by Larry Watson
Jennifer barks out a laugh and sits up. “Oh God, Mom. ‘Loved properly?’” This she says in a poor imitation of a British accent. “What the hell does that even mean? Properly!”
“It means—”
“Didn’t Dad love you properly?”
“All right, Jen.”
“That’s what you want. What about what I want? Me and Patrick . . . that’s about what we want.”
A sound enters the room, faint but distinct, and Edie and Jennifer instantly fall silent and listen. The sound could be a key scraping at the wrong lock. Or a window screen being cut. But an instant later, its source becomes obvious. Mickey is in the bathroom, scratching in his litter box.
Neither mother nor daughter says another word.
ROY LINDERMAN IS in his bathrobe, roaming the edges of his back lawn, his bare feet wet with morning dew, a coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
Then, from the back door, his wife calls out to him: “Hey! You have a phone call!”
Roy tosses the remainder of his coffee on the peonies and walks toward the house.
When he enters the kitchen his wife hands over the phone and leaves the room.
“Hello,” he says.
“Roy? It’s me. Edie.”
“Edie? Jesus. Edie . . .”
At the sound of that name Carla comes back into the room.
“I’m in town. We’re at the Rimrock Inn. My daughter is here with me.”
Carla is mouthing something to her husband—“What does she want?” perhaps—but Roy just shakes his head at her.
“Well, my God, Edie. My God.”
“I was hoping I could see Dean.”
“Dean. Hell yes, you should see him. He won’t believe this.”
“I don’t know where to find him.”
“He’s at Mom’s. God, he’s going to be so happy to see you.”
“Can I just—I mean, is he okay with visitors? Is there a time—”
“Hey, I’ll pick you up. I’ll take you over there. And I’ll check with Mom first to see how he’s doing today.”
“All right.”
“God damn. It is you. How about I pick you up in an hour?”
“We’re in 106,” she says. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
“Hold on a second. Will I recognize you? Have you changed?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll know you.”
Roy hangs up the phone. “Is that who called last night?” he asks his wife.
“Could be,” she replies. “As I said, the caller did not identify herself. And she didn’t this time either. To me.”
“She’s here with her daughter.”
“Just passing through?”
“She’s here to see Dean.”
“She knows about his condition?”
“Yeah,” Roy says. “She knows.”
“How? How does she know?”
“Dean wants to see her before . . . He wants to see her one more time.”
Carla Linderman is dressed for a day at the office. White silk blouse tucked into perfectly creased navy blue slacks that show off her long legs and the ass that she’s worked so hard to keep high and tight. Her streaked blond hair cut to shoulder length and perfectly coiffed. A simple gold chain around her throat and a gold cuff around her wrist.
“Well,” she says, snatching up her briefcase and the red blazer that all the agents in the real estate company wear, “Dean will get his wish. I hope the reunion is a happy one.” She heads toward the door leading to the garage. “Or as happy as it can be under the circumstances.”
Then Carla stops. “Wait. Did Dean call her?”
“I called her.”
“Oh my goodness,” Carla says, smiling her practiced but unconvincing smile. “Oh my fucking goodness. This does change things.” She walks back into the kitchen and sets her briefcase and blazer down.
“All right,” she says, gripping the top rail of a chair. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You called Edie. How you came to have her number is a fucking mystery we’ll leave for another time—”
“I asked—”
Carla raises a halting hand. “You call your brother’s ex-wife and tell her—what? That Dean’s dying? But that he’ll die a happy man if he can see her just one more time? And did Dean ever bring up her name? Or was this totally your idea? Did you figure, well, as long as Dean has to die anyway why not see if you can’t get something good out of the deal? And what could be better . . . what could be fucking better than to have Edie Pritchard back in town?”
“That’s not fair, Carla.”
“Fair? Do you really want to talk about what’s fair?”
“Carla . . .” Roy walks toward her and puts out his arms. “Come on.”
“Don’t.”
Roy’s arms hover in the air between them. “You have to believe me, Carla.”
At this she smiles and says, “That’s the one thing I don’t have to do.”
“That’s right, Carla. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Now, I have to get going.”
“Where are you picking her up?”
“She’s staying at the Rimrock Inn. With her daughter.”
“The Rimrock Inn,” she says and shakes her head. She lifts her blazer from the chair and puts it on. The garment’s incongruously wide shoulders make her look as though she’s impersonating a much stronger woman. “How long are they staying?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, I can’t imagine they’re comfortable in the Rimrock.” Carla snatches up her briefcase again. “Tell Edie that she and her daughter are welcome to stay here.”
“That’s very generous—”
“Fuck you,” she says on her way out the door.
EDIE IS STANDING in front of Room 106, and at the sound of Roy’s tires on the parking lot gravel she turns in his direction.
Roy stops the car and reaches across to open the passenger door. He smiles widely and says, “Hop in, Edie. Damn, it’s good to see you!”
“How have you been, Roy?”
“You know me. Same old, same old.”
“I hear that expression all the time,” Edie says, “and I never know what it means.”
“Where’s your daughter? She’s not joining us?”
