[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  51

  It seemed to Clare that California changed everyone except Neva, the one person whose life it was supposed to change. Neva still ate too little and coughed too much. Charlotte was happier—she was sewing new clothes and wearing Aunt Ida’s jewelry. Instead of worrying and nagging everybody, his mother more or less ignored them all. But she was happier, too, singing to herself as she cooked with Ida, smiling and gossiping about people he’d never heard of. His father stopped reading aloud. He stopped reading to himself. He stopped shaving. His beard began to take over his cheeks and neck. He worked picking fruit six days a week and on Sundays he sat in Ida’s bottle garden smoking cigarettes (Uncle Hurd smoked, so Clare supposed that was why he’d started) and watching the horizon, usually with a hand on the head of Charlotte’s dog. Clare figured his father was thinking of Aldine, but when Neva asked him, he said, “Oh, just things, Nevie.” Charlotte asked him, too, what he was always thinking about, and he turned to her and said, “I think you know.”

  His voice was so low and serious it seemed to set Charlotte back a little. She said, “The place, you mean.”

  He turned his eyes slowly away from her and in the same serious, low voice said, “Yes, I’m thinking about the place.”

  Once, when Clare asked him if he wished he’d brought his fretted dulcimer, his father considered it a moment or two and then said, “No.”

  Clare had hoped to go to high school, and everyone agreed that he should, but not right away. Better, Hurd and Ida said, to start fresh in the fall when he could start right alongside all the others instead of jumping in when the school term was almost done. Clare didn’t argue. He picked fruit together with his father and after supper he sometimes walked alone to the town library, where he could read magazines and, each week, write a letter to Aldine.

  Well, we finally made it to California. It’s every bit as pretty as they say. Did you get to Emporia all right? My mom says being a Harvey Girl was the most fun she ever had.

  He didn’t know why he was writing to her, or why he still thought about her all the time.

  Write and tell me what it’s like. Neva wears the hat and scarf all the time even though it’s too hot for it.

  Yours ever, Clare.

  The next week:

  We sure miss you. Specially Neva. She asks about you alot. At first her cold seemed to go away but now she’s had a repeat and I know a word from you would mean alot.

  Then he added,

  Remember when I said I loved you I still do. I think of you all the time, please let me know how you are. They say California is the place to come for cures, but Neva is still poorly and my dad—

  He was going to say that his father had a cough but he didn’t want Aldine to write only out of concern for him. Clare started the letter over, leaving his father out of it, and the part about him loving her. He sent the letters care of the Emporia, Kansas, Harvey House, and he checked at the Fallbrook post office whenever he could to see if she had written back.

  “You and your dad are the waitingest pair,” the postmaster said one afternoon in May. Bart Crandall had a lazy eye, a limp, and a twisted hand. It was quite a package, in Clare’s opinion. Little kids were scared of him even though he was always passing out candy. Butterscotch usually, but saltwater taffy today. Bart had managed to court and marry a plump woman named Florrie, who worked for Western Union, so they knew everybody’s business, just like the telephone operators in Kansas.

  “Waitingest?” Clare asked, twirling open a taffy wrapper.

  “Both coming in, checking for General Delivery,” Bart said. “I sure hope the money comes for you.”

  “It’s not money,” he said. Bart Crandall nodded and waited and Clare said, “We lost track of somebody back in Kansas.”

  “Family?” Bart Crandall asked.

  “Mmm,” Clare said, nodding, while the postman smiled and studied him and waited. Clare put the taffy in his mouth as a kind of stopper. He began to chew.

  “Cousin of some kind?” Bart Crandall asked.

  Clare shrugged and pretended to laugh and pointed at his mouth full of taffy. Before making for the door he bawled a thank-you that resembled a sound that Yauncy Tanner might make. That seemed about right to Clare. Because in letting Bart Crandall fish facts out of him, he had been an idiot and a swell one at that.

  52

  The snow started falling on Emporia after passengers left on the 2:24 westbound. It fell on the lead-dark tracks, on the roofs and windows of parked cars, and on the hunched shoulders of men and women caught out in the weather. The quiet that always descended in the wake of train departures, a slow, tired cleaning of plates, tables, and floors, was deepened by the whiteness outside, as if the snow were a sleep that invited them all.

