Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  I watch Bo rinse my washcloth, vigorously twisting it one way then the other so it will never be square again.

  My mother and I have seen the truth and horror in each other’s eyes and have held on to it together. We have shared this. But work needs to be done and professionals know how to do it. So Agatha thinks up helpers like using baby wipes in the bathroom and hiding smashed pills in a spoonful of applesauce. Agatha doesn’t fall apart when my mother doesn’t recognize her daughter. And Agatha forgives herself for loss of patience when my mother repeats and repeats the same question or wanders the house throughout a long night. But, eventually, Agatha departs…and leaves me with a blotchy red face.

  “Why don’t you throw this stuff away?” Bo opens my compact and smells the musty caked powder. “You don’t need it.”

  He’s complimenting me because he doesn’t know what else to say, but I follow his advice and discard the blusher in the wastebasket.

  Bo says, “How about if I fix some Irish Cream coffee?”

  “Great.”

  Baileys Irish Cream in dark rich coffee was our favorite treat before I left for Florida.

  Sitting in my familiar place on the bench beside my stacks of books, elbows on kitchen table, I realize this is the best spot to ease back into my psychic clothes. Here, I daydream. Here, I sketch out new jewelry designs. My famous artist friend says it’s important to daydream. To daydream, Kelly says, is an artist’s job.

  The geranium blooms on the windowsill above the sink. I tell Bo thanks for watering it while I was gone.

  With strong square hands, he reaches for coffee beans and mugs. I admire the way his forearms flare into muscle from beneath rolled-up flannel sleeves before tapering into surprisingly narrow wrists. Bo’s fine denim-covered butt passes in front of the kitchen cupboards from sink to stove; I admire that, too.

  “The geranium’s getting leggy,” he says.

  “Leggy?” My eyes move down the backs of Bo’s legs.

  “We should cut it back.”

  His Levi’s are tucked into unlaced Sorel Pacs, and he’s leaving little puddles of melted snow on the floor, but the worst of it is probably drying in the bathroom, so I don’t mention it.

  “My mother planted red geraniums just like this one outside the screened porch in Florida several years ago and now they’re big as bushes.”

  “So you all went out to dinner your last night there.” Bo is determined to keep me talking.

  “Dad sat across from Mom and me in a booth at Gentleman Jim’s. He said to Mom, ‘You and I are partners, aren’t we?’”

  “What did he mean?”

  “I think he began the statement conversationally. His tone was a bit patronizing at first. Then the words seemed to shift the atmosphere between them, and he reached across the table and held Mom’s hand.”

  That moment in the restaurant, waiting for dinner, I felt breathless at the sudden vision of my father’s truth: My mother and he were partners. They were playing out a holy exchange of life lessons. I was humbled by their vast undertaking. At that moment, I believed I understood the purpose of life, and I believed with absoluteness that life extended beyond the brief span we attribute to it. And though I can’t with dependable certainty draw forward either belief at will just now, I’ll never forget the certainty I felt of both at that moment.

  None of this I say to Bo, who has stopped his work and turned to me.

  I say, “My father has never acknowledged emotions before. With this disease he’s learning to interact with my mother on an emotional level, because nothing about her life is rational. When I was a teenager, he sent me to my room if I became teary-eyed and told me I could join the family again when I conducted myself with reason.”

  “What about your mother? What’s she getting from the partnership?”

  “I know she never got this loving attention from my dad before, or this acceptance. Mostly, I feel overwhelmed by the hard road her spirit has chosen, but occasionally I glimpse a kind of harmony emerge in her life.”

  “Goddamn big price to pay for some attention.”

  “It makes sense to me. In a way, we all give our lives for attention and acceptance.”

  Bo considers. “This partnership deal, are you talking about something unconscious here?”

  “I suppose. But whatever explains the exchange I witnessed between my mother and my father defines what I want in my own life. I want to learn life through partnering. I saw love and its long meaning that moment. I witnessed its worth despite the pain.” I sound formal, as if I’ve thought this out, yet I am surprising myself with this statement of intention.

  Bo nods. Behind him the coffee drips through the filter into the pot.

