by Larry Watson
Brad and Troy both look to their mother. Even when drunk and angry, she is still the highest authority in their lives.
“Go ahead,” she tells them. “Let your father spoil you for another night.”
Brad is careful about which container of chicken he grabs. Troy however turns in the other direction. “I’ll get your stuff too,” he says to his brother.
“Huh-uh,” their father says. “Let’s go. I’ve got anything you’ll need.”
“My retainer,” Troy says.
“You’ll be okay without it for a night,” his mother says. “Go with your father.” Then she says to Jennifer, “How about you? Have I put the fear of God into you? You can go with them if you like.”
Jennifer shakes her head no.
Only Troy says anything in parting. To Jennifer he says, “It was nice meeting you.”
“Yeah, sure,” she says.
Once they’ve walked out the door, she turns to Carla. “Where are my mom and dad?”
“They went to the motel. They’ll pick you up in the morning.”
“Maybe I should go there.”
Carla’s smile is sympathetic and knowing. “No, honey. Trust me. You shouldn’t.”
EDIE HAS BEEN lying awake for at least an hour, listening, and now she begins to move away from her husband with excruciating slowness. If another hour is required to get out of bed without disturbing him, she’ll take an hour.
She has slid close enough to the edge to extend one foot to the floor, and the rhythm of Gary’s snoring has not varied. She risks the other foot, and now she’s sitting up. She waits. If Gary were to wake at this moment, she could tell him she’s going to the bathroom. But if he sees her move toward the door, she’ll have no answer.
Now she’s standing. She gazes down at him. His mouth hangs open, yet his forehead is wrinkled like a frown.
Edie takes her first steps toward the door, cautiously lifting her purse from the top of the dresser. But just when she reaches for the doorknob, Gary snorts and rolls onto his side. He’s turned toward the empty space where Edie lay. But he’s sunk so deeply into a confident slumber that Edie can open the door without disturbing him. Perhaps he’s dreaming a dream that keeps her close beside him.
And then she’s out. If the door were made of glass, she could not close it more gently.
The night is so calm and quiet she can hear a dog bark blocks away, and the occasional rush of cars and trucks on the highway even farther in the distance. Crickets are scraping their all-night songs, and in the air is the odor of late summer rot, grass clippings and fallen blossoms melting into the earth. And another smell, a familiar one—baking bread, a Gladstone bakery, Flieder’s perhaps, preparing the next day’s bread and rolls for the citizenry.
She opens the door of the Volkswagen and sits behind the wheel, leaving the door open. She’s still waiting, watching.
But when the door of Unit 106 remains closed, she turns the key in the ignition. The car starts, and she shifts into reverse, allowing the Rabbit to roll slowly across the gravel of the parking lot. Not until she comes to the street does she slam her door shut, turn on her lights, and speed away.
EDIE TURNS OFF her headlights again before she turns into the driveway and parks behind Roy’s red Celica.
There’s not a light on in a single window. She gets out of the car and walks across the porch. She twists the doorknob without knowing what the result will be. The door opens.
She makes her way carefully through the house, sometimes navigating by touch, sometimes by the faint light above the kitchen stove.
Jennifer is sound asleep when Edie enters the downstairs bedroom, but the light is still on beside the bed and the girl is lying on top of the covers. Mickey however is awake, and he watches Edie warily. She returns the cat’s stare and puts a finger to her lips.
The suitcases are on the floor at the foot of the bed, and just as Edie lifts the largest and begins to back out of the room, Mickey wriggles free from under Jennifer’s arm, leaps from the bed, and meows urgently at Edie.
Jennifer comes awake but barely. She props herself up on an elbow and looks around the room as if she’s not certain where she is. “What?” she says sleepily. “What is it?”
“Shh,” Edie says and hurries over to her daughter’s side. Crouching by the bed Edie gently strokes her daughter’s hair. “Go back to sleep, honey. Everything’s okay.”
“Are you coming to bed?”
And then Jennifer sees the suitcase by the door.
“In the morning,” Edie says softly, “your father will come for you. You’ll ride back with him. I’m going on ahead alone. Everything is okay with your father and me.”
