by Tina Welling
“I can’t believe you remember.”
She leans over with both hands, gives my upper arms a squeeze, and I almost cry. “Sure, I remember. You’re a couple months earlier than I expected though.”
I joke, “I’m a couple lifetimes earlier than I expected.”
Tessa nods. “Sometimes it takes a couple incarnations for us to get where we want.” She speaks with a serious tone, then grins. “Congratulations. I’m impressed.”
Business is light, and we talk undisturbed. I tell her about my shabby new home and meeting the moose.
“Moose symbolize self-esteem—did you know that? It just stepped out in front of you?”
I nod.
“Hmm. Good sign.”
I feel like I just told her more about myself than I meant to. We talk a while. Then she says I’ve got a job here when the summer tourist season starts, if I’m interested. Tessa is manager of the bookstore. I might need work before then, depends on how fast Erik sells our house and settles up with me, but I’m pleased to be asked and tell her I’m definitely interested. I don’t want to keep her from her work, so I move toward the door.
“How did that moose look to you?” she asks.
“Ragged and shaggy, like it’s been through the worst winter ever.” I cast my eyes to the left, remembering. “But shiny-eyed and its step was springy, ready for a new year.” I smile. “I’ve never seen one so close. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondered. It’s a tough time for the wildlife right now. But each day will get easier.”
Tonight, I sit on the floor by my discount oil lamp and leaf through catalogs I found discarded at the post office today while signing the waiting list for a box.
Outside, a vehicle approaches, gunning upslope, crunching gravel, and I rush to a front window. I share the dirt road with the former owner of the cabin, whose ranch lies a quarter of a mile beyond me. I’m anxious to ask him about who used to live here and why he’s sold the place so fast and cheap.
A long-bodied Suburban careens past with its headlights off. The night is dark and moonless. Imagine having lived in one place so long you could find your way home with your eyes closed. He must know every bump and curve.
Nope. Wrong. Branches screech along metal, a tire bounces hard once and shock absorbers thump. Rock scrapes the underside of the car frame. I hurry outside when the car begins skidding, but before I get any farther than the porch, the brake lights go off and the Suburban continues up the invisible road. I wait on the porch for any further sounds indicating trouble up the road; then I return inside the cabin.
I flip the light switch by habit in the bathroom, forgetting I won’t be able to get the electricity hooked up until I call on Monday. To my surprise a dinky forty-watt above the sink comes on. I test all the switches and my oil-lit cabin blooms into a rusty glow. I feel suddenly industrious, as if the sun came up instead of the electricity on. Despite the late hour, I plug in the refrigerator, then fool with the hot-water heater. Soon the tick of metal expanding assures me the water heater is working, and I scrub down the bathroom, ceiling to curling linoleum floor. By the time I’ve finished, I have just enough hot water for a shallow bath.
With my sleeping bag unrolled on the musty square of thin gray carpet that lies before a mustier sofa of the same color, I fall asleep to spooky sounds inside and out: coyotes whooping like pirates, logs creaking, geese honking as they practice instrument flight in the dark and, nearer by, the tapping of toenails scuttling across hard surfaces—mice, I’ll bet.
seven
I’ve got a carload of furniture and household supplies I found at yard sales today. My best find is a kitchen table and chairs—only three chairs, but that’s what made it affordable. Wood of some sort, pocked and scarred, but graced with curvy lines. My plan is to paint the table and chairs with Rit dye. Smeary, watery shades of coral, lime green, rose, turquoise. Every slat and leg a different color. I read about it once somewhere. If it looks like I think it will—like old milk paint rubbed on by happy Gypsies—I’ll seal it with polyurethane and do something similar with the jelly cupboard.
Since I parked on the north side and came in the back door with my secondhand junk, I don’t see the note tucked into a tear in my front door screen until I decide to strip the table and chairs on the front porch. I’m invited to a cookout. Tomorrow at four. Please come so we can welcome you to the neighborhood. Chloe Hanes, Old Trace Ranch. Neighborhood? Old Trace is six miles away, though we do share an exit road off the highway.
