Bea opened the menu and glanced at the list of luncheon specials. Meat loaf. Corned beef and cabbage. And the Tuesday Catch-of-the-Day—baked halibut and green beans with corn bread and a peach half on the side.
“Can I bring you anything else?” The girl’s familiar voice serving the table behind Bea sent anticipation coursing up Bea’s spine.
“Nope. Guess that’ll do me. You tell the cook I don’t like my corn bread so dry. He’s got to do something about that tomorrow.” The girl was waiting on Walt Snell, a dry-waller from Ogallala who often came to Ash Hollow working on a job. Whenever Geneva saw Walt coming up the street, she’d say, “That man could say ‘Merry Christmas’ in a tone that would make you want to punch him.” Everybody knew he grumbled about everything.
“I’ll say something to the cook if you’d like.”
“I’d like.”
“Here’s your check then.” A ripping sound directly behind Bea’s head. “Come back to see us soon.”
The items on the menu swam together in Bea’s vision. She lowered her menu and peered over the top of it like a prowler peering over a fence top as the girl walked away.
Her heart hammered in her chest. Again there could be no mistaking this young woman, the one she’d seen across the aisle at church yesterday, her denim skirt now laundered and pressed, the red Cramalot Inn apron big enough to swallow her.
“Hey, honey.” Walt Snell gave a little whistle and, with no warning at all, the girl—who had been retreating—spun in the direction of her customers again. Bea hoisted the menu just in time to hide.
“Yes?”
Bea heard quick measured steps coming, a worried question. “Is something wrong?”
“I had the meat loaf lunch,” Walt announced in a belligerent voice loud enough for the whole place to overhear. “The price was listed as $4.99 on the menu. This bill says $7.49. It’s wrong.”
A moment of silence passed in which, Bea assumed, the girl made mental calculations. Her voice had gotten a little shakier when she explained, “It’s my first day working. Sorry for the mistake. Here. Let me fix it.” The sound of a ballpoint pen scratching out and scrawling. “There. How’s that?”
“We’ll see. You stand right here while I double-check your math. I don’t want to have to flag you down again.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bea couldn’t stand it. She had to peek over her right shoulder, over the plastic booth seat that came to her neck, to see what was happening. The girl stood beside her patron, her head hanging in humility, while Walt Snell held his own mechanical pencil in hand and calculated beneath his breath. Anger choked Bea. The protective feeling surprised her. She wanted to jump out of the booth and swat Walt Snell with her pocketbook for being so unkind.
“It adds up right this time. You’d best learn your prices, girl. No one wants a problem like this when they come out to eat.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll learn things, sir. I will.”
Bea faced forward again. After Walt left no tip and clomped out the door, Charlene Grover called out, “Don’t you mind him, Gemma. He’d complain if you hung him with a new rope.”
Even so, when the girl finally appeared at Bea’s tableside, she was already flustered. The crests of her ears had gone red. She tried to hold her pen at the ready, but shaking fingers gave her away. She didn’t glance up from her green order pad. “Have you decided what you’d like, ma’am?”
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“The pot roast is good today,” the girl said. “The meat loaf and halibut look pretty good, too. And we’re having a special on Tater Tots for the whole week. Truck jackknifed on the highway and we ended up with extra Tater Tots.”
“I’m not—” Bea looked up.
The girl looked down. “Oh.” She sent out a startled cry and went as white as the napkin on the table.
Bea sat absolutely still, not a nerve flinching.
Two beats passed, maybe three, before the girl lowered her eyes to her order pad and said, “You don’t know what you’d like, I can come back in a few minutes.”
“Miss,” someone called from another table. “Can we get ketchup over here?”
“I’ll just—” The girl backed away from Bea as if afraid to turn away. “Let me get that ketchup.”
Bea sat perfectly still after the girl had left, her stomach clenching and unclenching with its enormous load of regret and fear. When the girl returned at last, uneasiness exuded between them. For long moments, the girl’s gaze went everywhere except for Bea’s face. No questions this time, no careful smiles. She took a dozen weighted, wordless seconds before she said, “Hello, Mrs. Bartling.”
