“Hello?” I repeated, louder, and as the boy matched my volume, thinking I hadn’t heard him, I hung up the phone, cutting him off in mid-repeat, and after a few seconds, I lifted the receiver back off of the cradle, just a little bit. Then before the recorded operator could tell me what to do in case I needed assistance, I disconnected the cord linking the handset to the base. I for sure needed assistance but I didn’t think she could offer the kind necessary for this circumstance. The meteor Liza Jean McMorsey was not one to be trifled with, and I don’t know how the boy could have forgotten that.
“Well, who needed us so urgently that they had to call us at 9:30 the day after Memorial Day?” Liza Jean asked, pressing her pointer finger into her plate, lifting toast crumbs and licking them off her finger. “Someone wanting to talk about your new celebrity status?”
“Wrong number, I guess,” I said, checking those little hang-up buttons to make sure they set right. “No one there. Listen, I got some stuff to take to Prime and get it all priced and such this morning. Don’t worry. I won’t ever ask you to check on it, and when I come to take inventory, I’ll stay somewhere else.” I was trying to avoid arguments any small place they might creep in.
“You’ve got that right, and just you remember that. These locks will be different by the time you come back up here, rest assured,” she said, finding bitterness in the smallest openings I left.
“Anything you want from town or you wanna come?” She glared at me a minute, letting me know I could quit pretending right then and there that things between us were ever going to be all right again and when she knew she had done it long enough to sink in, she went back to staring out the window. In the past if I hadn’t asked her to come, she’d be screeching her head off and running around to get dressed and go, and then complain to rush me at what I was doing the whole time, but if I asked her, I could just about be assured she’d be the first one to say no. Strangely, she reminded me to be back by one at the latest to take her out to lunch, so we could discuss who was getting what, but that was about it. It had been like this since the interview. I would get moments of the old life, then she would snatch them back and as soon as I got to accepting the new life alone, she would offer me up some shot of the old one again. I don’t particularly want that shot, but maybe she needs to believe I do, and after all these years, I guess I can give her that for a little while.
“Okay, promise, be back by one,” I said and leaned in, some part of me on autopilot while the rest of me wondered what I had in store for me down at Prime.
“Oh, Tommy Jack, you have got to be kidding,” she said, before I realized what I had just done and could stop my movement. She pulled further away, pinching her lips tight, like a flower closing against a night’s cold. While this was understandable for our current circumstance, I had been receiving that expression for a while and was used to it, anyway.
All the way to Prime, I could not imagine what was on the boy’s mind that would bring him back here and think that we were just going to pick up like a good old family again, like he had not chosen to reveal his knowledge at the worst time possible, like nothing had ever happened between the wife and him, like she hadn’t shattered some of her favorite things throwing them at him and having them miss and explode, raining expensive porcelain shards all over the wall-to-wall we’d laid just a couple years before, or like any of that history would change just because I was on the damned TV—particularly not because of that fact. Had he not watched the whole thing?
Though really, the reason Liza Jean didn’t love him like she used to had more to do with me than with the boy. All those years it had been my name on the mortgage with hers and the bank accounts and all the other pieces of paper that keep two people together, even though all those things were about to change. What I’m saying here is that all those pieces of paper sharing our names and the hassle it would be to split them made it easier for her to forgive me back then for doing the things I had done than to forgive the boy for keeping his mouth shut. There were promises I had asked him to make. Maybe she was mad at his not keeping his mouth shut, eventually, when she might have preferred that. Maybe they had a chance now that there was nothing left to save between her and me.
When I pulled into Prime’s parking lot, there the boy stood, big as life, with this redheaded woman who was dark enough to be a Chihuahueño, but she looked too something. Too city, I guess. Her clothes were maybe from Dillard’s or Macy’s, a store where each item sits on its own damned little shelf, not being crowded by anything else, the kind of store far away from this little mountain town. And her lipstick, well, it wasn’t the kind Liza Jean wore, that I had to hand-scrub off all her cups whenever I did the damned dishes, that bright red making her lips look like she’d been kissing a freshly painted fire engine all night long. This woman’s lips were soft, and not real shiny-like, natural colored, like if she kissed you, no one but you and her would know it and she wouldn’t be telling and neither would you. The boy had good taste.
