Sally pretended she hadn’t heard Rachel’s “No fucking way.” Sally smiled at Steve before addressing Rachel again. “I’ll just ask George if I can borrow his truck. David needs a puffer.” Sally tipped her head back and shook her hair and smiled, and in Sally’s face, Rachel saw David’s widely spaced brown eyes.
“Go to hell, Sally.”
“Hey, can I get a pumpkin for David to carve?” Sally said. She didn’t seem to notice she’d just been sent to hell.
“Sally, I can take you to the store,” offered the salesman.
“Rachel, you must already know Steve,” Sally said.
“We’re neighbors,” the salesman said. “We’ve been waving to each other for months.”
Rachel rolled her eyes, but found herself feeling warm toward the man nonetheless. She said, “Well, I guess you’ve never called the goddamn police on the livestock.”
“I’m an animal lover.” The salesman appeared to blush. “Glad to finally meet you.”
This time Rachel accepted the big soft hand, and oddly enough, she liked the feel of the damn thing, which made her think of warm, dry sand in her fingers. She hesitated before letting his hand go, grasping it slightly longer and tighter than she had meant to, against the feeling of it slipping away.
Standing so close to the house, Steve could confirm what he’d suspected, that the wood trim was dry, even brittle, and that what had looked like unpainted horizontal boards actually had ancient specks of white paint, which meant that this house was not even stained with a natural finish, but was entirely unprotected from the elements. He couldn’t hold back any longer. “You really need some windows and siding. Have you got red squirrels in the walls?”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Here’s my card. I sell insulated windows and vinyl siding. That’s one of the biggest problems around here, the red squirrels.” He pushed the card toward her.
“We only just got the damn squirrels.” Despite an inclination to reach out and accept the card, Rachel stood her ground. “You must have driven them little sons of bitches scurrying out of other people’s houses right over here.”
“If I did, I certainly didn’t mean to.” Steve didn’t try to defend himself by saying that he’d only been assigned to this part of the county a few months ago. There was nothing to be gained by getting defensive with a customer. He withdrew the card, put it back in his pocket. In truth, Steve rather preferred the cranky women to the nice ones. The nice ones were nice with everybody, so you had no idea where you stood, but once you won over the cranky gals, you were in. From a distance, he’d figured Rachel was about twenty-seven years old, and he’d assumed that the birth date in the Gazette marriage license listing had been a typographical error, but up close she indeed looked seventeen. He wouldn’t have taken Harland for a cradle robber, but there she was.
“If you sell windows,” Rachel said, “then you can get me a piece of glass to replace a broken window pane.”
“You may want to replace the whole window.”
“It’s just a damn pane of glass.”
“I can take a look at it,” he said. “You guys heat with LP gas?”
“Oil and wood.”
Anyone could see the aboveground oil tank behind the house and the pile of firewood outside the back door, but Steve had wanted to make conversation. “You’re paying a lot for that oil, and you’re probably losing about forty percent of your heat through these windows and window frames. And if we put vinyl siding on, we layer insulation between the wood and the vinyl. Do your windows rattle in the wind?”
“Hell yes, the windows rattle. Windows always rattle.”
“If they’re rattling, you could be losing even more heat. I’ll be able to give you an estimate in twenty minutes.”
“We aren’t going to buy any damn windows. Any extra money we get we’re buying land. Land is all I care about.” Rachel didn’t understand why she was chattering on to this guy, saying more than she’d said to George all week. It must be something in the air today, she thought.
“Maybe buying windows will save you so much money on oil that you can buy even more land.” Steve smiled. “No obligation. I promise not to be a pushy salesman, especially being your neighbor and all.” He stared into her face. “I’ll check out that broken window for you.”
“Go ahead. I don’t care.” She turned away so he’d stop looking at her.
“I’d like to go in the house to measure the windows, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Fine, go in the damn house.” Rachel didn’t know what had made her think she liked this guy. Did everybody have to want something from a person? Could nobody leave another body alone?
