by Marlene Lee
“Would you like to have a drink in the new hotel?”
“I don’t drink.”
He turned away from the entrance.
“But I’d like to learn.” And in three long strides she was at the double doors.
“You can have coffee, if you prefer,” he said, catching up.
“No, I want to try something new. You don’t have to worry. I have ID.”
In front of the registration desk he managed to slow her down and steer her toward the bar where they were shown to a table in the corner. Below them, on the other side of the glass, the river flowed by. While they waited to order, Raymond idly watched the water for fish, but without sunlight the surface gave up no secrets. Rebecca looked at the rows of bottles lining the mirrored wall on the far side of the room.
“May I suggest something mild?” Raymond said.
“What do you mean by ‘mild’?”
“A soft drink.”
“I’ve had lots of soda pop in my life,” said Rebecca. “I want something stronger now.”
The waiter came. “Scotch on the rocks,” she said. Raymond ordered bourbon. Mood music hung over the room like a layer of smoke.
“I wish they would turn off the record-player,” she said. “I’m trying to hear the river.”
Raymond leaned back, then sideways, then back again, striving for a comfortable position in the metal chair. “A lot of people don’t like to be quiet and listen to natural sounds,” he said.
Rebecca folded her hands on the brushed steel tabletop, unfolded them again, and cracked her knuckles. When the waiter delivered their drinks, she stared into hers as if she’d caught a glimpse of something under the ice.
“Cheers,” Raymond said half-heartedly.
“Cheers,” Rebecca repeated, and lifted her glass. He spared himself the sight of her first encounter with alcohol by swirling his bourbon and studying its depths. Rebecca swallowed, coughed, and said “Good” in a game croak.
She was waiting for him to say something. He, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to feel the bourbon’s warmth, to be carried past this rough moment when he kept wishing his wife were sitting across from him instead of Rebecca. He wanted to feel peaceful, not on edge with a woman who couldn’t exchange two adult words, who couldn’t drink an adult beverage, who didn’t have the faintest idea of what it’s like to lose the person you’ve been married to for forty years. His dead wife hovered over his left shoulder. Together they were judging this strange woman who had no idea she was being judged. Pity for Rebecca’s awkwardness became part of the grief. He thought he was going to have to leave.
“I think liquor is overrated,” Rebecca said in a straightforward assessment of the experience she was having. “I wonder why so many people drink when it tastes the way it does.”
“We don’t have to stay here.”
“I like to finish what I start,” she replied, and downed the Scotch. She leaned one elbow on the table, rested her chin in her hand, and said in a firm, round tone, “This is exactly where I want to be.”
“I’d like to be somewhere else,” Raymond said. Rebecca didn’t seem to realize she’d been insulted. He hadn’t said it to hurt her, and so he was relieved when she replied in an open, curious manner,
“Where would you like to be?”
“On my ranch, twenty years ago.”
“What would you be doing?”
“Cutting brush. Mending fence. Climbing the logging road. Fishing for trout. Sledding with the kids.”
“You like to be outdoors.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to be sitting in the house by the fire, talking with your wife?”
He met her eyes. “Nope. I usually think of being outside. Active. My wife liked being outside, too.” At last he seemed to have found a comfortable position in his chair.
“Twenty years ago I never dreamed I would be having a drink with a man in Missoula, Montana.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“Or that my mother would die.”
“It comes to all of us.”
Rebecca’s eyes shone warmly green. “I feel as if she kept me in prison for fifty years, then freed me.”
Raymond’s dead wife, a co-conspirator against Rebecca, moved a few feet away. On the other side of the glass the river, under an increasingly gray sky, turned dark and private, running to please itself. Someone had turned down the sound system. Across the room the bartender wiped glasses with absent-minded flicks of a cloth.
“So you grew up on an orchard,” said Raymond.
“Yes. A peach orchard.”
“North of San Francisco?”
“Oh, my, yes. North even of Sacramento. We’re near Chico, in the Sacramento Valley.” Raymond noticed the “we’re” and wondered how long she could stay away.
“And your father won’t let you work in the peaches?”
“No.”
“And does your brother work in the peaches?”
“Yes.”
“Even after his father stole his fiancée?”
Rebecca was looking flushed. She began to unbutton her sweater. Raymond watched her fumble and was sorry he’d asked. He seemed drawn to the subject involuntarily, just as he was drawn to Rebecca and her strangeness.
“The orchard is business,” she said, turning and hanging her sweater on the back of her chair. “Besides, my brother doesn’t hold grudges.”
Or his women, thought Raymond.
“Your father must be very youthful.”
“Well, he is since the fiancée came to live with us.”
“How old is he?”
“Seventy-two.”
“How old is the fiancée?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Good Lord,” said Raymond. “I envy him his health. Does the fiancée have a name?”
“Not in my book.”
“And has that made her disappear?”
Rebecca twirled her empty glass on the steel tabletop. The nothingness underlying every self-absorbed moment of her past opened beneath her. Unlike Raymond who, wide awake, had wrestled with life, she, a recent convert to adulthood, was still half-asleep. She gripped her glass. Beads of sweat broke out across her forehead and bridge of the nose and her freckles stood out brown and prominent in her pale face.
