by Larry Watson
“I’m sorry,” she says to Roy. “We have to stay.” She shrugs helplessly. “The cat . . .”
Edie walks to the trunk and lifts her suitcase out.
“Are you sure?” he says. “Carla’s going to be disappointed. She was taking off work early today to help you and your daughter get settled in.”
She shakes her head no.
“How about you just stop over and say hello,” Roy suggests. Jennifer is still in the doorway, and he says to her, “Would that be okay? If I took your mom away for an hour or two?”
“Sure, sure!” Jennifer assents eagerly. She hurries forward to take Edie’s suitcase and carry it back into room 106.
“All right,” Edie says. Then she asks Roy, “What’s your phone number?”
He tells her, and Edie goes back into their room. On the notepad on the nightstand she writes down the number. She adds the names Roy and Carla Linderman.
“If Mickey comes back,” she tells her daughter, “call me. And you wait here for him. Do you hear me? Don’t go looking for him. He knows where you are.”
As Edie is climbing into Roy’s car, she says, “You said you and Carla have kids? Boys?”
“Brad and Troy. Carla’s from her first marriage. Except for a couple weekends a month, they live with us.”
“How old are they?”
“Thirteen and fourteen,” says Roy. “But when it comes to the child-rearing duties I mostly keep my distance.”
Edie’s eyebrows rise. “Nice trick,” she says.
GARY DUNN FINDS the Meadowlark Mobile Home Community without difficulty, but he can’t seem to figure out the system of addresses inside the trailer park. Some of the streets turn into other lanes, and some simply end when the pavement gives way to sagebrush and prairie.
He finally stops at a washed-out yellow double-wide with a carport. The trailer’s aluminum siding is covered with small dents, the result no doubt of a hailstorm.
Gary steps up to the door and peers through the screen. He can feel the heat coming from the dark interior. His knock rattles the flimsy door.
In another moment an old woman in a floral-print housedress lumbers toward the door. “Hold your horses!” she calls. “I’m on my way.”
When she sees Gary she says, through the screen, “You better not be selling something. This here’s a Green River ordinance town.”
“I’m looking,” Gary says, “for an Edie Dunn.” He looks at the slip of paper in his hand, though written there is not a name but the directions given him by a gas station attendant.
Mrs. Linderman leans forward until her forehead is almost touching the screen. “Did you call here before?”
Still staring at the paper, Gary says, “Her daughter is likely accompanying her.”
“Christ on a crutch,” Mrs. Linderman says. “Are you the law or something? She ain’t here. And I got my hands full without trying to keep track of her.”
She turns her back on Gary Dunn and despite the day’s heat shuts the interior door.
ROY AND EDIE enter the house through the back door. He flips a switch lighting the stairs that lead to the basement.
“Carla will be here shortly,” he says, “and she’ll give you the grand tour. But I want to show you something down here first.”
Edie follows him down to a rec room with paneled walls, a dark wood bar complete with stools, a large Naugahyde recliner, and a sofa upholstered in a fabric printed with charging horses. The air smells faintly of mildew.
“Back there is a bedroom that was supposed to be for the boys,” Roy says. “Now it’s where their toys go to die. Probably more Star Wars shit in there than they used in the movies.” He points to a console television set. “With cable we get maybe fifty channels. Most of it crap if you ask me. But I watch a lot of sports down here.”
He turns a slow circle as if he’s only now realized where he is. “Hey, Edie. Doesn’t this make you think of high school and the time—”
“No, Roy. No reminiscing. I didn’t come back to Gladstone to remember.”
“All right. Whatever you say.” He places his hands on her shoulders to turn her attention toward a far wall and its built-in shelving.
She twists away from his touch. “You said you wanted to show me something.”
“Yeah, yeah. Over this way.”
