Rose must have been watching for him; she opened the door before he’d even knocked. She wore dressier clothes than normal: a thin, full denim skirt, matching western-style shirt, fake tooled leather belt with fake silver medallions and turquoise, western boots. Could it all have come from Wal-Mart? And yet he thought she looked very beautiful, ample in a way that you never saw in L.A.’s muscle-bound gym dolls. It disconcerted him to see her in clothes that were so different from her usual jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts. People always led more complicated lives than he imagined or was prepared for.
He followed her into the living room, a shabby brown-paneled space furnished with mismatched furniture over which had been thrown bright crocheted afghans and scraps of lace, all of it clean and orderly. He fastened with appalled reverence on a single bookcase of pressboard and veneer occupying a place of honor along one wall. On the top two shelves were what looked like complete sets of works by Danielle Steel and Sidney Sheldon. Below them, neatly displayed, was a series of Happy Meal toys from McDonald’s.
“Mine.” Rose smiled when she saw where he was looking. “No one gets to touch those, not even Carissa.”
“Do you collect them all?”
“Oh, no. Just the ones I really like or think might be worth something later on. Otherwise you’d need a special place to keep them all, you’d have so many. Loose and Ryan, Petie’s boys, have whole shoe boxes full and we don’t even take them that often.”
Gordon nodded and buried his hands deep in the pockets of his corduroy trousers. It was conceivable that at that exact moment he was the only man in Hubbard wearing cuffs. He marveled that Rose would even speak to him. Sometimes when he passed by the barbershop or went into the post office, the conversation paused until he was out of earshot. It was not just his imagination, he was sure. And he minded; that was his dilemma.
Rose had walked over to a battered wood desk against one wall and was fussing with some papers, tapping them into order.
“It’s not going as fast as I thought it would,” she said apologetically. “I guess this probably doesn’t look like much.” She held out a thin sheaf of pages, handwritten on both sides of loose-leaf paper, school stuff. Gordon saw that her handwriting was firm, round and excessively legible. There were little circles instead of dots over the i’s, and at the end of each recipe she had drawn a happy face. With dread Gordon scanned the pages. Then he went back and began to read.
You might not feel like bothering to put the navy beans through a food mill, since no one ever uses them anymore and they take time and muscle, too, he found on one page. Do it anyway. A food processor will leave you a jillion little pieces of navy bean skin that will stick to your teeth, your spoon and the sides of your bowl. Another thing about this soup: don’t eat it the day before anything really important, as it can be cleansing.
On another page, chosen at random, Don’t use cheap cheesecloth to wrap the herb bundle in—get the good, close-woven kind and double it. Otherwise, halfway through the cooking when there’s no turning back, you’ll find an empty soggy pouch and little bits of herb floating all over the place that you can never fish out and the whole thing will be ruined. We know because it happened to us.
He read all the way through before he finally laid the pages facedown on her desk. What she’d done was delightful. In each recipe she had transcended the simple editing function he had described for her and introduced instead her simple, unpretentious, wise voice as she described shortcuts and false temptations, technical tricks and danger zones.
She watched his face and started smiling uncertainly. “Is that what you wanted me to do? Because, you know, if it isn’t I could work on it some more—”
“It’s wonderful! You’ve given it real charm. People will like this.”
“Oh well,” said Rose dismissively, “they all know me around here.”
“I’m thinking of people who don’t know you.” Perhaps, if the writing bore out, there might even be a market beyond Sawyer and Hubbard, through a publisher. He’d talk to Nadine about it.
“God, I’m relieved. I’ve been worried all day.”
“Don’t worry. Write. I’ll type this up and get it ready to go.”
“Have you ever done this before?”
“Never. Nadine, either. But she’s shrewd, so you’re in good hands.”
“And what about you?” Rose smiled. “What about your hands?”
Gordon shuddered faintly, but he could see that she was just feeling relieved.
