Carissa emerged from the kitchen and crossed the room on long colt legs. “She’s beautiful,” said Nadine absently, watching her. “Have I said that before?”
“No.”
“Well. Nothing needs to be decided right now. They’ll change his antibiotic and he’ll get better again and we’ll have some more time to think about it. If you hear of anything over here, though, a nice bright apartment or even a little house if it’s clean, would you let me know?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks, Rose.” Nadine slid out of the booth and straightened the tablecloth after herself. “Maybe, just for tonight, though, I’ll close a little early.”
Rose shrugged her coat on and gathered purse and keys. “Hey,” she called from the door. “If you’re late coming in tomorrow, I’ll just go ahead and open for you.” And she and Carissa ducked out into the evening.
Alone again, Nadine pulled out a SOUP’S ON TOMORROW sign—she and Gordon didn’t like CLOSED—propped it in the window, then went back into the kitchen to close up. The pitcher Carissa had used for her steamed milk was clean, set upside down next to the sink to dry; the cocoa had been put away and the counter wiped down. A good girl, Nadine thought, who showed every promise of carrying on her mother’s uncomplicated warm nature. She and Gordon had been lucky to find Rose, would be doubly lucky to keep her once she knew Nadine was going to let Petie go at the end of the week. It was a decision she had only reached yesterday; she hadn’t even told Gordon yet. But they had no choice. What had seemed to them like a gutsy adventure—moving to Oregon and opening a cafe, being their own bosses and reaping the benefits and challenges all for themselves—now seemed like sheer burden and folly, an endless drain on time and resources they did not have.
Finished in the kitchen, Nadine stacked several containers of soups and salads on a table—dinner for her and Gordon, at least she didn’t have to cook—and poured herself a last mug of coffee against the drive to Sawyer and back. She slid down the length of a pew and settled back, making herself tick off the “pro” side of the list. Petie’s husband was working again. The Coolbaughs would be all right, and besides, if Petie pushed, Nadine would still contract with her for bread. Rose loved to cook, and seemed fond of Gordon: she would stay. Nadine would have her cut down her quantities and they’d violate at last the policy Petie had always picked on: no more different fresh soups every day. They’d freeze, they’d recycle. They’d get by.
And hopefully Local Flavor would still pull for them, although it was now mid-November and Gordon, so excited that he might have discovered someone, wasn’t even talking about self-publishing anymore but thinking sugarplum thoughts of rave reviews in the L.A. Times.
Gordon.
Whenever she thought of him after a respite of a minute or two, Nadine’s stomach did a little jeté of anxiety. She knew he was deeply frightened. They both were. When the purple lesion on his wrist had appeared it had only been one, and small, and although it was ominous, of course, it had been somehow too modest to really frighten them once they got over the initial shock. Didn’t he still feel well, except for the perpetually swollen lymph glands, the occasional bouts of fatigue and diarrhea? And hadn’t the chemo techniques gotten better and better? And who really, really knew about the witch-away powers of AZT? Hadn’t he managed to stay clear of the host of opportunistic infections that plagued all the other AIDS people they had known in L.A.? All this brittle hopefulness they had conjured in the face of what they knew to be statistically true: he had nowhere left to go but down, and probably within two years or less. But mostly they’d remained perky—or mired in denial—as long as he had been feeling well. Now he was sick in earnest and the vigil had finally begun. They’d learn how to live this way, too, but it was going to take time.
Nadine stirred her cool cup of coffee, her chin in her hand, ruminating. Outside it was completely dark, and all she could see at the windows was herself and Souperior’s reflected back again, interrupted in streaks by the tears of the rain.
Chapter 7
PETIE WAS laid off at the beginning of the week. Poor Nadine had kept going around and around, explaining that business had been slower than they’d expected while their overhead had been higher, and if it was slow in November it was going to be everything they could do to stay open come January. She had blushed and stammered and finally Petie had decided to put her out of her misery. She put her hand on Nadine’s forearm—they were stalled in the kitchen doorway—and said, not unkindly, “Hey. It’s okay. I’d have chosen Rose, too.” Nadine had nearly wept with relief and gratitude.
