[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  46

  Ansel didn’t think anymore. He wanted to hold her as he had held her in his truck, with a love he could call pure and protective, but this time she didn’t tuck herself against him. She looked into his face as he pulled her up, and this look drew them into a kiss. He touched her hair and pressed her closer to him, and it was as blissful as the dream. What he saw in Aldine’s eyes was not rebuke or annoyance or boredom or fatigue. She wanted to be near him, part of him. He could be what someone wanted again. He moved his lips from her mouth to her neck, from her neck to her shoulder, then back again. There was no wind rattling the barn. There were no crops dying in the fields. There were no hogs dead in the ground. There was no family asleep in the house.

  47

  When he woke up on the last morning he would ever spend in Kansas, Clare didn’t know what to do with his Straight Shooter ring. My last morning here was the way he thought of it even though his father said things about returning. That sounded to Clare like the kind of thing a person would say when he needed to believe that the everlasting change he was about to make wasn’t really everlasting. Clare went over to the nail sticking out of his wall and tugged on it. It slid out easily, dribbling crumbs of plaster on the floor. The wall was chalky underneath the yellow paint, and he fingered it, then hacked at the plaster with the nail. There was horsehair in the plaster. His father had told him it was there for binding and strengthening. He’d always thought his father was trustworthy and now he knew he wasn’t. This knowledge was like a hand and the hand was wrapped around a fact. The fact was that Aldine cared for his father. Clare dug into the wall with the nail until the hole was big enough for the ring. Once he had pushed the ring into the hole, he pushed the nail into the palm of his hand again and again until he broke the skin and a small bulblet of blood formed. Then he set the nail on the windowsill, back behind the curtain, and went downstairs.

  His mother was awake and busy, trying to get the last of the edible food together for breakfast and for the car. “Just eat a biscuit,” she said to Clare. “And there’s a little bit of preserves we need to finish.”

  He nodded. Normally he would have happily eaten a biscuit and he would have happily finished the preserves. The kitchen was clean as a whistle. It seemed strange to him that his mother would feel the need to leave it just so.

  “Where’s Miss McKenna?” Neva asked. Neva was wearing her good dress for reasons unknown. Her wrists stuck out of her coat sleeves and her hair puffed out on one side but not the other. She had decided to take her Shirley Temple paper dolls with her, he noticed, along with Milly Mandy Molly and she was eating a biscuit that dropped crumbs on the pile of paper clothes she held in her lap.

  Ellie wiped out the biscuit pan with a towel and put it back in the cupboard, then removed it and put it on the counter. “Your father already dropped her off at the station. She’s off to be a Harvey Girl.” She opened the cupboard and put the biscuit tin inside it once again.

  Neva began to wail and Clare’s back prickled all over with chills. “But she didn’t tell me good-bye,” Neva said. “She said she would tell me good-bye. And I want to go to the Harvey House, too. You promised we would!”

  “And we will,” Ellie said, folding the towel into thirds and hanging it on the towel bar as she always did. “But we’ll go to a different one. Where Aldine’s going is east, and we’re going west.”

  Neva kept crying. His mother opened the cupboard and peered into it without comment.

  “Where’s Dad?” Clare asked.

  “Barn.”

  Clare went out to the porch with a cold biscuit to avoid hearing Neva. The air was freezing and the car was parked out front, facing the road. Wind whipped at his face and tore at the wooden trailer, packed with quilts and crates, including the one that said Lofty Lemons. The crate that had once enclosed the new radio had been lined with a horse blanket for Artemis. Krazy Kat would come, too. The other cats were staying behind. The hogs and chickens were dead and the cows were sold, so that was it. Opal had told Neva she would take care of her goldfish until she came back. Artemis wasn’t in her crate yet, and she came walking up to him, nosing his hand with her wet black nose. “We won’t leave you,” he told her. The dog began licking the drying blood on his hand.

  While he petted her, he heard a fluttering sound. A stone had been set on the porch, a round rock that they’d brought back from a trip to the Arkansas River and used sometimes for home plate. The little beret for Neva lay underneath it, finished, along with a scarf. A piece of paper had been folded into the brim, and Aldine had written in her schoolteacher script, Please give these to Neva, my favorite student. Aldine. He brought the small beret to his nose. It had the faintly yeasty scent he associated with her hair. Inside, he could hear Neva crying and beginning to cough. He took the hat and scarf and note inside and set them beside her.