“Hello.”
“How are you today?”
“Not real good,” Bea answered. “Not real good at all.”
The girl picked up the fork, laid it down again, didn’t take her eyes from it for a long time. She bent over and checked the peppershaker, screwing the lid off and on. She tried to do the same with the saltshaker but salt spilled out and with her fumbling, anxious hands, she couldn’t make the lid scrape back on again. She gave up on that, grabbed a wet rag from her apron pocket and scrubbed hard, sending salt granules flying everywhere. With each of these motions—with the determined slant of her head and the rigid sweep of her arm—came the subtle, strong message. She wanted nothing from Bea Bartling.
Bea had just finished dusting salt off her lap when the girl finally stopped messing with objects on the table and looked her in the eye. “Guess I’d feel the same way if I didn’t know if somebody was telling me the truth or not.”
“You would.”
It wasn’t the time for Bea to say she’d been wrong or that she might have done things differently if she’d known they didn’t have a place to stay. It wasn’t the time to say “I’m sorry,” because she wasn’t. It wasn’t the time to say, “If only I had a way to know you are who you say you are.”
And so she didn’t. “The halibut,” Bea said instead.
“Huh?”
“Put me down for the halibut. The Tuesday Catch-of-the-Day.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” The girl colored and fumbled for her pad. “I got myself all shook up because you’re here. You know how people say ‘halibut’ instead of cussing? ‘I’m going to do something just for the halibut?’ That’s what I thought you were doing.”
“Well, no. I’m just trying to order lunch.”
“Sorry.” The girl flushed even deeper. “You want something to drink with that?”
“Iced tea.”
“For dressing, we’ve got Ranch, Thousand Island, Bleu Cheese, and French.”
“French.”
“Okay.” The girl scribbled it all down and brushed a strand of hair from her face. From somewhere in the kitchen came a clattering of plates, a dinging of a bell, and someone hollering, “Order up!”
The girl glanced over her shoulder. “That’s mine. I’ve got to get it.”
When she walked off, Bea studied her, the sway in her slender hips, the way she held her neck rigid with pride, the camber at the small of her back where the big apron knot gathered her shirt. Emotions eddied inside Bea. Guilt. Longing. Dread. Hope. What had she come here searching for? Evidence of this girl’s duplicity? If she had, then perhaps she would leave disappointed. The girl’s cool behavior, her forced detachment, did more to attest to the soundness of her claims than any-thing else Bea had seen.
A salad appeared before her, the pale chunks of lettuce and shreds of carrot slathered in French dressing, delivered by the girl’s quivering hand.
After setting the plate, the girl stood back. She crossed her arms over her chest as if she was protecting herself from something. At last she said, “I know he never told you about me.”
The salad sat uneaten.
“No, he didn’t.”
“I know you two didn’t ever talk. Not for as long as I knew him.”
Bea used her knife and fork to mix lettuce and grated carrot with the same zeal as if she
were flinging weeds in her garden. Outside the window, a truck from Jake Jab’s American Furniture Warehouse rattled past, rattling the window, its load of mattresses and box springs jostling against each other in unison. The dreadful joke ran through Bea’s head unbidden. Why don’t the customersbend over at American Furniture Warehouse? Because Jake Jabs.
A little boy slalomed along on his razor scooter, his leg paddling in long strokes, a perfect rhythm with the cracks in the sidewalk. Across the street in the town square, Joe Metzger stretched high with a long-handled pair of shears and chopped wayward boughs off the old box elder tree.
Someone hollered from another table. “Hey, hon, can we get a coffee over here?”
The girl pretended not to notice. Instead she asked, very quietly, “Why did he leave home?”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“No.”
A woman at the booth right beside them joined in with the other customers. “What’s a body got to do to get coffee in this place?”
Charlene Grover came from behind the counter, her tray loaded with hamburgers and Tater Tots. “Gemma. You need to get those coffees.”
