I decided to get up and amble around the block. Otherwise Emily might glance out the window, peg me on my bench, suspect me of eavesdropping, and as a result become too self-conscious to share her worst. After one circuit I headed back, figuring she’d be so engrossed in her tale of woe by then that she wouldn’t look outside. On my return I was annoyed to see somebody had stolen my seat. A claim-jumper in a dove-gray dress. Nina.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Hiding from photographers,” she said. “Go away.”
“But I always sit here.”
“Well, stop talking about it, then, and sit.” She slid to one end of the bench. Nina was sporting the sort of inward expression people get sometimes when they have stomach troubles or they’re trying to remember something they feel like they ought to know.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She didn’t respond, but her color was good and she wasn’t sweating so I decided she wasn’t sick. “For the record, I don’t mind you calling me Cashmere,” I said. “But you know my real name’s Ward. Right? It’s short for Howard. That was my father’s name, too. Once I was born he started going by Big Howard, and—”
“Hush,” Nina said. “I can’t hear what Emily’s saying.”
I realized then that what I had mistaken for the look of a person searching her mental filing cabinet was in fact her listening-in face. “Are you eavesdropping?” I asked.
“Shhh. Don’t pretend you weren’t trying to do the same thing. I saw you from the window.”
Nina had my number. “I was not eavesdropping,” I said anyway.
“I’m not judging you, Cashmere. I’m saying you were an inspiration. I saw you and realized I ought to move Emily’s chair over by the window so it would be easier to hear her. Then I angled it so that it would be harder for her to look out and see the bench. I wish Emily would just tell me why she’s dragging her feet about filing her divorce papers. Then I wouldn’t have to do all this.”
“Isn’t she meeting with the lawyer now to get that ball rolling?” I asked.
“I hope so. I assumed Emily was ready to leave her sorry excuse for a husband, since she drove herself all the way to Reno the day she found out what he was up to. But I almost had to drag that woman here by her hair. Now I wonder if she has the guts to follow through.” Nina shrugged. “He’s the hell she knows, I guess. I go for hell I don’t know, myself. Why not take a chance at winning big next time? People do.”
“You sound like my uncle,” I said.
“Oh? What kind of guy is your uncle? A die-hard optimist? Unrepentant romantic?”
“He was more a ‘what’s-in-this-for-me’ kind of a guy.”
“Was? Is he dead now?”
“No,” I said. “Just dead to me.”
Nina tipped her head and stared at me for a minute. “You interest me, Ward,” she said. She stretched her fingers out in front of herself. They were long and elegant, but her nails looked like she trimmed them with a chain saw. After careful consideration she zeroed in on a hangnail, nibbled it contemplatively, then shoved her hands in her pockets and murmured, “Stop that.”
“You really should,” I said. “Nail-biting spreads disease, particularly if you don’t wash your hands several times a day. Which not that many people do.”
Nina furrowed her brow at me and said, “Thanks for the hygiene tip, pal. Now, shush, or we’ll miss something important. Which would be irritating after I invested so much thought and energy into arranging the chair by the window.”
At first the zephyr mostly flipped the leaves away from us, which meant we were treated to tantalizing fragments of what Emily said, her voice sounding more scraped-up than ever: “—mother said all men cheat, but there are limits—” “—a long blond hair on my pillow, in the house I grew up in—” “—and he said, ‘I’m not your lapdog. You don’t own me.’ As if I—” The wind shifted in our favor then and we were able to catch complete sentences: “Archer said, ‘You think you’re so wonderful, Emily. Such a lady. Well, I could walk down the street right now and meet five women better than you are.’ I said, ‘Ah, so that’s where you meet your lady friends. Walking the streets.’ Then he said—” The wind shifted again and we lost the rest.
“Good,” Nina said. “She’s sticking up for herself. Atta girl.”
The wind shifted our way again, though not in time for us to hear Archer’s comeback. “So I packed both our suitcases and Portia and I were all set to leave together,” Emily said. “Then Archer started shouting. ‘You can’t take my daughter with you. If both of you go, I will die. Or sue you. Or die. Or sue you.’” An errant breeze bucked the rest away.