“I told her she could sleep in. She’s a teenager, Roy. You remember what that was like.”
“I sure do.”
“So I don’t want to be gone too long this morning.”
Roy has been looking everywhere but at Edie’s face. He looks at her feet in their leather sandals. At the purse she’s put between them on the seat beside her. At her knees and thighs, bare below the hem of her denim skirt. But finally, like a man looking up at a break in the clouds, he lifts his gaze. That face. Yes. The large green eyes. The cheekbones. The dimpled smile. The lips, perfect in their curve but chapped in this morning’s dry Montana air.
“God damn, Edie. Here you are. Here you are and it’s starting all over again. Except I don’t believe it ever stopped.”
“Don’t, Roy. Please.”
“I’m happy to see you. That’s all. Man, twenty years just fell away like they were nothing.”
Edie points vaguely toward the street. “Just go.”
But Roy’s searching examination is not over. “What happened to your wrist?”
“Oh, I slipped on a throw rug. And I landed wrong.”
“There’s a right way to land?” He puts the car in gear and drives slowly away.
Edie is looking back at the motel when she says, “Sometimes I have to remind myself it wasn’t you I was married to.”
“Whoa! I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Don’t. It just turned out I couldn’t tell the two of you apart as easily as I thought I could.”
“You’ll see a hell of a difference now. And back then I never would have let you get away.”
She continues to stare out the window. “You couldn’t have stopped me,” she says.
> “Well, I would have made a hell of a sales pitch,” Roy says. “Wait—I should have said this right away. Carla says you can stay with us. We’ve got plenty of room. Maybe a little less when her boys come back. But you and your daughter can have the whole basement. We’ve got a bedroom down there and a full bath. Wet bar. Cable TV. And I’d have what I’ve always wanted—you sleeping under my roof. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. You’d have all the privacy you could ask for. You and your daughter.”
“Thank you, Roy. That’s very kind of you. But I already paid for another night.”
“So? You want to spend another night in that dump just because you paid for it?”
“It’s not a dump, not at all, it’s—”
“Don’t bother, Edie. Circumstances have forced me to spend a few nights in the Rimrock. I know what it is.”
“We have our cat with us. Mickey. Our big old Tom.”
“Hell, that’s not a problem.”
“Thank you. But you have to let me pay you something.”
He waves away her offer. “No need. Carla and I are doing pretty well. She’s the best-selling real estate agent in eastern Montana. If you have any ideas about coming back to Gladstone, she’s the person you’d want to see.”
“Carla . . . selling houses.”
“Commercial buildings too. And I’m selling Toyotas.” Roy pats the steering wheel of the Celica as if it’s a creature whose goodwill must be maintained. “Who’d have thought Montanans would go nuts over a Japanese car? You keep your money in your purse. You’d be our guest. You and your daughter. And Mickey.”
“LOOK WHO’S HERE,” says Mrs. Linderman. “I never thought I’d see you darken my door again.”
“Hello, Mildred,” Edie says as she steps inside the trailer. “It’s good to see you.”
The two women spend a few seconds assessing what the years have done to the other. Edie has gained a few pounds, but they’ve distributed themselves evenly and she still has that figure that can induce gasps when it’s displayed just so. Mildred Linderman is exhausted and whittled down by the decades, but she still has her height—close to six feet—and those big bones.
She nods in the direction of the hallway and the bedroom beyond. “He’s sleeping.”
Roy says, “I’ll leave you two to catch up. I have a customer coming in, and I can’t afford to take a chance he’ll spit the hook.”
Edie casts a pleading look in his direction, but he’s as good as gone.
Neither woman speaks until the sound of Roy’s car dies away. Then Mrs. Linderman points to the couch. “You might as well sit.”
Edie sits. She looks around the living room. The console television. The picture on the wall—mustangs in full stampede. The La-Z-Boy recliner, its mauve velour worn smooth in spots. “Not much has changed,” she says.
“Unless you count one dead and one dying.”
After a moment’s hesitation Edie says, “I was sorry to hear about Elmer.”
Mildred Linderman flicks a hand in the air. “He was never the same after we sold the ranch. He couldn’t get used to town life. Not enough to keep him occupied. So he drank too much. I kept telling him what he was headed for but he wouldn’t listen.”
“He always seemed so cheerful.”
Mildred pokes a loose swirl of hair back into the bun at the nape or her neck. “I might as well get this said,” she says. “When you left it took something out of Dean he never got back.”
“That was a long time ago,” Edie says.
“You get to my age,” says Mildred, “the years don’t mean like they used to.”
“How’s Dean doing?”
“Good days and bad. Though if anyone wanted to keep count, they’d probably say more bad than good now.”
From somewhere outside comes the sound of children at play, gunplay if the mouth noises—the kra-chows and kra-jings—are any indication. And just when that battle seems at its height, one gunshot in rapid succession after another, Dean appears in the living room, shirtless and barefoot and clad only in gray gym shorts.
“Jesus Christ! Edie? Is that you?”
At the sight of him Edie gives out a little gasp that slides into a moan, as if all his sharp edges of bone—hips, ribs, shoulders—were slicing into her flesh as well as his.
