Keeper of Dreams

by Orson Scott Card

  She reached the intersection where the road to town slanted up from the Great River Road. There was a car coming, so she waited for it to pass before crossing the street. She was looking forward to heading southeast for a while, so the wind wouldn’t be right in her face. It’d be just her luck to catch a cold and get laryngitis. Couldn’t afford laryngitis. Once she got that it could linger for months. Cost her half a million dollars once, back in ’73, five months of laryngitis and a canceled tour. Promoter was going to sue her, too, since he figured he’d lost ten times that much. His lawyer talked sense to him, though, and the lawsuit and the promoter both went away. Those were the days, when the whole world trembled if I caught a cold. Now it’d just be Minnie Wilcox in Jack & Minnie’s Harmony Café, and it wouldn’t exactly take her by surprise. The sign was still in the window.

  The car didn’t pass. Instead it slowed down and stopped. The driver rolled down his window and leaned his head out. “Ride?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t be crazy, Ms. Johnson,” he said. So he knew her. A customer from the café. He pulled his head back in and leaned over and opened the door on the other side.

  She walked over, just to be polite, to close the door for him as she turned him down. “You’re very nice,” she began, “but—”

  “No buts,” he said. “Mrs. Wilcox’ll kill me if you get a cold and I could have given you a ride.”

  Now she knew him. The man who did Minnie’s accounting. Lately he came in for lunch every day, even though he only went over the café books once a week. Rainie wasn’t a fool. He was a nice man, quiet and he never even joked with her, but he was coming in for her, and she didn’t want to encourage him.

  “If you’re worried about your personal safety, I got my two older kids as chaperones.”

  The kids leaned forward from the back seat to get a look at her. A boy, maybe twelve years old. A girl, looking about the same age, which meant she was probably younger. “Get in, lady, you’re letting all the heat out of the car,” said the girl.

  She got in. “This is nice of you, but you didn’t need to,” she said.

  “I can tell you’re not from around here,” said the boy in the back seat. “Radio says this is a bad storm coming and you don’t walk around in a blizzard after dark. Sometimes they don’t find your body till spring.”

  “Dougie,” said the man.

  That was the man’s name, too, she remembered. Douglas. And his last name . . . Spaulding. Like the ball manufacturer.

  “This is nice of you, Mr. Spaulding,” she said.

  “We’re just coming back down from the Tri-Cities Mall,” he said. “They can’t wear last year’s leather shoes cause they’re too small, and their mother would have a fit if I suggested they keep wearing their sneakers right on through the winter, so we just had the privilege of dropping fifty bucks at the shoe store.”

  “Who are you?” asked the girl.

  “I’m Ida Johnson,” she said. “I’m a waitress at the café.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said the girl.

  “Dad said Mrs. Wilcox had a new girl,” said Dougie. “But you’re not a girl, you’re old.”

  “Dougie,” said Mr. Spaulding.

  “I mean you’re older than, like, a teenager, right? I don’t mean like you’re about to get Alzheimer’s or anything, for Pete’s sake, but you’re not young, either.”

  “She’s my age,” said Mr. Spaulding, “so I’d appreciate it if you’d get off this subject.”

  “How old are you, then, Daddy?” asked the girl.

  “Bet he doesn’t remember,” said Dougie. He explained to Rainie. “Dad forgets his age all the time.”

  “Do not,” said Mr. Spaulding.

  “Do so,” said Dougie. It was obviously a game they had played before.

  “Do not, and I’ll prove it. I was born in 1948, which was three years after World War II ended, and five years before Eisenhower became president, and he died at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, which was the site of a battle that was fought in 1863, which was 127 years ago last July, and here it is November which is four months after July, and November is the eleventh month and so I’m four times eleven, forty-four.”

  “No!” the kids both shouted, laughing. “You turned forty-two in May.”

  “Why, that’s good news,” he said. “I feel two years younger, and I’ll bet Ms. Johnson does, too.”

