Does it? I thought maybe you were just willing to suffer for your beauty.”
“Wow.” Jennifer sits up and pulls the straps back up onto her shoulders. “Where did that come from, Mom?”
“Sorry,” she says. “Sorry. Maybe I’m just jealous.”
Jennifer is folding up the lawn chair. “I’ll move the sprinkler,” she says.
As she walks toward the house, Edie looks back over her shoulder. She hasn’t been in hiding, and she’s made no attempt to keep her life secret. So why does she feel as though she’s been found out?
THAT NIGHT THE telephone rings, and though Jennifer scrambles up from the living room floor where she’s been lying and watching St. Elsewhere, she can’t beat her father to the phone. Gary Dunn has been sitting at the kitchen table, his broad shoulders bent over his forms and his calculator. He rises to his full, considerable height and with an exasperated sigh picks up the receiver.
“Dunn residence,” he says.
A man’s voice asks to speak to Edie.
“Who’s calling?”
The man gives his name and without saying a word in reply, Gary Dunn simply lets go of the phone. It dangles from its cord and bumps against the wall.
Jennifer strides into the kitchen, and her father shakes his head no and says, “It’s for your mother.”
Into the living room Gary marches, his daughter close behind. His wife is paging through a copy of Good Housekeeping.
“It’s for you,” he says.
“Who is it?”
“Answer it,” he says.
He follows Edie into the kitchen, and when she picks up the telephone, he stations himself on the other side of the room, his arms crossed, his back against the stove. He’s wearing a white shirt and dark slacks, but he’s built as if stiff-arming a tackler and perhaps bucking hay might be in his past. And you wouldn’t want him looking at you the way he’s looking at Edie, his dark eyes glowering.
Edie turns toward the phone and focuses her gaze on the numbers printed on its buttons. “Hello,” she says.
“Hey, Edie. It’s me again. I thought of something I should have said earlier.”
“What’s that?” she says, her voice an uninflected whisper.
“I could pick you up. Or Carla and I could.”
“Carla?”
“Oh shit. You don’t know. Hell, why would you. You remember Carla Hall? Sure you do. She’s Carla Linderman now. Going on twelve years since we got hitched.”
“You and Carla . . . Well, congratulations.”
“Yeah, thanks. Anyway. We could drive up to Granite Valley and bring you back to Gladstone. You could look in on Dean, and then we’d take you back home. Same day, if you like. Though that’s a hell of a lot of miles in a day.”
“I told you, Roy,” she says, and now she looks back at her husband, who has not moved from his station. “I can’t do that.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
“Whichever.”
“Nothing I can say then?”
“No. There’s nothing you can say.”
“Okay,” he says. “I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed. But setting everything else aside, I have to tell you, Jesus Christ it’s good to hear your voice again.”
“I’m saying good-bye now, Roy.” She places the telephone receiver gently on the hook.
From across the room Gary Dunn addresses his wife. “What the hell was that all about?”
“My ex-husband has cancer,” she says. “He’s dying.”
> “He sounded pretty damn chipper to me.”
“That was Roy.”
“I know who it was.”
“Dean’s brother. I was married to Dean. They’re twins. Maybe you have trouble telling them apart.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“I thought it was funny,” Edie says but she’s not smiling either.
There aren’t many crew cuts left in America, but Gary Dunn still has his. His close-cropped hair bristles from his scalp like iron filings on a magnet. He brushes his palm across his skull and says, “But the one with cancer couldn’t make the call himself?”
Edie remains by the telephone, leaning against the wall, her hands behind her back. “He wants to see me . . .”
“The hell.”
“You asked why he called.”
“This Dean—do you still have feelings for him? Is that what his brother thinks?”
“My God, Gary. It’s been twenty years since I last saw him.”
“That’s not exactly an answer to my question, is it?”
Usually the central air hums almost constantly, so when it shuts off momentarily it seems as though someone has suddenly left the room. In the silence following Gary Dunn’s question there’s time for the air-conditioning to cycle off and then on once again.
