by Brad Smith
Driving back to the farm, Billie kept thinking about what she had just learned. She felt betrayed by David Clay. But how would she have felt if he hadn’t told her and she somehow found out he’d been keeping the truth from her? Just as betrayed. She had no doubt it was true. She remembered her mother taking the classes and bringing home books on obscure Italian poets. Billie had never laid eyes on the professor. What had Clay called him—a tweedy little shit? How could her mother fall in love with a man like that? But Billie knew she wasn’t happy with her life on the farm. She tried to be, but trying to be happy when there was no happiness present was a futile task. Maybe the tweedy little shit provided her with something to hang onto. For a while anyway.
Billie had only found out about the waitress her father was seeing after her mother took the pills. She had then jumped to conclusions that had apparently not been quite accurate. And Clay was right: Billie ended up punishing her father for something he hadn’t done. Why didn’t he tell her the truth? Billie knew the answer to that, too; if she didn’t, lawyer Clay had laid it out pretty clearly over breakfast. Will Masterson was merely protecting her, as he’d done since the day she was born.
David Mountain Clay had also been protecting her. Today he decided to stop. And the reason he decided to stop was—at least in part—because she told him she was going to sell the farm. Well, what was she supposed to do? She was taking what appeared to be the only practical way out of the situation, and he’d acted as if she had spat on her father’s grave. He and the old man had been good friends for a lot of years; maybe that was the problem. But wasn’t he required, as the probate attorney, to set aside his opinions, especially those of a personal nature? Billie didn’t need him to tell her what she should do.
At the house, she poured another cup of coffee and sat in the kitchen for a time, thinking about what she had learned that morning. As disturbingly enlightening as it was, she decided she couldn’t let it prejudice her thinking about what she needed to do now. In terms of the farm, whatever action was practical before Clay’s revelations was still practical. She reminded herself that although there was no real upside to the situation, there wasn’t a downside, either. All she needed to do was to go forward, deal with the paperwork, and get the estate settled. Hopefully she wouldn’t lose any money in the process, because she didn’t have any to lose. Sitting there, it occurred to her that there was no reason why she couldn’t head back to Chillicothe and conduct things from there. All she needed was a lawyer—probably not David Clay, given his attitude when leaving the diner—and a realtor. Easy peasy, as Athena would say.
She sat there, absently drumming her fingers on the old harvest table. The pine top was scarred by several generations of abuse by plates and saucers and pots and pans, by rings left by liquor glasses and beer bottles, by random scratches and cigarette burns, by gouges made by impatient children (Billie among them) with knives and forks. Billie thought she recognized the rings from her mother’s martinis. They had grown in volume and frequency toward the later years. There was family history ingrained on that tabletop, one whose code could never be broken. The table, like Will Masterson, was a survivor.
She glanced over to the answering machine on the counter. After a moment, she took her phone from her purse and punched in the number. She listened to her father’s voice on the tape, then hung up before the beep. She did it again and then a third time before setting the phone aside. Wiping her eyes, she stood up and looked out the window in time to see the little girl heading into the barn. A few minutes later, as she’d done the day before, she emerged into the corral on the other side, dragging a bale of hay.
Billie watched for a while. When the girl finished with the feeding, she hooked a lead on the pony and led it into the barn. Billie went out the back door and started down the hill, lighting a cigarette as she walked. It was late morning and the day was fifteen degrees cooler than the one before. The storm had seen to that, chasing the humidity across the Mississippi to the plains.
The girl had the pony tied to an upright wooden beam and she was feeding it pieces of apple when Billie walked unnoticed through the open door.
“You’re a greedy guy, Mister Buster,” the kid was saying.
“You named your pony Mister Buster?” Billie asked.
The girl looked at Billie for a half second and then away. “He was already called that when I got him. I didn’t want to change his name and confuse him.”
“I could never tolerate a confused pony,” Billie said.
The little girl had no reaction to that but instead picked up a brush and began to groom the pony’s withers, which were streaked with mud. No doubt the animal had been rolling over in the wet paddock. Billie took a drag on the cigarette.
“You’re not supposed to be smoking in here, you know.”
“You’re not supposed to be giving me orders,” Billie said. “It turns out this is my barn now.”
“I guess that makes it okay for you to be foolish.”
“What did you say?” Billie asked.
The girl turned away from her and went back to her grooming. Billie stared at her a moment before looking down at the cigarette in her hand. The kid was right, of course. Billie had walked into the barn without even thinking about it. Her father would have kicked her ass. He’d smoked most of his life but Billie had never once seen him, even when he was in his cups, light up in his barn or anybody else’s. Billie knew better, but what bothered her was the fact that she’d forgotten. What was wrong with her? She walked over and flicked the butt into a mud puddle outside the door.
“You happy now?” she asked, returning.
The kid kept up her brushing and made no reply.
“I’m told you’re Jodie,” Billie said.
The kid nodded, still focused on the job at hand. The pony, however, sidestepped around to give Billie a look. He was restless and not particularly enamored of the brushing. Most ponies Billie had known were cantankerous and often downright mean.
