The Quality of Life Report

by Meghan Daum

  “I was sorry to hear Up Early let you go,” he said.

  “When did you hear that?”

  “A few weeks ago,” he said. “I got an e-mail saying they wouldn’t need to coproduce with us anymore. I just hope it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Why would it be your fault?”

  “Because I wouldn’t release that footage that Jeb shot at Brenda’s house,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I know I should have talked to you about it,” said Joel. “But as it turned out, my boss looked at it and said there was no way we could send that out into the world. It doesn’t give a very good impression of our community. I mean, meth! Come on, Lucinda. We get enough bad press from Cops.”

  “You never sent Up Early the footage?”

  “Your boss hassled me over it for weeks,” he said. “But I just couldn’t do it. Besides, Valdette was all bent out of shape about not being on camera. She’s got some competitive thing with Christine. Everyone was on my case. So I just said screw it. I destroyed the tape.”

  Suddenly I loved Joel. Sort of, anyway.

  “Can I buy you lunch?” I asked. “Do you want an egg roll or anything? A funnel cake?”

  “No thanks,” Joel said. “Although, I gotta say, I wish I’d destroyed that barn dance footage, too. In all my years in television I’ve never gotten horse semen on my pants. You might want to consider a career as a producer in the porn industry.”

  I figured that statement pretty much shot down my chances of getting hired on Parent Talk.

  “You know, Lucinda,” Joel continued, “you remind me a lot of the way I was when I first came out here. When I left New York, I had big plans to turn this part of the country into a major market. I was going to revolutionize public television. I was going to make Prairie City known for high-end, original public programming the way Seattle was known for coffee. Granted, that was before Seattle became known for coffee. But you know what I mean. Man, I was a fireball of ambition. I tried to create a roundtable news show, like The McLaughlin Group. I tried to develop a documentary series about barns that had been converted into architectural award-winning homes. I tried to make a fucking kids show! It was a kind of Zoom meets Barney, only edgier because it had kids learning to speak different languages. And I’m not just talking about Spanish. I’m talking about Vietnamese, Arabic, Czech, sign language, for Christ’s sake. I thought I was going to change the world and be all the more impressive because I changed it from here, because I didn’t sit in some office in midtown Manhattan making lunch appointments but actually did the shit from Prairie City. I mean, I’d love to see Ted Turner try to do his business from some godforsaken place like this.”

  “He kind of does, doesn’t he?” I said.

  “Okay, bad example,” said Joel. “But you know what I’m saying. And what I want to tell you, Lucinda, is that, in the end, I stopped caring. No one wanted to do The McLaughlin Group thing. I’d called it Lipinsky and Significant Others, which, admittedly, wasn’t the sexiest title. No one wanted to do the barn documentary series. No one wanted to do the kids foreign language show. So we kept making Parent Talk. We kept churning out local news stories about ethanol production. And suddenly, that was my life. I was a guy who produced local programming in a third-tier market. End of story.”

  That would be me in a few years, I thought. If I never left Prairie City I would be sitting in the mall waxing despondent over my unrealized dreams, my still-unsold proposal for Inspirations from the Heartland, the brilliant New York career that I threw away because I stupidly thought I could achieve success on my own terms. If I stayed here long enough I’d probably listen to The Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack until I was fluent in Spanish, or at least knew all the words to “Amor de Loca Juventud,” the first line of which, if I wasn’t mistaken, translated to “Lost are the dreams of my deluded youth.” By then Faye could be the president of NBC. Bonnie Crawley would be anchoring the nightly news. Maybe Joel had the right idea. Maybe the third tier was the place to be. Maybe there was an inherent morality there that compensated for its lack of glamour. Who knew? I was exhausted from trying to make sense of it all.

  “You should be proud of the work you do,” I said lamely and utterly disingenuously.

