The Home Place: A Novel

by Carrie La Seur

  “Nice to meet you. So you’re old friends of Chance’s, you two?” Either Tiffany is quite an actress or she knows nothing about Chance’s history with Alma. She’s young enough that she might have no idea.

  “Chance and I went to high school together,” Alma volunteers. “I live in Seattle now. We’re just in town for a funeral.” That nutshell version of events, she hopes, will hold off awkward questions.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Somebody in the family?”

  “My sister.”

  “Oh my gosh! Your sister! Oh, what a shame!” After this exclamation, Tiffany is struck dumb by the information and retreats to the cutting board. Alma sympathizes. It’s hardly a conversation topic.

  Jean-Marc is humming French opera to himself, sipping at Ed’s homemade hard cider and adding butter liberally to a pan of onions. As Alma approaches he looks up, smiles, and holds out the cider glass. “You’ve got to try this!” he enthuses. “Notes of oak.” It’s an inside joke, from a wine tasting they did at a Washington vineyard where the wine tasted like it had been strained through oak chips. The pushy winemaker kept referring to oak this and oak that until Jean-Marc and Alma turned it into a drinking game. Alma smiles and tastes the cider. It’s better than the wine was, and Jean-Marc turns back to his pan in satisfaction at her approving nod.

  As he turns away, Alma knows suddenly that their relationship has entered that twilight between the moment when it’s over and the moment when she works up the nerve to tell him. It’s impossible that what she and Chance have just done isn’t written in neon on her forehead. If Jean-Marc were paying attention to her at all, her tension should be screaming at him. But he trusts her. She’s never lied to him. She walks to the counter to pour herself a large glass of cider, aware of Jayne’s wary eyes on her every step.

  Dinner lasts too long. Alma doesn’t know which way to look. Chance—situated by Jayne at the opposite end of the table, between Tiffany and Ed—drops the ceramic butter dish and spends what seems like a very long time on his knees beside the table, rubbing up the greasy butter mark and collecting shards of crockery.

  “There were antelope,” Brittany says when the conversation pauses. She’s speaking softly to Mae, but everyone looks up. These are the first words Brittany has spoken since arriving at the Murphys’ this evening, while Mae happily chatters enough for both of them. Her silence comes and goes now, a protective veil she puts on.

  “Oh, right.” Alma sets down her knife. “At the home place. Right up next to the front porch, close as can be.”

  “Some of them were going to have babies!” Brittany tells Mae, eyes full of excitement. “They were all big like this.” She gestures with her arms and puffs out her cheeks to imitate a heavy antelope. The table dissolves into a common laugh of affection and relief at being able to laugh at anything. Brittany looks up with an expression of unalloyed, bright-eyed joy, taking in their pleasure. It comes and goes quickly, but Alma drinks it in, watching her niece long after the moment has passed.

  There is discussion of Maddie’s worried call, and the consensus emerges that Alma will leave the front porch light on. The light is visible from the Murphys’, just barely, and in case of emergency she’ll turn it off as a call for help. The plan suits Jayne, who bridles at Ed’s suggestion that the Terrebonnes and Jean-Marc simply stay on at the Little m for safety. “There now,” she says, taking a very firm grip on her husband’s arm, “let’s not go overboard. I’d be more worried about Maddie all by herself in town.”

  “That’s right,” Alma joins in, grateful that Jayne has moved the focus from her. “I should call Detective Curtis and ask him if someone can check in on Grandma, especially after this afternoon.”

  Tiffany stirs at the table, pushing her chair back. “I need to be up early for school. I’ll call you tomorrow,” she says, giving Chance a quick kiss on the cheek as she gets up. At her touch, Chance reddens and his eyes flicker to Alma, who picks up her glass of cider and bolts the rest. When Tiffany pulls away from Chance, eyes close to his face, she freezes for an instant, then continues farewelling the whole group as she moves for the door.

  “I’m sure we’ll all have an early morning,” Jayne announces, folding her napkin and standing. “Alma, why don’t I walk out with you to get the car, just to be on the safe side?” The offer is at once kind and inarguable. Before Alma can say a word, she’s back in her coat and walking into the snowy night beside Jayne, who settles her shotgun against her shoulder. Alma is light-headed from the cider—good God, what must the alcohol content be?—and the intensity of the last two hours.