“I’m Billie.”
“I know who you are.”
“Then I guess that means you know what’s going on. You know you’re going to have to start thinking about what you want to do with your little petting zoo here. I’ll be selling the farm.”
The girl didn’t reply at first. Billie began to wonder if she was dimwitted (although she was smarter than Billie when it came to the issue of smoking in the barn). Marian Dunlop was right about one thing—she was a pretty little girl. Today she had her thick dark hair tied back at the nape of her neck, tucked beneath a baseball cap with the Cardinals logo on the front. The bill of the cap was frayed. Whether it was a nod to the current style or just a really old cap, Billie couldn’t know. In spite of her dark complexion, the girl’s eyes were blue. That would be the Rickman in there. The family was all blonde and blue-eyed—and shiftless for the most part. From what she had seen of the kid so far, it seemed to Billie that she hadn’t inherited that.
“Maybe whoever buys it will let them stay,” the girl said softly. “I pay for their keep.”
“That’ll be for the new owners to decide,” Billie said. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. A wise man told me over breakfast that anybody buying the place would be after the property only. Which means they’d be bulldozing the buildings.”
The girl stopped her brushing. “How can you let them do that?”
“They come up with the money, they can do whatever they want.”
“This is your family farm.”
“Well, it’s also the real world, kid. The place is up to here in debt. A mortgage, back taxes, power bills. Got those horses to feed. All of that costs money and there isn’t any.”
“Will always managed.”
“Will was the one who created all the debt,” Billie told her. “You do get that?”
The girl went back to brushing the pony but her heart was no longer in it. Apparently a short conversation with Billie was all that was needed to sour her mood. First lawyer C
lay and now a little girl. Billie was having quite a day, spreading optimism and goodwill wherever she went. After a few more strokes with the brush, the kid untied the animal and led it to the door and released it outside into the paddock. She stood there for a time, with her back to Billie. She’s going to start bawling, Billie thought. When the little girl turned, though, her eyes were dry.
“I have a thousand dollars,” she said. “Or I will have. Mr. Clay told me that Will left it to me. You can have that to help pay the bills.”
“Jesus Christ,” Billie said. “I’m not going to take your money. You should blow that on video games and CDs.”
The girl frowned. “Nobody buys CDs.”
“You know what I mean,” Billie told her. “That’s found money. Blow it. What’s wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” the girl said. “Those animals are my responsibility. I have to take care of them.”
“How old are you?”
“I’ll be ten in October.”
“Then act like it,” Billie said. “You shouldn’t be worried about looking after things, especially things like ponies and goats and whatever.”
“You had a pony when you were my age. His name was Little Joe.”
Billie regarded the girl a moment. “Sounds as if you and my father were besties. What else did he tell you?”
“Nobody says besties,” the girl said. “He told me you wanted a pancake that looked like a platypus.”
It took Billie a moment to realize what the kid was talking about. She remembered the old man making pancakes in the shape of animals, but she didn’t specifically recall a platypus. If Will had told the girl about it, though, it was true. The old man obviously had a better memory than Billie, about some things anyway.
“So my father made you pancakes, did he?”
“No,” Jodie said. “He made me oatmeal. Marian told him he needed to eat oatmeal for breakfast.”
Billie had heard enough about her father and the two women in his life. She had come down here to tell the girl that she and her animals were going to have to vacate the premises, and all this talk about her father wasn’t helping matters. She didn’t need to hear about the conversations between the two of them, about duck-billed platypuses and a pony named Little Joe, after the character in Bonanza, a show that had been off the air for ten years before Billie was born but one that she and Will had watched in reruns almost every Saturday morning.
“Well, I have things to do,” she told the girl, wishing now that she did. “I just wanted to give you the lay of the land. It doesn’t have to happen today. Like you said, maybe whoever buys the place will let you and the herd stick around. But you’d better be prepared for otherwise.”
She walked out before she could hear any more protest. As she passed the paddock, the gray colt trotted over to her but she ignored him, heading up the hill to the house and not looking back. She’d had enough interaction for the day, whether it be with kids or horses or oversize lawyers. She’d been home for a day and a half and already it was too much.
Nine
THERE WAS BEER IN THE FRIDGE, a local brand that she hadn’t heard of, and after a lunch of crackers and cheese she opened a bottle and carried it out onto the deck. This time she sat in her father’s chair as she drank the lager and tried to think about what she needed to do in order to extricate herself from the farm. She found that her thoughts kept returning to her mother.
Of course Billie had known that her mother had emotional issues. She’d had her ups and downs over the years, but who didn’t? Billie was of the opinion that people were fucked up in general, even the ones who seemed to have it together. There had been a time when Billie had wondered if her mother’s problems stemmed from her marrying the wrong man. But that wasn’t even true. She hadn’t married the wrong man; she’d married the wrong circumstance. Billie doubted she was ever really happy on the farm. She’d met Will Masterson at a wedding in St. Louis, where she’d grown up. The bride was a childhood friend and the groom a cousin of Will’s. Apparently a whirlwind romance had followed, the horse farmer and the debutante, and the two got married before Billie’s mother even realized how her life would change.