  “You bet your ass I’m proud of it,” Joel said. “This is what I’m trying to tell you. Let it go! Accept the life you’ve walked into. Enjoy the sunny days. Spend the rainy days inside the house making love. Hey, man, there’s more to life than bagels and lox. As Frank Fussell told me that night at your farm, ‘I’m a wild seed, let the wind carry me.’ I say ‘Right on’ to that.”

  “I think that’s a Joni Mitchell lyric,” I said.

  Joel stared at me.

  “Well, there’s nothing new under the sun,” he said. “Shakespeare said that.”

  The diamond stud in Joel’s ear caught a glint from the fluorescent lights of the food court. He rose from his chair and picked up his shopping bag. In the Barnes and Noble bag, through the semitransparent plastic, I noticed the unmistakable dust jacket of Haley Bopp’s A Broad and Her Sheets.

  WHEN I ARRIVED BACK AT THE FARM, there was a note stuck in the back door. Written in the bubble handwriting of a teenage girl, it said: “Had the day off so I stopped by. Very interesting.—Julie.”

  I couldn’t imagine why she had come by without calling first, nor did I know how she’d gotten directions, unless Jill had told her. I assumed that by “interesting” she was referring to the mural that Mason had begun painting on the side of the house. In his new ambition, and his dwindling supply of canvases, he’d embarked on an abstract expressionist rendering of Lucky the horse. Since he was using the exterior paint left over from doing the trim the previous summer, the mural had the added benefit of actually matching the house. Even the landlord liked it. Mason hoped it would serve as an advertisement for the horse-boarding operation.

  It was still midday; Mason wouldn’t be home for a few more hours. I e-mailed Daphne and left a message for Elena. I was pulling up my résumé on the computer when I heard a loud knocking on the door downstairs. Looking outside the window, I saw a sheriff’s car in the driveway.

  “Ma’am, did you lose a horse?” the sheriff asked when I opened the door. He was tall and gaunt and looked to be near sixty, the kind of sheriff who looks more like an actor playing a sheriff than an actual one.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes,” I said. I slipped into my clogs and stepped outside. Cupid was in the pasture. I couldn’t see Lucky in his corral; surely he was in the barn.

  “How many horses you got out here?” the sheriff asked. The name on his badge said T. Gastinov.

  “We have two horses,” I said. “The other one must be in the barn.”

  “Who else lives out here? Your husband?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “Your roommate?” the sheriff asked, his eyes narrowing a bit as though he were measuring our sleaze factor. “Is your boyfriend your roommate?

  “Yes,” I said. “But he’s at work now.”

  “We got a complaint from someone a couple miles down the road about a horse that’s gotten himself in their pasture,” the sheriff said. “Why don’t you and I take a walk back to the barn and make sure your horse is in there?”

  “Okay, sure.”

  We walked through the yard to the barn, the dog trailing behind us. The sheriff, pausing briefly to look at the mural, said, “Well that sure is interesting.”

  Lucky was not in his stall. Moreover, the gate to his corral was open. I’d taken him out in the pasture that morning. Was it possible that I had not shut the gate all the way when I brought him back?

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Was that a white horse?” the sheriff asked. “A stud?”

  “Yes, actually.”

  “Because you got some folks down the road who are pretty angry right about now. It seems they have a mare in heat and your horse here got i
n and, according to them, mounted her several times.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “You gotta keep a stud locked up real good, ma’am.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just . . . maybe I left the gate open. I’m from New York.”

  “I’m gonna need to take some information,” he said. “They’ve secured the animal.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “From the sound of things, he had a real good day.”

  I laughed. This was a sheriff with a sense of humor. This was no big deal, just another wacky day on the farm. It would have made a good segment for Up Early. The sheriff was petting Sam Shepard. He pulled a dog treat from his pocket and gave it to him.

  “Are we going to get a citation or anything?” I asked, now confident that the sheriff had distinguished me from the usual scumbags and would be impressed with my level of cooperation.