  “You certainly lost no time getting reacquainted with my son,” Jayne says. Her tone is not unkind, but the worry comes through powerfully.

  “That wasn’t my intention. It just sort of . . . happened.”

  Jayne takes this in as they walk. “Our Chance, he’s a good man, and he’s had such terrible luck with women, starting with you.”

  Alma presses her lips together to hide a wry smile from Jayne, who has shown her nothing but kindness since childhood. This is fallout she never considered—how much her actions would have hurt Jayne. Chance must know what his mother will say to her, must be stiff with embarrassment, but under the circumstances he can’t prevent it. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Murphy. I never meant to hurt him. Or you.”

  Jayne moves the gun to the shoulder farther from Alma and reaches out to pat the younger woman’s shoulder. “You know, back then, after you wouldn’t see him anymore, he closed up so tight none of us could reach him. I think it’s why he transferred to Stanford, to get away from everyone who knew him. Even after Ed had his cancer surgery and Chance came back here to help out, I worried to see him so alone. I asked him once, didn’t he want to get married, have a family? You know what he told me?”

  Alma doesn’t dare answer that one.

  “He told me, ‘Ma, I’m not the marrying kind.’ Can you imagine? After I helped him pick out that ring for you, telling him all the while you were both way too young. He finally stopped me and said, ‘I love her, Mom. You understand that.’ Alma, I can understand telling him no, but then just to break it off without even saying goodbye—how could you do that to him?” Jayne’s eyes are moist and her question is plaintively stated, the cri de cœur she’s held in all these years.

  Alma stops walking and turns to Jayne. “I should have said goodbye,” she begins. “It was wrong of me just to cut him off like that. I was . . . not myself. But you should know, he never proposed. I guess I didn’t give him time. I didn’t even know about the ring until tonight. He showed it to me.”

  Jayne sighs right down into her boots. “Tiffany is such a nice girl. I set them up, you know. I should have known it would never work out. There’s no edge to her. Chance’s been humoring us both, like he does.” She lets the weight of the shotgun slip through her hands until the butt end rests on the ground. “So are you going to break his heart again? I’d like to be prepared.”

  Jayne looks so small and fearful and fierce, standing there in the snow with the barrel of the gun clenched in her hands, that Alma has to smile. “Jayne—” she risks. It’s always been Mrs. Murphy, but for the first time they’re speaking to each other as women. There is no room for falseness in the moonlight between them. “Would it be enough if I promise to give him a decent goodbye this time?”

  “I guess that’ll have to satisfy the mother bear,” Jayne agrees and resumes their walk toward the machine shed. “Maybe I took it so hard because you broke all our hearts, Alma. You always fit here so well. We thought you’d be our daughter one day, we really did.”

  Tentatively, Alma reaches out to squeeze Jayne’s hand. The snow has begun to accumulate, hiding ruts in the yard, smoothing over imperfections in the buildings and landscape, making the circle of light through which they walk as fresh and perfect as new creation, where all things are possible.

  CHAPTER 17

  WEDNESDAY, 9 P.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  When Alma parks the car in fr
ont of the Murphys’ and goes back in, Jean-Marc insists on driving home.

  “You’ve had way too much to drink,” he tells Alma, snatching the keys from her hand.

  “Now hold on there,” Chance interjects. “You’ve had quite a bit yourself. Why don’t I drive you? I’ve had nothing but coffee all night.”

  “I’ve had about enough of your help for one day,” Jean-Marc snaps in a voice just a little too loud for sobriety. He puts an arm around Alma and steers her toward the door. Alma looks back to see Chance’s jaw clenched tight, but he says nothing as they follow Brittany into the night.

  Jean-Marc relinquishes the keys to Alma without looking at her. The ride home is short and silent. The three of them wash up in the kitchen sink and tread upstairs, where the clanking radiators have raised the temperature enough that they can no longer see their breath. It can’t be later than nine thirty, but Brittany falls asleep immediately and Alma can hardly stay awake to strip down to her long underwear and woolly socks. Jean-Marc sits on the edge of the bed, still dressed.

