Something to that effect. How scary to think his words were fading from memory. He never spoke much. But if Chloe did something that pleased him—cleared a five-foot fence on the Canadian thoroughbred, or took the trouble to hunt up sweet basil and fresh oregano to make him homemade spaghetti sauce—he might laugh out of pleasure, deep and rumbling, causing the pearl snaps on his shirt to flash and jiggle. He favored fat cigars and the ever-present smell of gin—that’s my juniper berries—would filter up through the smoke and laughter. His hands, the left one broken so many times the fingers lay crooked, and his only ring, that mother-big hunk of Bisbee turquoise set in a silver horseshoe. This April he would be dead two years. The idea drove a fist into her sternum. Some people had Jesus, and some others believed in the reincarnation of souls, as if the human spirit were nothing more than recycled gases, but Chloe believed only in the here and now: what she could feel beneath her fingertips, between her legs, and thumping hard in her heart.
Hank. Such an old-fashioned name for a man with college degrees. What business did she have sleeping with him like that, no more than a torn shirt and a cup of store-bought cocoa mix to go by? He was a walking plot to an old movie starring Jimmy Stewart. In this movie nobody took out the garbage or got a yeast infection or had credit card companies breathing down her neck for unavailable sums of dinero. When she was a girl she used to dream about that kind of stability, ache for arms to hold her on the long first nights when she didn’t dare toss or turn in one of the new foster homes, just lie there praying for enough of her own self to imprint on the sheets to make them feel comfortable. Be careful. You are not an easy child. Walk alone. Darlin’, you can whip the meanest horse into a cowering obedience, but you lose….
Hannah snapped at a passing insect, and Chloe hung her arm out the window to signal a left turn. The blinkers on the truck didn’t work, hadn’t in a decade. Not that anyone paid attention in this traffic anyway; it was a free-for-all when a space opened in one of the lanes and a power game not to let anyone in, because to be nice meant you were fair game.
Set your priorities, girl. When was your last menstrual cycle? So sporadic she couldn’t remember, so scratch that worry off. Gabe said she was too malnourished to support the delicate balance required for the monthly release of an egg, but that didn’t mean not to be careful. Especially now that working at Wedler’s she ate a regular meal every day, and she could tolerate raw vegetables again. Hannah could get downright tubby off the scraps Kit was sneaking her. She’d buy a package of condoms and stick them in the glove box. Think ahead, if there was a next time. Abortions cost money, more than the professor’s shirt, you could bet the farm on that. Damn it all, she wouldn’t be pregnant, she’d will it away, she’d never have children. Women could do that. They had the power to create life and the power to deny it as well. The shirt had to be replaced. She’d buy one, tell him, yeah, sure, sex was nice, one heck of a party hat, and you did it, buddy, you made me smile, but time to get real, back to work for both of us, good-bye, sayonara, vaya con whatever you believe in, Professor Folklore. Then back to work. That was all there was to life, really, work, and if it made you happy, you were lucky to have it. She wouldn’t get rich off the horses, but she would get by just fine, thank you, she and Hannah.
So why did her bones ache and her very skin feel like an envelope for a hive of angry bees? Fucking town, fucking traffic, fucking—get to the truth of it. Goddamn that shirt. She hit the gas, cut across four lanes of traffic, and took the freeway exit to the mall.
Inside her canvas bag, the shirt label rested in her wallet. She found a parking space with a shade tree and cracked the window for Hannah. “Don’t you go working that door handle,” she warned. “Stay in the cab or some Big Canyon housewife will think you’re a rare white coyote and try to make a coat out of you.”