  “There,” Ellie said, her face hard the way it got when Neva coughed, or maybe because the beret reminded her of Aldine. “You see? She did say good-bye in the best way she could.”

  Neva pulled the hat over her puffed-up hair and smiled a little.

  “Clare’s going to take you out to the car, Neva,” Ellie said, deliberately smoothing her voice. “We’re almost ready to go.” She took off her apron, hung it on the nail where it always hung, then seemed to think better of it and tied it back on.

  “I hate California,” Neva said, and rubbed at her wet cheek. “I don’t want to go there.”

  “It’ll be warm,” Clare said. Neva in a fit had strewn her paper dolls. Clare helped her pick them up and slip them into their paper wardrobe. “Come on,” he said, and she let herself be lifted into his arms. He leaned close to Neva’s ear. “You’ll get better there right away,” he said. “You’ll get so big I won’t be able to pick you up.”

  He set Neva on the cold seat of the car and waited for his father to come out of the barn. He dreaded the moment that he would look at his father and his father would look at him. He stared at the house. It made him think of a large silent animal they were leaving to die. Charlotte and his mother came out with things in their hands. Charlotte was holding her notebook, and his mother carried the Tiffany lampshade she’d said she was going to leave behind. There had been a lot of talk about what to take and what to leave, what was too heavy and what was too hard to pack. They had to leave the sofa, the armchairs, the washing machine, and the stove. His mother wanted to take the radio, and that’s when his father had said, But we’re coming back, aren’t we? and his mother had fallen silent and there wasn’t any more discussion about the radio or coming back, either one. In the end, the only machine they were taking was the Singer. It was small and had its own carrying case.

  Clare liked the lampshade, but doubted it was going to be easy to hold in the car all the way to California. It was big, for one thing, and the thick pieces of glass—amber, blue, ruby, and emerald—were divided by heavy lead. He opened the car door so his mother could get in, but she just set the lampshade down on the seat next to Neva and turned to walk back to the house. “Help me,” she said. He didn’t want to, but he did. He followed her back up the steps, through the door, and into the living room, where the furniture stood waiting as if this were an ordinary day. His mother unfolded a sheet and draped it over the radio. “Help me pull it taut,” she said. He held the sheet, and she took a roll of gummed tape out of her pocket. She dipped her fingers in a cup of water and moistened a length of the brown paper, and then she taped the edges of the sheet to the floor. It stuck in some places, but Clare could see it wouldn’t hold.

  “I have to keep the dust out of the tubes,” she said.

  “Well, we used it the whole time we were living here,” Clare said. “Never got dust in the tubes then.”

  “Because I dusted it,” his mother said, but it didn’t really make sense. Nothing did.

  “That ought to keep out the dirt,” Clare said just to say something, patting the top of the radio. He thought suddenly of Aldine in the bar
n, kissing his father like that. He could hardly believe it. Even having seen it, he could hardly believe it.

  His mother nodded and looked around one more time before walking out to the porch with her mug of tape-moistening water. She was done. She was ready to go. She’d been ready for years. She set the mug down by the front door. “Come on,” she said. “I want to get going. Before this wind picks up.” But she still stood looking around.

  Neva and Charlotte watched from the car, and Charlotte was angrily mouthing, “Come on!”

  “Where’s Dad now?” Clare asked.

  “Still in the barn, I guess,” his mother said.

  He looked at the blank face of the barn as he walked and he climbed into the backseat with Charlotte. She was stiff and set and ready to go, too.

  “Look at my hat, Charlotte,” Neva said, curling herself around so that she could hold both hands to the sides of her new beret.

  “Looks familiar,” Charlotte said. She fiddled with the frayed edge of her notebook, and Clare wondered what he would learn if he stole it and read every word. The air in the car smelled like moist wool and gasoline.

  “It’s like Miss McKenna’s, dummy,” Neva said.

  Charlotte sniffed and said, “And where is the wee Scotch lass?”

  “On her way to Emporia,” Clare said. “Dad took her to the station already.”