“He’s going to die,” Edie says. “I feel sorry for him.”
“And that’s not an answer either.”
Jennifer comes back into the kitchen, and for an instant the distance between her parents seems to disconcert her. But she has her own curiosity to satisfy. “Who called?” she asks.
“One of your mother’s old boyfriends,” says Gary.
Edie shakes her head sadly. “Don’t listen to your father,” she says. “Someone I used to know is sick.”
“Go watch your show,” Gary says to his daughter.
Jennifer looks to her mother.
Edie tells her, “No one you know, honey.”
Jennifer has long legs and when she backs slowly out of the room, it seems a maneuver as awkward as a filly’s. Once she’s gone, Edie says to her husband, “Shame on you.”
“Me! Look who’s talking!”
If there was any sadness in Edie’s eyes earlier, it’s gone now, and she looks at her husband with pure defiance.
“So if he wants to see you,” says Gary, “I guess that means he’s up to traveling.”
“He wants me to come there.”
Gary emits a chuffing little laugh. “Like hell you are!”
She says, “I haven’t decided yet.” She walks out of the kitchen.
JUST AS IN her first marriage, Edie usually stays up later than her husband. She’ll watch The Tonight Show or a movie. Or read one of her mysteries. But finally she’ll shut down the house for the night. She makes certain the front and back doors are locked.
In the bathroom she washes her face and brushes her teeth. On her way down the hall, she checks for a strip of light under her daughter’s closed door. There’s no light tonight.
She opens the door to the bedroom she and her husband share. The lamp beside the bed is burning, and the bed is still made and her husband is nowhere to be seen. Edie steps into the room, and when she does the door closes behind her. Before she can turn around, a hand clamps down hard on the back of her neck and shoves her forward.
“You ‘haven’t decided’?” Gary Dunn says. “You haven’t decided?”
Edie can’t free herself from his grasp, and she can’t do anything to keep him from rushing her toward their bed.
“Here’s your decision,” Gary says, his words a harsh whisper in her ear. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
He pushes Edie facedown on the bed, but he keeps his grip on her neck. The bedsprings squeal under their weight. Edie tries to crawl away from him, and she makes a little progress toward the other side of the bed, but then Gary grabs her legs in those big hands of his and pulls her back. She slides easily across the satin bedspread, and as she’s hauled backward her nightie rides up, exposing her backside.
Edie begins to thrash. But Gary has planted his knee on her back, right above her tailbone, and he leans forward and places his hand on her spine and runs this hand right up to the back of her neck again.
“You hear me?” he says. “You aren’t going anywhere.” His knee pushes down harder.
“You hear me?” he asks again.
Gary briefly relaxes his grip on her neck, and when he does, Edie is somehow able, with his knee as a pivot point, to rotate herself out from under him. She twists over onto her back and kicks herself free of his weight. When she slides onto the floor, most of the bedspread slides off with her. She is quick to her feet and she starts to run toward the door.
“Wait, Edie!” Gary says, and his tone has changed utterly, from that of a man filled with rage to a husband who wants only to finish his side of an argument. He reaches out to grab her, and his hand clamps onto her right wrist.
When Edie tries to yank her arm away, he tightens his grip, and in her desperation to be free she slips to the floor.
Both of them hear the pop of ligaments breaking loose from bone, and at the sound Gary Dunn lets go and Edie yelps in pain—the first time she has cried out since she entered the room.
FOR NEARLY AN hour, Gary sits fully clothed on the bed with its spread and sheets askew. He is slumped over, a man made weak by waiting and contemplation. Finally something in him resolves and he leaves the room.
He finds his wife sitting in the darkened living room in her favorite easy chair, her legs folded under her, a plastic sandwich bag filled with ice pressed to her swollen right wrist.
She watches him. Her look is wary, but she doesn’t flinch as he approaches.
He falls to his knees beside her chair. He presses his forehead to the armrest. “Hey, Edie. I’m sorry. I . . . I’m sorry.”
Edie says nothing.
