Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “Don’t go, Sam!” Portia wailed.

  Sam looked a little startled, but said, “All right, miss,” and stood there turning his hat around and around in his hands as he stared off into the middle distance to give the ladies the semblance of privacy.

  Emily sat beside Portia and put her arm around her. “It’s all right, sweetheart. I’m here,” she said.

  Portia burrowed into her mother. “I thought that if we came into Reno every day, Mama—” She gulped and started over. “It occurred to me we might just happen to—and then you’d see him and—oh! But not like that!”

  “Shhh, sweetheart, it’s all right.”

  “I didn’t know—that—that—Mama, who is she?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” Emily said. “I’ve never seen that one before.”

  “That one? Are there others?”

  Emily didn’t answer.

  Nina said, “Take them home, Ward.”

  “No!” Portia howled, shrugging off her mother’s arm and pushing her away. “Not without my h-h-hat.”

  Emily took a deep breath. “We’ll buy you a hat another time.”

  “I need a hat,” Portia said angrily. “You don’t care if the sun makes me go blind. You don’t care if I die. No wonder Papa hates you. You know what? I hate you, too.” Raising children is not for the faint of heart, you know. In my years of practicing family medicine, many mothers asked me how infants they’d carried inside them, who grew into toddlers who clutched their legs and yelled “my mommy” whenever other children approached, could turn into teenagers capable of saying such hurtful things. Well, I’d said, who better to test their fangs on than someone who’d love them no matter what? They will outgrow it, I said. And if they don’t, disown them. Then the mothers and I laughed, but only on the outside.

  I must have shaken my head at Portia’s outburst because the kid all but spat at me, “Why are you here? What business is this of yours?”

  She made a valid point. “I’ll go wait in the car,” I said.

  “No. Stay,” Emily said.

  “Can’t you ever be on my side, Mama?” Portia snapped.

  Emily pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything she’d live to regret while I eased back a step or two and did what I could to blend into the scenery. Nina, I noticed, was about to chew off her thumb. She looked sadder than I’d ever seen her look.

  The cavalry, in the person of Sam Vittori, rode to the rescue. “Miss?” he said, holding his hat out to Portia. “Why don’t you have mine?”

  Sam had always been so good with kids. Comes of having so many brothers and sisters, I suppose. He always knew just what to say.

  Portia stopped crying abruptly, the way very little children and people at their wits’ end do. She looked from Sam to the hat to Sam again. “It’s a nice hat,” she said.

  “Thank you, miss. Every night I go over it with a hat brush and then I leave it sit on a post down at the corral to air out till morning. You take care of your hat, and your hat will take care of you.”

  “I can have it? Really?”

  Sam smiled at her. “I got another,” he said. I knew he didn’t. “If it suits you, you’re welcome to it.”

  Portia ground the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, then took the hat and mashed it on her head. It fit her as neatly as Cinderella’s slipper. “Thanks,” she said, then got up and headed for the Pierce-Arrow without uttering another word. Emily watched her go.

  Nina watched Emily watch Portia, then touched Emily’s cheek. “She isn’t mad at you, you know,” she said.

  “I know,” Emily said.

  “Go on, Ward,” Nina reiterated. “Take these ladies home. I’ll see you back there.”

  “Aren’t you coming with us?” I asked.

  “I’m meeting my friend,” Nina said. “Remember?”

  “I forgot,” I said, not wanting to admit I thought Nina’s “friend” had been another of her plausible fictions. “I can drop them off and come back for you,” I offered.

  “That’s all right,” Nina said. “Sam will make sure I get home in one piece. Won’t you, Sam?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Nina hooked her arm through Sam’s and said, “Let’s buy you another hat. Then I’ll introduce you to my friend.”

  “Oh, now, you don’t need to be doing that,” he said as Nina dragged him away.

  When I saw Sam the next day in a new version of his same old hat, I asked, “Did Nina buy you that?”

  “I tried to stop her,” Sam said, “but she like to of broke my arm.”