  I remind myself, or perhaps it’s Agatha’s reminder before she finally departs, there will be times I’ll forget this vision. That with the rage of the powerless I’ll wonder where to point the finger of blame for my mother’s illness.

  “My father’s energy is like his hair—cowlicks spurting in all directions. I think he’s finally found his match in tending Mom. He gives himself totally to her these days.”

  Bo brings our mugs to the table. As he pulls out a chair to sit, I scoot off the bench and go searching for cookies to have with our coffee.

  “Much of Dad’s early-retirement funds will be spent on Mom’s care. There isn’t an insurance company in the world that covers Alzheimer’s disease,” I say, stretching on my toes to reach deep into the high cupboard over the stove. “Thank God he’s well set there.” I sit back down with my loot, a half-empty tin of Piroulines, a cream-filled wafer so expensive and delicious I have to hide them from myself.

  Bo stirs the Baileys into his coffee, then into mine. I feel all these words pushing the lump away in my throat. Bo’s listening soothes like a deep massage. If I keep talking like this, Bo might wish he had voted for the muteness of my tears. I offer Bo the tin of wafers. There’s an interesting survey question: Would men prefer to hear women talk out or cry out their sorrows? I bite off the tip of a wafer. In this survey no third choice would be offered, such as: Suffer in silence.

  “Your dad sounds like an unusual guy.”

  “Oh, he is. The star of the family, the one Mom and I worked to impress.” I dip my wafer into my coffee. “Events were not real to us until we reported them to him.”

  Anger toward my father rises up out of nowhere once again. It’s so inappropriate I’m embarrassed inside my own head.

  I chase the little piece of wafer floating on top of my coffee. I sigh. “I don’t know. While my dad encouraged Mom’s dependence, I badgered her to get a job, to volunteer, make more friends, learn birding, anything. We both should have left her alone.”

  I take a sip of my coffee. I feel a deep gratitude for Bo’s company and care.

  I say, “Tessa is having a potluck and scavenger hunt later this afternoon. Come with me.”

  Turns out Bo knows most everybody at the party and introduces me to more people than I do him, even though a lot of Tessa’s guests are associated with the bookstore. After the scavenger hunt, we all sit around with paper plates on our laps, the guests’ dogs dozing between rows of Sorel Pacs at the front door.

  Bo tells how his scavenger hunt team of five men stopped in the driveway of a woman, known locally as an ice climber. While she was unloading groceries from her car, the men asked if she had any crampons they could borrow, one of the items on the team’s list.

  “She hurried into her house without answering us,” Bo says. “I think she misunderstood and thought we asked for tampons.”

  Bo is good at parties. I am not so good. Erik wouldn’t go to parties and I never went alone. In Findlay, Ohio, if you’re not with your husband at a party, you’re just looking for trouble—or so goes your reputation. I’m way out of practice and not back into my skin from my Florida trip enough to be entertaining in a crowd. Fortunately, Bo hangs close.

  Too close for many people at the party to believe we’re “just neighbors,”
as I keep explaining. One woman, whom I haven’t met before, asked a few minutes ago if I was aware that Bo spent a lot of time out with some reddish-haired woman.

  “Oh, that must be his mistress,” I said, using Caro’s joke. “Isn’t she pretty?” That took care of her.

  But perhaps the stress of trying to be sociable is getting to me. I’m beginning to sneeze and sniffle. I ask Tessa for a tissue and she returns loaded with herbal remedies. She hands them to Bo, rattles off the dosages to him and says, “Stop at Fred’s for oranges on the way home. And take some of the echinacea yourself to bolster your immune system, Bo, or you’ll get this cold next.”

  Bo reads the list of ingredients on one of the herb bottles, “Deer antler, peony, tortoiseshell, placenta—of what they don’t tell.”

  “Why don’t we just swallow pond scum?” I say.

  With these remarks, Tessa decides not to chance us following her directions. “Open up, both of you.” She squirts a dropper of a foul-tasting tincture onto each of our tongues, and we both rush to the kitchen sink for water.