  “Not unless there was any damage to the property, which it doesn’t sound like there was,” he said. “As for the condition of the mare, that’ll be between you and your neighbors. I suggest you talk to them when you retrieve the animal.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  We walked back through the barn. Passing the tack room, the sheriff glanced through the glass door and saw Mason’s paintings.

  “You’ve got quite a museum in there,” he said.

  “Mason’s a painter,” I said.

  “Mind if I take a peek inside?” he asked.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  Then, in the stupidest thing I had done since not only coming to Prairie City but since being born (this is no exaggeration, I had a lot of time to think about it and came up with nothing even close), I failed to consider my rights to refuse him entry into the tack room and, as if the sheriff were an art dealer, opened the door and led him inside.

  The place was ransacked. Paint brushes were flung on the floor, cans of water spilled over, bones and birds’ nests and tools thrown every where. A few of the canvases had been knocked over and books and framed pictures had fallen off the shelves.

  “Must be quite the angry artist,” the sheriff said.

  “I don’t know what happened here,” I said.

  Mason would never have left the tack room in that condition. I wondered if the wind had somehow blown the door open. Or maybe an animal had gotten in. Then I saw a note on the table. It was written on the back of one of the horse-boarding flyers in Julie’s idiotic handwriting. Before I could read it I saw something else on the table. A small white rock next to an empty film canister. The sheriff closed in on the table. As he picked up the rock, I picked up the note. It was one word long. Even then, it was misspelled.

  Gotchya, it read.

  “Ma’am,” the sheriff said, “I’m gonna ask you to come with me.”

  There’s nothing much to say about riding in the back of a sheriff’s car that hasn’t already been said by people far wittier and more experienced with run-ins with the law than I was on that spring day. After being read my Miranda rights I’d been handcuffed. “It’s for your protection as well as mine,” the sheriff had said. “If you stay still they won’t cut you.” As he spoke into his radio, saying “We got white female, age thirty-one, in possession of an eighth of an ounce of methamphetamine,” I sat in the car with my hands in my lap, silently cursing Mason while wanting nothing more than to call him, to hear his voice, to have him pull into the driveway right then and there, although I figured he’d be arrested, too.

  I would like to say that I continued to joke with the sheriff as we drove down the gravel road and made our way to Prairie City. I wished I could have been the kind of person who said things like “Not your everyday runaway horse call, eh?” or “Guess I really am between a rock and a hard, uh, thing.” But I said nothing during the forty-five-minute trip to the sheriff’s department, a trip during which Sheriff T. Gastinov never exceeded forty miles per hour and took us right through downtown Prairie City. We passed the library and the Thirteenth Street TGI Friday’s. We passed the main post office and the YMCA and the Prairie City Recovery Center for Women, where an EMBRACE, EMPATHIZE, EMPOWER banner was hanging in the front window.

  The sheriff’s department was tiny, the size of a couple of double-wide trailers; even the walls were paneled with fake wood like the inside of a mobile home. A receptionist sat at the front desk below a Thoroughbred horse-of-the-month calendar.

  “Come this way,” T. Gastinov said, leading me into a small, unoccupied office where there was a desk, a phone, and an empty coffee mug that said I HATE MONDAYS. “Use this phone and make your call.”

  He stood beside me while I dialed the grain elevator. Frank Fussell answered.

  “Frank,” I said, “It’s Lucinda. I was arrested at the farm.”

  “Try some circular breathing,” Frank said.

  IT APPARENTLY DIDN’T MATTER MUCH what Mason had done. It was my farm—my name alone was on the lease—and since every thing that occurred on it was my responsibility, Mason was not charged with the possession of the eighth of an ounce of meth that, as he later insisted, was the first meth he’d touched since the night the propane went out. I knew from my research that most meth addicts relapse at least three times before kicking for good; even then, most never kick it for good. The meth had again been in the film canister behind the framed photograph of Mason and me. Julie, who had indeed been tipped off by Jill (“but I never thought the bitch would do that,” Jill said later), had rummaged through the tack room until she found it. Leaving it out in the open with the note, she later said, was an attempt to get back at us for “scalding” her daughter’s ankles that morning when I’d put Erin in the too-hot bathwater. Julie also claimed to have been suffering from PMS, though in the end none of it mattered. She was never charged with illegal entry. And though she hadn’t known it at the time, she was also pregnant by another guy from Effie’s Tavern.

