Juliet in August

by Dianne Warren

  Still, the sight of the dunes had tempted her enough that she’d parked her truck in the yard of an old schoolhouse and found a faint trail to follow on foot. It was mostly covered over by sand, but she could make out the two vehicle tracks worn into the surface and it was enough of a trail that she could stick to it and not risk getting lost. When she left the trail to climb one of the dunes and looked to the west where the sun was shining hot on the waves of sand, she’d thought, The woman in the post office was right; these hills are a wonder. The landscape was so vast and simple, reduced to sky and grass and sand. Yet, in the surface at her feet, she saw patterns as intricate and complicated as the veins in an insect’s wings. The discovery of this spot was almost worth the aggravation of the missing horse.

  A rogue gust blew sand in her eyes and she had to turn away, blinking, her eyes watering. When they cleared, she slid back down the dune, and when she got to the bottom she saw something at her feet, mostly buried in the sand, a leather strap, so she reached down and pulled on it and it came loose. It looked like an old halter. The leather was warm in her hand from the sun and cracked and dry as toast, but it was in one piece, still buckled as though whatever had been wearing it had sloughed it off and wandered on without it. She wondered what else was buried under all this sand. She thought of taking the halter with her, but she laid it back down to be covered up again.

  She’d returned to her truck then and driven more miles around the countryside, checking herds of horses in pastures, stopping at farmhouses to inquire. She came to a Catholic church out in the middle of nowhere and, across the road, an old woman named Anna working in her flower bed. When Joni asked her about the horse, she nodded and said, “You talk to that boy, Lee Torgeson. He might know something about your horse.” Joni had imagined a ten-year-old. Then Anna had insisted she come into the house for coffee, and Joni couldn’t say no and ended up telling Anna about her grandchildren and showing her the school pictures, and Anna had gushed appropriately over them. When Joni finished her coffee, Anna had provided directions to the Torgeson place, back the way she’d come, but when Joni got to the farm there was no one there. Just a black-and-white dog that barked a few times and then came and rolled at her feet. More driving around until after dark and the hunger pangs got to her, and she’d seen the Oasis sign and pulled in.

  Joni makes up her mind to stick with the soup du jour, whatever it turns out to be, because it’s too late to be eating a big meal. Potato soup would hit the spot. She could hope for potato. When the woman in the apron comes back into the restaurant—the waitress, Joni assumes—she closes the menu to indicate she’s ready to order. She should maybe ask what kind of soup the du jour is just in case it’s clam chowder. Seafood that’s been sitting on a warming plate for hours is not likely a good idea.

  The waitress doesn’t make a move toward her table, and Joni begins to wonder if this is the kind of place where you help yourself, like a cafeteria, or maybe go to the counter to place your order. She looks around and doesn’t see any kind of buffet table. She holds up her menu. The waitress just stares at her, or perhaps glares would be a better word. Joni wonders if maybe she missed seeing a CLOSED sign hanging on the door, and is about to get up and ask if she’s too late to get a bite to eat when the woman strides over to her table and says, “What can I get you?”

  “Just soup. Du jour. And a bun. What is the soup? I guess I should ask that.”

  “Beef barley.”

  She wants to ask about potato but is afraid to, the way the waitress is looking at her. “Beef barley’s good,” she says. “I’ll have that. And a bun.”

  “A bun. So you said. You can help yourself to coffee.” The waitress turns and goes through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

  Before Joni can get up to help herself to coffee, the man in the plaid shirt says, “I’ll get that. You just sit.” He gets a mug and the pot from the burner and carries them to Joni’s table, where he sets the mug down and fills it without saying anything else.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  He responds with a nod. Then he fills his own cup before he puts the pot back on the burner.

  Joni shivers and wraps her hands around the hot mug, wishing again that she’d put on a sweater or even a jacket. The waitress comes back through the kitchen doors and slaps Joni’s soup down in front of her. The broth slops over the edge of the bowl and splashes the bun.

  “Thanks,” Joni says. She’s thinking how strange this is, this bitchy waitress, but the soup smells good and she would have dipped the bun anyway.

  The two truckers stand up from their table and make their way to the cash register.

  “Sorry,” one of them says to the waitress, “nothing smaller than a twenty.”

  “I thought you were a big tipper,” she says, following them.

  “Not that big.”

  After they leave, Joni can see the waitress is watching her again from behind the till. It’s unnerving.

  When the man in the plaid shirt says, “I wouldn’t mind another slice of that pie,” the waitress goes through the swinging doors and returns with a plate of something lime green.

  “This is the last piece for you, Willard,” she says to him. “You’ll be turning green.” She sets the plate on the table in front of him and asks, “So how’s the movie business, anyway?”

  “Marian’s doing the movie tonight,” he says.

  The waitress goes back behind the till counter and begins replacing the menu inserts with new ones for the next day. Joni finishes her soup and pushes the plate and bowl aside. She watches as the man Willard eats the pie, wondering if she should maybe try a piece. As soon as he’s done, he slides away from his table and stands, searching through his pockets. He checks one pocket, and the next, and the next, and then an expression crosses his face that clearly means he’s realized he has no money with him.