  “Dreaming about Los Angeleez?”

  Glynis’s raspy voice from behind. It gave Aldine a start.

  “No,” she said, “not at all.” She glanced out. “Though the snow falling on the street like that puts me in mind of Ayr.”

  Glynis gave a cheerful little laugh and said, “Well, kid, stop dreamin’ and get crackin’,” before heading off with a bin of dirty dishes. It was a line that Gilbert Dorado used. Mr. Dorado had been Ansel’s friend, and Mrs. Price’s, too, when she was still Eleanor Hoffman. Mr. Dorado was nice, but he moved from restaurant to restaurant and always called Aldine “our fair lass” because he had never learned her name.

  In the beginning it felt odd to be called “kid” by a girl younger (and shorter!) than herself, but Glynis’s steady everyday friendship and her confident certainty in all matters of conduct had altered Aldine’s view of her, and made it more accommodating. Still, Glynis traded on confidences, both the giving, which she yielded readily, and the getting, which she sought relentlessly. She’d pointed out to Aldine the purveyor of sheet music who had last summer, by means of a note written on a coaster, suggested a riverside “rendezvous” and she told her about the railroad man who came in twice a week and after his meal would withdraw from his vest a packet of off-color postcards and then select one to leave for his waitress, “which,” Glynis said, “I will not say did not sometimes amuse me but then he left one that could not be abided.” Aldine felt obliged to ask the nature of the offending card. “Too offensive,” Glynis returned. “I cannot say.” But of course she did. “You’ve got a safari tent occupied by newlyweds. Flap’s closed, see, so it’s dark inside but a curious elephant slips his trunk inside and the bride in happy surprise exclaims, ‘Ye Gods, Charlie!’” Glynis’s tone was disapproving. Aldine wanted to laugh—it was the kind of thing that in their younger days she and Leenie might’ve laughed themselves sick at—but she couldn’t laugh now because of Glynis’s somber presentation of it all. “Next time I waited on him I told him to eat his dinner and keep his filthy cards to himself. “You see, don’t you?” she said to Aldine but didn’t wait for a reply. “If my father and mama taught me one thing,” she said, “it’s that you have to draw a line or the men will run roughshod.” This was a common theme for Glynis, who returned time and again to the tragedy of her sister.

  As much as Glynis needed to tell her stories, Aldine preferred to conceal her own.

  About her own sister, she had been very brief. “I lived with her in New York before I came to Kansas,” she said. When letters came for Aldine—four or five from Clare and two from Ansel—Glynis asked, “From your sister?” and Aldine just shook her head and tied them together with a pink ribbon she found left behind in one of the booths at the Harvey House. She hadn’t wanted to share the letters, but Glynis had prompted so relentlessly that Aldine finally read them aloud. She started with Clare’s letters because they required no explaining. “He sounds sweet as molasses,” was Glynis’s response after the last one, “and almost as slow.”

  “No, he can recite anything,” Aldine said, and began rewrapping the letters, but Glynis said, “What about the others?” so there was nothing for it. She lifted Ansel’s onionskin page out of the slit-open air mail e
nvelope, and tried to keep her hands from trembling.

  “Dear Aldine,

  If I had not kissed you or declared how I felt, there would have been no wrong in insisting that you come with us to a place where you’d be among friends. Please let me know if you get this letter because then I’ll know Gilbert’s watching over you all right.

  Ansel”

  “Oh, Gilbert would watch over you all right,” Glynis said with a sniggering laugh, “if he was ever here. But it’s such a sad, beautiful letter . . . Why did Ansel have to go to California?”

  “Work. His farm was failing and he had work out there.”

  Glynis lay silent and still for a minute on her bed opposite Aldine. Then she said, “What did he mean by ‘coming with us.’ Who’s ‘us’?”

  Aldine pretended she didn’t know. She said Ansel had a brother he was close to, and to change the subject said, “I guess I should tell him that Gilbert has a different job now.”