Rose went into the kitchen, returning with a plate heaped with brownies and two mismatched mugs of coffee. “Carissa made the brownies last night. She’s a very good baker. She says she’s going to be a pastry chef when she grows up. She also says that she’s going to be a pediatrician, though, so I don’t know.” Rose chuckled. “Jim told her once he likes brownies, so she’s made him at least nine batches since he got back, and that was only a week ago. Lord only knows what she’d have done for Pogo if he’d have kept up with her.”
Gordon took the plate from her and set it on a coffee table. “Pogo?” Why did so few men have normal names in Hubbard? Bob-O, Roy Boy, Jimbo, Bry.
“Carissa’s father. My ex-husband.”
“Oh.” Gordon had never heard Rose mention a husband before. Somehow, he’d thought she’d been—what had they called them in high school?—an unwed mother. “Was he a fisherman, too?”
“Pogo? Oh, no. It’s hard to say what Pogo did. He was a little like Eddie Coolbaugh that way, he drifted around. Mill work, woods work, mechanic. You know.”
“Here?”
“Here first, then over in Doggett for a while. I’ve heard he’s in Longview, Washington, now.”
“You lived away from here?”
She smiled. “Umm-hmm. You thought I’d never been anywhere, didn’t you? Well, it was only for a little while. Pogo had itchy feet and some buddy of his, I can’t even remember who it was, got him a job at a dinky little mill over there. We were broke, though, so we went. You know where Doggett is? No? It’s on the way up to Portland, maybe sixty-five miles from here.”
Gordon recalled a scattering of buildings along the roadside: a shabby cafe, a combination filling station and market with dusty video posters in the window, a couple of billboards, a small shake mill. “There’s not much there.”
“No. A market, post office in a trailer, two taverns. You know what the kids wanted most in that town?”
Gordon shook his head. He couldn’t imagine. When he’d been in school, they’d wanted world peace.
“McDonald’s. While I was there the mayor even helped them get up a petition to send to the McDonald’s people, saying how the city council would support a McDonald’s if one came to town, but McDonald’s wrote back and said there weren’t enough people for them to do a good business. The kids were so disappointed.”
“So what brought you back to Hubbard?”
“Oh, layoffs at the mill. Plus Pogo had started getting bored and I missed home. I was pregnant, and I didn’t want to have a baby in a town where I didn’t know anyone. Well, of course I knew everyone in Doggett by then, but, you know, I didn’t know them. So we came home. Well, I did. Pogo dropped me off and said he’d let me know when he found work. I stayed with Petie and Eddie until the baby came.”
“Didn’t he come back?”
“At first.”
“Then what?”
Rose shrugged. “You’d have to have known Pogo. I mean, you just knew you’d lose him one day, right from the get-go. Pogo didn’t like people to get too close. The minute he felt cramped he’d start to rise and thin, just like smoke, until one day he wasn’t there at all. I’m grateful it happened before Carissa could get to know him. He would have broken her heart.”
Rose chewed the last of her brownie serenely.
“And you’re not bitter?”
“Bitter? No. You know, it wasn’t really personal.”
“But it was hard.”
Rose smiled at him, amused. �
��Sure.”
Gordon nodded and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. He found her story unspeakably depressing. “Do you believe there are brave people in the world?” he asked suddenly.
“Brave?”
“Brave. Courageous. People who live well in the face of terrible things.”
Rose thought for a minute. “Yes, I do.”
“You?”
Rose laughed. “Oh, no, not me. Nothing terrible has ever happened to me.”
“Then name someone.”
“Petie,” Rose said without hesitation. “Petie is brave.”
“Is she?”
“When God contemplates Petie, He never seems to have a break in mind. He just keeps piling it on, and it’s been like that as long as I’ve known her, and none of it’s ever been her fault. And she keeps getting up in the morning, just the same.”
“Yes, but is she brave, or is she just dogged?”
Rose began to gather up their trash. “I don’t know,” she said. “Is there a difference?”
Maybe not, Gordon thought. Sometimes simply waking up in the morning was an act of bravery, and lasting until sunset a matter of putting your head down and following your shadow.