“Bully,” Nina breathed. “Imagine shouting at Emily. And in front of their child.”
“That’s what bullies do,” I said. “If you pound the table when you know you’re wrong, maybe people will be too distracted to notice.”
The breeze kicked back, just in time for us to hear, “Portia said—Portia said—Portia—” Emily’s voice broke down, then rallied. “Portia said, ‘I can’t leave. You heard what Papa said. He’ll die.’”
“Or sue her,” Nina said.
“‘Oh, Portia, honey,’” Emily continued, “I said, ‘I don’t believe Papa will—I mean, I hope—’”
“Although it would certainly make things easier for her if he dropped in his tracks,” Nina said.
I shushed her. Nina smiled and patted me on the back. We missed the rest of Emily’s sentence, but caught, “Who will have me now? I’ll never find another husband. I’m damaged goods. I’m old.”
Nina shook her head. “Oh, Emily,” she said. We heard the rumbling, interrogatory rise of the lawyer’s voice, if not the words themselves. Nina made an impatient gesture. “He’s too far from the window,” she said. “I couldn’t get him close enough without asking him if he’d mind sitting in Emily’s lap.”
Another gust delivered Emily’s answer. “I told you, sir, I packed her bag. I didn’t desert Portia. She refused to leave if Archer wasn’t coming with us. She wanted to know what he’d done that was so terrible. How could I explain? She’s too young. He’s her father and she loves him.”
“Rumble rumble?” the lawyer asked. We couldn’t catch Emily’s reply, but then we heard the lawyer clearly. “You’re right, my dear. It usually is about the money.”
“How about that? She listened.” Nina pounded my knee with a victorious fist. “I’ve been to this rodeo before, you know. Mike Stack said that very thing to me when I divorced my second husband.”
The lawyer asked something else inaudible, to which Emily replied, “All I said was, ‘Papa cheated.’ She said, ‘But he’s always cheated!’ I almost died on the spot. The idea that she knew when I didn’t? Then Portia said, ‘We just won’t play Monopoly any more, Mama, how about that? Then Papa won’t be tempted to cheat.’”
“I have news for that child,” Nina said. “A man who cheats his own daughter at Monopoly cheats at everything. Cheaters cheat. It’s what they do.” She shook her head and tsked. “I don’t want to hear any more,” she said. “Let’s go wait in the car.”
“You know, I’ve hardly ever been in the front seat of an automobile,” Nina said once we settled into the Pierce-Arrow. “This dashboard doesn’t really look all that different from the control panel in my airplane. I believe I could teach myself to drive this thing without too much trouble.”
“Or I could teach you,” I said.
“But why? Trial and error is always the best way to learn, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Not when it comes to operating heavy machinery. That’s a good way to get yourself killed, and to take a few people out with you while you’re at it.”
“You sound like my flight instructor. A sweet man with a surprisingly pedestrian turn of mind, alas. Didn’t read much, and when he did his lips moved. No way we could stay married, obviously. Look. Here she comes. Poor kid.”
If you ignored her red varmint boots, Emily coul
d have passed for a woman who’d just left a funeral. Black dress. Drawn face. Hunched, my-life-is-over posture. She waited on the other side of the street, wringing her hands and watching for a break in the flow of traffic so she could cross to us. It was a Tuesday afternoon and Virginia Street was the busy main drag, the very avenue the Pony Express riders had thundered down back in gold rush days. After what must have seemed like an hour to Emily but was probably three minutes, Nina said, “She needs help,” and scrambled out of the front seat.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“You stay put,” she said, and slammed the door.
Sir Walter Raleigh wasn’t a patch on Nina. She hesitated on the curb, inserted her index fingers in her mouth, and let rip a head-swiveling whistle. Then she plunged into the street, her hands palms out to bring the automobiles to a halt, took Emily by the elbow, and escorted her across.