  Tessa follows me to the bedroom. While I’m getting into my coat, she says, “Inner crying. Colds and grieving, same symptoms: watery eyes, filled sinuses. Take care of yourself and don’t come to work tomorrow.” As manager, Tessa has authority over schedules. I know she thinks I have not fully acknowledged my sadness over my mother, and of course, she is right, but I don’t like to encourage her reading metaphors into my life, so I just thank her for the day off.

  A snowfall began during our potluck, and the Suburban’s windshield wipers work against heavy piles of wet snow as we pull away from Tessa’s house. During the drive home, everything in sight—the road, the buck-and-rail fences, the rumps of cattle—is covered unevenly, as if the snow had dropped in clumps instead of flakes. By the time we reach my cabin I’m chilled and achy, eyes streaming and nose stuffed up.

  Bo says he’ll squeeze the orange juice while I get ready for bed. I wait for him under my comforter, propped against pillows, wearing my longest, fluffiest flannel nightgown. I discarded the notion of staging a scene with lacy straps against bare shoulders shyly peeking above my covers. I really don’t feel good.

  “Open up,” Bo says, coming into my room. He sits on my bed and presents a dropper full of echinacea.

  “No icky-natia. I’ve had enough.”

  “Open up,” he says sternly.

  I do and he squeezes the awful tonic into my mouth, while I curl my tongue way back out of reach. He quickly hands me the freshly squeezed juice. I hold a mouthful and bathe my tongue in it, trying to erase the stringent taste of the tonic. I shudder.

  Bo smiles slightly with his eyes cast downward, screwing the top back on the brown bottle.

  “You enjoyed that,” I accuse him.

  “I wish I could give you some more.” He stretches crossways on the bed over my lower legs and plants his elbow, resting his head on his hand. “It has to do with having some noticeable effect on you—good or bad,” he says.

  I know exactly what he means, but I act obtuse. “Give some to Caro. In fact, give her the whole bottle.” I pop out two red Sudafed pills from their foil and chase them with my juice. I’m only a faithful believer in natural medicine when I’m feeling good.

  “It isn’t easy to have an effect on Caro. You’re more fun.” He shakes the bottle menacingly.

  “I think you’re in love with Caro.” My voice sounds querulous, as if I’m challenging him. Part of me wouldn’t mind picking a fight. I’m kind of irked by that woman’s remark about Bo spending a lot of time with Caro. Can’t be work. How much stock do you buy in the dead of winter?

  “Men aren’t in love with Caro. They’re obsessed by her.”

  “Are you obsessed?” I grab Tessa’s cherry bark cough syrup from the bedside table and take a slug.

  “Once I was, for the heck of it.”

  I feel like acting superior. “I don’t believe you’re that much in control,” I say. It was irritating to take him to my friend’s party and have him know more people there than I did. And all the way home, while I’m ripping into the Kleenex box catching my sneezes, he tells me everyone’s story.

  “Besides, I know you only went to the party because Caro has family visiting.”

  “Believe what you want, Suzannah.” Now Bo sounds irked. He rises from the bed.

  “Sit back down.” I pat the covers and look apologetic. “Talk to me till my Sudafed kicks in.” I don’t want him leaving me alone here, sniffing and restless. “Tell me about Caro’s visitor.”

  He sits on the edge of my bed. “This guy Caro’s taking everywhere? His name’s Benj? Her older brother?”

  “You sound like an up talker.” I pitch my voice high. “Like, you know, everything has to end in a question?”

  “Well, something’s going on.” Bo holds up the tincture bottle and swings it by its rubber squeeze top. “Something icky.”

  “Now you sound like me—icky.”

  Bo shoots off my bed again. “Sick people are so goddamn self-absorbed. Zannah, I can’t talk to you. I’m leaving.”

  “Talk to me. I’ll behave. Please?” I know I can’t sleep yet and my eyes are too watery to enjoy a book.

  Bo stares down at me disgustedly, and I wonder if he can read my mind. He says, “Shit.”

  I hear him in the kitchen rinsing my juice glass before he slams out the back door. I try to imagine being married to Bo and complaining about him to my women friends. They would say, “He rinsed the glass before slamming out? My God, what a dreamboat.”