  She couldn’t help but smile.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  It took her a moment to realize that without any directions, he had taken her right to the garage with the outside stair that led to her apartment. “How did you know where to take me?”

  “It’s a small town,” said Mr. Spaulding. “Everybody knows every-thing about everybody, except for the things which nobody knows.”

  “Like Father’s middle name,” said the girl.

  “Get on upstairs and turn your heat on, Ms. Johnson,” said Mr. Spaulding. “This is going to be a bad one tonight.”

  “Thanks for the ride,” said Rainie.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Dougie.

  “Nice to meet you,” echoed the girl.

  Rainie stood in the door and leaned in. “I never caught your name,” she said to the girl.

  “I’m Rose. Never Rosie. Grandpa Spaulding picked the name, after his aunt who never married. I personally think the name sucks pond scum, but it’s better than Ida, don’t you agree?”

  “Definitely,” said Rainie.

  “Rosie,” said Mr. Spaulding, in his warning voice.

  “Good night, Mr. Spaulding,” said Rainie. “And thanks for the ride.”

  He gave a snappy little salute in the air, as if he were touching the brim of a nonexistent hat. “Any time,” he said. She closed the door of the car and watched them drive away. Up in her room she turned the heater on.

  During the night the snow piled up a foot and a half deep and the temperature got to ten below zero, but she was warm all night. In the morning she wondered if she should go to work. She knew Minnie would be there and Rainie wasn’t about to have Minnie decide that her “new girl” was soft. She almost left the apartment with only her jacket for warmth, but then she thought better and put on a sweater under it. She still froze, what with the wind blowing ground snow in her face.

  At the café the talk was that four people died between Chicago and St. Louis that night, the storm was so bad. But the café was open and the coffee was hot, and standing there looking out the window at the occasional car passing by on the freshly plowed road, Rainie realized that in Louisiana and California she had never felt as warm as this, to be in a café with coffee steaming and eggs sizzling on the grill and deadly winter outside, trying but failing to get at her.

  When Mr. Spaulding came into the café for his lunch just after one o’clock, Rainie thanked him again.

  “For what?”

  “For saving my life yesterday.”

  He still looked baffled.

  “Giving me a ride up from the river.”

  Now he remembered. “Oh, I was just doing Minnie a favor. She never thought you’d stay a week, and here you’ve stayed for more than a month already. She would have reamed me out royal if we had to dig your corpse out of a snowdrift.”

  “Well, anyway, thanks.” But she wasn’t saying thanks for the ride, she realized. It was something else. Maybe it was the kids in the back seat. Maybe it was the way he’d talked to them. The way he’d kept on talking with them even though there was an adult in the car. Rainie wasn’t used to that. She wasn’t used to being with kids at all, actually. And when she did find herself in the presence of other people’s children, the parents were always shushing the kids so they could talk to her. “I liked your kids,” said Rainie.

  “They’re OK,” he said. But his eyes said a lot more than that. They said, You must be good people if you think well of my kids.

  She tried to imagine what it would have been like, if her own parents had ever been with her the w
ay Mr. Spaulding was with his children. Maybe my whole life would have been different, she thought. Then she remembered where she was—Harmony, Illinois, otherwise known as the last place on Earth. No matter whether her parents were nice or not, she probably would have hated every minute of her childhood in a one-horse town like this. “Must be hard for them, though,” she said. “Growing up miles from anywhere like this.”

  All at once his face closed off. He didn’t argue or get mad or anything, he just closed up shop and the conversation was over. “I suppose so,” he said. “I’ll just have a club sandwich today, and a diet something.”

  “Coming right up,” she said.

  It really annoyed her that he’d shut her down like that. Didn’t he know how small this town was? He’d been to college, hadn’t he? Which meant he must have lived away from this town sometime in his life. Have some perspective, Spaulding, she said to him silently. If your kids aren’t dying to get out of here now, just give them a couple of years and they will be, and what’ll you do then?