  “I left the house in such a hurry,” he says.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the waitress says. “If I can’t trust you, I might as well pack it in right now and give up on humanity.”

  Still, he stands there.

  “Everything okay?” the waitress asks.

  Willard licks his lips. “That pie was good all right,” he says. And still he stands.

  “Willard,” the waitress says, looking worried. “If there’s something wrong . . .”

  And then he quickly turns on his heel and leaves, muttering something about Marian and the drive-in and all those kids who need a man to keep them in line. Through the restaurant window Joni can see him hurrying across the parking lot. He backs his truck out and onto the highway so quickly, he hardly looks to see if another vehicle is approaching.

  Joni is now alone with the waitress in the restaurant and she decides it’s time for her to leave, too. She reaches for her purse, but then the waitress approaches Joni’s table, stops right next to it, and says, “Just turn your damned phone on.”

  “Excuse me?” Joni says.

  “Your cell phone,” the waitress says. “Turn it on.”

  Joni would love to tell this rude woman to go to hell, she can keep her green pie, it’s probably not real food anyway, but then the waitress sighs deeply, and when Joni looks at her face she sees that the glare is gone and the woman looks very tired, just the way she feels herself. Joni reaches into her purse, takes out her phone, and switches the power on. The waitress takes her own phone out of her apron pocket and dials a number. Joni’s phone rings. Once. Twice. The waitress switches her own phone off and the ring tone stops.

  “What the hell?” Joni says.

  “Yeah. What the hell.” The waitress turns to walk away.

  “Wait a minute,” Joni says. “You’re the one who’s been calling me all day?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Why? And how did you get my number?”

  “I go
t your number out of my husband’s back pocket.”

  “Well, frankly,” Joni says, “that doesn’t make sense. I’m not in the habit of handing out my phone number . . .” She stops, remembering that she gave her number to the cowboy in the campground that morning. “Wait a minute.”

  “Never mind,” the waitress says. “No explanation needed. I read your notice out there. The mistake was mine. I thought I had a missing husband, turns out you had a missing horse. So, sorry about all the calls. I went nuts for a while. There’s a story, but you don’t want to hear it.”

  “I might,” says Joni.

  “Well, I don’t want to tell it.”

  The waitress goes through the doors to the kitchen again and Joni thinks that’s that, but then the woman returns with a slice of the green pie.

  “On the house,” she says.

  Joni isn’t altogether sure she should eat the pie given the waitress’s suspicion about her cheating husband, but the woman says, “Don’t worry, I’m not planning to poison you. It’s a new recipe. I’ve been trying it out on my preferred customers all day. I figure I owe you at least a slice of pie. Like I said, I don’t know what got into me.”

  Joni takes a tentative bite. The lime flavor dances on her tongue. “Wow,” she says. “Very tasty.”

  “That seems to be the general opinion,” the waitress says. “It’s going on the menu. Anyway, I’ll leave you to your coffee. I’ve got some cleaning up to do in the kitchen.”

  She looks so tired and depressed that Joni says, “Hey, don’t worry about the phone calls. It doesn’t matter. Really.”

  “You’re not about to run off with my husband, are you,” the woman says. It’s not even a question.

  “No,” Joni says, “definitely not.”

  “Christ, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Well, for one thing, my feet hurt. I do know that.”

  Joni looks down at the woman’s feet, the pointed leather shoes, and then sticks one of her own feet out from under the table, showing off her new green cross-trainers.

  “Running shoes,” she says. “I never wear anything else anymore.”

  “Just one more sign that you’re on the downward slope. Practical footwear. Not that those are especially practical, not the color anyway. No offense.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Joni says. “Take a load off.” She should probably just leave and let the poor woman go home to bed, but the way she’s standing by the table, she looks as though she would dearly love to get off her feet.

  Joni’s assessment is right. The waitress—Lynn is her name—pours herself a cup of coffee, refills Joni’s cup, and sits across from her.

  And then Joni can’t stop herself. She asks Lynn if she has any grandkids, and when Lynn says no, Joni takes out the pictures of her own grandchildren. In spite of the fact that Lynn harassed her with phone calls all day long and behaved so rudely before revealing her motive, Joni tells her the reunion story. She knows there’s no reason for Lynn to be interested, but she just can’t help talking about her newfound family, proudly showing off the school pictures when she doesn’t know yet whether she has a reason to be proud. But these children are her blood. Whatever is in the past between her and her daughter, she tells Lynn, whatever happens when they meet again, maybe she can help in some way. She wishes she had more money. That’s likely what her daughter needs more than anything.

  Lynn expresses the opinion that the boys are fine-looking kids, and Joni agrees and puts the pictures away. Lynn looks out the window, at the truck and trailer under the light in the parking lot.

  “That must be your rig out there,” she says.

  “Unfortunately,” Joni says. And she tells Lynn the rest of the story—the foolish purchase of the now missing horse.

  And then, a development Joni could not possibly have predicted when she walked through the restaurant door: Lynn says, “Tell you what. I’ll buy that horse from you, and when I track him down, I’ll find him a good home. Someone around here will want him.”