She stands up but doesn’t move toward him. “Hi, Dean.”
“Jesus. I woke up and I thought I heard your voice, but I knew that couldn’t be. I thought maybe I was going nuts.”
Dean falls into the recliner. “Christ almighty. Edie.” He’s short of breath now but manages a question. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.”
“Roy . . . did he? Because I’m dying?”
“I wanted to see you again. Can’t we leave it at that?”
His head is thrown back. His arms hang over the sides of the chair. “Edie,” he says yet again. His eyes cloud over with tears. “I’m not about to kick just yet, you know.”
Edie smiles and sits back down. And when she does, Mildred Linderman rises and heads for the trailer’s kitchen.
“You see how skinny I am?” says Dean. “It’s not the cancer. I took up running a few years back. Like everybody else in the damn country.”
“Are you in pain, Dean? How bad is it?”
Before he can answer his mother sticks her head in from the kitchen. “He don’t complain,” she says. “Not one word.”
Dean and Edie both smile, remembering a time when Mildred Linderman was a joke between them.
“I just can’t seem to get comfortable,” he says. “Can’t sleep. Can’t stay awake.”
“But you have medication? When it gets bad?”
He nods. Then, eagerly changing the subject, he asks, “When did you get in?”
“We got in late last night.”
“We?”
“My daughter Jennifer’s with me.”
“You got a daughter?”
“She’s seventeen.”
He tries to brighten at this news, but he can’t manage it. He has to turn away, and when his head is turned toward the window he says, “Gladstone always looks better when the sun’s shining. That’s my notion anyway.”
Mildred Linderman steps into the kitchen doorway. “We got changes aplenty around here,” she says. “There’s a Indian family a couple trailers over. And I mean Indian like in India. The country. Nice folks too.”
“So you see,” Dean says to Edie with a wry smile, “you’d hardly recognize the place.”
Edie slides her sandaled foot back and forth on the floor. “And,” she says, also smiling, “I believe this carpet is new since I’ve been here.”
“Paid for that,” says Mildred, “with Elmer’s insurance. His idea. When he was just barely hanging on he told me, ‘Mildred, get yourself some new rugs. Something soft underfoot and warm on those winter mornings.’”
Mildred ducks back into the kitchen, but only a second or two later she returns, wiping her hand on a dish towel. “So you got yourself a teenager,” she says to Edie. “Good Lord. I first met you when you was about that age.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “What the years fashion for us.”
In a whisper Dean says, “I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know your married name.”
“Dunn. D-u-n-n.”
“Edie Dunn,” Dean says, and his eyes close slowly. “That’s easy to remember. Edie Dunn.”
JENNIFER WALKS OUT of Unit 106 into the calm August morning. She closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sky. The sunlight dapples her features as it shines through the leaves of a towering cottonwood. She pushes the room key into the back pocket of her shorts and looks up and down the block. After a moment of indecision, Jennifer begins to walk in the direction of the morning sun.
Within a few blocks the neighborhood shows signs of age. The sidewalk crumbles in places and tilts along its cracks. The houses are smaller, closer together, and built of mismatched parts—one side of a house clad in aluminum and anoth
er side in unpainted planks, a roof with a sheet of tin nailed to the shingles, plywood in place of window glass. The air smells of motor oil and dead grass. The yards are mostly dirt, and occasionally littered with the things of children’s play—trikes and bikes, inflatable swimming pools and beach balls. On the block ahead is a windowless, abandoned building that was once the home, as its sign says, of Lueck’s Creamery. Jennifer turns around and walks back.
GRANITE VALLEY TORE down its Carnegie library in 1977 and built in its place a glass-walled building that in the afternoon allows in so much light and heat it’s impossible to sit near any of the west windows. On one of the low shelves in the middle of the main floor is a collection of telephone directories from Montana cities and towns. Gary Dunn sifts through the piles until he finds the one he’s looking for. He takes it to a desk and opens the white pages of the Gladstone telephone book.
There are three Lindermans—a D, an R, and an M. He takes an index card from his shirt pocket and copies down all three numbers. Then he puts it back in his pocket and drives home.
In the kitchen he picks up the telephone and begins to dial one of the numbers. A recorded voice announces that this number is no longer in service. Gary Dunn hangs up but only for a moment. Then he dials the second number on the card.
A woman’s voice says hello.
“I’d like to speak to Edie Dunn, please.”
“Jesus! You’re calling here for Edie? Is this long distance?”
“Is she there?” asks Gary.
“No, she’s not here. God.” And Carla Linderman hangs up the phone.
Gary Dunn hangs up on his end as well.
In the voice of a man comfortable listening to his own speech, Gary Dunn says, “You mean she’s not there now.”
JENNIFER HAS JUST entered the parking lot of the Rimrock Inn when she sees the door to their unit standing open and, outside the door, a cart stacked with sheets, towels, and cleaning supplies.
“No!” Jennifer cries and breaks into a run.
She bursts into the room just as a squat older woman is walking into the bathroom with a few white towels draped across her arm.
“Mickey!” Jennifer calls out. “Mickey!”