  “So what were you doing out in the barn all that time?”

  Alma dives under the covers and curls up facing the wall. “Just catching up. I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “And he wanted to try your lipstick on his neck?”

  Alma freezes. Of course, that too-dark shade she put on for the funeral. It would smear easily and show up on anything it touched, leaving traces even when wiped away. Back at the house she’d been too busy not looking at Chance to examine him for stray smudges. What a rookie error. So that’s what Jayne saw—and what Jean-Marc eventually spotted too. She wonders about Tiffany’s powers of observation.

  “I’m sorry, Jean-Marc. We have a lot of history.”

  Jean-Marc waits. Minutes tick by and Alma says nothing. After this day, at this hour, she has no strength for confrontation. At last he sighs and pulls off his outer clothes. They lie on opposite sides of the bed and fall asleep without moving, like tired children.

  Alma is walking along the creek, in among the water birches and black cottonwoods, their bark papery and slick under her hands as she moves from rock to rock, balancing barefoot like they used to, she and Petey and Vicky, playing in the creek bottom, running free as long as the sun stayed up. She’s alone, but their laughter echoes in the water sounds. The sun lights on the water in golden currents, carrying off the mountain of words. They float away in foamy clumps, dissipating, dissolving into eddies, swirling around her toes, then breaking free, leaving her, washing her with the benediction of the waters.

  From upstream, a smell begins to accumulate around her—natural, but nothing she’s accustomed to. A smell of hurt. Standing bare-legged in the middle of the cold current, Alma feels an unexpected warmth. She begins to walk upstream, seeking the source of the temperature change. As she comes around the bend, she hears an elk’s cries, and then she sees it: in the shallowest part of the creek, a cow elk is down, under vicious attack by a pack of coyotes. Two are at her neck and two more at her belly, ripping at her, releasing her hot blood to the stream. Alma looks down to see that the warmth she feels is the elk’s blood, coagulating around her knees, and what she thought was the dissolution of the mountain of words is in fact blood flowing out of them, blood flowing because of them, because of all she’s done and hasn’t done. When she looks back up, buzzards are descending. The coyotes have begun to tear at the elk’s exposed viscera, and when her dying, glazed eyes meet Alma’s, the eyes are Vicky’s. Alma begins to scream.

  Jean-Marc is shaking her. “Alma! Alma, wake up! It’s just a dream, wake up!”

  Alma throws her arms around his neck and hugs him close, breathing hard. The moon has risen and hangs so near it feels like a personal visitation. “Oh God, it was awful. It was Vicky. It’s my fault. It’s my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Jean-Marc shushes her and pushes her hair back. “It’s not your fault. Calm down.”

  Alma relaxes onto her pillow as Jean-Marc rubs her back and holds her. She feels the tension still alive in him, set aside to comfort her. “I’m sorry about tonight,” she says.

  “Would you like to tell me about your history with Chance Murphy?” Jean-Marc’s hand moves through her hair in a gentle, familiar gesture. He is not yet fully awake.

  They are so close that any telltale movement could give away her racing thoughts, the foregone conclusion of the end of the relationship. Alma wants to save that for later, when she’s gathered up the courage and the words to do it right. She forces her shoulders to wiggle a little like she’s looking for a comfortable spot on the old, lumpy mattress.

  “The oldest, most boring story around. My first love.” The words are as laughing and dismissive as she can make them, a weak effort, but apparently enough for Jean-Marc.

  “I think he still has plans for you.” Jean-Marc takes the same amused tone.

  “Maybe he did, I don’t know. But not after tonight.” Her mind goes to the jeweler’s box, then to Chance’s slumped profile outside the machine shed. She and Jean-Marc are looking back over an evening as they often do, mocking and interpreting, sharing anything the other missed. Normally she enjoys these conversations.

  “No?” Jean-Marc’s question is light, clipped . . . hopeful.

  “No. I’m not quite the person he remembers.” She feels the heat in her face, glad he can’t see it.