The cat jumps back on the bed and inserts himself between Edie and her daughter.
“And Mickey,” Edie says, stroking the cat, “will ride with you.”
Jennifer’s expression says she doesn’t really understand what’s happening, but sleep is too alluring for her to comprehend what her mother has said.
Edie stands up and switches off the lamp by the bed. “Sleep well, sweetheart.”
“‘Night,” Jennifer says. She puts her arm around the cat again, and immediately he curls into her embrace and begins to purr.
The girl’s eyes are already closed before her mother reaches the door. Only Mickey is awake to watch Edie leave, and human tears hold no meaning for him.
RATHER THAN LUG her suitcase through the house, Edie leaves by way of the back door. Just as she comes around the corner of the garage, a voice says, “Sneaking off without saying good-bye?”
Edie gasps and drops her suitcase.
“I almost said ‘again,’” Roy says as he steps off the porch.
“Oh Jesus!” Even in her fright however, Edie has kept her voice down. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
“Came out for a smoke,” he says and holds up his cigarette as proof. “But I believe the question is, what the hell are you doing?”
Edie sets her suitcase upright. “Can you do me a favor?” she asks. “Would you tell my husband—and Jennifer too—that I drove on ahead, and that I’ll meet them back in Granite Valley? Tell them I wanted some time alone, some time to think. Tell them—oh, I don’t know . . . Tell them I’ll have supper waiting for them.”
“You know I’d do anything for you. But come on. We have too much history between us. What’s going on?”
She carries her suitcase back to the Volkswagen. “You really want to help me out? You’ll tell them exactly what I just told you.”
When she opens the car’s back hatch, Roy puts the suitcase in for her. “Sure, sure, of course,” he says. “You decided to drive back home alone, and you had to leave in the middle of the night. Whatever you say.”
She looks up into his face, and she must see something in his expression, something that causes her to sigh and say, “I’m not going home.”
“Where are you going?” Roy says softly.
“I don’t know. I’m just going. And if you give them the message I asked you to give, I should have enough of a head start to get far away before he has a chance to come after me. This time he won’t know where I’m going since I don’t know myself. But by the time they get to Granite Valley there’ll be a message on the answering machine telling them I’m not coming back. I’ll get in touch with them. Eventually.”
Roy inhales sharply. “My God, Edie.”
“This time Gary might cut me loose for good. His pride probably won’t let him come after me again.”
“And your daughter?”
Edie looks away. “Jen is busy with her own life. She’ll be fine.”
Roy drops his cigarette in the driveway and crushes it with his shoe. “Listen, I’ve got an idea. Let me go with you. I don’t care where. You don’t want your husband coming after you? We’ll change our names. We’ll—”
Edie begins to laugh.
“I’m serious!” he says.
“Oh, I know you are. I know. But be someon
e new? I’d like to take another shot at being me. Look, I don’t have much time to explain this . . . When Jennifer was born Gary bought a movie camera. For the first few years he filmed just about everything—Jennifer’s first steps, her first ice-cream cone, her first Christmas. Not long ago he pulled out the projector. ‘It’s movie night,’ he said. He was probably feeling guilty about spending so much time at work. But all right. We set up the screen, and the three of us sat there watching the herky-jerky images. Even though Jennifer was in every frame, she was bored sitting there watching it and didn’t mind saying so, but Gary kept the projector running and pretending we were all having a great time. At some point he asked me if I’d get him a beer. So I stood up and walked in front of the projector, and when I did Gary said, ‘Stop!’ I was right in front of the screen, and I was wearing a white T-shirt, and the movie was playing on me. I looked down and saw myself—holding Jennifer’s hand on a playground. ‘There you are!’ Gary shouted. ‘It’s you!’ I knew what he meant. But I suddenly had this sick feeling. It was me all right. I was the screen. And it was what people—men especially—had been doing all my life. They’d seen what they projected on me. And now when I look at myself I wonder if that’s what I’m doing too—just seeing someone else’s movie. So no, Roy. I don’t want a new identity. I want to figure out the old one.”