  “Did you meet her friend?”

  “Yep.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Hugh. She was a he. He was her husband. Is.”

  “The one she’s about to divorce, you mean? Holy Joe. What was he like?”

  “Well, let’s see. Good-looking fella. Tall and blond, like Nina. Was waiting for her on the sidewalk, with his bicycle. Brought that bicycle on the train, he said. Bought a ticket for it and everything so he could keep it right next to hisself the whole trip. Says he takes that bike everywhere, then rides the thing around ever new place he visits. Thinking a opening a bicycle store someday if he finds a place he’d like to settle.”

  I loved Sam like a brother, but sometimes getting the right details out of him was like pulling teeth. “Sam,” I said. “I don’t care about the bicycle. I want you to tell me about Hugh.”

  “Right. Sorry. I got sidetracked. It was a nice bike. I always wanted a bicycle growing up, but my folks never had the money for it. I never even rode me somebody else’s. City kids had bikes. Not the likes of us.” He scratched his head and lapsed into silence.

  “Sam. Let’s talk about the bike later. Right now I’m interested in hearing about Nina’s Hugh.”

  “Yep. Yep. Sorry. Don’t know where my head is at today. So this Hugh was real polite. Shook my hand, introduced hisself, looked me in the eye when he done it. He and Nina seemed awful glad to see each other. Hugged for a good long time. Said they loved each other when they said goodbye. Like to of broke down when they said it. You know how it is.”

  I did not know how it was. None of what Sam had just said made a lick of sense to me. “They love each other? Still?” I asked. “Then why are they getting a divorce?”

  Sam took his hat off, turned it around in his hands a few times, and stared off into the middle distance again. Finally he shrugged. “Didn’t ask. Wasn’t none of my business.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Let’s circle back to the day before. The trip home to the Flying Leap that day was painful. We’d hardly gotten underway when I heard Portia say to her mother, “Don’t touch me.”

  I glanced into the rearview long enough to see Emily’s hand hover above Portia’s shoulder. Then I turned my eyes back to the road.

  “Listen, baby—” Emily said.

  “I’m not a baby,” Portia said.

  “Sweetheart, I’m sorry about what happened back there. I tried to keep you from knowing what—”

  “Stop talking,” Portia said. “Whatever you’re about to tell me, I don’t want to hear it. This is all your fault.”

  After a pause, Emily asked, “And how is it my fault?”

  “If it isn’t your fault, whose fault is it?” Portia asked. “Mine?”

  “Oh, Portia,” Emily said. I saw a flicker of movement in the rearview that was Emily scooting across the seat, arms extended to gather her daughter into a hug.

  “I said don’t touch me,” Portia said. “If you need something to pet to make yourself feel better, ask the cowboy to fix you up with one of those kittens.”

  Emily sighed and retreated to the opposite end of the seat. I reached up and adjusted the mirror a little to check on her. Watched her press her cheek against the cool glass of the window and close her eyes. Neither Emily nor Portia said another word for the rest of the trip.

  Back at the ranch, I hopped out and opene
d the car door for Emily. Portia wanted no help from anybody. She threw her door wide and flung herself out so violently that she landed on her knees. Emily winced but didn’t say anything as the kid scrambled to her feet and slammed into the house.

  When I handed Emily out of the automobile she tried to smile, but it was more of a grimace. “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” she said.

  “I’ve heard worse.”

  “It’s kind of you to say that, even if it isn’t so.”

  After I backed the car into the shed I saw Emily on the porch, gripping the railing and looking down. For a brief, crazy moment I wondered if she might be thinking about jumping. That porch wouldn’t have made much of a launching pad from this life into the next. At most, she’d sprain an ankle. Then Emily stepped away from the railing and I saw she was in her socks. She’d been using the cast-iron jack Margaret had installed there to pry the varmint boots from her feet.