The shelves are heaped with books, paperback mysteries and romances mostly but with a few children’s picture books as well, along with piles of comic books. Next to the stacks of games—Sorry, Clue, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, and Parcheesi—and boxes that look as though they haven’t been opened in a long time, there are photo albums, grade school projects, and sports trophies and awards. A plastic milk crate full of record albums is on a shelf by itself.
“Here we go,” Roy says, lifting the crate. “Maybe you want to sit down and take a gander at these.”
Edie sits on the sofa, and Roy places the crate at her feet. She looks at the records and then up at him, waiting for an explanation, but he simply smiles and nods as though they share an understanding of this moment.
The telephone rings upstairs in the kitchen. “Shit,” Roy says. “I better get that.”
He hurries up the stairs, at least as much as a man with a bad leg like his can hurry. He picks up the phone in the middle of a ring.
He has no sooner said hello than the voice on the other end says, “Something ain’t right here.”
“What isn’t, Ma? What are you talking about?”
“Your brother. His temperature is up again. A hundred three maybe. I can’t read that thermometer worth a damn.”
“Okay. And what is it you want me to do?”
“I believe he should go to the hospital.”
“Have you called Dr. Hall? Is that what he said?”
“You know what it’s like getting him to return a phone call.”
“I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”
Mrs. Linderman says, “This is your brother we’re talking about.”
Roy slumps against the wall and sighs. “Go ahead and call an ambulance, Ma. I’ll meet you at the hospital.”
He hangs up the phone, but he continues to hold on to it as if it were a handle he needed to keep himself upright. Then he lets go and pushes away from the wall. He walks to the head of the stairs and calls down, “Edie? I’ve got something I need to attend to. Carla should be home any time now. You okay waiting here by yourself?”
“I should be getting back to the Rimrock soon.”
“Sure, sure. One of us will take you back there.”
The back door closes, and Edie reaches into the crate and lifts out five or six albums. The colors of the covers have faded and warped, and their cardboard shows the circular imprint of the record inside.
Simon and Garfunkel. The Rolling Stones. To whom could these belong? Credence Clearwater Revival. They’re too old for Carla’s sons—they’re younger than Jennifer, and she would never have these albums in her possession. Otis Redding. Aretha Franklin. The Doors. She picks up a few more. The Beatles—Revolver, Rubber Soul, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. She turns an album over and from the songs listed there, she begins to hum a tune.
And then she knows.
Footsteps sound overhead, and from the top of the stairs a woman’s voice calls down, “Hello? Brad? Is that you? Troy?”
“It’s me—Edie!”
The woman’s high heels tap rapidly down the stairs. She stops, puts her hands on her hips, and says, “As I live and breathe. Edie Pritchard.”
“Hello, Carla.”
“I must have misunderstood,” she says. “I didn’t know you were already here.”
“Roy had to go somewhere,” Edie says when she notices Carla glancing toward the bedroom.
“I see you found Dean’s records.”
“Yes,” Edie says.
Carla nods and says, “When Dean had to move out of his apartment, he got rid of damn near everything but those old records. He wanted Roy to
hold on to them. Roy asked him why. ‘You love music. Don’t you want to listen while you’re . . . you know . . . bedridden?’ That was Roy trying to be delicate. Considering how good a talker he is on the sales floor, he sure has trouble getting some things out. You know what Dean told him? ‘As long as I’m dying I don’t want to have anything around to remind me of all I’m going to miss.’ ‘But music?’ Roy asked. ‘Nothing beautiful,’ Dean said. Well . . . If that’s how he wants it, he’s in the right place over at Mildred’s.”
“He wanted Roy to keep them though?” asks Edie.
“I guess. And then when Roy heard you were here, he said he thought you’d like to have them.”
Edie stares at the album cover in her hands. A young man and a young woman walk arm in arm down a snowy city street. She drops the album back in the crate and says, “We don’t even have a record player anymore. Just cassettes.”
