“She’s fine,” he said.
“Give her my best. You’ll have to bring her in some time.”
“Yep.”
“So how long since we’ve seen you?”
“Since not long after I retired, probably.”
“So I guess that means you didn’t know Jim and I got married?” She held up her left hand, palm inward, to show off a wedding band and what looked to Gunther like a pretty expensive engagement ring. Jimmy must have been squirreling it away for years, unless he was just spending himself into the poorhouse out of love.
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. It was a long time in coming, I’ll tell you that. Look, we even changed the name.” She held up a menu with JIM AND IRMA’S printed on the cover. “We had to throw out all kinds of menus and pens and guest checks marked Jim’s,” she said. He nodded, thinking it would have been more economical to keep using the old guest checks until they ran out.
“Here’s something else you don’t know about.”
Irma pulled a framed photo off the wall behind the counter and handed it to Gunther. It was a wedding picture with Jim and Irma surrounded by a bunch of kids, ranging in age from toddler to about ten.
“Nice looking bunch of kids.”
“Three of ’em are mine by my oldest daughter Nina, the others are Jim’s son’s kids. They’re all cousins now, is what I keep telling ’em. You got any grandkids?”
“Six, all of ’em grown,” he said, though it was a guess. It was something close to that, anyway. “One or two got kids of their own now.” He found himself distracted by the smell of frying onions.
“You don’t have a picture to show me, do you?”
He reached for his wallet and opened it, thinking he didn’t. Inside, though, were pictures of a little boy and girl of about five, taken separately, and another of the little boy, slightly older, with a girl of about two. There were also high school pictures of two other girls and another boy. He pulled them out one by one and gave them to Irma.
“The one girl’s my granddaughter Cynthia’s first; Cynthia’s expecting her second in November. The brother and sister are my other granddaughter Tammy’s. My grandson Steve isn’t married yet, but there’s nothing wrong with him. These three older ones are Tricia and Amy, and the boy’s Danny. They’re Dot’s boy Sidney’s kids. None of them’s done with school yet.” The litany of names and relationships had poured out so fast and effortlessly he wondered where it had come from. For the first time since he’d left it occurred to him that people might be worried about him. Well, he’d go back when he’d done what he set out to do and not before. The worrying couldn’t be helped.
Irma studied the photographs with great interest as she poured out his coffee cup and refilled it from the fresh pot. “They’re beautiful, Gunther.”
“Yeah.” He took a sip of hot coffee. It was the first caffeine he’d had in a long time, and he could feel himself starting to tense up a little by the time Jimmy came out from the kitchen holding a plate with a cheeseburger and fries on it.
“Told you I didn’t want anything to eat.”
“I was going to throw these fries out anyway, and you never used to come in here without eating a cheeseburger.” He set it down in front of Gunther, who was too hungry to be stubborn.
“Guess I’d hate to see it go to waste,” he said. He poured some ketchup onto the plate for the fries, then some more onto the onions on top of the patty and took a big bite out of it. Jimmy’s had never been his favorite burger in town, but this was better by a long shot than any he’d had since taking up residence at Lake Vista. Five minutes later the burger and fries were gone.
“You sure you don’t want something for dessert, Gunther? Piece of pie, maybe?”
“Guess I’d better not.” He took another sip of his coffee and got up off the stool. “Going to get my hair cut this afternoon.” He paid for the cheeseburger and the coffee, left a good tip for Irma and stepped back onto the sidewalk with five dollars in his pocket for the haircut.
A block west was a bar that Gunther knew from an armed robbery one afternoon in the late sixties during which the owner gunned down the would-be thief who, it had turned out, was armed only with a starter’s pistol. Gunther remembered shaking the man’s hand at the scene and congratulating him, both of them marveling at the poor dead shit-for-brains on the floor next to them who had tried to rob a bar in midafternoon on a Tuesday, when the till must have had less than twenty-five dollars in it.
Gunther was peering into the dark, empty bar through the glass pane set in its front door, trying to remember the owner’s name and coming up blank, when he heard the horn honking behind him. He turned to see a late-model silver Caddy pulling over to the curb, its passenger side window rolling effortlessly down. The driver scooted over to lean out the window.
“Excuse me,” she said. With her hair fluffed and dry, it took him a second to place her as the woman he’d been ogling back at Ray and Cal’s. She was prettier than he’d thought before, more carefully made up than most of the women he saw lately. Since he found large women attractive anyway, he appreciated the fact that they often worked extra hard to look nice, although in her case he thought she might have overdone it a little around the eyes. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you back there.”
“That’s okay,” he said, surprised that he rated an apology. “Didn’t mean to stare.”
“The thing is, after you left? When you said I reminded you of somebody?”
“Probably my imagination.”
The woman looked at him doubtfully. “Is your name Gunther?”
“Who’s asking?”
“My name’s Loretta Gandy. It used to be Loretta Ogden.”
The first name meant nothing to him, but the second resonated somewhere in the back of his mind.
“Sally Ogden’s my mom,” she added.
The name gave Gunther a jolt, but he wasn’t altogether sure why. It was a good bet, though, that this Sally was the woman she put him in mind of, and he relaxed a little. “Sure. That must be it, then.”
“Do you need a lift? I’d be glad to give you one.”
“Which way you headed?”
“Whichever way you need to go.” She unlocked the passenger door and pushed it open, sliding back into the driver’s seat.
“Thanks a lot,” he said, and he got in just as the first few warm drops of rain started falling. As they pulled out and the rain started to spot the reddish dust on the windshield she set the wiper to the slowest speed, smearing the drops into mud and necessitating a shot of wiper fluid.
“Harry’s Barber Shop, on Cowan and Second.”
“So don’t you want to know how my mom is?”
“Sure,” he said, though who she was might have been a more pertinent question than how.
“Well, pretty good, at least as good as you can expect. She buried old Donald last year.”
“Was he dead?” He was instantly sorry he’d said it, but the old censoring mechanism had never been too sharp to begin with; now it seemed to be completely shot. She held her breath for a second, then looked over at him with her mouth wide open, stunned. He was about to apologize when she let out a loud laugh like a seal barking.
“That’s a good one. Guess you didn’t have any reason to like him much, huh?”
He guessed that he probably hadn’t. The list of people he liked much was a short one.
“They moved back to town five years ago. I’ve been here since after college. I don’t think she ever sees any of her old friends.”
“Probably they didn’t like Donald.” He didn’t know who Donald was any more than he knew who Sally was, but at this point it seemed like a good bet.
“Probably. He was pretty good to her, though, you’ve got to give him that.”
“I guess you do.”
“You were, too. She always said so.”
He turned away from her to look at the passing streets, making her suspect he was trying to hide a tear.
In fact, he was just trying to figure out exactly who this Sally was and what it was he was supposed to have done for her.
In an odd, indirect way it seemed to Gunther to be connected to his money and where he’d left it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SCOTT PHILLIPS is the national bestselling author of The Walkaway and Cottonwood. His debut novel, The Ice Harvest, was a finalist for the Hammett Prize, The Edgar Award, and the Anthony Award. He was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, and lived for many years in France. He now lives with his wife and daughter in St. Louis, Missouri. Visit the author’s website at www.scottphillipsauthor.com.
Also by Scott Phillips
COTTONWOOD
THE WALKAWAY
The Ice Harvest is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2005 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Scott Phillips
Excerpt from The Walkaway copyright © 2002 by Scott Phillips
All rights reserved.Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-48602-8
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