I know that kind of thinking is what got me in this situation in the first place but I have met all kinds of women and it had always seemed a crying shame to have to keep telling yourself no all your whole life because you said yes once. While I’ve gotten better as the years have gone on and I admit there are fewer women asking than used to, I never was that good at saying no. I guess I also said yes at the wrong time though there’s no use in making that confession now.
This line of thinking of course changed as soon as he introduced her as Shirley’s daughter. It seemed like all the bantams were coming home to roost today, and I could only thank the Lord that Liza Jean had decided to stay home. If she knew any of this was happening, she would be on that phone to a lawyer seeing what else she could get quicker than a cloud coming up in May and ripping your world apart, leaving your life a disheveled mess on the plains. I wouldn’t even put it past her to get out a baseball bat. Her capacity for violence was not something I wanted to be the one to test.
I asked how Shirley was, finding myself wondering, picturing her as she was then, not unlike her daughter right now, in looks, mind you. I’d imagined her as she aged, like those computer simulations they have on the crime shows, but my memory was the way I liked her best. The Shirley I got to know then, okay, yes, the Shirley I had fallen in love with then, never saw this side of a thrift shop, and we spent lots of days driving around to any one we could find, me looking for junk and her looking for clothes. She would try them on for me at night after her kids had gone to bed and I would take them off of her and make love to her among those rumpled clothes and that Pendleton blanket on her living room floor. We always had to be quiet because it was a small apartment and those kids could have woken up at any time and when I would bring her right to the edge, I would always press my lips against those soft pink ones of hers, making sure she wouldn’t let out a cry and wake those kids, and I never missed.
Later, I would head back out to the reservation to Fred’s place, and we would spend the rest of the night around a bonfire, me and my old guitar that never played just right, Fred, his brother, and some others. I could still smell those thrift-shop clothes of hers on me into the morning hours when we would head to bed, that mixed perfume of mothballs, beer, and the blues, sending me off to sleep.
I wondered if this woman standing with the boy before me, all these years later, was one of the kids who was about to wake up as I was ordering corned beef hash and runny eggs a mile or so away from that apartment, or if she was a later kid, born after I went back to my other life. Well, even if she wasn’t there the first time, no doubt she was the last time I returned.
When the boy ran into Prime, leaving us alone for a few minutes, she gave me an earful, and among that jam of information, she told me something that I wanted to hear but could never ask, myself, and something else I never expected to hear. The boy almost never talked about what he was doing when he called. I usually watched anything on the TV that had Indians in it, hoping I might catch him
one of these days, but I ain’t seen him anywhere, not even on the satellite dish. When he came back, the boy knew something was up, and looked down at the pavement. He knew that some kinds of words had passed between the girl and me, but I don’t guess he knew ahead of time the direction the conversation had gone in his absence. A daughter. I still didn’t fully believe it as they left me in the Prime parking lot, but it wasn’t like I had a lot of choice in what I had to do next.
So when I got to the house I said the most neutral thing I could. “Well, things seem good at Prime, lots of customers for a weekday.” Liza Jean could tell right away that something more than our dissolving marriage was up. I do not know how she tells these things but it’s like she sniffs them out of me, like I have a cloud of lies or vague answers floating about me, giving off some noxious scent.