“Maybe I’ll follow you,” he says. “You can’t stop me.”
“That’s right. I can’t. But you won’t. You’ll stay with Dean. And Carla. And your mother.”
Roy takes out his billfold. “You’ll need some cash,” he says.
She puts her hand over his. “I’m fine,” she says. “But thank you.”
He looks up at the house’s second-story windows. “Dean might be awake,” Roy says, “if you want to—”
“I can’t. I’m sorry. Tell him . . . tell him I was just too much of a coward to say good-bye.”
“Then don’t say it to me either,” Roy says, and he opens the car door for her.
Edie says nothing. But before she climbs in behind the wheel, she stands on tiptoe and kisses Roy Linderman lightly on the lips.
Roy continues to hold the door open. “You need anything,” he says, “anything at all, call—you hear?”
She nods as she turns the key in the ignition.
“And if you want to know when Dean . . .”
She shakes her head no.
“All right then.” He closes her door.
Edie puts the car in reverse. She has backed out of the driveway and driven halfway down the block before she turns the Volkswagen’s lights on.
ROY CLIMBS THE stairs slowly. He passes by the room where his wife sleeps and enters instead the room where his brother lies.
Dean’s enlarged liver makes most positions uncomfortable, so he sleeps on his back. Roy approaches the bed and leans over his brother. He lowers his palm close to Dean’s forehead, but then stops his hand a few inches away.
He crosses around to the other side of the bed, slips off his shoes, and lies down. His sigh is enormous.
“Well, she’s gone,” Roy says.
And when Roy’s eyes close, Dean’s open, as if the brothers had agreed to sleep in shifts. Not that there’s anything to see. Though morning is approaching, the windows remain as dark as midnight. But this is the hour when birds detect some lightening in the morning sky, and the dawn chorus has begun, the trilling echoing through the neighborhood, all variations on the same song: “I’m here, I’m here—I made it through another night.”
Someday a morning will come when Dean won’t be able to rise from his bed unaided, but this is not that day. He swings his legs off the bed and slowly and stiffly sits up. Then he stands and with his feet wide apart in the stance he has adopted to keep himself steady, he shuffles over to the window.
He presses his forehead to the glass. He stares for a long time, and though the dawn always arrives in imperceptible increments, arrive it does. And Dean is confirmed in what he sees.
“Roy?” He raises his voice. “Roy?”
Dean’s brother stirs and grunts a reply.
“Why,” Dean says, “is Edie sitting in her car in the driveway?”
Three
Edie Pritchard
2007
Even if she were not alone in the apartment, no one would be able to hear Edie Pritchard scolding herself, so softly does she whisper her own name.
“Edie, Edie.”
In the living room she looks on the coffee and end tables, on top of the television, and on each of the shelves of the small bookcase. She walks to the kitchen and looks on the table, and on each of its four chairs. She looks under the table and on the counters and behind the sugar, flour, and coffee canisters. She looks in a drawer filled with a tangle of pencils, pens, rubber bands, playing cards, keys, postage stamps, and laundromat tokens. She runs her hand across the top of the refrigerator and comes away with nothing but dust. Just as she pulls out a sofa cushion, someone knocks on the apartment door.
Edie sighs and walks to the door, and just before she opens it she glances at the coat hooks on the wall. There, balanced across the hooks, empty in this season, is the envelope, white, letter-sized, but bulging with its contents. She grabs it and slaps herself lightly on the head with it before opening the door.
For a moment Rita and Edie face each other across the threshold as if for no other purpose than to demonstrate how they differ. They’re close in age—in their sixties—but it doesn’t seem as though the years have exacted a harsh penance from either one. Handsome women, many would certainly say, and both dressed in faded denim—jeans on Edie, a skirt on Rita Real Bird. Edie wears a red-and-blue plaid Western shirt with pearl snaps; Rita’s T-shirt says Gladstone Arts and Crafts Festival. Both women wear their hair long and loose, though Edie’s has all gone gray and Rita’s is still improbably black. Rita is six feet tall, wide faced, wide shouldered, and wide hipped. She’s deeply tanned and ruddy cheeked, while Edie has become more delicate with age.