I remember: This is Wyoming. Second-largest state in the lower forty-eight, with the least population of any. Six miles makes us neighbors. Going to a party alone in a strange place takes a lot more courage than going out to dinner alone back home, but if I go, I can imagine Dr. Whitely being proud.
If the wood is wet, I recall having read, and allowed to dry for fifteen minutes before applying the dye, the colors will be softer and the grain will show through. By the time I surface into awareness again, the sun is behind the tallest spruce, cooling the yard, and I am faint with hunger. While I wait for a Swanson’s frozen chicken pot pie—the Hungry Man size—to bake in the oven, I get started cleaning the kitchen cupboards. By this time tomorrow I hope to have this room fully useful.
It helps to tire myself. I slept well last night. And the work allows my thoughts to catch up to where my body is, the way a long car trip prepares you for your destination.
Beckett was still in California when I pulled off I-80 into Cheyenne. I spent a couple days there anyway, getting familiar with his setting as a second choice to being with him personally. Walked around his campus, had coffee in the student union, ate dinner at the brew pub. There, between wine and dinner and dinner and dessert, I wrote Beck a long letter, explaining that I was divorcing his father, that I was moving to Jackson Hole, that I loved him and always would. I slipped it under his dormitory room door. Before leaving Cheyenne I asked for directions to Jackson at a gas station.
“Take this road to Rock Springs and make a right.”
A four-hundred-fifty-mile trip with one turn?
It was that simple.
Now I read the directions for my new phone, untangle the wires and plug it into the phone jack. Just like the lights, this works, too. I dial Beckett’s number, hoping he’s back from visiting Delinda.
“Hey,” he answers.
“It’s me. How was your trip?”
“Rotten. She wasn’t there.”
Damn her. She has promised most of Beck’s childhood away. Promised visits, gifts, phone calls, and only come through often enough to keep rumors from spreading that she was no longer among the living. Beck is like a laboratory mouse that gets food once in every ten lever pulls, and each promise has just increased his fervor to keep believing her.
“I want to tell you something, Beckett.” I pause and ask, “You got my letter?”
“Yeah.”
“All your life you and your father have called Delinda your ‘real mother.’ Delinda is your birth mother. I am your real mother. I have cared for you, fed you, watched you breathe at night, chased behind you on your two-wheeler, packed your school lunches…mothered you, Beckett. And I have loved every minute. I am your mother—do you hear me? I will no longer accept a diminished position in your life. I am your mother.” I stop, exhausted. My heart revving. My hands shaking.
Long pause, no response. Has this stinker picked up his father’s habit? Did I fail to insert a question in there?
“So…Mom, how’s it hanging up there in old Jackson Hole?”
I laugh. Beck laughs. Then I begin crying and I hear Beck sniffling in the background. I wish I could hug him.
“Beckett, you are the best. If Delinda could stand still long enough for us to figure her out, we’d discover exactly how injured she is, but then…so would she. That’s what she’s running from, Beck, not you.” While I talk, I mindlessly pace my three rooms—four if I count the mudroom. From there, I see out the back door that the shaggy
remains of the winter’s snow are shrinking farther into the shadowed areas, behind rocks, beneath the trees, the north side of the shed.
“This is not your fault, Beck. She does what she can, and that just doesn’t happen to be very much where you’re concerned.”
“She’s busy.”
“She’s afraid of you.” I lift a stack of clean underwear from the dryer and carry it through the kitchen, into the living room a couple feet, turn left into the bedroom. Hold the phone with my chin, pull open the closet door, and set it on the top shelf. No bureau yet.
“Afraid? I don’t think so.”
“I do. I think so. Afraid.”
“Producers don’t have a lot of time. Even if it is a small film company. It’s okay with me.”
Beck needs to change the subject. I can tell he’s close to overload. Before hanging up, I say, “I’ll expect Mother’s Day presents from now on. I like books and pajamas.”