Carla shrugs. “It didn’t sound like all that great an idea to me, but I wasn’t about to say anything. I gave up trying to figure out those two long ago. It’s funny,” she says, “my first husband, Jay Stepke, was a record collector too. For him it was all jazz and big bands. Stuff I couldn’t stand. But one day I was looking at an album, and Jay says, ‘Go ahead. Give it a listen.’ I told him I was just looking at the cover. ‘Because I used to know a girl,’ I said, ‘who looked a hell of a lot like this woman.’ ‘I buy them for the music,’ Jay says, all superior like. But that woman? I was talking about you.”
“I guess I missed my calling,” Edie says.
“Damn right. Give ’em that sexy look, and you could have sold a million copies. So—you’re settled in? I hope the room’s okay. The boys have sort of used it for a locker room, so there might be a stray jock strap under the bed.”
“I appreciate your hospitality,” Edie says. “Thank you. But we won’t be staying here. Our cat went missing at the motel, and my daughter doesn’t want to leave until he turns up.”
“You brought your cat? Well, I guess not being a pet owner I can’t relate.”
“We’ve had him for almost fifteen years. Jennifer can’t remember a time when he wasn’t around.”
“Like I say—never been a pet person.” Carla points to the stairs. “I was about to have something to drink. Can I tempt you? You haven’t turned into a teetotaler, have you, Edie?”
“No.”
As they ascend the stairs, Carla turns and says over her shoulder, “White wine? Will that be all right?”
THE ENTRANCE TO the trailer park is right off Hoffman Road, and that’s where Gary Dunn has parked, so he can see every car that drives in or out.
When he is not scrutinizing each passing car, he watches four boys across the street playing something that resembles baseball, though they’re playing with a tennis ball and an aluminum bat—and their only object seems to be to hit the ball over the roof of a steel storage building. Each time the tennis ball is struck with the metal bat, making a distinctive pung, Gary shakes his head as though he’s offended to see something even remotely similar to baseball played so frivolously.
But Gary turns his attention away from the boys when an ambulance enters the trailer park. Ten minutes later the ambulance exits onto Hoffman Road and turns on its siren. Gary makes a U-turn and follows.
CARLA PUTS A glass of wine down in front of Edie and says, “So you brought your daughter and your cat to see Dean?”
“I didn’t want to leave them.”
“But your husband? There is a husband?”
Edie nods.
“And he’s okay with you making this mercy trip to see your former husband?” She points to Edie’s swollen wrist. “Or is that him trying to make you stay?”
Edie pulls her arm off the table and rests the injured wrist on her lap. “He didn’t really approve of the journey.”
“That’s a hell of an argument he made.” Carla takes a long swallow of wine.“Which motel did you say you were in?”
“The Rimrock Inn.”
“The Rimrock? Why that place?”
“I could find it,” Edie says.
“And your daughter is there now? Honey, Gladstone’s not the folksy, friendly little community you might remember. A year ago someone was arrested for dealing coke out of the Rimrock. I wouldn’t even try to sell a property in that neighborhood.”
“Shit,” Edie says. “Shit, shit.”
Carla picks up their wineglasses and carries them to the refrigerator. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go get—what’s her name again?”
“Jennifer.”
“Jennifer. We’ll go get Jennifer and bring her back here.”
“She won’t want to come,” Edie says. “Not without—”
“Then maybe we’ll stay there and keep her company.”
Edie rises and heads toward the door with Carla. When they’re outside and about to climb into Carla’s white Toyota Corona, Carla looks at Edie across the top of the car. “God damn it,” Carla says. “Why couldn’t you be fat?”
BOTH ROY AND his mother rest their heads against a cinder block wall in the waiting room. From where they sit they have a perfect view of the clock across the room, and they can observe how hospital time passes like no other.
“What did the doctor say again?” Mrs. Linderman asks her son.
“He was a nurse. We won’t know a damn thing until the doctor comes.”
Minutes of silence pass, and then Mrs. Linderman says, “Say, who else knows Edie’s visiting? A fellow come to the door earlier asking after her. Edie Dunn? Ain’t that right? Dunn?”