  Their mother pulled open the car door, her wavy hair blown across her mouth for a second. Then she sat down next to Neva in the front seat and closed the door. Clare looked at the porch. The mug was still by the front door. That wasn’t normal. Nothing was.

  “She gets to be a Harvey Girl,” Neva said in her high voice. “And I don’t.”

  Charlotte sniffed again. “Huh,” she said doubtfully. “Is that why Dad isn’t here?”

  “No,” Clare said. “He’s already back. He’s in the barn doing something.”

  Charlotte’s eyes looked a little buggy, like they always did right before she told on Clare for smoking or missing school. “Well, I hope she has a loooove-ly time,” she said, her voice hard and meaningful. “Though I know she’ll miss our papa.”

  From the front seat, his mother turned to give Charlotte a rigid look. “We don’t need any more meanness this morning, Lottie.”

  Charlotte squinted her eyes a little. “Don’t call me that. And I don’t think it’s mean,” she said slowly, with particular emphasis on each word, “to point out that she was gaga for him. And—”

  His mother cut her off. “Enough,” she said. She held the heavy lampshade and stared straight out the windshield.

  The four of them breathing in the car staled the air and fogged the windows. Artemis barked from her wooden crate, pulling at the rope Charlotte had tied to the trailer. Clare thought of what he could say about the barn and his father kissing Aldine and he knew that he wouldn’t. He didn’t know what it meant. Maybe if he said nothing, it would mean nothing. He wiped at the window with a fingertip and thought suddenly of Mr. Tanner. A hardness like a peach pit formed in his stomach. “What did Dad say he was doing in the barn?” he asked.

  His mother seemed not to hear. She sat with the lampshade and turned her wedding ring around and around on her finger, which she always did when she had nothing to do but wished she had.

  Clare said, “I’ll go tell him we’re ready,” and stepped out of the car and walked steadily toward the barn, just as he had the night before, except that now he went to the wide barn door. “Dad?” he called.

  No one answered, and when Clare thrust his hand into the gap between the door and the frame, he grabbed in the wrong place, where a rusty, broken clasp poked out. He knew that it was sharp, had been told several times to remove the clasp, and now it ripped into his finger. When Clare got inside, he held his index finger between his lips and looked with dread into the half darkness, to where his father was standing. He was holding a rifle.

  “What are you doing?” Clare asked.

  “Forgot that,” his father said, nodding vaguely. A few feet away the dulcimer case sat in the packed, oily dirt. His chin was bristly and his winter coat was muddy. He looked like he hadn’t slept. Knowing the reason for that made Clare feel queasy, and a little mean.

  “We should go,” he said. “They’re all in the car.”

  “I’ll be along,” Ansel said. He continued to finger the rifle.

  “Okay,” Clare said, but he didn’t go. He felt the blood on his finger and brought it to his mouth again.

  “Cut your hand?”

  “Mmm.”

  “That clasp needed coming off.” His father said this but he did not seem to be thinking about this. He seemed to be thinking something else.

  “I kept forgetting,” he said. “It’ll be the first thing on my list when we get back.”

  His father was quiet. Then he said, “Wait for me in the car. I’ll be along.”

  “They’re all in the car and it’s cold,” he said. His father didn’t move. “Please, Dad,” he said. “Please put the gun down and come with us.”

  Ansel lifted the gun and pointed it at the rafters, where owls and other birds roosted. He raised the rifle slightly and cocked it.

  To shoot doves in the barn would be cheating. Clare knew this. His father did, too. He had stropped him for it once.

  “Please, Dad,” Clare said again.

  His father sighted and fired. One bird fell with a dull plop. The other plowed the air and circled, terrified, but it couldn’t find a way out. It returned to the same beam where it had been sitting before.

  “You have to drive, Dad,” Clare said. He walked toward his father. His feet felt heavy again, like they had last night. He held out his hand for the gun. His father didn’t speak or move. Clare wrapped his hand around the barrel, which still pointed up.

  His father didn’t move. Clare pulled on the rifle, and his father let go.

  “Okay,” Clare said. To what he was saying okay, he had no idea. “Okay.”