“Rose,” Gordon said—cowardly, waiting until she went into the kitchen. “There’s something you probably ought to know.”
“Mmmm?” she said.
God, he hated this. “I’m HIV positive. I have AIDS. I thought you deserved to know.”
She appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She looked at him with concern. “How terrible.”
“It’s not communicable, you understand. To you, I mean. You can’t catch it by being around me.”
“Yes, I know that. I’m so sorry, Gordon—I don’t know much else. Is there anything I should be doing for you that I’m not?”
Gordon smiled a small, grateful smile. “No. It’s enough that you didn’t gasp or run.”
“Is that why you and Nadine are here? Why you came to Hubbard, I mean?”
“Yes. Most everyone has died. My—my partner died this past spring. He was the last and best of us. Nadine thought it might be a good idea to come here and wait someplace that didn’t remind us of a thousand things that are gone.”
“Wait for what?” Rose asked.
“For me to get sick. Rose, do you believe in ghosts?”
“I don’t know. No, I don’t think so.”
Gordon nodded. “I didn’t either, before. I do now. They talk to me sometimes, my dead friends. And the thing is, it’s so good to hear them again. I miss them all so much.”
“Do they talk to you up here? In Hubbard, I mean? Or just in California?”
“No, here, too,” Gordon said.
“What do they say?”
Gordon smiled. “Everything. Nothing. They remind me to buy milk, to pour Nadine another cup of coffee, to look around without bitterness, to get on with things. A million unimportant reminders. I feel ridiculous having told you.”
“No,” Rose said, suddenly chuckling. “You’re lucky to have friends like that. If Petie ever haunts me, it’s going to be unbearable.”
TEN YEARS ago, two months before she died of lung cancer, Eula Coolbaugh gave Petie a Crock-Pot. It was nothing very special, just a cheap one out of the Sears catalog, but it had a pretty floral pattern going around its middle, and inside Eula had packed some of her own kitchen things: a carrot peeler, some tin measuring spoons, a dish towel, two matching pot holders, some turkey trusses, three little egg cups and a coffee scoop, all of them well used.
I know it’s not usual to give old things to a bride, she’d written in a note to Petie, but you know we don’t have much. Well, hell, even if we did, I’d want you to have these things. They’ve been in my kitchen for twenty-eight years, some of them, all the time I was raising my family, and they helped me cook many a fine meal. My table was always a happy one, and I’m hoping that all that accumulated love will somehow seep out of these things like groundwater into everything of yours they touch. You be happy, honey. Eula. P.S. Love my boy but make him stick to his promises. It’s how I raised him, but he’s always been weak that way.
Eula was a plain-faced woman, thin as a wire even before her cancer; a woman who understood that not everyone good had reason to be proud. She was the only one in the world Petie had told, really told, about Old Man. And Eula had heard her out, had poured her cup after cup of good country coffee, not fancy like Nadine’s but hot and strong, and patted her hand and gone right on putting clean shelf paper in her cupboards like she did every spring, even this one when she could so easily have kept herself busy dying.
Petie had sat at the kitchen table—the honest old thick-legged farm table she now had in her kitchen—and, picking at the fake slubs in the fake linen of Eula’s yellow plastic tablecloth, let it all come out, all that poison, all the years of living in the twelve-foot camp trailer with no privacy and nowhere to go when Old Man came home.
“Some things can’t be undone,” Eula had said when Petie was through, “though the good Lord knows there are times when nothing else would be just. All the same, you and Old Man, you’re pretty well stuck with each other now, aren’t you? You can never escape your family. The damn fool, I’ll bet he’d cut his own heart out if he thought he could undo sober the misery he’s committed drunk.”
“You’re wrong,” Petie said. “The only thing he’s felt remorse for in his whole life was letting my mother die in that hospital over in Salem. It turns out there was a hospice place just starting up over in Sawyer, only no one told him in time. He figured if he’d known, it would’ve saved him maybe twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“That’s just talk.”