He lifts his gaze to meet his wife’s shining, impassive eyes. “It was the thought of you going away,” says Gary. “No, not just going away. Going there. You know I have trouble thinking of you and . . . of you having that life before. And that you’d go back to it. Back to him.”
She lifts her injured arm and the ice bag off the armrest.
Gary reaches tentatively toward her right wrist. Even in the dark he can see how swollen it is. “God, did I do that? Jesus, I’m sorry.”
She pulls her legs in tighter to her body. “It’s fine,” she says.
“It’s not fine. I can see it’s not fine. Do you want to go to the ER?”
“It’ll be fine,” she says, and she looks away from her husband to their daughter standing in the hallway.
“Mom?” Jennifer says. She’s wearing the Van Halen T-shirt that belonged to a boyfriend from the previous school year.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
Jennifer hesitates. The sight of her parents in the dark living room and in this arrangement obviously confuses her. Has she intruded on a quarrel? Or something sexual? Her mother’s in her nightie, yet her father is fully clothed and on his knees. Is this some kind of family crisis? But in the next moment, her adolescence reasserts itself and she says, “I don’t feel good.”
Edie pushes the ice bag between the chair’s cushion and one arm. Then Edie rises, careful not to touch her husband in the process.
“How don’t you feel good, honey?” Edie asks.
“I think maybe I have a fever.”
Edie turns back to her husband, who is still crouched beside the chair. “Go back to bed,” she tells him. “I’ll be in soon.”
“Are you sick to your stomach?” Edie asks Jennifer.
“Not really.”
Although Jennifer is at least two inches taller than Edie and has a woman’s body, she allows her mother to lead her like a child.
Gary Dunn follows them down the hall, but when they come to Jennifer’s room, he keeps walking. Edie and Jennifer enter, and Edie closes the door behind them.
Clothes, ca
ssettes, and magazines are scattered about. Posters of musicians leer from the walls, and a tennis racket leans in a corner. On the bed a black-and-white cat wakes up and looks suspiciously, with its eyes narrowed, at Edie and Jennifer.
“Scoot over, Mickey,” Edie says and pushes the cat aside. The cat meows in protest but moves toward the foot of the bed. Jennifer lies down in the vacated space.
“I think,” Edie says to her daughter, “you just got too much sun today.” She pulls the sheet over Jennifer, then bends down and presses her lips to her forehead. “No fever,” says Edie. “Cool as a cucumber.”
“Is something wrong?” Jennifer asks. “You and Dad . . . Was it about that phone call?”
“You try to get to sleep,” says Edie. “You have an early day tomorrow.”
“I told you. I might not go. Alison said you can try out even if you don’t go to cheerleading camp. It doesn’t really help you that much.”
“You might feel differently in the morning.”
Jennifer regards her mother with eyes as narrowed as the cat’s. “And nothing’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You wouldn’t tell me even if there was.”
“Go to sleep,” Edie says.
She walks back to the living room, to her easy chair and the bag of ice melting between the cushions. From that station she can watch the hallway and with eyes adjusted to the dark see her husband, should he come searching for her—or see her daughter, should her temperature rise.
Eventually Edie dozes off but she sleeps fitfully, waking up at the sound of the Ellisons’ dog barking at who knows what and later at the song of birds that detect light in the eastern sky before any human eye is able to. She keeps her eyes closed when her husband comes into the living room to check on her. He makes no effort to wake her before he leaves the house.
But once the door clicks shut behind him, she quickly gets up from her chair.
AN HOUR LATER Edie, showered and dressed, walks into her daughter’s room, pulling a large suitcase behind her. “Up,” she says to Jennifer. “Up-up-up!”
Jennifer rolls over sleepily. “Mom! I told you. I’m not going.”
“This is not about cheerleading camp,” Edie says and gestures to the suitcase. “We’re taking a trip. Get up and pack as much of your stuff in here as you can. Pack for cold weather too. If there’s something you want to take and it doesn’t fit in the suitcase, stuff it in your backpack.”