  His mother came to the open door of the barn with a wild look on her face. She saw that everyone was standing up, unbloodied, and she saw that Clare held the rifle. She brought her gloved hands up to her mouth, and then put them down again. “Ansel,” she said, as if starting a pleading sort of sentence, but she went no further.

  Clare walked over to the dead bird and picked it up by the legs. There was nothing to do with it. He set it back down in the soft dirt for the barn cats.

  In a coaxing way, his mother said, “Neva’s going to freeze to death in that car, Ansel.”

  Clare walked toward the door, listening for his father’s footsteps behind him. When Clare finally turned, he saw his mother wiping her nose with a handkerchief, and he saw his father step out of the barn. His father didn’t have the dulcimer, he didn’t close the door, and he didn’t look at Clare. The way he walked toward the car put Clare in mind of a stick that has fallen into a river without much current. When his father sat behind the wheel of the car, and his mother once again had the glass shade on her lap, Clare closed his car door. Neva was asleep. Charlotte’s face was set, writing something in her journal. As the car began to move she did not even look up.

  Two hours passed without a word. Familiar farms and houses and little towns gave way to unfamiliar farms and houses and towns. They passed through Garden City and had almost made Colorado when Neva awakened and said, “We forgot Krazy Kat.”

  His father looked over at his mother, who said, “We’re not going back.” A few seconds passed. Then, over his shoulder in a soothing voice, his father said, “Krazy Kat will be happier there, Nevie. It’s her home. It’s all she’s ever known.”

  PART TWO

  48

  With every mile that passed, Charlotte felt better and better. They were actually going. They were not turning back. She kept her notebook at hand and jotted little reminders of the sights. She intended to write all about her fantastic journey to Opal and Emmeline, and perhaps also to Mrs. Gilman, the English teacher who’d once said she had
a gift.

  March 1, 1933

  Dear Opal,

  Guess where I am? In a cabin camp at La Junta, Colorado! Neva keeps asking about her goldfish so if you write don’t include news of its demise. Permission granted for happily ever after story however fishy! I hope the dust hasn’t been so bad in Dorland. We went over to have dinner at the Otero Hotel this evening and my was it regal. Prices to astound. My mom said we should just go back to the cabin and heat some soup but my dad said, no, it was what she’d been wanting forever, to be in the Harvey House again and we had the cow money so we could afford it this once. I had Tournedos of Beef Marco Polo and Mom had Lamb Chops a la Nelson. The price includes dessert so I had Brandy Flip Pie. Was too delicious for words.

  Your vagabond pal,

  Char

  March 2, 1933

  Dear Emmeline,

  Boy is Colorado nice. Tell your dad he was right that this route would be the nicest. Today was all paved roads (much easier on the derriere) and we’ve been lucky with the weather. It snowed some in Pueblo but didn’t stick. I sure like Santa Fe. We found a brand new Harvey House while walking about and it sure was pretty. It’s called La Fonda and the girls wear Mexican skirts and blouses instead of the regular black and white. My mom thought it looked like fun and I was half afraid she’d indenture me. We’re staying at a cabin camp, though, not the La Fonda. Dad says we have to for Artemis. We forgot Neva’s cat and she breaks out crying ever so often over that, but it’s for the best Mom says.

  Your roving reporter, Char

  P.S. I don’t know if you heard that the Scottish Songbird went to Emporia to work at the Harvey House. Tell your dad in case he goes there on business and needs to avoid. Dad says she still expects to be paid!

  March 4, 1933

  Dear Mrs. Gilman,

  I wanted to write and thank you for all you taught me. I’m sorry I didn’t get to come to Abilene and say good-bye. My sister’s been sick and the doctor said we’d better go before the dust kills her. For her health, we are moving to California to live with my aunt and uncle and then to farm there, lemons probably, but maybe alligator pears. (Watch out for them! Ha ha.) On the way, we sure have seen some pretty country. Yesterday we drove from Santa Fe through Albuquerque to Gallup, which was a rough road. Then we crossed into Arizona and it took all day to reach Phoenix. I waved to it for you and said you sent your regards. It is as you say a very cosmopolitan city (hope I spelled that right! We’re staying in a camp cabin and there’s a Bible but no dictionary). My dad says we’ll get to California tomorrow.