Her thighs were only slightly pink. She salved them with the excess from her hands and the underside of her forearms. The scorched tops of her feet sported fishbelly-white V’s left by the straps of her flip-flops. She squirted a generous blob of lotion on each foot.
“I asked him and first he lied, then he said he’d taken a second job so we could get a house sooner, then he accused me of messing around when he was out. God, it had only been three months since we got engaged! I gave up my scholarship for him. Did he think that I’d just take up with some random roughneck? He started texting me at odd times, insisting I answer right away. When I didn’t, he took my keys, called the housekeeping company and told them I didn’t have his permission to drive his truck. They let me go because I was supposed to have my own transportation. Then he told me I had to watch the camper. People knew he was off working. He gave me a gun and took me out to learn how to shoot it. I was supposed to spend the day in the truck yard where we parked. I knew by then it was drugs. Cody was using and making deliveries on his route. He thought it was genius.”
“So you left. That was brave.”
Pandora shook her head. “I was scared. Not of Cody, exactly, but his decisions. He was so sure of himself. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. I was more afraid of being suffocated or arrested than I was of getting raped on the road.” She rubbed her palms back and forth until the last of the lotion was absorbed. “Now here I am with nothing but two bags and twenty dollars from pawning the ring.”
That little chip of stone. A pawnbroker must have felt generous that day.
“I was such an idiot. Cody didn’t need me there. He just wanted a nice, reliable lay while he made his money. I should’ve known. Who has brighter eyes than a cranked up liar?”
Pandora’s bitter smile suggested she had wrung all the tears out of that subject. She capped the lotion bottle and set it on the kitchen table. Meg nudged it back to her.
“Keep it. And don’t beat yourself up. You made a mistake but it’s not irreversible.” Surely she knew enough not to get pregnant. “What’s your plan now?”
“I don’t know. I’m waiting to see if he’s followed me.” Meg stiffened and Pandora noticed. “Not followed me to your house—to Junction. He’d never think I’d come here. We talked on the way north about how you were a complete bitch about the money.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
“No lie. Anyway, he’d go straight to my parents’ house, even though they told me I was not welcome back if I went off with Cody. He knows all my friends. If any of them knew where I was, he’d have some story that would get them to tell.”
He knows where I live, too. The rumbling white truck and its blank-eyed headlights seemed more ominous now. What if this was a ruse by the two of them?
“Anyway, thanks for the water—and the use of your yard last night,” Pandora said. She nudged the flip-flops into alignment and fitted them gingerly to her feet. She checked the tie on her bundle and hoisted the gym bag, flinching as the shoulder strap slipped up her arm. “I know there’s a path that goes down to the river somewhere around here.”
The kid could act. She was resourceful, too, but without resources. The river was nowhere for a girl to sleep. In summer clothes even an overnight fifty degrees would penetrate to the bone. And then tomorrow—hitchhiking, trying to read the drivers who stopped, looking over her shoulder for Cody. Turning redder by the day.
“Is that all you have for shoes?”
“Cody took my Nikes when he took back the truck keys.”
A controlling, drug-dealing boyfriend was a matter for the police. There were community agencies equipped for these situations. Meg could use her connections to get Pandora in somewhere tonight.
“You need a safe place where Cody won’t find you. I can help with that.”
“Oh, thank you,” Pandora said. She dropped her bags. “It’ll only be temporary.”
Temporary? Here? No. Meg ran through the options. Women’s shelter. Full. Teen shelter. She’s eighteen. Regular shelter. Yuck. Anyway, it was too late to get in tonight.
All right, she’d pay for a motel, some meals, a few days to let things settle down. That was the way to stay out of the drama and not worry about Pandora rifling the medicine cabinet.
“I knew from the scholarship you had to be a good person,” Pandora said. “And I remember the last time I was here, seeing that picture of you and your sister. You called yourself the pensive one. I didn’t really know what the word means, but you had this amazing calm. You looked like her guardian angel.”
If only.
“This is the guest room.” More accurately, perhaps, the spare bedroom, since no one before Pandora had used it, and its décor so out of character from the rest of the house, as if Helen had once lived here. Their parents sold the family home and moved to Arizona, where they had purchased a smaller container for their emptiness, leaving Meg to deal with Helen’s things. After all, she had space that needed filling. Too much house, her mother had said after taking the tour. What were you thinking?
Helen’s print of the leaping sisters photo topped the old dresser she had painted with Keith Haring-style figures in bright primaries. Yards of books, arranged by Helen in the order she had read them, the titles demarcating the epochs of her seventeen years: the E.B. White bedrock, the Judy Blume sequence, The Outsiders stratum, the Johnny Got His Gun formation, the Rumi-Stanislavski uplift. A mock-Soviet-style red, black and yellow poster from Duran Duran’s “Strange Behaviour Tour,” which Meg had taken down from its thumbtacks and had framed. A plush cat, its stuffing crushed nearly flat, the only Meg hand-me-down that Helen had ever accepted. A framed page from a Joan of Arc audition script, with yellow highlights and lavish underscoring. Soft but INTENSE!! inked in the margin.
“Cool. You were in theater?”