“I’ve never lived through anything difficult,” she murmured. As if to prove it she added, “Do you think we could get some potato chips?”
Raymond immediately ordered chips and a Coke. When they arrived she picked up the cool glass and held it against her forehead. “I don’t feel well at all.”
“Would you like some fresh air?”
“I don’t think I should stand.”
While she and the Scotch struggled for dominance, he turned toward the river. Was that a fish’s movement in the water? The Clark’s Fork had been polluted for years. It was heartening to think the river might be coming back.
“Who will help you on the ranch when your daughter leaves?” Rebecca’s speech was slightly slurred.
“It’s a long-term visit,” he prevaricated.
Rebecca wiped her mouth with the cocktail napkin. Her hands shook. “You won’t be needing help, then.”
In fact, his daughter would be leaving shortly. He dreaded her departure. He turned back toward the river. “She won’t be staying forever.”
Still leaning against the cool glass of Coca-Cola, Rebecca smiled wanly. “I’d like to help you on your ranch, Mr. Butterick.”
“We’ll discuss it when you’re sober,” he said.
***
“Yoo-hoo!”
He had just sat down to breakfast: oatmeal—he wasn’t supposed to eat eggs—with milk instead of the cream he loved, less sugar than he liked, and no butter. It irritated him that he was allowed raisins. Irritated him almost as much as the voice at his front door. How had she found her way up the canyon? Even people with invitations and a map got lost. He said good-bye to his oatmeal and went to
the door.
“Yes?”
Rebecca stood there, apparently stimulated by her feat of navigation. She wore new bib overalls so blue and stiff they looked as if they could do a full day’s work without anyone in them.
“I found your ranch.”
“So I see.”
“I’m sober and ready to work.”
If he asked her inside, her presence would fill his house and commit him to adopting the view that he needed her help.
“Wait in the car,” he said. “I’m eating.” What was to be done with her? He’d seen her in a bathrobe after a panic attack. He’d chased her down the center line of a Wyoming highway at night. He’d seen her throw up lunch and Scotch on the river bank outside the new hotel. From the depths of anxiety, inexperience, inebriation, and vomitus she kept bobbing to the surface.
He looked out the kitchen window. The Lincoln sat empty. He moved to the south window. There she was, bent at the waist, pinching off dead blossoms from the geraniums growing around his porch and dropping them into a shopping bag. She was quick and deft, and she positioned her work shoes carefully among the plants.
He went back to the front door and stepped onto the porch. After the August singularity, the Canadian cold front had disintegrated. The sun, blazing with a show of conviction, fooled no one. Its heat felt thin. Snow pack on the peaks of the distant Rattlesnakes was closer to the truth.
“My daughter didn’t get around to the geraniums,” he said.
“Has she already left?”
He looked up at Mount Patterson leaning over his property, scanned the timbered hillside, visually strolled through the meadow, and returned to the geraniums. His daughter had helped him patch the barn roof, then gone back to her boyfriend. He touched the porch rail to steady himself against a wave of melancholy.
“She left.”
Rebecca pinched off the last of the brown flowers and dumped the shopping bag in her car trunk.
“How did you find my ranch?”
She slammed the lid shut. “I went to the Forest Service and told them I was your sister whom you hadn’t seen in twenty-five years and that I wanted to surprise you but that I didn’t know how to get to your ranch. The woman behind the desk didn’t know, either, but she thought it was off Route 200, so I followed Route 200 and stopped at the gas station before the turn-off and told the man in the store that I was your cousin you hadn’t seen in twenty-five years . . .”
He half-listened to the mix of guile and naiveté.
“ . . . and that’s how I found your ranch.” She stood looking at him from the other side of the gate. The brim of her straw hat stood at attention; her overalls begged for a work assignment.
He stepped off the porch. “What did you have in mind for the day?”
“Work.”
“What kind of work?”
“Physical work. You know, labor. Don’t you have some plowing or planting or fertilizing to do? Don’t you have cows to milk?” She’d reached the end of her farm lore.
“I’ve got two horses,” he said, “and I fed them this morning. The only crop I grow is alfalfa and it’s already been brought in.”
The bib of Rebecca’s new overalls went slack. “Then you don’t need help.”
“Well, the drainage ditch needs repairing.” He passed through the gate and they set out toward the meadow. A snow-cooled breeze blowing across the Rattlesnakes freshened the space between them.
“How do you repair a ditch?” she asked as they approached the barn.
“With shovels.”
“How did the ditch get broken?”
“Cows trampled it. A neighbor grazes his cattle in my pasture.”
Inside, the barn was dark and smelled of musty hay and oats. Their footsteps stirred up the dirt floor. Rebecca sneezed.
“God bless you. Here’s your shovel.”
She half-carried, half-dragged it outside, raising more dust, then followed Raymond’s example and propped it on her shoulder. They walked for several minutes in silence. A mourning dove stroked the air with her soft, gray call. Then the meadowlark’s high song rang out, sweet, bright, and aggressive. When they reached the trampled ditch, Raymond motioned Rebecca to the other side. She backed up and made a run for it, leaping across the gap.