Steve, for his part, was surprised that Rachel gave him permission to go into her house alone—he’d figured she’d walk through with him. He wouldn’t allow a salesman in his house alone, and the thought of his wife even encountering another salesman made him feel downright itchy. Surely Nicole would send such men away.
Steve opened the side door into the little mudroom, which must not have been swept in ages. Some of the jackets hanging on a dozen wall pegs were connected to each other by a network of spiderwebs. He lifted a stiff nylon shell to confirm that it had hardened into position with the impress from the wall peg sticking out its back. With a tiny metal tape he carried in his pants pocket, Steve measured the windows in either side of this small room and recorded the numbers on a pocket-sized pad of estimate forms. Of course, he’d suggest these windows were the least important; he’d give the Harlands an estimate and then, to knock it down, he’d take these off. Rachel’s rifle lay on the windowsill looking black and clean, but Steve resisted his desire to touch it. The next room was the kitchen, where the slate floor made him worry about cold feet on winter mornings. Here he’d suggest replacing the six-pane double-hung job over the sink with a pair of roll-out windows. Women always liked roll-out windows over their sinks, and this Rachel couldn’t be so different from other women. Two large double-hung windows on the south wall brightened the table, which was cluttered with papers and books. Steve noticed a hardcover The Potawatomi with a library sticker on the binding. He ran his hand across a dog-eared Wild Plants of Michigan, which lay open, facedown. He wondered if Nicole would like such a book, if she might take an interest in wildflowers. Or birds, maybe. If he bought Nicole a bird book, he could also buy the binoculars he wanted and say they were for her. At first Steve had liked it that Nicole always read home decorating magazines, but lately it seemed she was holding up those glossy, overdone pages to him as a reproach for their plain house. The top of a small, dusty television in the corner of the Harlands’ living room was covered with newspapers. A lower corner pane of glass was busted out of the east-facing six-by-eight-foot window. Glass shards still lay on the windowsill, though somebody had propped an old leather Bible over the empty space to keep out drafts. He’d tell the Harlands that multipane windows were awfully expensive and that they should go with one big window. They could get a snap-on plastic grid to give the illusion of separate panes of glass, and that would be easier to clean. Not that cleaning looked like a priority around here. He and Nicole kept their own place nice and neat. He envisioned the interior of his ranch house across the street, with Nicole glowing slightly golden in the center of the living room, beaming at him as he arrived home. In his vision, the ceilings were slightly higher, and his wife was more solid, her face rounder.
He climbed the stairs to the second story, where he investigated and took measurements in each of the two smaller bedrooms, one of which was solidly packed with boxes and junk. The hall was floored with unfinished pine, same as the bedrooms. If he somehow managed to make love with Rachel, say, while her husband was out of town at a fertilizer convention and while Nicole was at work, he would not walk out onto this floor barefoot for fear of getting splinters—he’d put on shoes just to go to the toilet.
Rachel seemed like a woman who wouldn’t need constant reassurance from a man.
She wouldn’t burst out crying for no reason as Nicole had started doing lately. If Steve moved into this house with Rachel, say if Nicole left him and if George Harland died in a tractor accident, Steve would first replace all the windows, and then he’d sand these floors and apply coat upon coat of high-gloss polyurethane. He imagined his and Rachel’s life together in this house when all the woodwork was finished, and immediately the floors began to gleam before him. As Steve measured the two big windows in the bedroom looking out over the driveway, he smelled female sweat rising out of the mussed double bed. Afterward, he sat on the edge of the bed, on what he figured was her side, nearer the windows, and slid one hand between the sheets. He thought of Rachel’s muscular, curved body slipping out of the barn jacket and ill-fitting jeans, and climbing naked under the covers. Steve knew he would probably never sleep with her, never have her angry arms wrapped around him, never hear her obscenities whispered into his ears. In houses all over the township, there were so many women Steve would never have sex with. Sitting there on the bed with his hand under the covers, he let himself feel overwhelmed by the sadness of such a world, in which a man was not allowed to love every woman but was bound to only one.