“Only a little bit—Elwood P. Dowd’s sister kind of thing. These are all Helen’s things. Were.”
“Oh! I’m sorry for being so dense. Here I am all like, I broke up with my boyfriend and got sunburned. Poor little me. If you’d rather not have me in here...”
“No, it’s fine. I’m glad to have you.” It would be good to see footprints in the carpet, still furrowed from a months’ ago vacuuming.
“One thing, just so there’s no misunderstanding.” Pandora opened the gym bag. “This is Cody’s.” She withdrew a green duck canvas case, a bulging trapezoid with a leather Cabela’s tag.
“I can’t have a gun in the house.”
“You can bury it in the back yard if it gives you the creeps. I never wanted it. I only took it for the road.”
The image of an armed Pandora ready to defend herself from horny truckers and pursuing boyfriends was both disturbing and reassuring.
“Is it loaded?”
“Always assume yes. I know that much.”
“We’ll turn it in to the police.”
“No. They’ll want to know where we got it. I don’t want Cody madder at me than he already is.”
“If you’re afraid, you can get a protection order.”
A slow shake of her head. “Cody sells drugs to roughnecks. He’s decided he’s the smartest guy in North Dakota. He would ninja a protection order just to show he could get away with it.”
“But would he hurt you?”
“Do words count?”
Yes, words might as well be bullets, especially with a gun in the room. Then there was no question of who could speak, who had to listen and how things would be settled.
Meg had bought this Wyoming-sized mattress because it suited the master bedroom’s scale, never considering how it would swallow her. She woke surprised to find herself flopped sideways in bed, not lost and alone at sea. She had been the mayor of a town that had suffered a mining disaster. Borne on a litter through blackened streets roiled with victims’ stunned families, she reached out to their beseeching faces, but her arms shrank to flippers. She could only clap noiselessly over their heads. In shame, she dove int
o the sea on a lonely swim through fog and white-pillowed waves. Just as she became dangerously exhausted, a water-logged book the size of a steamer trunk drifted by. It sank when she tried to hitch aboard. A dream so transparent, it needed no interpretation.
Meg looked in on Pandora, arm crooked around a pillow, face down atop the bed, her brown-rimmed soles peeking from under the duvet. She had been too sunburned, she claimed, to endure a shower. It must not have occurred to her to take a bath.
Are you asking me?
Asking you what?
If she reminds me of me.
Seeing her in your room made me think of you.
It’s not my room.
Right. It’s just...Pandora hitchhiking with a handgun. You dancing on cliff edges. I always preferred my daring to be safe, like poetry.
More than safe. You wanted control.
Without control, how can you be sure?
You can’t. I was on a boring church outing, remember? Life doesn’t come with safety locks. Safe is not an objective condition. It’s a feeling—mostly about shit that will never happen. And when the really bad shit does come, you won’t be in control anyway. Meanwhile, look at your life. You’re perched on the great white cloud of the local powers that be. So what if you don’t control squat? Take the hint from that girl. She’s here asleep because she feels safe in your house.
Do you remember that night I warned you about sneaking around with church boys? It was the last time I held you.
You had me pinned in the bed when I woke up. You told me not to be stupid...do you think I was?
No, I think you were probably too kind. Too kind and too brave.
I like that, killed by an overdose of kindness and braveness.
And because you thought you were in control.
For every home there is a season. A time to list and a time to buy.
—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style
October weather was the town’s reward for suffering through summer. After September’s steady spread between highs and lows, the extremes began to compress until settling between room temperature and just above freezing. Needled with a fresh dose of this air, footballs revived and resumed their Friday night flights. Cottonwoods, lately beloved for their shade, drew fresh attention to themselves with cliddering flocks of golden leaves. The light angled noticeably; deep shadows came earlier where the sun dove behind the Monument; the Book Cliffs added new colors to their palette. These changes solemnized the month when Helen fell and Meg forever after called the season autumn.
Today might be the last warm Saturday before the tables left the sidewalk outside the Dream Café, a casual, buzzing place where she inevitably encountered people she knew among diners and passersby, an atmosphere in which a woman, cheered by, say, a Banana Strawberry Crepe and Peach Mimosa, might consider that her life was not a shambles after all. While not exactly viewing the world through Brian’s Hopi-tinted lenses, she saw more plainly the virtues of staying close to home and had accepted that she should forget the past and not obsess about the future. She was doing some good simply by doing what she did well—connecting people, matching families with homes and representing the positive things about her town. In return, this year had been good to her. Beyond the bread and butter transactions, she had sold properties in Redlands Mesa and Quail Run to buyers who had traded their inflated California houses for Colorado luxury. She expected to move another expansive home in Sobre El Rio before the first snowflakes hit the vineyards. In anticipation of that jumbo mortgage, Jules was due from the bank to buy lunch.
“You’re a hard person to get hold of.”
Joe Samson plunked down at the table. Meg thought reporters were supposed to notice things, like the second menu, water glass and setting. A bubble of something warm and ether-like broke inside her, a half-pleasant twinge. Joe had been such a strong presence in her mind of late, it was a shock to see him in the flesh.