Petie snorted. “You know what he said about my mother one time? He said, Aw, hell, you know how some things are. They’re pretty enough when they’re new but they don’t hold up worth a damn after you get a couple miles on them. He and old Charlie Lutie had a good laugh over that one.”
“Charlie Lutie drinks too much.”
“Old Man drinks too much.”
Eula had sighed. “I remember him when he was little. He had cowlicks all over his head and they always made him look a little crazy. The whole time he was in school he got picked on more than anyone else, I couldn’t tell you why. He just had a look about him. All his life, people never liked him much. He knew it. How could he not know it? Except for your mother, Lord bless her soul.”
“She never liked him, she was scared of him. He hit her sometimes. Well, he hit a lot of people sometimes. But he hit her in sneaky ways, like he’d go after the backs of her thighs with his overall straps, the buckle ends, where no one would see the marks. Did you ever notice how she sat on a chair so straight, so proper, never leaned back? That’s because he hit her right where the seat would cut into her legs if she sat back. Then he’d call her prissy. In front of people. He’d tell her, Sit back there, Paula, take a load off you’re nothing special. And she’d have to scootch back in her chair, let the edge dig in, and try to smile so he’d leave her alone and she could ease forward again and it would start all over. Eula, you know I’m not making this up.”
“I know, honey,” Eula said softly, sitting across from Petie at the table with her dustrag quiet in her hands. “I remember the way she used to sit.”
“You know what she loved? She loved being in the hospital. I think it’s one of the reasons she hung on so long. Everyone did things for her, she said. People she’d never even met before, and they were always doing things that the only reason for doing them was to make her feel better, since everyone knew nothing they did was going to save her. She couldn’t get over that. The first time they rubbed lotion on her back she cried because it felt so good but she was afraid we’d have to pay extra for it. I guess she’d heard somewhere about people who give massages, that they were real expensive, so she thought Old Man would find out and get back at her. She was afraid he’d make her come home.”
Eula spit on her
thumb and rubbed a spot from the tablecloth. “She was a pretty woman, your mother. Maybe it was fear that made her go so plain so fast; she started getting plain before you were even born. We used to wonder, but we just figured the women in that family bloomed early and then faded. None of us knew much about her folks. She came down to town for school every day from Camp Twelve, you know the old logging camp back there over Peach Tree Hill? Even then they hadn’t logged back there in years, but a few families stayed in the camp and tried to homestead. She was real poor, I know that, because I remember her clothes. Not that any of us had much. She told me once she was grateful to your daddy for getting her away from all that.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“That depends, honey.”
“On what?”
“Did she ever tell you anything about what she came from?”
“No.”
“Well.”
It was true that they rarely saw any of her mother’s family, although Petie had a grandfather and two uncles; her grandmother had died of pneumonia a few years before Petie was born. The uncles, skinny men with bad skin, blue-black hair and tiny eyes, sometimes came and talked to Petie’s mother at the front door, occasionally came all the way into the kitchen in their heavy boots. Sometimes Petie’s mother argued with them about money, but mostly she just listened and then tried to get rid of them before Old Man came home. It sounded to Petie like the uncles talked most about Petie’s grandfather, who she didn’t even see until she was six or seven. She and Paula had gone to the feed store in Sawyer to get some more young tomato plants that year after year her mother nursed into bearing hard green tomatoes that never ripened because Hubbard was too cold. Petie had been examining a box of smelly chicks when she heard her mother make a noise of surprise, or distress, or possibly fear; it had been nothing more than a sharply drawn breath, really. When Petie turned she saw her mother holding her purse tightly before her in both hands. Blocking her way was a big bearded man, the darkest man Petie had ever seen although his hair and beard were mostly gray. He had a gut that hung slack over his belt, and a look like a murderer, and he’d stood in her mother’s path staring for a long time before leaving without speaking a word. Paula stayed where she was, then rubbed her hands one at a time down the front of her skirt. Petie had said, Who was that? and her mother had said, No one, a bad man. No one. If you ever see him again, you walk away. He looked like you, Petie had said. Well, her mother had said. That can’t be helped.
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