When Billie was little, she and her friend Glenda from town had for a time become enamored of the classic movies channel. The two of them came to compare Billie’s parents to mismatched characters in film, convinced that Will was Gary Cooper and her mother Jean Arthur. The martinis helped with the comparison. Of course it was nonsense: even Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur weren’t Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur.
The good times in Billie’s memory bank far outweighed the bad. Her mother sewed and played the piano and showed Billie how to do both. Not particularly well, but it didn’t matter. She had days when she would wake up literally singing “Oh What A Beautiful Morning.” And others when she wouldn’t get up at all. Billie later recognized her behavior as manic depressive, or bipolar, or whatever the current term was. But she obviously had never appreciated the depth of her mother’s problems. Billie assumed that everybody suffered to some degree. There were days even yet when she didn’t want to get up.
But now David Clay had taken it upon himself to tell Billie more than she wanted to know. Maybe he’d done so, as he suggested, to vindicate his old friend Will Masterson, or maybe he’d done it to convince Billie to keep the farm. Probably both. Whatever the reason, Billie didn’t feel particularly appreciative of the effort. And if Clay thought his little revelation session was going to change her mind about selling, he was dead wrong.
Now she needed to put things in motion and she was unsure of how to do that. Lawyer Clay would be able to guide her, but she didn’t feel like asking him, not after what had happened. She would let things settle for a couple of days. Maybe then she’d be less angry with him, and at the same time maybe he’d come to realize that selling was the prudent move, something he should have known all along. It could be that his sentimental side regarding his old friend was clouding his pragmatism. She would never have expected that, not from David Mountain Clay. Not only had he always considered himself to be the smartest man in the county, there was a very good chance it was true.
Of course, she hadn’t expected any of this. Certainly not her father dying, even though he was seventy-three years old and had spent at least sixty of those years eating bacon for breakfast every day. The oatmeal had arrived on the scene too late. Still, it was unexpected, as was everything and everybody Billie had encountered since. Like Marian, who, as it turned out, was probably not a shrew, although Billie was still unsure exactly what to make of her. And the little girl, so cute she should be in commercials, who had somehow taken up the spot in Will Masterson’s heart once solely reserved for Billie.
She finished the beer and went inside for another. When she came back out, she saw one more thing she couldn’t have expected—the silver Porsche Carrera winding its way among the puddles in the back drive. Billie opened the beer and sat down, watching the car. Why would Reese Ryker come up the back drive instead of the main one leading to the house? Of course, that was the secondary question. Why was he there at all?
He parked beside the machine shed and got out. He was apparently alone today; there was no stunning brunette lounging in the passenger seat. He spotted Billie up above immediately and waved and she raised her hand tentatively in reply. He started toward the house but stopped when he got past the barn and saw the thoroughbreds in the paddock. He walked at once to the gate. Billie watched, thinking the colt would go to him as it had her. But the animal stayed its ground. Reese stood there for longer than she would have expected, staring at the horse while not giving the broodmares a second glance.
Finally he turned and came toward the house. He was wearing a blazer and a white shirt with blue jeans. When he got near, Billie could see the jeans were neatly pressed, with a crease in them. What had her father called the man—a fart in a mitten?
“Hello, Billie,” he called as he stepped onto the deck, sm
iling and attempting a hale and hearty tone that somehow didn’t fit him. “You look comfortable.”
“Got my feet up and my mind in neutral,” Billie said, her words betraying her mood. But she wasn’t going to tell Reese Ryker her thoughts. She wondered if she was required to offer him a beer. She decided against. She couldn’t be providing beer to every person who dropped in unexpectedly. And uninvited to boot. “What brings you out this way?”
Reese gestured pointlessly toward the south. “Oh, I had some business and driving home I realized I was close by. Thought I’d stop and say hello. We never had a chance to speak at the funeral. My wife and I had a previous engagement and couldn’t make it to the community center.”
“You missed out on some kickass brownies.”
The statement seemed to give Reese pause. He was looking his age, Billie thought, which would be somewhere north of fifty, maybe fifty-five. There were pouches beneath his eyes and his hair was colored an odd shade of maroon. She could see evidence of expertly installed hair plugs in the front. He had a deep tan that was either unhealthy or artificially applied. His teeth, when he had smiled at Billie, were brilliantly and unnaturally white.
“I just wanted to express my condolences,” he said then. “I knew your father a good many years.”
Billie mumbled thanks as she wondered at the accuracy of what she’d just heard. Had Will Masterson gotten chummy with Reese Ryker? It seemed unlikely, but if he had, it probably had something to do with Marian Dunlop. Maybe she—like Ryker—was what passed for a Kentucky blueblood herself. Whatever the case, it really didn’t matter to Billie, and in truth it was none of her business who her father had chosen to hang out with in his later years—whether it be feisty matrons or curly-haired waifs or spray-tanned billionaires.
Reese had turned and was now looking the place over, taking in the fields and the bush lot and the pasture to the west. He did not glance toward the barns and the horses there. Billie watched him, wondering what she might add to the conversation.