Chloe tucked her T-shirt into her jeans and ran her fingers through her hair, twisting it into a knot at the base of her neck. Though she hated them, she slipped on sunglasses someone had left at the diner, because the mall with its designer clothing stores and jewelry shops always made her feel the need to become invisible. She took a breath and braced her weight against the heavy glass doors to step inside that other world. Cooled air and Muzak blared through the bright sunlight directed through skylights onto the crowds. Forty-foot palms abounded, and impossibly green ferns rested in sterile dirt no weed could ever hope to penetrate. There was a motor-driven waterfall gushing over what looked like the rippled corrugated metal used to anchor Thin Set when laying bricks—arty. Someone had thrown pennies into the pool, the old make-a-wish, but what kinds of wishes could a fountain like that possibly grant? People moved by in droves, blank-faced and clutching bags, three or four to each arm. Three-thirty in the afternoon. It was after Christmas, way after. What was going on? Was she the only person who worked for a living?
She stopped to look in the windows of an art gallery. Not much to fall in love with, but there was a Charlie Russell oil of three tired cowboys on buckskin horses, the yellow dust of a desert storm swirling at their feet. In the background of the canvas, a notch-eared palomino wearing a rope halter was being ponied back to camp. The damaged ear reminded her of Amánte, one of her geldings off the old lesson string she’d been forced to sell. One by one, she found the best homes she could secure, and told herself not to look back. Amánte was lesson-sour and aging, past twenty, not much to look at. What’s that ding in his ear? kids would ask, and she’d weave fables for them: He used to belong to a big-game hunter, and that’s where he’d lay his shotgun, you know, like a sight. Really? Oh, sure. Absolutely. She’d let him go for one fifty, plus the Circle Y saddle. It was the only one that fit his touchy back. She could have gotten two or three hundred for the saddle alone. The man who bought him kept assuring her he was picking out a first horse for his daughter—wanted something bullet proof—but she didn’t trust anything at that stage of the game and cried herself to sleep at night wondering if it might not have been kinder to make an X and put a bullet through the horse’s skull. Saying good-bye was like abandoning a retarded child in the middle of traffic. Amánte knew. He never minded loading into a trailer before, but this time he turned his head and stared back at her, whinnying all the way down the drive onto the highway. He knew.
Her throat closed up. She wanted to buy that painting so that she could secrete it away in a closet where no one else could see the nicked ear accusing, You left me when you said you wouldn’t.
A pale young man in an expensively tailored tan suit brushed against her arm. “Western art is a wise investment. Would you like to see some Remington bronzes? Reproductions, of course, but still worth consideration.”
Already he had turned away from the Russell. He didn’t feel anything when he looked at the painting. He didn’t notice the tears welling in her dark eyes, or the shame she couldn’t dismiss. Already he was dividing up his commission: this much for the car payment, this much for the condo, this much for the cocaine that got him through the week.
“You ever been on a horse?”
“Excuse me?”
“Riding. Horseback.”
He looked at her, confused, then smiled. “Russells are expensive, but certainly one way to approach a serious collection.”
She pointed to the saddle girth in the painting. “See the way he painted that, and the bridle, how the horse’s mouth isn’t yanked up by the bit, just wrinkled, the way the cowboy’s hands give a little slack to the reins? That man knew about horses. You couldn’t know that if you didn’t ride them.”
“How interesting. Well, he was a vanguard as far as colors went. I find that quite compelling in his work. Did you know some of the early Western film scenes were patterned off specific paintings of his? Isn’t that just astonishing?”
Sure it was, considering most Westerns were about as phony as election year speeches. She didn’t ask the price. It would be one of those amounts with an elephant’s nest of zeros. She set her gaze and marched through the st
orefront, past the splattery Leroy Neiman sports figures and the starving Flavia urchins and beggars. Bypassing the slick fossilized marble front of Bally shoes and the granite mouth of Tiffany’s, she stood before Nordstrom’s—three solid floors of inventory capped by skylights and stained glass. Likely as not, the men’s department had this shirt or one of its near cousins.
“Eighty, ninety bucks,” the snub-nosed clerk informed her, flicking a thumbnail on the edge of the label. “You want me to throw this in the trash for you?”
“No, I want it back.”
“Oh. Really? Here. That particular men’s line is one of our finest, but the shirt you’re describing we haven’t carried for six months. Can I show you something similar?”
“If it won’t cost me to look.”