  I closed the shed door and headed into the house to see if I could find some lunch. Emily had left her boots on the porch and the front door standing open. I gathered up the varmints to carry inside, took off my hat with my free hand, and hesitated in the doorway, blinking, while my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the hall beyond. Portia was nowhere to be seen, but Emily was at the mail table, holding something in both hands. An envelope. “Ward!” she exclaimed, when she saw me. “You startled me. I didn’t hear you coming.” She dropped the envelope on the table.

  “Cowboy boots,” I said as I hung my hat on the rack by the door. “The cat burglar’s shoe of choice.” I walked over and twisted my neck around to look at the envelope she’d dropped on the table. It was addressed to me. I got the sense she’d been about to hold it up to the bright rectangle of doorway before I’d eclipsed it, in order to make out what might be inside it. “I brought in your boots,” I said.

  “Oh, thanks,” she said, and picked up the envelope again. “There’s a letter here for you. From your uncle. There’s something inside it. Two somethings. Round.”

  “Trade you,” I said, and handed her the boots.

  She handed me the letter. “You should probably read that,” she said. “He sounded upset when I talked to him the other day.”

  “I will later,” I said. I worried the letter with my thumbs and located the two circlets inside. Suddenly I was as hot to find out what they were as Emily seemed to be. I slipped a thumb under the envelope’s flap and tore it open.

  Two gold rings sprang out, dinged onto the floor, and rolled in her direction. She stooped and captured both, stuck the larger of the two on her thumb, and held the smaller one up to examine it. “There’s an inscription inside,” Emily said. “HSB to PKH, 3/12/12,” she read, slowly. “I’d be lost without you.”

  I already knew what the inscription said. What I couldn’t figure out was what the rings were doing in that envelope. I scanned the first line on the page folded up inside. Ward, it read, both your parents are deceased.

  I didn’t read any further then, as I was having trouble breathing.

  Emily looked up at me. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, my voice cracking. I let go of the letter about the same time Emily dropped my mother’s wedding ring. A puff of wind blew through the open door and picked up the pieces of paper that had fallen from my hands. Next thing I knew the two of us were on our knees, trying to gather up the shattered pieces of my heart.

  The ring had rolled under the table. I crawled after it as the letter’s pages drifted past behind me. Emily caught both and looked at the one on top just long enough to get the gist. I located Miss Pam’s ring and stuck it on my pinkie while I struggled to my feet again. I misjudged the distance between Emily and me as we both made to stand and we cracked foreheads on the way up. In any other situation this would have struck me as funny, but it wasn’t something we’d ever laugh about. Not then. Probably not ever.

  “Oh, Ward,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “That didn’t hurt half as bad as it sounded like it should have,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Are you all right?”

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “Come here. It’s about time you got to use one of your own bandanas for a change.” I stood there while she rooted one out of my pocket and started wiping my face. She put a hand behind my neck to crank me down to where she could get at me better. Then somehow she was using her lips to dry my face. Then her lips were on mine.

  The sound of approaching footsteps tore us apart. Emily gave me a wild-eyed look, grabbed her varmint boots, and ricocheted up the stairs, bounding from one side of the staircase to another, skipping some steps entirely. I remember noticing she didn’t make any noise at all racing up in her sock feet.

  I turned away and was sorting the mail as if the future of the human race depended on it when Margaret’s hand fell on my shoulder. “I thought I heard somebody out here,” she said. “Where’s your fan club?”

  “My fan club?” I asked. My voice sounded odd and tinny to me, but Margaret didn’t seem to notice.

  “Nina and Emily and Portia,” she said.

  “Oh, them,” I said. “Nina’s still in town and Emily and Portia are upstairs, I believe.”

  “Hmm,” Margaret said. “I didn’t think any of you would be back for hours. Are you hungry?”

  “We got something to eat in town,” I said, then panicked. Where had we gone for this fictional lunch? I needed to have an answer ready in case Margaret asked. I appreciated for the first time then how nimble Nina’s brain must be, given her constant rejiggering of facts.

  Emily’s voice floated down from the second floor. “Margaret,” she called. “Is that you down there? Do you know where Ward is?”