“You could have just stepped across.”
“I felt like running.”
Raymond struck his shovel in the dirt, sliced along the crumbling wall, and tossed scree from the ditch bottom over his shoulder. Rebecca did the same on her side. At first she got in Raymond’s way, but before long they worked out a rhythm: strike, dig, lift, toss, and keep your shovel away from the other fellow. Raymond took the lead and Rebecca worked behind him, following the cut in the earth. They appreciated the work for different reasons: Raymond for the silence, Rebecca for the use of her body. She thought she could bring in a whole crop of whatever Raymond grew by herself.
Raymond stopped and leaned on his shovel. “We’ve done enough for a while,” he said.
“I’m not tired. I can finish it for you.” She kept shoveling.
“Stop for a while.”
She did, breathing hard from physical work and satisfaction. From under the floppy brim of the hat her green eyes held depths. Raymond felt himself drawn under the hat, into her eyes.
“I could work all day,” she said.
“Not on my property you couldn’t.” It would be easy to get used to her. But then something would go wrong and she’d run away from him again.
The bib of her overalls flared. She was about to make a sharp retort until she remembered this was his ranch. His ditch. For the first time in days she thought about her manners. Mother would be appalled. Oddly, she hadn’t thought about Mother in the last few hours.
“I’ve worked this property for a good many years,” Raymond said, “and I intend to continue.”
“Well, of course.”
“I don’t really need any help.”
“Don’t you like the way I work?”
“Yes, but you work too fast and look for it too often.”
Though Mother’s voice no longer sounded in Rebecca’s head, there was a voice. She was so unacquainted with it that she didn’t know it was her own. She lifted her head so the message could get out from under the hat brim.
“Why do you think I’m back in Montana?”
“I have no idea.”
“To be near you, and help you, and listen to you talk, although sometimes I don’t like it when you tell me the truth.” She took off her hat and wiped her forehead with a swipe of her arm. “I hated it when you said I’ve wasted my life living at home with Mother.”
Raymond looked up at her, squinting into the sun. She moved to shield him from the glare and stood tapping the brim of her straw hat against one knee.
“I don’t know whether your life has been wasted or not,” Raymond finally said. “I don’t know you.”
“Well, it has been wasted.” The starch went out of her overalls. “I haven’t had a career or family or”—she stepped forward to get his attention, as if she didn’t have it—“a purpose in life. You said it yourself. I haven’t really lived.”
Raymond unbuttoned the third button of his sport shirt and inserted his hand over his heart. “When did I ever say you haven’t lived?”
Rebecca kept an eye on his hand. “At the truck stop in Wyoming when you were criticizing me for still listening to Mother.” She stepped into the ditch and sat down beside him. “Is your heart bothering you?”
“I’m upset,” said Raymond. “Being upset is bad for my heart. It upsets me to remember the night in Wyoming.” He moved away from her. “Who needed help that night?”
“I did.”
“So when we were eating breakfast at the truck stop, why did you say I was hunting you down?”
“What I said wasn’t one hundred percent true.”
“It wasn’t one percent true.”
Rebecca moved closer. Their work shoes rested side by side
in the ditch. “I asked you for help,” she admitted. “But I didn’t ask you to follow me from the motel in the middle of the night. What percent is that?”
He was about to say that she was missing the point, it wasn’t a matter of percentages, when she said, staring at the third button of his shirt, “After you left I finished breakfast, and when I went out to my car I saw the most beautiful sunrise, and I thought of you driving back to Montana”—she dislodged dirt as she took a step and raised her arms impulsively—“back here to your ranch, and I felt so happy and so lucky to know you.”
Raymond wanted to trust her, even while she skittered from deception to ecstasy. “Forget the sunrise,” he said, buttoning his shirt. “What I remember is you in your Lincoln rolling out of the motel parking lot in the middle of the night, running away from me.”
“You got your revenge.” She turned the straw hat around and around in her freckled hands. “It was terrifying being followed. I didn’t know the headlights were yours.” She put her hat back on her head. “And even if I had, we were strangers.”
Raymond felt another uneven beat of the heart. He stepped up onto level ground. “We’re still strangers. I didn’t invite you to the ranch. I didn’t ask you to upset me again. Maybe you’d better go back to your bed-and-breakfast. Early tomorrow morning you can drive on home to California or wherever you’re going.”
For a long moment Rebecca remained motionless. Then she stepped up out of the ditch and, hiding her stricken face under her hat, picked up a shovel and retraced her steps across the meadow. Her height, floppy hat, and long stride gave her a purposeful look she had never achieved at home on the orchard. Raymond followed at a distance, both relieved and sad when he saw her lean the shovel against the barn door and continue on toward her car.
***
From inside the barn he heard rather than saw her drive away. In the stillness that settled over the ranch, he made his way to the front porch of the house. Short of breath, he sat on the swing he’d hung from ceiling hooks years ago and looked at the empty place in front of the gate where Rebecca’s car had been parked.