“There you go, my chickadee,” Nina said as she held the car door open and handed Emily inside.
“Thank you, Nina,” Emily said. “But you could have gotten run over.”
“But I didn’t. And here we are.”
“How did it go?” I asked.
“It went,” Emily said. Her eyes and nostrils were rimmed with pink.
I turned the key in the ignition, but Emily put a hand on mine. “Not yet,” she said. “Can we sit here for a few minutes while I collect myself?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Could I have one of your bandanas, please?” she asked.
I dug one out, and she sat twisting it between her hands. “For the record, I haven’t been crying,” she said, giving up the twisting long enough to point to the single strand of Wally’s fur still adhering to her shoulder. “I’m allergic to cat hair. I’m sure of it now.”
From where we were parked we had a front-row seat on the cavalcade flowing across the Virginia Street Bridge. The Bridge of Sighs, some poetic journalist or the Reno Chamber of Commerce had dubbed that span across the Truckee River. An unassuming little waterway that flowed shallow, bright, and noisy most summers, just like the town it cut through. Rumor had it that newly minted divorcées stood at the bridge’s halfway point to throw their wedding rings into the churn below after casting off their husbands at the courthouse half a block away. A rumor also made up by businessmen involved in the tourist trade, if you ask me. Who would be fool enough to do that when you could unload anything remotely precious at a pawnshop? Maybe the minimal payoff just wasn’t worth the effort to women who were as rich as Croesus.
For a minute or two the three of us sat there, taking in the parade. Cars and pickup trucks and delivery vans, plus herds of tourists—pretend cowboys in stiff new denim hoofing it home from lunch; women in dark glasses who looked like movie stars or wanted you to think they did; gamblers half-drunk at 2:00 p.m. stumbling from or to casinos; and men dressed like the gangsters they might actually have been. So much money flowed through Reno during the Depression that crooks and money launderers called that little town in the middle of nowhere The Big Store. You could get anything there, it seemed, licit or illicit. Like Nina said, a twentieth-century Sodom and Gomorrah, where folks parted with their cash and inhibitions as if there were no hell, heaven, or tomorrow.
“Emily. Do you want to hear something funny?” Nina asked.
Emily nodded, then said in a small, scratchy voice, “Yes, please.”
“See that older man just sitting in the blue sedan parked over there?”
“Yes?”
“That’s Poppy.”
Emily sat up straighter and looked more closely. “Your father?” she asked.
“Good lord, no. He’s a photographer. I call him Poppy because of the sound his flashbulbs make when they go off. He’s trawling for a catch. See how he has binoculars around his neck, and a camera propped on his steering wheel? If he sees anybody interesting coming out of the courthouse or the Riverside Hotel next door there, he leans out the window and takes pictures to sell to the newspapers. If they’re interesting enough, he’ll even get out of the car and chase whoever he has his eye on down the street.”
“What makes someone interesting?”
“How rich you are, how rich your husband is, who’s famous or infamous. Movie stars, society girls, titled aristocrats. That sort of thing.”
“How do you know all that?” Emily asked.
“Because I broke one of his cameras the last time I was in town, divorcing Lord Whattamoron.”
“I don’t think a photographer would be interested in me,” Emily said.
“They go for the pretty ones, too. Bonus points if you’re crying. It makes me want to serve those guys a knuckle sandwich. But they always run so fast.”
Emily patted Nina’s knee and gave her a tight little smile. “I’m glad you’re on my side, Stilts.”
Nina wrapped her arm around Emily’s shoulder again and hugged her close. “Me, too, pal.”
“I am trying to be brave, you know.”
“And you’re doing a great job,” Nina said. “Sometimes.”
Emily rested her hands palms-up in her lap and studied them as if she’d written the answers to an exam there. “You know what I don’t get, Nina?” she asked.
“What?”
“Why you’re so nice to me.”
“Except for when I’m being mean to you? Well, I’ll tell you why. You have vast untapped potential, Em. I believe we’ll make a rabble-rouser of you yet. Uh-oh, look out! Poppy’s swinging into action.”