Rita is carrying a plate covered with a gingham cloth napkin. “Muffins,” she says and walks past Edie.
She doesn’t stop until she gets to the kitchen. She puts the plate on the round wooden table and puts her hands on her hips.
“Well,” she says to Edie, “he won’t put on his goddamn leg. Again.”
“I’m sorry,” Edie says.
“Maybe you can talk to him.”
“I’m not sure what I’d say.”
“I don’t think it much matters. As long as it’s you saying it.” Rita points to the envelope, which Edie has been holding with both hands as if she’s worried it could be snatched away. “What have you got there?”
“This? Oh, I went through some photo albums and pulled out pictures for my granddaughter. I thought it’d be fun for her to look at these.”
“When’s she coming again?”
“She said they’d be here this afternoon.”
“They?”
“A boyfriend, I’m told. He’s driving.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You know. Boyfriends. This is the girl who lives in Spokane?”
Edie lays the envelope carefully on the table. “With her mother. Her father is way up in the woods somewhere in Idaho, and they were going to stop and see him on the way here. The family tour, or something like that.”
“Good luck with that. Those dads generally don’t like to be found. How long since you’ve seen your granddaughter?”
“When she was just eight? Seven? I’m not really sure.” Edie laughs nervously. “Those Rocky Mountains . . . I guess both Jen and I have had trouble crossing over them.”
“So she and the boyfriend are coming to see Grandma . . . How old is she now?”
“Eighteen. She just graduated this spring.”
“Coming all that distance . . . That means spending some nights along the way.”
“It’s 2007, Rita. Their world isn’t our world.”
Edie says nothing but lifts the napkin and uncovers four muffins, plump, sugared, perfectly browned, and still warm.
“Look at those!” Edie says. “Blueberry?”
“You probably already had your breakfast,” Rita says. “Maybe you want to save them and impress your granddaughter. And the boyfriend.”
“I might do that.”
“Where you going to have them bunk down, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Lauren can have the guest room. And he can sleep on the sofa.”
Rita smiles slyly. “So you’re keeping the young lovers apart, huh? How about when you go to work?”
“What do you mean?”
“You keep them in separate beds all night, and then you leave in the morning and they can fuck all day.”
Edie shrugs.
Rita shakes her head. “I worry about you. What you don’t know about human nature . . . Well, I’ve got the extra bedroom. Someone’s welcome to it.”
“Don’t you want to check with George?”
“He won’t mind. That son of mine hardly ever leaves his room anyway.”
“That’s good of you to offer. I think we can work it out. But thank you.”
“And don’t worry about coming over to talk to him.”
“Are you sure?” Edie asks.
“He just sits in front of that damn computer all day anyway.” Rita squares those wide shoulders of hers. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll get out of your way. You probably want to get on with cleaning something that didn’t need cleaning in the first place.”
But after Rita leaves, Edie doesn’t clean anything. She opens the sliding glass door and steps out on the balcony, a space just large enough for two white plastic lawn chairs. She doesn’t sit down but leans on the rail and gazes out across the parking lot and beyond, to the street that winds down from this height to the community of Gladstone, Montana.
Custer Ridge Apartments, a matched pair of two-story buildings that look as though they’re balanced on the slope of a butte east of the town, are less than twenty years old, and though the buildings are what Gladstone residents would call out of town, the road up the hill is paved, which it wasn’t back when Edie Pritchard was growing up here. When she was in high school, a gravel road led up to this height, winding around the rocks and the few pines and junipers clinging to the slope, and here, with the lights of the town twinkling below, lovers parked, their cars sometimes so close that the wheedling, the begging, the struggling, the heavy breathing, the moaning from one car might be heard in another. All the radios were tuned to the same station, and a song that played in one car—“Poor Little Fool” perhaps—played in others as well. From one dark interior came the glow of a cigarette, in another the glint of a beer can or liquor bottle, in another the flash of a pale garment and paler flesh. Eventually engines coughed, whined, and growled to life, and their headlights swept down and across the hillside.