With one sad glance backward, the girl uncrossed her arms and hurried to get the pot. Then, taking her time, she freshened everybody’s coffee around the room. Alva T. stopped by Bea’s table to say hello. “I see you’ve met my new waitress. What do you think? She’s going to court in a few days, did you know? It’s the strangest thing, her getting arrested. Maybe I’ll go, too, so she’ll have someone to support her.”
The bell dinged in the kitchen again. “Order up!” A Tuesday Catch-of-the-Day slid into view beneath the warming lamps. The girl carried Bea’s lunch over, balancing it against the crook of her elbow. Bea didn’t touch her food. She spread her fingers wide and pushed the rim of the plate away before she laid ten fingers decisively on the tablecloth. “Your name’s Gemma.” It was a statement, not a question.
“It is.”
“Pretty name.”
Gemma stuck her hands in the pocket of her Cramalot Inn apron. “It’s common, I guess. Lots of people have it.”
“Not too many.”
The girl’s expression got all soft and sad, like she could see something far away. “My daddy named me that.” She picked up the salad plate and laid it aside. “Said he’d read it in a book once, that it reminded him of buried pirate’s treasure. You know. Like precious gems.”
Beside the cash register, the telephone rang. Alva answered it and then bellowed into the kitchen, “Harvey, you mind making a pot roast lunch to go?”
Bea said, “Saw your little girl at church yesterday.”
Gemma tucked a strand of hair behind her ear again and gave a brittle laugh. “They’ve been real nice to us over there, taking us in the way they did. George and Ellen Sissel are nice. I don’t know where we’d be without them.”
“When you came to my door, you didn’t tell me you were stranded. You didn’t tell me you had no place to go and your car had broken down. You said you had family. You said you were headed back to them.”
“No, Mrs. Bartling.” Gemma shook her head. “I said I had family. The rest of it’s what you said.”
Bea had the grace to hang her head. “It’s just . . . so hard.” She raised her eyes, though, after a moment. “Everybody in town’s talking about you two, you know.”
“They are?”
“Well, maybe not everybody. But I have a friend named Geneva who is. She talks about everybody. We don’t have many strangers that come through here and stay more than an hour or so.”
Gemma said, “Sure made it hard, seeing Nathan’s name printed out on a church bulletin like that.”
Nathan’s name.
The subject presented itself almost before Bea was ready to speak of it. This one baffling detail had been haunting her for days. The words to the awful question popped out before she had the chance to stop them. “If you were married to my boy, how come you didn’t take his name? How come you been going around town telling everybody your name is Franklin instead?”
Gemma’s chin dropped to her chest. She stood motionless for an eternity before she raised her face. “I fig-ured that would shake things up too much, me coming to Ash Hollow, telling everybody I was a Bartling. I figured that wasn’t anybody’s business but ours.”
Bea’s thumb made tiny polished circles on her teaspoon.
“Besides,” Gemma said with false confidence, “never changed my name on that old Toyota. Franklin’s what the deputy pulled up when they found the car on the highway.”
Bea thought about the girl’s answer. And thought some more. Finally she pulled in a deep breath and began to stir her tea. She stared into the glass a long time before raising her eyes. “I’ve read Nathan’s obituary in the paper over and over again, checking to see if something there gives those stories of yours away. Nothing does. No way for you to have known those things, except if he had told you.”
Gemma spoke in a hushed way that hid neither her confidence nor her hurt. “I know there isn’t anyway for you to figure out if we’re telling the truth or not. We talked about that before.” Her eyes started roving the room again, not settling on anything, not even the customers waiting with frowns at other tables. She snapped up Bea’s butter bowl to tote it someplace else. “Best get back to work if I want to keep this job past the first day.”
Bea grabbed her wrist with a firm hand. Pats of butter, still wrapped in their white wax-paper squares, went sailing out of the bowl onto the table. Their gazes met. “Isn’t anything in that paper that would have told you how I used to get mad at Nathan whenever he squeezed petals off my roses.”