  Margaret stepped away to look up the stairwell. “Emily,” she said. “Stop leaning over the railing. You’re going to fall head over heels and break your neck if you aren’t careful.”

  I looked up, too, and saw Emily hanging almost upside down over the banister, her hair dangling across her cheeks like curtains and her face a little red from the angle, or else what we’d just been doing. “I’m always careful, Margaret,” she said. “Have you seen Ward anywhere?”

  “I’m here,” I said. My voice still sounded foreign to me.

  “Oh, good. Margaret, can I borrow Ward for a minute? He said he’d help me carry something in from the car.”

  “Have him for as long as you want,” Margaret said. “I didn’t expect anybody to be back for hours. I’d planned to use this afternoon to catch up on bills and update my ledger.” She patted me on the shoulder and disappeared down the hall.

  Occasionally when I can’t sleep I think about Margaret’s ledger. An earthly version of the book Saint Peter is said to refer to at the Pearly Gates, a record of who’s deserving and undeserving of being welcomed into paradise. Sometimes I wonder if Margaret noted down my name there, and what aperçu she wrote alongside it if she did. I imagine something along the lines of Howard Stovall Bennett III: Seemed trustworthy. Wasn’t. Although of course that’s just my guilty imagination working overtime. For all I know Margaret never found out what I got up to there at the end.

  Despite my overactive conscience I am not a Catholic, so I’ve never been inside a confessional booth. There was something about sitting next to Emily in the semidarkness of the parked stagecoach, though, staring at the tufted leather seat opposite us instead of at each other, that made me think of that. “You don’t have many private places to talk around here,” she said as she opened the door painted with the Pegasus insignia of the Flying Leap.

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” I said. “I’m not ready to talk about my parents.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking honestly surprised, “I wanted to talk about us.” The things folks choose to focus on when they hear tell of a crushing loss never cease to amaze me. I remember telling the wife of a patient once that her husband had been killed on his way home from work when some old man who had no busines
s driving anymore ran a red light. The first thing the wife said was, “I wonder if he picked up the dry cleaning.” She was in shock, of course. Though that was hardly Emily’s excuse. Her parents weren’t the ones who’d died.

  “Us? What about us?” I asked as I climbed into the stagecoach and settled in beside her.

  “I think the last time I was in here, I was with that tomcat, Wally. I may start sneezing at any minute,” she said. I handed her a bandana, which she proceeded to crumple and uncrumple as we talked. “I want you to know that I’m ashamed of myself. I don’t know what got into me. It just that you’re so young and good-looking, Ward. I hated seeing you so upset, and I let myself get carried away. Now I feel like one of those old men who pinch cigarette girls in nightclubs.”

  “You aren’t like them. Those old men are not ashamed, for one thing.”

  “Let me finish. I’m also sorry I kissed you because if there’s one thing I despise, it’s a cheater.”

  “I don’t think it qualifies as cheating once you’ve filed for divorce,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about me cheating. I’m talking about you cheating. On Mary Louise.”

  I didn’t have the least idea of what she meant by that. “Me, cheating on Mary Louise? I don’t follow.”

  “You don’t have to pretend, Ward. Portia told Nina your little secret, and Nina told me.”

  I twisted around to face her. “What’s my little secret?”

  “That you and Mary Louise are engaged.”

  “What makes Portia think I’d want to hitch myself to Mary Louise?” I asked. “I can find Paris on a map without someone always reminding me where to look.”

  “Nina said Portia told her she overheard Mary Louise ask you to marry her.”

  “Oh? When?”

  “Right after she found out her husband was dead. I gather Portia ran past you in the hall just as Mary Louise proposed.”

  Then I remembered the kid whisking past us. Given how today had unfolded so far I had to laugh to keep from crying.

  “Portia misunderstood,” I said once I regained my composure. “Mary Louise wasn’t asking me to marry her. She was telling me she was free to marry anybody she wanted to now that she was rich. Even the likes of me, a man Sam would call about as broke as the Ten Commandments.”