  As he sat there eating, looking through some papers from his briefcase, it began to grate on her that he was so pointedly ignoring her. What right did he have to judge her?

  “What put a bug up your behind?” asked Minnie.

  “What do you mean?” said Rainie.

  “You’re stalking and bustling around here like you’re getting set to smack somebody.”

  “Sorry,” said Rainie.

  “One of my customers insult you?”

  She shook her head. Because now that she thought about it, the reverse was true. She had insulted him, or at least had insulted the town he lived in. What was griping at her wasn’t him being rude to her, because he hadn’t been. He simply didn’t like to hear people badmouthing his town. Douglas Spaulding wasn’t in Harmony because he never had an idea that there was a larger world out there. He was a smart man, much smarter than the job of smalltown accountant required. He was here by choice, and she had talked as if it was a bad choice for his children, and this was a man who loved his children, and it really bothered her that he had closed her off like that.

  It bothered her so much that she went over and pulled up a chair at his table. He looked up from his papers, raised an eyebrow. “This a new service at Jack & Minnie’s Café?”

  “I’m willing to learn,” said Rainie. “I’m not a bigot against small towns. I just sort of took it for granted that small towns would feel oppressive to kids because the small town I grew up in felt oppressive to me. If that’s a crime, shoot me.”

  He looked at her in wonder. “I don’t have an idea on God’s Earth what you’re talking about.”

  “A minute ago when you shut me down,” she said, really annoyed now. “You can’t tell me that shutting people down is so unimportant that you don’t even remember doing it.”

  “I ordered my lunch is all I did,” said Spaulding.

  “So you do remember,” she said triumphantly.

  “I just wasn’t interested in continuing that conversation.”

  “Then don’t shut a person down, Mr. Spaulding. Tell them that you don’t appreciate what they said, but don’t just cut me off.”

  “It honestly didn’t occur to me that you’d even notice,” he said. “I figured you were just making small talk, and the talk just got too small.”

  “I wasn’t making small talk,” said Rainie. “I was really impressed with your kids. It’s a sure thing I was never that way with my father.”

  “They’re good kids.” He took another bite and looked down at his paper.

  She laid her hand on the paper, fingers spread out to cover the whole sheet and make it unreadable.

  He sat up, leaned back in his chair, and regarded her. “The place isn’t crowded, the lunch rush is over, so it can’t be that you need my table.”

  “No sir,” said Rainie. “I need your attention. I need just a couple of minutes of your attention, Mr. Spaulding, because in your car yesterday I caught a whiff of something I’ve heard about but I always thought it was a legend, a lie, like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny.”

  He got a little half-smile on his face, but there was still fire in his eyes. “Since when is Santa Claus a lie?”

  “Since I was six years old and got up to pee and saw Dad putting together the bike on the living room floor.”

  “It strikes me that what you saw was proof that Santa Claus was real. Flesh and blood. Putting together a bike. Making cookies for you in the kitchen.”

  “That wasn’t Santa Claus, that was Dad and Mom, except that my mom didn’t make cookies for me, she made them for her, all neat and round and lined up exactly perfect on the cooky tray, Lord help me if I actually touched one, and Dad couldn’t get the bike together right, he had to wait till the stores opened the day after Christmas so he could get the guy in the bike shop to put it together.”

  “So far you haven’t proved that Santa Claus was fake, you just proved that he wasn’t good enough for you. If Santa Claus couldn’t be perfect, you didn’t want any Santa Claus at all.”

  “Why are you getting so mad at me?”

  “Did I invite you to sit at this table, Ms. Johnson?”

  “Dammit, Mr. Spaulding, would you call me Ida like everybody else?”

  “Dammit, Ms. Johnson, why are you the only person in town who doesn’t call me Douglas?”

  “Begging your pardon, Douglas.”