  “Happy journeys describing it. From what I hear he just goes from Harvey House to Harvey House flirting with all the plump girls. Have you seen the girlfriend he plays house with? You’d think she’d be plump enough to take care of a dozen Gilberts, but oh no. I’d never marry a Mexican, Italian, or Frenchman for that very reason—the vows don’t mean a hill of beans to them.”

  “I thought you said you would never marry a Catholic,” Aldine added. Glynis could get carried away with all the types she wouldn’t marry, and Aldine wanted her carried away.

  “Correct-o,” Glynis said. “Catholics or Jews, either one. And to tell the truth I haven’t liked what I’ve seen of Bohemians.” But she was eyeing the packet of letters Aldine was trying to put away. “What about the last one?” she said.

  Aldine slipped it out, but it was too hard to read aloud. She started, but her voice faltered, and she just handed it to Glynis.

  Aldine, I know I wronged you. I forgot myself. Still I can’t bear not knowing if you’re safe. Please write back and tell me that the money I gave you was enough and you’re serving coffee, having fun.

  He had signed it simply Ansel. Then without a P.S., he’d added, It is terrible and wonderful the vividness of your face in my mind.

  Glynis handed the letter back. “It’s like the words are soft but the meanings are hard. He said good-bye to you, didn’t he?”

  Aldine lowered her eyes and nodded. Glynis came over and sat beside her on the bed and when she turned to hug her, Aldine was surprised at the urgency with which she turned to receive it. She was soon crying lavishly, as if a dam had given way. Glynis’s words were consoling. It was going to be okay, she said. Aldine was lucky she hadn’t run off with a man like that. “We’ll stick together,” she said, “get a good transfer together. You’ll meet a man ten times nicer than that. You didn’t write back to him, did you?”

  Aldine shook her head miserably.

  “Good,” Glynis said, “because writing back would just make forgiving himself all that much easier,” and then she said nothing else but hugged Aldine until the last tear had fallen.

  Aldine was ashamed at how much of Ansel she’d given up, and she was horrified by the sordid figure that Glynis had turned him into. She was glad at least that she hadn’t mentioned the nausea. She’d never been one for keeping track of dates, but she wished now that she was. She hadn’t been on, it seemed, in over a month, maybe six weeks. She didn’t boak, like Leenie had, so it was probably just the change of weather or some mild form of flu, but whatever it was, it wasn’t Glynis’s business or anyone else’s.

  The snow had covered everything now, had turned everything dirty into a soft, comforting white. It was Aldine’s job to drain the giant coffee urn and wipe the spattered silver, to place washed coffee cups on trays that could be carried to the tables for the 5:13 eastbound. If customers appeared in the meantime, she would stop what she was doing and serve them, but few in Emporia could afford restaurant meals, and fewer still dined at 2:30 in the afternoon, so she was surprised to see a man in a dark coat stop at the door, remove his hat, and come in.

  She recognized him before he’d finished brushing the snow from his coat and hat. It was the ginger hair, she supposed, and the upturned nose and the freckles; they were all the same despite a general thickening of his features and limbs. Still, she thought she might be seeing things. Had she ever asked what part of the states Elder Lance came from, to what part of it he would return? Had he mentioned farming? She thought he had.

  “Can you wait on that man?” Aldine whispered to Glynis while Mrs. Gore’s back was turned. The room was hushed and brown and warm, and the gleaming surface of the counter reflected Aldine’s white sleeve as she lifted her hand to indicate Elder Lance.

  Glynis looked across the room. “Sure, kid. Your wish is my command.”

  Glynis headed for the booth. Aldine turned her back and made a serious business of rubbing the coffee urn with a flannel cloth. Glynis soon returned to say, “He wants Finnan Haddie and ‘a big ol’ glass of buttermilk,’ but I should tell you that he asked me if your name is by any chance Aldine McKenna.”

  Aldine knew that she shouldn’t turn her head, but she couldn’t help it, and when she looked at the booth by the window, Elder Lance waved his hand at her and smiled in the snow-lit air. Aldine looked around for Mrs. Gore, saw that she had left the room, and lifted her hand in what she hoped was a noncommittal way.