On impulse when she left, Petie turned the snout of her little car northward. The Sea View Motel was a single-story horseshoe perched on top of a little hill on the east side of the highway, its office tucked between units six and seven like a mother hen guarding her brood. Each of the twelve guest rooms had floral curtains and spreads made by Marge; each had a screen door protected by aluminum swirls from getting punched in by careless guests; each had shag carpeting, green for the even-numbered rooms, orange for the odd, installed when Marge and Larry bought the place in 1979 and still shampooed by Larry every four months, even in the off season. The Sea View was tidy inside and out, and tended to attract young honeymooners driving festooned pickups, older people taking a break from their RVs, families with young children visiting the beach: decent people. Larry had been known to turn away potential guests he thought looked like trouble. Shoot, he’d tell them. Ain’t that NO VACANCY sign, lit up out there? No? Must have forgot to turn it on again. Old people, you know, we’d forget our names if they wasn’t on our Social Security checks. Sorry, folks. You try the Bailey Courts down south of town. They have a real nice place.
Petie pulled up to the Sea View office and got out without taking the keys from the ignition. Through the window she could see Larry behind the desk, working on a wall clock. He was thick and jug-eared and he wielded a screwdriver with the delicacy of a surgical tool. He’d been a diesel mechanic for thirty years, until he’d had a heart attack and his shop had canned him. That had been in Albany, over in the Valley. He had only been fifty-nine and anyway he couldn’t stand being still, so he and Marge had decided to sell everything and buy the Sea View for cheap from the previous owner’s widow. The place had been a dump then, but look at it now.
“Well, look who’s here!” Larry said when he heard the harness bells on the doorknob ring. “Why, Marge was just saying the other day how you were getting to be a stranger.” He came around the desk and gave Petie a crushing one-armed hug. “It’s good to see you, honey. You’re looking real good. Let me find Marge and tell her you’re here. I think she’s in number four, putting in some clean towels. That Rhonda. Well, I’ll let Marge tell you.”
Larry called Marge on the phone and in a minute she came bustling in the door, breathing hard, soft and warm and generous as an old sofa cushion, thirty pounds overweight, freshly permed, lightly emphysemic. She was smiling so hard Petie could see the edge of her upper plate. “Oh, honey, what a nice surprise!” She folded Petie in a big, honest, country hug. “We were just talking about you, weren’t we, Larry. That Rhonda. Shoot. We miss you around here.”
Marge poured Petie a mug of coffee from the perpetual pot behind the desk. Neither she nor Larry drank it, because of her nerves and his heart, but they always kept a pot on for the guests. Petie flopped down on the soft old couch by the window, and Marge heaved herself down, too, patting the back of Petie’s hand.
“So what’s going on with Rhonda?” Petie said. “She still drinking?”
Marge sighed. “Well, sure, but it’s not just that. You know she’s been seeing that Clayton See fellow, he comes down here from Tillamook all the time. The good Lord must know what he does for a living, but Larry and me, we sure can’t figure it out. Anyway, it was last Wednesday and we’d had some people in number twelve, a young couple married one year exactly, real nice kids from over by Silverton, expecting their first baby next March. Larry’d just che
cked them out—honey, you sure you don’t want to tell this story, it’s going to embarrass me to death—and I’d sent Rhonda down there to clean up. Well, it gets later and later and I need her to run over to the laundry and fetch me my linens back, you know how we do in the winter when we don’t use enough for them to do deliveries. Anyway, I look out the window and see Clayton’s truck out there and I put two and two together. I was getting real mad, wasn’t I honey, so I go down there to twelve and I knock on the door but I don’t hear anything. So I knock again and I still don’t hear anything, so I’m thinking maybe she really did finish in there and moved on, except we didn’t have any other guests that night to clean up after. I know, honey, I’m making this a long story, I never could tell a decent story, jokes, either, but I’m almost to the end, I swear. Anyway, I get my master key, you know, just to be sure, and I open up the door, and there they are rolling around buck naked, and on clean sheets.”
Marge’s face was bright with indignation. She put a hand to her chest to catch her breath. “Well, I was so angry I took one of those dirty pillowcases she’d dumped by the door and I started hitting them with it, I mean really whaling.” Suddenly she broke down and started giggling, and Petie and Larry did, too, big helpless belly laughs. After a few minutes Marge wiped her eyes and sighed. “Shoot,” she said. “I wasn’t in my right mind, I’ll tell you.”