When he looked up to the doorway he saw Sally smiling at him, one small hip thrust out. He yanked his arm out from under Rachel’s blankets and stood.
“Lot of windows,” he said. “I’ll bet this bedroom gets cold.”
Sally smiled in a way that told him she knew just how dirty-minded he was and that she didn’t care. Steve thought that Sally would be an especially easy woman to please. A few beers and a few packs of cigarettes was all she’d need to keep her going for a day. She might ask a guy to take her to the store, but she’d never want him to stroll with her through the mall. Steve brushed against her as he moved into the hall.
“All these upstairs windows are the same size,” Steve said. “That’s convenient.”
“What about those way up there?” Sally said, pointing to the ceiling. Above where they stood on the landing was some kind of opening into what must be the attic—light showed around two sides of a wooden panel. Sally said, “Let’s check it out.” Her little body seemed to float upward from the wall rungs, and when she pushed aside the panel, daylight poured down. She said, “Come on.”
Steve felt a little uneasy about going up into another man’s private space, but light meant windows, surely. He risked the smoothly worn rungs with his 265 pounds and at the top pulled himself through the square entrance, to arrive in a tiny room. He could barely stand with the ceiling as low as it was, so he sat beside Sally on a built-in bench. He was surrounded on three sides by old, rattling multipane windows whose putty had crumbled, whose white paint, probably lead-based, had mostly flaked onto the plank floor. He had noticed this structure in the winter when they first moved in across the street, but he’d forgotten about it since the big sycamore leafed out and covered it from view. From his sitting position, he took approximate measurements, jotted notes, and reminded himself about the tremendous heat loss of keeping such a room. He looked through the branches at his own house, which was nearly identical to Elaine Shore’s from above, except for Elaine’s protruding corner breakfast nook. He looked beyond the houses, to the cornfields and farther, to the pond that fed the creek, which ran under Queer Road and down into the river. He hadn’t realized the source of the creek was so close behind his own house, or maybe it was an illusion. Bushes and small trees lined the creek, and big trees surrounded the pond. His own little half acre had no bushes or trees, and it made his house look lonesome. He’d talk to Nicole about planting a tree or two; he’d tell her he wouldn’t mind mowing around them. Trees kept a house cooler in the summer, and they increased resale value.
“Which house is yours?” Sally asked.
“That one, on the left.”
Sally leaned against him more than was necessary to look. He reached both arms around her and pulled her light body onto his lap to give her a better view, and she stayed there. Steve ran his hands over the outside of Sally’s thighs, but he felt mostly bone. Nicole was small too, but she had firm flesh. Though Sally wiggled and leaned against his chest, Steve could tell the woman didn’t desire him one bit. He didn’t mind—he was married, after all, and starting such an affair with a neighbor lady would be too risky.
The roof-truss construction of his own house made it impossible to build a room like this at home, but Steve had to figure out how to have some kind of small private place. Nicole had started crying the one time he’d said he’d wanted to sleep the night on the couch in his little office, and he’d given in and gone to bed with her, but he really liked the thought of curling up for the night somewhere small and out of the ordinary, somewhere like this window room. He looked down through the high bleached branches of the sycamore to see that a blue-and-white police car was parked in the driveway. At the roadside, a man Steve didn’t recognize closed a hatchback on four bright pumpkins. Steve imagined Nicole still naked under her white bathrobe, sitting at their dining table, thumbing through a magazine depicting tastefully overdone bedrooms while she talked to her mother on the phone.
“Look at this.” Steve pulled out a bleached photo from behind a window frame. “It’s an old photo. A woman, I think.”
Sally took it from his hand and held it up to the light. “I don’t see anything.”
“Hey, there’s your house,” Steve said, pointing west over cornfields toward a house with a deteriorating, rust-colored silo.
“I need a cigarette,” Sally said. “Let’s go to the store.”