Gemma wrenched her hand away, grabbed the rag from her pocket again, and began scrubbing the red and white plastic hard enough to rub a hole in it. “You look for ways to prove we’re not who we say we are, Mrs. Bartling, and you’ll probably find them. You look for ways to prove we knew Nathan, and you’ll probably find those, too.”
“Isn’t this what you wanted? For me to try to figure it out? For me to acknowledge that you could be who you say you are? Isn’t that why you came to my door in the first place?”
“No.”
Bea pressed her elbows to the tabletop, linked her fingers together, and gave it to Gemma sad and straight. “If you knew Nathan, you knew him better than I did. You knew him better because you knew him last. That’s what I’ve been thinking.”
“Maybe so. But that isn’t the same as knowing somebody in his own place.”
The halibut lunch sat untouched before her. Bea linked her hands tighter together, desperate to hold on to something. She shook her head, her voice a mere whisper. “Neither one of us had all of what we wanted of him, I guess.”
“No. We sure didn’t.”
Bea unlinked her hands and felt like she was letting go of everything that protected her. She swallowed, trying to speak the words. But, for a long time, they just wouldn’t come. She forced herself to utter them anyway. “I know you two are all settled in over at Sissel’s. But I hoped you might want to stay at my house for a few days. I know you won’t be here long. But at least until you get your car fixed . . . ”
“You’d want us?” The rag in the girl’s hand lay motionless on the table. The girl lifted her face to Bea’s. Her plaintive expression made Bea’s throat constrict with doubt.
Even so, Bea couldn’t turn back now.
“I keep thinking about how maybe you’re Nathan’s family now.” She stared at her splayed fingers, her pulse clamoring. “Yes. I believe I would like you to come.”
The rag began to move on the table again, first in little circles, then in larger and larger sweeps. “Paisley’s doing vacation Bible school this week. She likes it real well, too. Then she goes home to Loren Sissel’s before I get off. Sometimes she takes a nap, but I can’t promise it. That’s getting to be a struggle.”
Bea said, “I could do that schedule, too.”
“You could?”
“Yes.” Bea picked up her fork, cut a bite of the fish. “So, are you going to be at my place for supper?”
“Yes. Please. I—I’d really like that.”
“Call Loren Sissel and let her know, would you? So she’s not worried about fixing you anything.”
“I will. I get off here at five.”
“I’ll be along about five to get you.”
Gemma made one more round of coffee with everybody, splashing it haphazardly into cups. She turned in another order to the kitchen before she returned to Bea’s side. She twisted the plain gold wedding band around and around on her left ring finger. “Nathan told me once there was nothing better than waking up in a place to make you feel like you owned it. He said that’s why he loved to go camping up at Lake McConaughy so much. He said it makes you feel like you belong, seeing a place as it wakes up, as the fog lifts off the lake and the mallard drakes glide on glass water before the dew burns away and the day gets hot. Morning is fragile, he always said. Makes you belong to something in a way that someone who hasn’t slept over never would.”
“Nathan said that?”
“I always thought some day he would take me there. That one day he would show me the place he was talking about.”
“Why did you come here, really? Are you just looking for a place to belong?”
“I belonged to Nathan.” Gemma began picking up butter pats that had fallen, dropping them one by one into the little white bowl. “Nathan’s all I ever needed.”
Chapter Eleven
When the ten-year-old white Monte Carlo turned in at 117 Pattison Drive, the rosebush beside the Bartling’s front stoop stood laden with yellow blossoms. Lacy and hearty, as cheerful as the sun and as fragrant as perfume, the wind stirred the flowers delicately as though it tested them, and every so often a petal coasted to the ground.
“This suitcase.” Gemma elevated herself on her knees and tried to reach into the backseat to grab it. She couldn’t quite get hold of it. “I feel like I’ve carried that thing halfway across the country.” When she glanced sideways, she realized Mrs. Bartling was eyeing the hem of her skirt, seeing how it sidled up high against her thighs. Gemma tugged it down as far as it would go.
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