  “It was a long time ago. He couldn’t possibly understand who you are now.” Jean-Marc leans into her neck and laughs. Alma knows perfectly well that everything about Big Horn County is dangerously exotic to Jean-Marc. A safari trip. He’s one of those who will never go back to the country, could never live here. She hadn’t understood that about him until recently. He believes her to be like him.

  Jean-Marc runs a hand up her body, settling on her breast in a gesture of ownership that, for the first time, bothers her. Yet she lets the hand stay.

  “Jean-Marc, you and I have had a lot of fun,” she begins.

  “Past perfect,” he notices. Every muscle in him goes taut. “Is that the tense we’re in?”

  “I’m sure we could go on having a lot of fun. It’s just that—I’m starting to think that life will have to be about more than that.”

  “More than having fun?” Jean-Marc runs a finger between her breasts, down to her belly, then follows the line with his lips. “Like living out on the tundra with that cowboy, a thousand miles from a decent restaurant or a nice shoe store? Is that what you have in mind? Because it doesn’t sound like you.” His voice strains to hold the same unemotional tone, but his eyes are locked on hers as he moves down her body. This is the way he usually ends arguments.

  “I know. Not the me that you know. But you don’t know all of me. Maybe you don’t know me very well at all.” What she intends as defiant comes out instead small and sad.

  Tugging at her long underwear bottoms, watching her sad expression, Jean-Marc changes. He looks down at her body and inhales. When he looks up, his eyes have gone dark and impenetrable. “And he does?” he whispers.

  Alma’s mouth opens. “I didn’t mean—” She breaks off, afraid of what Jean-Marc might know.

  Jean-Marc’s jaw is set. He raises himself over her lower body on flexed arms. “Did you think I wouldn’t be able to smell this?” he says in a lower voice than she’s ever heard from him.

  Of course. How could Alma have forgotten? She shuts her eyes and pulls her arms in tight, covering her breasts. “I’m sorry.” She realizes that she can smell sex herself, all over her. It’s impossible to miss.

  “So am I.” Jean-Marc moves back up to look at her eyes. “I don’t know how I expected this to end—I guess I knew it would, but I never imagined it would be like this.”

  “You’re right, you don’t deserve anything like that.” Alma squirms for a more comfortable position, but Jean-Marc is right on top of her, alive to every flinch and grimace. “Jean-Marc, it’s no excuse, but these last few days, I’m finding out things I don’t know how to
handle. And in the middle of all that, I have to deal with him again. Last time I saw him, I was seventeen years old and knocked up. Seeing him—I kind of lost my grip on reality.”

  “Knocked up? You have a—”

  “No. I . . . I didn’t have it. He never knew.”

  Jean-Marc looks down into her face as if she’s a total stranger. This isn’t moral disapproval. She knows that he long ago abandoned his diligent Roman Catholic upbringing. The blow he’s feeling is what she’s hidden from him through all these months of intimacy, and what she did to him tonight, an arrow’s shot from the ranch house. This is the person she’s becoming—someone capable of brutal, almost sociopathic acts of detachment. This is what she will be, a few more episodes of serial monogamy down the road, never genuinely connecting, never allowing entry to the darkened sanctum. She sees her soul all at once as a snow globe balanced on a windowsill: something beautiful within, but sizzling with potential energy, so close to falling, shattering.

  “So you told him tonight.” Some of the tautness goes out of Jean-Marc’s body, other emotions edging out his anger.

  “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to tell him ever, it just came out.” How long has it been since she let a secret loose like she did tonight, just told, because the need to connect was stronger than her risk aversion?

  “In the heat of passion.” The dark, shuttered eyes are back, holding hers with their poorly hidden pain.

  “It wasn’t like that. Jean-Marc, you’re heavy.” She wriggles a little, trying to get out from under him.

  “Am I? You never used to complain.” His tone is singsong, his movements familiar, but their meaning has become different. Jean-Marc pulls her forearms up near her head with both his hands. The moves to propel him off her run through Alma’s mind in crisp choreography, but she has no will to do it. She’s betrayed him. She’s let down everyone. Rather than indignation, she is consumed by despair, and a desire to bring punishment upon herself. She goes limp and turns her head to the side.