Roy opens his eyes. “Who was asking for Edie? Are you sure?”
“Fellow about your age I’d say. Big square shoulders. Big square head too, come to think of it.”
“Why didn’t you say something? What did he want—”
“I told you. Edie. He asked for Edie.”
“How would anyone know she was in Gladstone?”
“Maybe he saw the damn parade they were holding for her. Hell if I know. And I wasn’t about to ask him. I had Dean in there with his temperature going through the roof. I couldn’t stand out there gabbing with a stranger.”
She looks down the hallway again. “Didn’t they say that infernal doctor’d be here soon?”
Another half an hour passes before Dr. Hall appears in the waiting room. His hand-tooled western boots give him an extra inch or two, but he still barely tops five feet tall. The doctor repositions a chair so he’s facing the Lindermans.
“Is his fever come down any?” Mrs. Linderman asks.
“I’ll come around to that fever in just a minute. I’m more concerned right now with his breathing. Dean has himself a touch of pneumonia. More than a touch. Pneumonia. He has pneumonia.”
Mrs. Linderman turns to her son. “Pneumonia is what finally did your father in.”
“I know, Ma.”
Dr. Hall makes a calming motion with his hands. “Antibiotics are the usual treatment for pneumonia, and we’ll get him started on that right away. And we can bring the fever down. But this might be the time to talk about what’s down the road. What measures we might want to take when—”
“If there’s things that can be done,” Mrs. Linderman says. “We’ll do them.”
The doctor turns to Roy. “Has Dean expressed any—”
Mrs. Linderman interrupts. “So he don’t need to stay here? You can give him the antibiotics and we can take him home?”
“Maybe there’s someone else you want to talk to,” suggests Dr. Hall. “I could have Reverend Rowe come around. He’s a good man to consult at times like this.”
“And what the hell kind of time is this?” she asks.
Dr. Hall looks helplessly at Roy.
“Ma—”
“We’re not a regular churchgoing family,” she tells the doctor.
“I’m sure that won’t matter to the reverend.”
“I can’t imagine that man’s got a damn thing to say that I need to hear.”
D
r. Hall says, “I was only—”
“You was only, all right,” Mrs. Linderman says. “You go write that prescription and let us take him out of here.”
The doctor rises and walks away without saying another word to the Lindermans.
Roy says to his mother, “What the doctor was trying to say—”
“You think I don’t know? Christ, give me some credit!” She’s silent for a long moment. Then she turns to her son and says, “You ask him. He’s your brother. You be the one to ask him what he wants.”
“I think I know what he’ll say, Ma.”
JENNIFER SITS CROSS-LEGGED on one of the beds. Balanced on one leg is the notepad with the Rimrock Inn’s name on the top of each page, and with the Rimrock’s pen, she’s trying to compose a letter.
Dear Patrick,
I know you will think this is crazy but can you come get me. My mom brought me here because her first husband is dying, did you even know she was married before? and she wanted to see him to say goodby. I kind of feel the same way. I didn’t even say goodby to you before I left or when we broke up and last night when I couldn’t sleep I thought what if you died and I didn’t say goodby. I couldn’t stop crying just thinking that. I’m afraid now mom’s not going back to Granite Valley ever and that scares me so much—
She tears this sheet off, then she tears it into tiny pieces and drops them in the wastebasket. She leaves room 106—but with the door still left open a few inches—and walks across the parking lot and down the sidewalk. “Here, Mickey, here, Mickey, here Mickey,” she whispers over and over in a voice so faint a cat’s ears would be necessary to hear her call.
CARLA DRIVES LIKE Roy, with one wrist draped over the steering wheel. She asks Edie, “Anyone else you planning to look up in Gladstone? Relatives? Old friends?”
“No. No one.”
“Let me ask you this,” says Carla. “Are you going back to him?”
“Him?”
“The Husband?” She points at Edie’s right wrist. “Who tried to make you stay?”