He led her to one of those torso mannequins, square breasted and tapering to a waist as narrow as her own. It wore a cream-colored silk shirt that closely resembled the one Hannah’d eaten. Her attentive clerk quickly laid a paisley tie across it. “Smashing, don’t you agree?”
“The material’s different.”
“It’s sand-washed silk—the latest fabric.”
“Does this store have a layaway policy?”
He squinted as if he had been stung. “Credit department is on the third floor.”
“Got it,” Chloe whispered back to him. “Write me up a slip or something. This one’s near enough to what I want.”
He did, all the chitchat suddenly dissipated. She had thirty-seven dollars in her wallet left over from the fifty in tips for the week. If she put a third toward the shirt, she would have to get by on next to nothing until her paycheck. Gas tank was full, she’d done that this morning, and it would last until Monday. She could take Hannah out on the trail this weekend and let her hunt up cans. Ask Kit to pay her for a block of lessons up front. Robbing Peter and lying to Paul, but it would be the first step toward distancing those tender hands. She scouted the floor for the stairway; she didn’t like the feel or smell of elevators.
She wasn’t the only one buying on time; in front of her an older couple held hands, waiting patiently for their turn behind three young giggling girls. The man’s hand rested in the small of the woman’s back. Chloe looked at the wedding ring the man wore. It was softly scuffed, as much a part of his finger as the knuckle.
Margaret and Ben Gilpin behaved like that well into then sixties when Ben died. Chloe watched her final set of foster parents in the kitchen, mornings she’d come down for breakfast, dressed for the public high school in the most neutral clothing she could muster from Margaret’s ideas of high school fashion. Ben made the coffee. He set out the tiny calico pitcher of cream for his wife and the saccharin tablets in the medicine bottle. You’re not fat, he’d say, but Margaret faithfully used the tablets instead of sugar. She bought Ben English muffins and a special brand of marmalade that came from the deli, imported from Scotland. Just like that man’s hand on his wife’s back, they were small acts of kindness that contributed to the comfort of the household. There was passion, too, Ben’s hand patting Margaret’s behind as she stood at the counter stuffing pork chops with the chopped apples and bread crumbs he loved. Some nights when she was supposed to be studying, she’d hear Nat Cole on the stereo and catch them dancing in the living room, all the lights turned off, they knew their way around the room so well. She’d watch from the stairway, her chin resting on the curved banister, wondering how in creation they could still find the courage to make love when death had robbed them of their children. They held on to each other as if love were an offering they alone had discovered, infinite in possibilities.
Her senior year they said okay to her working afternoons at the stables so long as she kept her grades up, and that meant above C’s. When the failing notice for Civics and Economics arrived, Ben took Chloe for a drive in the turquoise Apache. They drove in silence, Ben rubbing his chin once in a while but not looking her way. Chloe said nothing until he threw the transmission into park and shut off the key. They were in the parking lot of the county courthouse.
“Ben, are you going to have me arrested for failing Social Studies?”
Spring air wafted through the old truck’s cab. Ben didn’t play the radio. Chloe looked the county courthouse over, one of an anonymous gray cluster of buildings connected by walkways. Around the corner was Orangewood, which despite the brick-and-glass exterior, still felt like home.
Ben said, “You’re smart, and you’ve never crapped out on us in school before. I’m just wondering if this doesn’t have something to do with finding out where you came from.” He reached beneath the seat and brought out an envelope. “Now, I’ve got some papers from Orangewood, and the picture that was in your file. You’re nearly eighteen and you have a right to them.”
Her heart hurt; the muscle was stoning her.
“I’m mixing this all up, aren’t I? If you want to find out, I know how to help you, and this is the place to begin.”
“I’ll pull the grade up, Ben. Put the papers back where they were.”
“Sooner or later—”
“Later, all right?”