“Anyone besides Lurlene ask you about your big moment on TV?” she said, waiting for me to give some kind of deadly answer, so she could rehash my performance, conveniently forgetting her own. At that moment I saw Lurlene in my head picking up the phone earlier and calling the cabin, telling Liza Jean that Tommy Jack was standing outside with some man and woman she had never seen before and was just wondering if we had guests this holiday weekend and who they might be—nosy bitch. If she spent even a quarter of the time selling that she spent trying to keep tabs on every damned person in that town, I might actually turn a profit once in a while. I was trying to decide what I was going to say, when I glanced over at the phone and saw it was still disconnected, so Lurlene couldn’t have called.
“Just a couple people.” This was not technically a lie. “They didn’t say anything. Maybe it didn’t look the way you think it did on TV,” I said, though I really didn’t care anymore. We shouldn’t have been together for, oh, the last ten years or so, easily, probably even more, probably from the time of Wanda’s. “Well, did you decide where you want to have lunch to discuss who gets what?” I thought about reconnecting the phone, but sometimes, silence is the better option. This was one of those times.
“Foley’s?” she said, making it a question, like pretending I was going to be the one who made the decision, but this time, I did.
“How about the inn, instead? We go to Foley’s all the time.”
“We won’t be going there all the time anymore.”
“And besides, I’m feeling lucky. We can play a few slots beforehand.”
“Oh, all right, I guess we can go there. Whatever. Let’s get this over with. Just know that I am not wasting my afternoon there while you play one more machine that turns into ten machines. My days of waiting for you are over, Tommy Jack.”
“Yes, you have made that clear, but don’t for one minute think you are the only one who is looking forward to not putting up with someone else’s nonsense. Now come on, let’s go and have lunch, play a few slots, like two people who’ve known each other almost fifty years. Just because we can’t live together anymore, doesn’t mean we have to be so damned snarly to each other.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you went nuts on the damned TV!” she yelled.
“Maybe you should have, too,” I said back, not shouting. In the past, our casino ritual had been a kind of foreplay, with her saying “I’m feeling a little lucky, myself ” and pinching my ass. “Pinch to grow an inch,” she’d say. She could be wildly forward that way, and I’d reach around and cup hers, back.
“Keep that up and your luck might deliver you more than one inch a little later,” I’d say.
“Huh! You’d be the lucky one,” she’d say back, and grab her purse. The pinch was always just a preview of what would come once we got back from the casino, but I guess my inch-growing days were over with Mrs. Liza Jean McMorsey.
The lot was jam-packed when we got there, even that early. All kinds of people wheeled their little oxygen tanks around in one hand and smoked a Pall Mall with the other and they came here from all over the damned country. When we walked by the boy’s Blazer with New York plates on it, Liza Jean paid no notice to it. She was already rattling her little casino bucket of quarters, part of what she called her winner’s ritual. But she did it with little enthusiasm, like she was sleepwalking almost. She always said her quarters called to the ones inside the slot machines, singing for them to join hers in this lucky bucket, but her quarters weren’t singing very loud just then.
She roamed around the casino, trying a dollar’s worth in the quarter machines and if they did not cough up anything, she moved on to another, as if the previous machine had slighted her somehow, but I always play the same machine. I even wait for this one, and as soon as some oxygen sucker moved, I would sit my ass down and would not move it until Liza Jean told me she was ready to hit it. My machine has three full moons as the big jackpot, and various phases of the moon as lesser jackpots. It was called High Tide, and the man in the moon smiled down his lucky face onto the ocean and my own face as I slid quarter after quarter in. I won five thousand on this machine early on—three half moons—and though I’ve probably put that much back into it over the years, I was certain it would pay off big time for me at some point. I guess, though, I had picked it in the first place because it reminded me of Fred, in both Vietnam and Hollywood.
“Tommy Jack, you are always hogging that machine,” she said, after I had put in about thirty dollars’ worth in a very short period. I kept looking around, but the boy didn’t seem to be anywhere. Maybe they checked in. I wandered the floor, looking at the other machines, the other players winning and losing, and any distraction was mightily appreciated. I did not want a scene in public.