“She’s just lucky Clayton didn’t drag out a gun,” Larry said, getting back to his clock. “That boy’s a bad one.”
Marge snickered and slapped Petie’s knee lightly. “He didn’t exactly have nowhere to hide one, now did he, honey?”
Larry shook his head.
“You better be real careful with him,” Petie said, sobering. “He runs drugs, and I hear he’s pretty good at it, too. Rhonda never was too smart about men. Well, she never was too smart, period.”
“I don’t know. The real truth of it is, she just don’t fit in here with Larry and me,” Marge said. “We’ve about decided to let her go.”
“When?” said Petie.
“Well, we were going to do it right away, but we really want to see the grandkids at Christmas, you know, like we do, and we need someone back here.”
“I keep telling her we could just close, but she won’t do it,” Larry told Petie.
“That’s a good week for us, Christmas to New Year’s,” Marge protested. “He knows it is, too. So we’ll probably wait until we come back. We worry about it, though. We haven’t completely decided.”
“What if I take care of it for you?” Petie said.
“Oh, that’s so nice of you, honey.” Marge reached over and squeezed Petie’s hand. “But you’ve got your family and your new job.”
“Not by then I won’t.”
“Uh-oh,” Marge said.
“I just got laid off. I’ve only got a week left.”
“Oh, honey!” Marge cried. “Now, that’s a shame. And you thought they were good people, too.”
“They’re okay. They waited until Eddie was solid with Pepsi before they did anything. And they’re keeping Rose on.”
Marge looked unconvinced.
“So you’re really thinking you could come back with us?” Larry said.
“Well, I was thinking of it. If you needed any help.”
“Why, honey, that’s wonderful! Isn’t it, Larry? Petie coming back here?”
“Hell, yes,” Larry said quietly. “We couldn’t pay you more, though, Petie. You know that.”
“I know,” Petie said. “It’s okay.”
Marge’s eyes grew bright. Her Christmases with her three kids and seven grandkids meant more to her than anything else all year. She pressed Petie’s hand, and then kept it in her own. “We’ll be so glad to have you back. You just don’t know.”
Petie stood and patted Marge’s hand. “That’s okay. Listen, I’ve got to go.”
“Listen to us going on and I haven’t even asked you about the babies yet,” Marge cried.
“They’re okay. Ryan’s Ryan, you know, and Loose’s having a little trouble in school, but they’re okay,” Petie said, pouring her leftover coffee down the little sink in the Pullman kitchen at the back of the office. She rinsed and dried the mug and hung it up on its peg. “Okay, you two, I better go.”
“Okay, honey,” Larry said, one-arming her again as she passed by. “We love you.”
“Oh! Wait just one more minute,” Marge said, heaving herself out of the sofa. “I have something for you to take for the boys, just something little. Just wait right here, they’re back in the back room.”
Petie shrugged into her jacket and Larry shared an amused look and head shake with Petie. That Marge.
She came out in a minute, puffing, and held out to Petie two net bags holding plastic beach pail sets shaped like turtles. “Here. Aren’t these just darling? I was going to give them to the grandbabies, but what are they going to do with beach toys in Tempe? A salesman brought them around last week and we kept a few just to be polite.”
Petie tucked the pails under one arm and gave Marge a quick hug. “Thanks. I really better go. You talk to Rhonda and let me know when you want me to start. Anytime after a week from tomorrow.”
“All right, hon. Bye-bye.”
Side by side, Marge and Larry watched her get into her car and waved until Petie had turned onto the highway. She waved back as she pulled away. The plastic beach toys clashed together on the floorboards. Neither of the boys would be caught dead with them, but it didn’t matter. She’d treasure them for a while and then sell them at her next yard sale.
· · ·
FROM A distance, the hills east of Sawyer seemed to roll away pristine and virginal as schoolgirls, but this was an illusion. In fact, on acre after acre, switchbacks teetered along the ridgetops, balanced there by cat skinners who drove the big timber company Caterpillars with the delicacy and surefootedness of mountain goats. These roads had no names, no mileposts, no directional signs and no shoulders, just mile after single-lane mile of decaying track threading in and out of new and recently planted clear-cuts.