  Joni is stunned. “Why would you do that?” she asks. “For a stranger?”

  Lynn says, “I’d like to say it’s because I’m a good old-fashioned nice person. But I’m not. I’m hard to get along with—just ask the girls who work for me—and most of the time I can’t be bothered doing favors for people.” She looks out the window again and nods at the truck and trailer. “What I really want is your trailer. If I buy the horse, I assume you won’t need the trailer anymore and you’ll be open to offers.”

  It’s such a relief, Joni can’t believe it, horse trouble dissipating just like that. Lynn goes for her checkbook, and Joni is free of the burden she’s been dragging around since the auctioneer said “Sold” and pointed in her direction. And then Lynn surprises Joni again by laughing. At the circumstance that put the trailer in her possession—the phone calls, the ridiculousness of it all—and Joni thinks how Lynn looks like a different person when she laughs, how laughing makes everyone look better, and she should remember to do it herself, often, when she’s with her daughter again, because there hadn’t been much laughing in those last ugly years before the girl left to live with her father. And she should laugh right off when she meets her grandsons, she thinks, to make a good impression.

  “Well,” Lynn says, looking at the clock on the wall. “It’s been nice doing business, but I suppose it’s time to get this placed closed up.” She asks Joni if she has an e-mail address so she can let her know about the horse, one way or the other, but Joni doesn’t have one. She says, “You’ve got my cell number,” and they both have a good laugh about that. Lynn walks out to the lot with Joni and helps her with the trailer hitch, and then Joni pulls away, free of the trailer, and heads back to the campground for the night.

  Once she’s gone, Lynn goes inside and carries the last remaining plates and coffee cups to the kitchen and washes them and wipes down the tables and, finally, turns out the lights. As she leaves the dark restaurant and looks across the lot at the trailer, she’s pleased that she has a surprise for her husband. A present—a little rusty, but good enough—to make up for the fact that she had, briefly, lost faith.

  Cowboy

  Sometime after midnight Lila hears Kyle’s truck on the street in front of the house. The sound is unmistakable. The truck stops, a door slams, and Kyle’s boots thump up the steps. The doorbell.

  Lila quickly goes to the door before the bell wakes Rachelle. When she opens it, Kyle teeters on the top step. She can see that he’s left the lights on in his truck.

  Kyle looks terrible, worse than she does, Lila thinks. She’d like to believe that when Rachelle told him she wasn’t going to marry him—she assumes Rachelle was the one who broke it off—Kyle drank himself into this state out of hurt and heartache, but then she remembers the night before, Kyle passed out in the backyard, and a few other times that she was pretty sure he’d been drinking, even though she’d argued with Norval that Kyle was a responsible boy who wouldn’t dream of getting behind the wheel of a vehicle with alcohol in his veins. Maybe Norval was right: The wedding had been a mistake from the beginning. She is suddenly so very sick of the soap opera of her daughter’s love life.

  “You can’t drive home in that state,” Lila says. “You just can’t.”

  Kyle asks if he can see Rachelle, and Lila thinks he is saying something about being sorry but she can’t make it out, his words are so slurred.

  “How could you allow yourself to drive?” Lila says. “You could have killed someone. No one would forgive you for that, Kyle. No one. It would haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  He stares at her, as though he just can’t process what she’s said.

  “Get in here,” Lila says.

  Kyle steps inside and the smell of alcohol fills the foyer. Kyle struggles to get his boots off without falling, and when he finally does, he sta
rts for the stairs to where the bedrooms are.

  “No,” Lila says. “Not that way.”

  Kyle stops and looks at her. She points down, to where there’s a basement recreation room with a pool table, a pullout couch, and a bathroom. “You can talk to Rachelle in the morning. She’s going to need you then, Kyle, if that means anything to you at all.”

  Kyle obediently turns and stumbles past Lila and goes down the carpeted stairs to the basement. She thinks about leaving his truck lights on all night to teach him a lesson, but then she thinks again about morning and how she and Rachelle will need all the strength they have to get through the day, and Kyle’s truck with a dead battery will be just one more impossible detail. She goes outside and switches off the lights, and on her way back up the walk she notices again Norval’s lawn. It’s a dense, green, beautiful lawn, even if it is overgrown. She’s been lobbying for some kind for xeriscaping, which she read about in a garden magazine. This would entail getting rid of the grass entirely and installing materials in its stead that require no watering. And, of course, no mowing. She wonders why this had seemed like a good idea when Norval had so loved his lawn and the act of mowing. She doesn’t understand herself.

  She steps back into the house and locks the door, then decides she’d better go downstairs and check on Kyle. She finds him passed out on the pool table, curled into a fetal position like a little boy, although he is far from little. These children, Lila thinks. These foolish, ignorant children. How in the world will she deal with them without Norval? She flicks off the light and climbs heavily up the stairs to the living room, where she sits once again in the armchair and takes up her box of Kleenex, knowing that she must be brave, she must tell Rachelle, she cannot put it off much longer. She turns on the television, which is on Norval’s favorite channel, and watches the weather forecasts for the Atlantic provinces and the Far North and Mexico and Russia and the south of France.