Lawyers and secretaries moved purposefully across the walkways in the noontime rush for lunch between court cases. Ben waited, the papers in his lap. Chloe waited, fear bristling the hair on her arms, adrenaline flooding every pore until she felt hot enough to levitate. Finally she took the photograph from him. It was of a sober-faced two-year-old sitting on top of an old Shetland pony, one of those photos everyone had taken as kids; a man brought the pony door to door and posed you, your mother paid him money. Some weeks later he came back around again minus the pony, with a sepia eight-by-ten made personal with hand-tinting. Here, the painter had done a careful job on the red bandanna, but gotten her eyes wrong. He’d painted them blue instead of leaving them brown.
“Most everything was blacked out on the papers I saw,” Ben said: “But from what I could make out, her first name is Belle. If you ever want to know more, all you have to do is ask. Margaret and I’ve discussed it, and we understand that it’s natural you’d want to know. So don’t you go worry about hurting us, you hear?”
Ben’s bare face did it to her. That crewneck white T-shirt and zip-up Windbreaker jacket. She cried noisily, like that two-year-old must have when she was left off at the Children’s Home later that same year. The crying scared her when it wouldn’t stop. She grabbed Ben’s hand. “Help me,” she said between sobs. “I can’t get my breath.”
“Here now,” he said, becoming very businesslike with a hand-kerchief. “Let’s see what we can do.” He held on to her for awhile, one big arm around her shoulders, beefy hand patting her awkwardly. “Let’s take a little walk.”
He locked up the truck and made her walk three laps around the park while they drank regular Cokes. “A good snort of sugar will settle most shock. Learned that in the Pacific, when I went to fight for this country.” He pointed out small birds and squirrels racing through the shrubbery. “Sometimes I think we got it all wrong, kid. Take those critters in the bushes—they sure look happy to me. Maybe we just live too long. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“Ben?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve been a great father to me.”
“I tried to give you breathing room.”
“You did that, and more.”
When she was back in control, he handed her the keys to the Apache. “Here,” he said. “It’s all yours. I was going to give it to you anyway. Now’s as good a time as any. Happy graduation, early.”
That was when he’d bought the motor home to retire in. He drove it to work. Ben Gilpin drove short hauls for Elder’s Meat Markets, a small chain that specialized in servicing restaurants and delis. The trucks were painted a deep burgundy with gold-leaf letters on the side and a phone number. When Chloe stopped by the bowling alley to buy cigarettes from the vending machine on the way home from school, she saw his truck parked outside and looked in to see if he were catching a quick afternoon gam
e or a beer. He was kissing a dyed-auburn barmaid across the wet bartop. Her lacquered fingernails wove through his thick hair like giant pink lice.
“Always tell the truth,” he’d told Chloe the day she walked into their home. “I’m not saying it will get you out of trouble if what you’ve done merits punishment, but in the end, folks will respect you for having the guts to say it, and you’ll respect yourself.”
The elderly couple standing at the front of the line now arranged to have their packages sent to Florida, where, they took great pains explaining to the clerk, they had seven grandchildren, four in college, one—uttered in hushed tones usually reserved for the priesthood—pre-med.
What was a wedding ring anyway? A piece of metal hammered into a circle that could just as easily be melted down into money.
“I want to buy this shirt,” Chloe said when it was her turn.
“How do you want to pay for it?”
She fanned out her tip money as if it were a Reno jackpot. “Same way I do everything. One week at a time.”
The note was nailed to her door, right through the center of the yellow lined paper. Three words: See me. Hugh.
She took it down with shaking fingers. Rent all paid, could he kick her out just like that? He could. He had done it before, when people got rowdy or arrested. She’d been quiet. Kept everything neat. Cut the brush back from the cabin without being asked, trucked her trash out to the dumpster at the stables. Hannah hadn’t bitten anyone. No guests besides the professor. That was it. She dropped her stuff inside on the unmade bed and let Hannah take a long drink from her water bowl. She made the bed up tight, tucking the corners of the sleeping bag and fluffing the single pillow up as much as it would fluff. She swept the floor clean. Hannah looked at the broom curiously. “Relax, I’m not going to hit you. We’ll take the long way,” she told the dog, “and pretend it’s just a walk we’re taking for as long as we can.”
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