Cows and their nursing calves dot the fields far into the distance at Chloe Hanes’s ranch, and the party spreads across the ranch yard into the fringe of Engelmann spruce that lace the base of the grassy butte. Mountains lasso the farthest perimeters of sight. And sky—blue as the gas flame on my water heater—cups us overhead. I stand listening to some old-timers tell tales on one another as a form of flirting with me, the new woman among them. Far, far across the yard is the Marlboro Man, cowboy hat propped on the buck-and-rail fence he leans against. He is lifting a can of Coors to his mouth. Eyes meet. Can jerks down from his face without one sip and jaw drops into a shocked and delighted smile. The act is clean, without blemish of self-consciousness or forethought. The reflex of a young boy. Without hesitation he starts across the yard toward me.
My smile grows as he nears, but keeps within boundaries of politeness in case any of these old-timers glance my way for an appropriate chuckle to their outrageous lies. I realize now I’m just a talking stick to be passed around their circle and used as a focus for stories they might not remember without me.
“Bark, here, was tossed so swift from that bronc, he landed straddling a fence rail and never knew he weren’t still hanging on Young Major—just thought he’d tamed him to a standstill! We holler, ‘You done it, Bark. That bronc ain’t going nowhere.’ Bark here just sits, holding tight. Had to pry you off that fence rail, Bark.”
The man keeps walking toward me with his openmouthed smile, teeth glittering so brightly in the sunlight they flash silver for one moment like his belt buckle.
I am not so at ease as the Marlboro Man; my own can of half-empty Coors buckles once in my grip and pops back into shape with a loud noise. Part of me is taking inventory of my appearance, part putting on the necessary facade of appreciative audience for these storytelling Big Bellies, yet veiled over that is a wonder at this man’s candid reflex at seeing me, his unshielded advance across the yard. It’s all so simple for him. I am the new bike under the Christmas tree. I have his name on me.
A shadow falls across his chin; his eyes spend a moment longer with me before he drags his glance downward; my glance follows, and we both see the woman who earlier arrived at the party in a helicopter. She is Caroline Donnell, married to Dick Donnell, pilot of the helicopter locals say he uses like a Jeep, despite its burning twelve to fourteen gallons an hour of fuel. Their large spread is less than five miles away by road. The Donnells, too, are newcomers, but not as new as me. All this I learned earlier from the ranchers around me, as together we shielded our eyes from the dust and chaff that was rotor-whisked by the Donnells’ landing.
The Marlboro Man glances once more toward me, and I adjust my position in order to appear as if I was expecting nothing. I laugh at another bucking-bronco tale, in which the rider is “so buggered up he can’t walk nor talk till spring.” I drop the sunglasses propped on my head onto my face so I can watch anybody I care to for long as I wish.
Possibilities for my life are suddenly endless. I could take on a cowboy lover. I smile at the cocky thought. I feel like someone I knew once—a potential version of myself. Someone who could actually be as confident as I am acting. I move to another gathering of people.
This group, I assume at first, is discussing breeding stock. “Smokey, he come out of Lucille by Chet, but Davy was out of Stella. Her daddy was once a banker back in Michigan someplace.”
I see I have a long way to go before I’ll fit in here. An hour later I am walked across the yard to be introduced by my hostess, Chloe, to the Marlboro Man and the Donnells.
Chloe says his name as she guides me over: Bo Garrett. Short, she says, for Bartholomew Owen Garrett.
I know this name.
We should have met Friday at the Jackson State Bank, but he sent his lawyer, Mick Farlow, for the closing instead. “Mr. Garrett is indisposed.” He and the real estate agent, Myrna Loy MacKinder, exchanged smiles and familiar head shakes.
Once I signed all the papers and handed over my down payment, Myrna Loy joked, “You are now officially the owner of a one-acre parcel plus a run-down cabin and the odd shed or two.” With a name like that—“My parents were very devoted fans”—and with the low price and fast paperwork, my ownership felt uncertain. It still does.
I’d walked into Myrna Loy’s office last Wednesday just as she was taking the call from Bo Garrett. She had forty-eight hours to sell the cabin for cash.
“If Garrett wasn’t in such a damn hurry for beer money, I could sell the place for twice that much,” she said to herself, hanging up the phone. She swiveled around in her desk chair and spotted me just stepping inside her door.