  Glynis poured buttermilk into a glass and looked mischievously at Aldine. “Old beau I’m thinking?”

  Aldine shook her head and used the flannel to rub water spots from a silver knife.

  “Want to take him his big ol’ glass of buttermilk?”

  Aldine said no, she didn’t. Instead of putting the glass on a tray, Glynis just stood there grinning. “I guess he’s coming to fetch it himself,” she said, and a moment later Elder Lance was at the counter. When Aldine turned, he began to smile, to lean his head back with amazement. The teeth were still the same gingery brown. “Ye gods and little fishes,” he said. “Aldine McKenna—am I right?”

  His remembering her full name was a surprise.

  “It’s me,” she said, and smiled in the most guarded way she could. “How are you, Elder . . . ?” She knew his name but preferred him not to know it.

  “Lance,” he said. “Elder Lance. At least that’s who I was. Now I’m just Roy.” He drew from his vest pocket a small card that said Roy T. Lance, Farm Implements. “That’s another person I used to be. I’m in college now.” He stopped talking, shook his head, and spread his blunt fingers wide on the lunch counter. “Ye gods and little fishes,” he said, softer this time. “Aldine McKenna.” He sat down on one of the stools and said, “Can I just eat here?”

  “Course you can,” Glynis said, setting his buttermilk before him.

  Elder Lance turned from Glynis to Aldine. “Well, this does beat everything,” he said. She wondered if he’d ever stop shaking his head. “This really takes the cake.”

  Through her demeanor, Aldine tried to suggest that she would have to be curt. There were jobs that were hers to do, and there was the strict no-flirting rule, and there were the stories about how fast Mrs. Gore could have you on the street.

  “You know I just saw Leenie and Will,” Elder Lance said. “I ate at their house, what, two weeks ago. The baby’s real sweet. Spitting image of Will.” He was nodding. “Absolute spitting image.”

  Aldine couldn’t look at him because of the brown teeth, but his words had a stiffening effect on her. Outside the window, the April snow kept falling and deepening. She had not written Leenie because she couldn’t think of a way to tell Leenie and Will where she was living, what she was doing.

  Mrs. Gore entered the rear door of the lunchroom with a vacuum cleaner that had been sent out for repairs. She set it down in the corner, made sure that Aldine saw it there, and left again.

  “There’s your haddie,” Aldine said and went for the plate the cook had set on the ledge.

  “They’re not going to believe
that I saw you! They told me you were in Kansas, but they said Loam County. They don’t know Kansas, I guess.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Aldine said. Glynis was removing soiled tablecloths and shaking out fresh ones, but Aldine noticed she was sticking to the nearer tables. Aldine resumed polishing silverware, but Elder Lance was not one for subtleties. He went on talking.

  His mother had been pretty darned ill, he said, squeezing a lemon over the white ruffled flesh of his fish, down in Olpe. She was all right now. She was a corker. He was studying to be an engineer at Brigham Young University, which was a beautiful place—she ought to see it. It was just over the mountain pass from where Leenie and Will lived in Salt Lake.

  Aldine had only an image from Leenie’s moth-brown photo of the Salt Lake temple, the spires like masts, the windows like portholes. She wondered if Will and Leenie had gone there and done the magic things that would keep them together even in death, and if they had done the magic for her parents.

  “I thought Leenie said you were working as a teacher here, living with a Mormon family.”

  Glynis was smoothing out a cloth and pretending not to listen. Aldine hadn’t told Glynis that she lived with a family at all. On the windowsill the snow was rounding into the corners, the way you might find them in a cozy holiday card. She wished she were out in it, catching the lacy formations you could see for an instant if you caught one on your sleeve.

  “How was that, with the Mormon family?” Elder Lance said, bringing her back.

  “They had to leave their farm because of the dust storms,” Aldine said and kept her eyes on the silverware. “Their little girl had what they call dust pneumonia.”

  Elder Lance forked a bite of haddie, dragged it through sauce, and popped it in his mouth.

  “Why’d you stay here, then?” he said, still chewing.

  “Seemed for the best. And I’d heard this could be fun.”