  As Frank Fussell told it, Mason had broken down in tears in the grain elevator when Frank went to get him after my phone call. He had been loading corn from last year’s harvest onto a train car and Frank, shouting to him under the din of the grain pouring from the huge elevator bin, had pulled Mason into the office and told him he needed to send a lawyer to the sheriff’s department rather than going to get me himself. Mason knew a lawyer from Effie’s Tavern. Though he couldn’t remember the guy’s name, they’d smoked pot together in the early 1980s and Mason got in his truck and drove to Effie’s to ask the bartender how to reach him.

  It was four hours before anyone came. I was put in a jail cell—the “women’s cell,” as T. Gastinov called it, which presumably distinguished itself as a feminine space by virtue of its cushioned bunk beds. For four hours I sat in it alone, crying softly and intermittently, not so much out of fear but out of grief over the apparent inevitability of losing the farm. To me, that meant losing every thing. Even after recovering from the coma of winter, after believing Mason had kicked the meth for good and thinking, like a fool, that he might actually lift himself out of the error margin and become a serious painter or, at the very least, cease to be a liability to every thing he touched, I had once again looked the other way while he blithely fucked up both of our lives. And naïveté no longer worked as an excuse. Now it was just plain laziness and denial, which was far less charming than naïveté. That, right there, was what finally shook me awake. The horror of being judged was nothing compared to the fear of being dull, of being less than endearing, of being written off as a loser. Even after all that had happened, even after I’d fallen through more cracks than I’d ever even stepped over on the sidewalks of New York, I’d managed to hang on to my belief that I was not, despite my obnoxiousness, without my charms. But now it was clear that there was nothing charming about me. I was as boring as the problems I was refusing to face. And though it shamed me to admit it, being uninteresting was the last straw. In the Lucinda Trout universe, this was simply an unacceptable condition.

  A sheriff—not T. Gastinov but another one—came an
d told me that someone was sending a lawyer for me. He asked if I wanted coffee and just to make things feel a little less dire I said yes. Ten minutes later I had to pee.

  The lawyer, whom I recognized from Effie’s, sat outside the holding cell and told me the case would probably be thrown out. From what he’d gathered from the sheriff and from Mason, it sounded like an illegal search and seizure. And given the evidence of a break-in (although it hadn’t really been a break-in; technically I’d invited Julie to the farm, and the tack room hadn’t been locked) it was doubtful anyone could press charges of any kind. The lawyer had a ponytail and a goatee. He made me sign documents agreeing to his representation. He said I’d have to stay for a few more hours, that there was a mountain of paperwork, though it was strictly routine.

  “How much do you charge?” I asked.

  “We’ll work it out,” the lawyer said. He had reading glasses on a string around his neck and he pushed them down on his nose and looked at me as if he were about to say something profound, or perhaps scold me. I could hear a commotion outside in the office, the ringing of phones, the static from radios.

  “I’ve known Mason forever,” he said. “These things happen.”

  He put his papers in his briefcase and the guard escorted him back into the office. A few minutes passed and a woman in orange jail garb walked in the door, followed by the same female guard who’d brought me in.

  “You’ve got some company now,” the guard said, opening the gate to the cell.

  It was Dawn, my downstairs neighbor from the house in town. Her tangle of hair covered her face, but as she passed me and sat down on the opposite bunk bed, I recognized her round face, her green eyes, and patchy skin. Her extra-large scrub pants were pulled flat across her hips. She looked like she had been crying. I gasped. I turned away so she wouldn’t see me. But after a few seconds, because I was desperate to talk, because even my embarrassment couldn’t override my urge to explain myself, I stared at her until she caught me eye.