Liza Jean won a little, twenty-two dollars, enough to keep her interest for a short while. She never put the quarters on credit, cashing out every time she won a little, loving the sound of them falling into the stainless steel pit at the bottom of the machine. Scooping them into her bucket, she kept playing. She glanced up and saw what I saw, reflected in the glass man-in-the-moon’s face. Surrounded by WIN! WIN! WIN!, my face, and the boy’s face stood next to mine, for just a second, and then, when she turned to look at me, he was gone. He disappeared around a corner. The girl stood in front of me, at the edge of this bank of slots as Liza Jean frowned at me. The girl smiled, holding up a baseball cap of mine from home—Big Antler Tractor and Feed—then motioned her head for me to go outside and disappeared into the crowd, just like the boy must have.
“What?” I said, as Liza Jean continued to stare at me.
“Nothing, just been thinking about the boy, all day, since this morning. It’s almost like I could hear his voice, and laws, I’m even seeing him now. I swear he was standing next to you a minute ago, I could see it in the glass, here, but when I turned, it was just you again. He looked different, though, older, not the way I usually think of him,” she said, then added more quietly, “when I do.” I said nothing. “Well,” she continued, abruptly, “your machine, like you, has worn out its welcome. Let’s get us that lunch and start sorting this out.”
The casino restaurant was pretty good, but not cheap, like those ones in Vegas. The Mescalero reservation was the only game in town, so they felt no need to bribe you with dinner bargains. I wondered if the boy’s tribe has done anything with casinos, like this tribe in Cascabel did. A lot of them worked there, but a fair number just lived off their casino profit dividend check at the start of each month. Maybe that was how he got through school. I still don’t even know how he left our place that summer after high school, disappearing while we were away.
“Just a sec, I’ll catch up with you, I want to go check the answering machine at home,” I said, waving my cell phone. “Dispatch was gonna call, said maybe they were going to change my route a little.” She was used to my eccentricities, and for the most part, didn’t fight them too much these days. Maybe she just didn’t care anymore as she was featuring her new life without my nonsense. She didn’t even slow her stride.
In the parking lot, their Blazer was gone, but the girl leaned on a post at the entry
.
“He’s gone up to your place,” she said.
“What’s he doing up there?”
“Said he had to deliver something. We’ve come up with a compromise.” I couldn’t wait to hear it. It wasn’t like I had a lot of choice in the matter. She said she’d tell me when I came back after dropping Liza Jean back at the cabin, and that I should plan to be gone for a bit. So after lunch, I asked Liza Jean if she wanted to take a ride up to Peter Creek, or maybe way down into Loborosa for some dessert, or even up to Crowd Loft for some fried pies. She just stared off. I tried to plan my exit already, telling her that dispatch had changed my plans and I had to leave a little later that very afternoon. Her lack of interest was clear, and I could only imagine how fast this was going to go from flatness to rage when we got to the cabin and saw the Blazer there in the drive, the New York plates shouting his return. I had about had my fill of her explosions by then and wanted to get my ass out of there. The boy could do what he wanted, I just did not want to be a participant.
But the Blazer wasn’t at the cabin when we got there. No sign of it, or him, nothing, until we got in the house. Sitting on the kitchen table was a perfect-condition figurine, that limited edition model, “Over the Threshold,” as if just out of the shipping box, bride and groom, frozen still, in that last moment before their lives get complicated in their own unique, intertwined way. No note, or anything else. It had been a long time since I had seen this particular item. When the boy would travel with me in the early years, one thing we did was to always bring back a new Lladró figurine for her collection. It seemed to make the hauls we did easier on her, becoming a game of sorts.
She had a collectibles book on them, and back then she would give us a list of three she was most looking for when we headed out, and we would try to find one of them. They were always so outrageously dear in price that it did not matter that we found them only rarely. If we had kept up with her desires, we would have been broke as a family, but the occasional porcelain figurines always delighted the wife when we returned. And if we didn’t have one, she was still generally delighted to see us.
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