Petie knew most of the roads well. So did Schiff. So, of course, did two-thirds of Hubbard, but who else was going to be out there jouncing around seven miles east of Sawyer at one o’clock on a wet Wednesday afternoon in November? They hadn’t seen another vehicle since they’d turned off the highway. Schiff’s muscle-bound truck took the ruts and potholes stiffly. Petie rode with her legs tucked up Indian-style, watching out the window. She wore no expression whatsoever. Her hands were out of view, stuffed into the pockets of her old denim battle jacket, which she wore tightly buttoned. Inside her pocket she toyed with fifteen new crisp dollars.
Schiff sat more easily, even athletically, behind the wheel, one arm resting on the door, the other riding the top of the steering wheel. Inside his beard he was smiling. It had been twenty minutes since he’d picked Petie up at her car on a back street in Sawyer, and she was still nervous as a cat. To guard herself any more tightly she’d have to be wearing a padlock.
Schiff had no idea what Petie was going to do, what either one of them would do. When he first turned off the highway onto the logging roads he half expected her to jump out of the truck and run away. But Petie had just stared out the window. She smelled faintly of soup—bean and sausage, Schiff guessed. She always smelled of some kind of soup or bread. It was better than any perfume. He had always loved the smell of food on a woman. He wished she’d say something, though. He didn’t enjoy silence, although he could use it effectively enough when he put his mind to it. He was easier with talk, though, being a talker himself.
To see if he could shake her up, he steered the truck through a few unnecessary potholes and grinned. Petie shot him a look that said she knew what he was up to. Eddie always said she was real smart. Was she? Smarter than Schiff? He’d gone out with a smart girl once after he left the carnival; a college girl, rich girl, she’d worn a little string of pearls that were worth a couple of months of Schiff’s fleaba
g rent if he’d stolen them, which he prided himself on not doing, broke as he was. Her father had run a bank. The father had hated him. Schiff was screwing the girl every chance he got, often in her little pink bedroom just down the hall from the family room where the father read the newspaper, so who could blame the guy? Certainly not Schiff, who had sympathized completely and tried to stay out of his way. Not that Schiff had been the girl’s first, but the father wouldn’t know that, and anyway the others had undoubtedly been pretty boys, college boys the father wouldn’t have been afraid of. Even then Schiff had understood that he was scary; now he looked back at the pictures from those years—the squirrelly eyes, the dazzling fuck-you, walk-in-front-of-trains smile—and marveled that he had not even once been shot by one of the fathers, boyfriends, brothers. Not that there hadn’t been some close calls. At any rate, the girl had thought Schiff was romantic because he had shrapnel buried like a hundred peppercorns under the skin of his shoulders, and because he’d been in a lot of trouble in the last couple of years. The girl had liked to brush his hair—he had had more of it back then, brown and glossy as a girl’s, and he’d grown it long—and she gave him money sometimes; twice she bought him books he pretended to read. Once she took him to a fancy restaurant and he tried very hard not to embarrass her. She had been nice and gentle and earnest, and she’d been pretty good in the sack, too, but she’d started closing in on him just the same, and then she’d begun crying a lot. Surely something had happened at the end, but Schiff had no recollection of what.
Sitting on the seat beside him, Petie still wasn’t talking, and it was starting to annoy him. It wasn’t like he’d forced her to meet him, although there’d been that tiny financial incentive; he had been sure she’d come for the company. When he pictured the two of them together—something he’d been doing lately—she didn’t look like this little sparrow, all puffed up against bad weather. In his imagination they were in bed together, but, oddly, not during sex. Instead they were cuddled together among big white pillows and crisp white sheets, Petie’s head on his bare shoulder, that black hair spread out and glossy. Carla hated to cuddle. Schiff had too, when he was young, had actually taken pride in it: here was a man who couldn’t be held, who was nothing but a sweet strong wind blowing through. Well, he’d been younger then, he hadn’t needed the shelter; or maybe he just hadn’t minded the elements as much.
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