The three of us watched as the photographer sat up, held the binoculars to his eyes with one hand, and lifted his camera with the other when an attractive and well-dressed young couple emerged from the courthouse and bounded down the steps. Poppy leaned forward, peered intently, then lowered his spyglass and let his head drop back against the seat. You could almost hear him thinking, Just a couple of nobodies. Damn.
“Poor Poppy,” Nina said.
At the bottom of the stairs, the young man swept his companion into his arms and spun her around before kissing her deeply.
“They seem awfully happy about getting divorced,” Emily said.
“Probably just got married,” I said. “People elope to Nevada because you can get married the same day you get your marriage license. Heck, you can marry the same hour. If you want, you can get divorced and walk across the hall and get married to somebody else fifteen minutes later.”
“Ugh,” Emily said. “That sounds like giving birth at a funeral.”
“Yes,” Nina said. “Although that sounds like the kind of thing that would really cheer people up. See, folks! Life goes on! Shakespeare would have loved something like that, I think. Weddings, death. He ate all that stuff up. His comedies always end with people getting married, have you noticed? And the tragedies with somebody kicking the bucket. Really, it should be the other way around.”
“Yes,” Emily said. I’d eased the Pierce-Arrow out into traffic by then and she brushed away the hair that blew across her face as we picked up speed. Then she added, “I used to love A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I took Portia to see the movie—”
“The one with Mickey Rooney playing Puck?”
“Yes. I didn’t find it the least bit funny.”
“Well, that happens when you marry an ass,” Nina said. “Joke’s on you.”
“I suppose,” Emily said.
She looked so dejected that I tried to change the subject. “They put that play on up at the college last winter,” I said. “I took some of our ladies to see it.”
“Oh?” Nina asked. “How was it?”
“Not bad, considering most of the students are there to study mining,” I said. “The costumes were the best part, I thought. Showed real imagination. Bottom’s in particular.”
Nina said, “Let’s drive around some before we go back to the ranch. Show me where this college is, Ward. I never went to college. Maybe I should enroll there since I’m about to become a citizen of Nevada again. Maybe if I had a university degree people wo
uld treat me with the respect I probably don’t deserve.”
Chapter Seven
It must have been around midnight when I heard it.
I was lying flat on my back on my bed in the bunkhouse with my window open, sweating. Between the zephyr, the dryness of the desert air, and the way the temperature plummeted once the sun went down, I’d found Nevada after dark more bearable than the humid summer nights back home in Tennessee. As happened sometimes, though, for the last few days the manager of the big thermometer in the sky had forgotten to turn the heat down come nightfall, so I’d stripped off every stitch of clothing and lay spread-eagled on top of my sheets. After an hour or two of tossing and turning, I rolled off my bunk, got my towel, and wet it at my sink to spread over my torso. Sometimes that helped cool me off enough to sleep.
Passing the window, I was stopped in my tracks by what sounded like the muffled purr of the Pierce-Arrow’s engine. The ranch being outside the city limits made it relatively secure, but every now and then a poor desperate soul from the real world wandered up the long drive looking for things to steal. Someone had crept into the tack room and stolen a saddle one night but not a horse, though the heavy, fancy saddles we used were probably worth more than any of our horses were. Another time our guests’ lingerie had been nicked from the clothesline in broad daylight. Nothing major, so far; but for anybody thinking of making off with an automobile, Emily’s would make a particularly juicy target.
The waxing moon put out enough light for me to see the shed door swing open and the dark shape of the convertible roll out. Top still down, headlights off, nosing out and swinging toward the bunkhouse on its way to the gravel drive. I couldn’t make out the driver, but a tall figure closed the shed door behind the automobile and jumped in over the passenger-side door instead of opening it. I went for my jeans hanging on a peg by the window since I couldn’t very well take out after car thieves stark naked.
But before I could reach my pants, I heard Nina’s voice. “So what’s this knob for?”
Better Luck Next Time Page 6