Steve figured Nicole couldn’t mind his doing good deeds, say, taking this woman to the store. He’d explain that creating goodwill in the neighborhood would pay off in sales eventually.
To the south, across the street from April May Rathburn’s house, Steve saw smoke rising from the doorway and roofline of the old barn. George Harland must be burning that barn, he thought; that must be why Rachel said he couldn’t take Sally to the store. Though earlier today Steve had fantasized about putting his office there, he now told himself that the old barn must be unsafe, a hazard for children, and its roof probably leaked, making the building of no use to anyone. Farmers didn’t waste anything, so why else would Harland be burning?
“They’re burning that barn,” Steve said.
“Come on,” Sally said, already beginning the descent. “Do you want to stop at the Barn Grill before we go to the store?”
Steve noticed Sally had dropped the little photo on the floor. He picked it up and studied it again. He made out the outline of a woman’s head and shoulders. He stuck it back under the window frame before following Sally down the ladder.
22
“GOOD-LOOKING PUMPKINS,” TOM PARKS SAID WHEN HE met George in front of the toolshed. George was carrying a greasy shaft eighteen inches long, something from his tractor or combine, but he didn’t seem to have gotten any grease on himself. Parks became filthy the minute he opened the hood of his truck to check the oil. Lately he’d been on call so much that he drove the cruiser all the time, which was nice because the county took care of its maintenance.
“Rachel’s an awfully good gardener,” George said. “Reminds me of my grandmother that way.” Only after he said it did George realize what an odd comparison that was: Rachel and Henrietta. Both of them gardeners deep down into their bones, both of them angry and unknowable. Of course George hadn’t tried to get to know his stern grandmother—it would have seemed like a betrayal of his grandpa.
“What happened to your front window?”
“A kid tossed a pumpkin into it at three A.M.”
“Kids can make trouble, all right,” Parks said, but even as he said it, he was thinking that kids just needed some time and space. “You want to file a complaint?”
“Nah. Rachel’s keeping the pumpkins on the wagon,” George said. “She can pull it into the stock barn at night.” George had a way of staring over the horizon while he conversed with a person, as tho
ugh that person was just one of many rows of a crop over which he was keeping watch.
“I saw a kid messing around in your barn just now. I pulled in and looked inside. His bike was in the doorway, but he was hiding.”
“That was David,” George said. “Sally’s kid. He was helping me stack straw.”
“I found these cigarettes on his bike. Sally’s brand.” He held out the cigarette pack, then felt a little embarrassed to be showing he knew what the woman smoked. Parks figured George must have already noticed he had a soft spot for Sally.
George looked away from the mashed green-and-white pack. “He’s a good kid. I don’t think he’d smoke in the barn.”
“Don’t know why he’d hide from me,” Parks said, although really he did understand that even a good kid might hide from a cop. Parks put the cigarettes in his top pocket. “I thought you might want to go down and check the situation out, make sure everything’s okay.” Parks followed George’s gaze, turning and looking in the direction of the river, though they couldn’t see it from this distance.
George nodded. “I think David’s ma’s here somewhere.”
“I gave her a ride home from the Barn Grill a few nights ago.” Parks looked down at his wide black shoe. “Sounds like there’s no chance of Mike coming back. How do you think she’s doing?”
“She’s same as always, far as I can tell.”
“You’re still letting her live there rent free.”
“That’s how it turns out.” George looked briefly at Parks before letting his gaze sweep over Rachel’s garden and through the windbreak of walnut trees separating it from the soybean field beyond. Both Parks and George then looked northeast toward the Whitby pig farm and Higgins’s dairy operation, where both men worried to themselves that new subdivisions would appear within a couple years. George had a standing deal with the Higginses, who bought most of his second and third cuttings of alfalfa for their dairy herd. If the rumor was true, if the Higginses were trying to get out of the business, George didn’t know who’d buy that much hay from him in the future. Like the Taylors, the Higginses would get a good price from a developer, enough to retire comfortably.
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