“Sold,” I said, joking.
Dad wired the cash to me so I could take my time setting up a mortgage when my share of the Findlay house came through.
Our hostess introduces me. “Our newest neighbor, Suzannah Perry.”
He doesn’t recognize my name. Chloe Hanes just assumes we’ve met. “You know Bo, of course, and this is Caroline and Dick.”
Bo doesn’t get why I should know him, but he doesn’t question Chloe; perhaps he is notorious enough in the valley to be accustomed to such assumed introductions; everybody at the bank knew his name. Myrna Loy says he has lived here all his life. Caroline Donnell, I notice, has not left Bo Garrett’s side since she cast her shadow over our meeting-in-progress. Dick, her husband, comes and goes, but Caroline stays.
Chloe moves me on. We are to make the rounds of guests.
Later, after we’ve all eaten and only the tips of the tallest peaks of the Tetons luster pink and gold, with one shaft of last light beaming over a pass and into Cascade Canyon, I spot Bo, Caroline at his side, talking to the same group of old-timers I began the party with. I see Bo look surprised, then scan the crowd until he spots me. I know someone just told him: I am the person who bought his cabin on Friday. Since I have car keys jiggling in my hand, and I’m thanking my hostess Chloe for including me in today’s gathering, I must follow through now and leave.
eight
In the morning I wake to sounds of homey stirrings coming from my kitchen. I swear I smell bacon, and I don’t even have any in the cabin. Water runs in my sink. I lift my head from my pillow and ask myself why I’m not full of fright. Ready to arm myself with the stove poker, climb out a window, run. But what kind of threat can such domestic activity present? I scoot out of my sleeping bag and crawl across the carpet to peak around the sofa.
It’s him. The Marlboro Man is in my kitchen. Cooking, I think. Dishes rattle. Then the side of his head flashes again across the space between the sofa back and doorway as he reaches for a paring knife by the sink. I flatten myself to the floor.
I try to figure what could account for this strange scene, but vanity surges to the forefront. I picture my sleepy face. My suitcase is in the bedroom, between me and the kitchen doorway. My robe is there. And my lip gloss. And I can’t get to them without being seen.
No choice but to present myself as is, long rumpled nightgown and bare feet. I get off the floor and stand in the doorway.
I do as Bo says; I don’t know why. On through the kitchen, I step into the bathroom and turn on the water and the exhaust fan so he doesn’t hear me flush the toilet. I brush my teeth, wash my face. I smooth wrinkles out of my flannel gown. There doesn’t seem to be a thing to do other than go back out there. I am hungry. I only nibbled at the party yesterday. I never eat well when I have to talk to strangers while doing it. Then I came home last night to empty cupboards. Bo must have brought groceries.
“So,” he says when I reappear, “are you called Sue, Suzie, what?”
“Never,” I say. “Suzannah.”
“The whole deal? Su-zan-nah?”
“The whole deal.”
“Juice. Su-zan-nah.” He hands me a filled glass. “This used to be my grandma’s place. I ate most my breakfasts here when I was a kid. I’d come over from the ranch house in my pajamas.”
“Thanks for dressing this morning,” I say.
He looks my face over real well, while I take a sip of juice. “You’re prettier than Grandma.”
“I don’t cook much,” I say, just to enhance the distinction between me and his grandma. Those blue glass Mason jars sitting on the countertop could fool a person. They look so good all lined up, holding dried lentils and peas, black turtle beans and pasta—but I don’t plan on cooking those things. I plan on being a frozen-food thawer for a while. I did my stint of bread baking and stew making, roasting and toasting during my marriage.
Bo cocks his head toward a chair. I sit, and he serves eggs baked with herbs and Swiss cheese, brings over the bacon, toast, and coffee. Everything looks and smells wonderful. He pulls out a chair, sits, and smiles at me. Movie-star teeth. Slight cleft in his jaw. We unfold our napkins, and I wonder if this is what they mean by Western hospitality. Maybe somebody cooks breakfast for all newcomers in Wyoming. How would I know?