  After turning out my light, I snuggle deep into my comforter. I follow the sound of Bo’s Suburban backing out the drive, straightening onto the road, accelerating toward his house. I try to roll over in my long flannel nightgown, but between the flannel bedsheet and the flannel duvet cover I feel stuck like one of those felt cutouts arranged on a cloth-covered board used in Sunday school lessons. I’m not going anywhere unless someone peels me off the sheet and moves me.

  From my imagination I pull out my favorite sleep inducer, a fantasy from another biography I’m reading about the Countess Cissy Patterson. It involves Cal Carrington, her Wyoming outlaw hunting guide, and—some say—dark and feisty lover. Cal looks remarkably like Bo in my version of the story. Lately, I’ve been changing things around. Cissy’s French maid does not rush back east in fright after her first day in Wyoming, as she did in reality. She leaves the dude ranch, all right, but only goes to town. There, she stays with Rose Crabtree at the Crabtree Hotel on the corner of the square, and learns English with a flirty accent. In my version she looks remarkably like me. With the help of the local cowpokes, she learns to ride, to dance the Western swing, to gamble at the Wort. Then, having become an accomplished Wyoming woman and having mastered Rose Crabtree’s chokecherry pie recipe, the French maid goes after Cal Carrington. And most nights before I fall asleep, she gets him.

  I wake up the next morning surprised to feel so good. I recall Bo leaving in a benign huff last night, which he will not hold against me. Still, I need to apologize. One of these days I hope I can ask him to a party without canceling out the invitation with a scene designed to turn him away. I decide to go into town for cappuccino and eggs Benedict at Shade’s Café. I hear steady dripping from my eaves as I lie in bed, so I know the snow is melting and the roads will be safe. I shower and dress and stuff two books and my journal into my backpack.

  Tessa claims she “manifests” parking spots by visualizing the exact empty space she wants. I picture the space right in front of Shade’s, next to the alley, so I can easily pull in and out. While I’m at it, I visualize the table I want, too. The small, round one smack in the middle of the big window.

  I don’t get the parking spot, but I do get the window seat. I order my eggs with yolks hard as rocks. “Bounceable,” I call around the corner to Kim, who is cooking today. While I’m spooning foam off my double cap and eating it like ice cream, I spot Caro with a man about to go into a gallery acro
ss the street. This must be her visiting brother. He halts Caro from behind with one hand on top of hers, grasping the doorknob, and his other hand holding her low on her abdomen. He says a few words in her ear; then they both disappear into the shop.

  Thirty minutes later, I glance up from my reading and see the two of them dart across the wet street, clotted with snow that has fallen off passing cars. They don’t see me until they boisterously push each other into Shade’s. My table is too small for three, I gratefully realize, but other tables are available. They are as relieved as I am, I’ll bet, because Caro immediately begins a case for not disturbing me and the books I’ve spread around.

  “Don’t move a thing, Suzannah. Benj and I have business to discuss before I drive him to the airport. Oh, this is my brother. He’s here from Oklahoma.”

  “Where in Oklahoma?” I ask, as if I could name a single town there. I’m like my family used to be about Wyoming when I first moved here, mix it up with all the other square Western states.

  Benj says, “Pierce. Small place.”

  “Ah,” I say knowingly, as if I’m about to ask if that little drugstore on the corner still serves those great cherry phosphates. I may be picturing Kansas for all I know. Around and around my head march Bo’s words, Something’s going on. Something icky.

  Benj looks older than Caro, maybe by as much as eight years or so. Tall, slender build. The most arresting thing about him is the contrast of his light gray eyes against his long, slightly curling black hair. Caro, also, has gray eyes. Though they don’t share the exact same shade, they look out of those eyes the exact same way. As if they had a parent who often recited, “Don’t take any shit. Ever.”

  While Benj lists the places Caro has shown him, Caro eases toward the order counter. I pretend to listen to him while picturing a rough-talking father who kept his distance, maybe traveled a lot. “You take any shit, you’ll just smell bad.” Two sets of gray eyes listened carefully.

  “Benj,” Caro urges, “get in line.”