“Sorry. I’ve been swamped. Whatever the story, I figured you’d have no trouble finding another broker happy to see their name in the paper.”
“This is related to some homeless stuff.” He said it so offhandedly. Did he want her to sweat a bit before he mentioned Isaac?
“Sister Rose is the one to talk to.”
“This is outside her realm, I think. You heard about the protest?”
Thank God. “I haven’t read the paper for days.” Joe’s frown made further explanation seem necessary. “I was in Arizona.”
“A group surrounded city hall to protest the homeless crackdown and lack of low-income apartments. They want an okay for a tent city to fill the housing gap. Until then, they’ve threatened to occupy downtown parking places with a roving camp that Zack Nicolai has named Winslowville.”
Eve must be so pissed. Meg was surprised she hadn’t heard the eruption. This was the sort of thing she was supposed to stay on top of for Eve.
“And, in typical fashion, the Council is rewriting the code to prohibit non-vehicles in parking spaces.” Joe seemed happy about the protest. City Council meetings must be so boring for him most of the time.
“I don’t see why you want to talk to me.” But of course she did.
“I heard you were working on the tent city planning with the Homeless Coalition.”
“I wouldn’t say I was working on it. I’ve been asked to advise the planners.”
“Do they have a location in mind?”
“Nothing official.”
“So you must know Wesley Chambers. What’s he like?”
“He’s…this is not for publication, Joe. He’s not political. Zack calling out Eve Winslow is definitely not going to help Wesley’s cause.”
“But the conflict’s ironic, don’t you think? The town’s plowing up tamarisk, tinkering with ordinances and cracking down on panhandling, camping and loitering—all because transients won’t take responsibility for their lives. Now here comes a guy who says they will, and he has a plan to do it.”
“It’s a dream, not a plan. It won’t happen here, especially now.”
“Now?” Joe arched an eyebrow and took out his notebook.
“I just meant…the economy. Wesley seems very determined, well-intentioned. He wants to do something positive but he doesn’t have any kind of base in the community. He used to live on one of the islands before the fire.”
Joe tapped a pen on the notebook’s open page.
“Chambers was a firefighter in Beaverton, Oregon, injured when a burning gymnasium roof collapsed on him. He got a disability settlement, divorced, disappeared and then showed up here. The police say he’s a vet, has no record, has even been helpful keeping peace on the river. I’d like to talk to him. He was at the demonstration but I can’t locate him now. Zack Nicolai won’t say. My brother knows Chambers, but not where he is. He just got beat up looking for the guy.”
So Isaac was Joe’s brother. His connection with Wesley was one more reason to extricate herself from riverbank politics.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a brother in town. Shelly’s never said anything.”
“It’s a sore topic. We love him, but at some point you have to protect your family and your sanity. Letting go still sucks.”
He had to mean protecting Shelly and the kids. So Isaac was outside his family, which meant he might never tell Joe about finding the eye. Her relief mixed with sympathy for the brothers. For Isaac living outside what Sister Rose called the circle of kinship. Was being close to home and family comforting or did it estrange him even more? And for Joe, losing a brother and retaining a window on his suffering. Did he avoid Isaac when he saw him on the street or did he reach out, knowing it would make no difference? No wonder Wesley had left his Oregon hometown to wander unknown lands, where the ghosts and monsters posed more straightforward threats.
The server, assuming Joe was her lunch date, headed toward the table. Meg waved her off. Jules would be here any minute.
“I can’t say anything, okay? Wesley already think
s I’m trying to torpedo his camp idea and Eve would like this whole thing to go away.”
Joe stuck the pen in his pocket. “It’s still a good story: A disabled fireman’s dream goes up in smoke.”
For a moment, she wished Wesley Chambers had come to her before he got enmeshed with Zack Nicolai. She might have been able to redirect him toward a more realistic solution, to help him… No, her powers of redemption were not that great. Wesley was on the river for a reason. So many reasons.
Joe looked past her toward the middle of the block and Meg could tell from his concentration that Jules must be crossing Main Street. A woman accustomed to stopping traffic.
“What are you two plotting?” Jules demanded.
“Downtown revitalization,” said Meg.
“Insurrection,” Joe said.
“Oh, are you joining us?” Jules said.
He answered before Meg could. “Just going—but since I have you two… Our editorial board just met with a Michigan honcho who’s close to announcing a big development project. He said all the right things about downtown, about how he’s going to transform the local economy.” Joe watched for a reaction and got nothing. “But come on—a medical destination? St. Mary’s and Community are trying to nuke each other. Doctors aren’t taking new patients. Big city companies don’t invest to create jobs in the hinterlands, they come to where the talent is, and I doubt Betterment is looking for rock climbers and mountain bikers. If Lew Hungerman truly wants a nice environment for his kids, he can send them to Cranbrook. Anyone else think he’s spreading pixie dust?”
“I can’t help you,” Meg said. “He’s a client.”
Jules said, “The bank never comments on specific companies.”
Joe covered a mock yawn. “That’s right, you both make your money up front. Commissions and fees. What does it matter if nothing gets built? But even if it does, let’s be honest. He’s promising way more than he can deliver.”
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