  “Begging yours, Ida.”

  “All I was trying to say, Douglas, when I brought up Santa Claus, Douglas, was that in your car I saw a father being easy with his children, and the children being easy with their dad, right in front of a stranger, and I never thought that happened in the real world.”

  “We get along OK,” said Douglas. He shrugged it off, but she could see that he was pleased.

  “So for a minute in your car I felt like I was part of that and I guess it just hurt my feelings a little when you shut me down back then. It didn’t seem fair. I didn’t think my offense was so terrible.”

  “Like I said. I wasn’t punishing you.”

  “All right then. More coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Pie? Ice cream?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well then why do you keep calling me over to your table?”

  He smiled. Laughed almost. So it was all right. She felt better, and she could leave him alone then.

  After he left, after all the lunch customers had gone and she was washing down the tables and wiping off the saltshakers and emptying the ashtrays, Minnie came over to her and looked her in the eye, hard and angry.

  “I saw you sitting down and talking with Douglas,” she said.

  “We weren’t busy,” said Rainie.

  “Douglas is a decent man with a happy family.”

  Now Rainie understood. In her own way, Minnie was just like the guy who rented her the room over the garage. Always assuming that because she was a good-looking woman, she was on the make. Well, she wasn’t on the make, but if she was, it wouldn’t be any of Minnie’s business or anybody else’s except her own. What was it about this place? Why did everybody always assume that sex was the foremost thing in a single forty-two-year-old woman’s mind?

  “I’m glad for him,” Rainie said.

  “Don’t you make no trouble for that good man and his good wife,” said Minnie.

  “I said something that I thought maybe offended him and I wanted to make sure everything was all right, that’s all. I was trying to make sure I hadn’t alienated a customer.” Even as she explained, Rainie resented having to make an explanation.

  “Do you think I’m a fool? Do you think I’m such a fool as to think you’re a fool? Since he first laid eyes on you he’s been in here every day. And now you’re going over sitting at his table arguing with him and then making him laugh. I’ve got half a mind to fire you right now and send you on your way, except I like you and I’d like to keep you around. But I don’t like you so much I’m willing
to have you making things ugly for people around here. You can make a mess here and then just walk away, but me and my customers, we’ll have to keep living with whatever it is you do, so don’t do it. Am I clear?”

  Rainie didn’t answer, just furiously wiped at the table. She hadn’t been reamed out like that since . . . her mother was the last one to ream her out like this, and Rainie had left home over it, and it made her so mad to have to listen to it all over again, she was forty-two years old and she still had some old lady telling her what she could and couldn’t do, laying down rules, making conditions and regulations, and claiming that she liked her while she was doing it.

  Minnie waited for a minute till it was clear Rainie wasn’t going to answer. “All right then,” said Minnie. “I’ve got enough in the register to give you your pay. Take off the apron, you can go.”

  I don’t need your money or your job, you poor old fool, I’m Rainie Pinyon, I sing and write songs and play the piano and cut albums, I’ve got a million-dollar ranch in the Horse Heaven Hills of eastern Washington and an agent in LA who calls me sweetheart and sends me checks a couple of times a year, checks large enough even during the bad years that I could buy your two-bit café and move it to Tokyo and never even miss the money.

  Rainie thought all that, but she didn’t say it. Instead she said, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to mess around with anybody’s life, and I’ll be careful with Mr. Spaulding.”

  “Take off the apron, Ida.”

  Rainie whirled on her. “I said I’d do what you wanted.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Minnie. “I think you got the same tone of voice I heard in my daughter when she had no intention of doing what I said, but promised to do it just to get me off her back.”

  “Well I’m not your daughter. I thought I was your friend.”

  Minnie looked at her, steady and cold, then shook her head. “Ida Johnson, I can’t figure you out. I never thought you’d last a week, and I sure never figured you for the type who’d try to hold on to a lousy job like this one after the tongue-lashing I just gave you.”