[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “I’d go with you,” Clare said on one such occasion and his father had glanced at him with soft eyes.

  Clare trudged to the bin, drained his bagged oranges into it, and headed back up the row. He had just begun to set his ladder at the next tree when he smelled something wonderful in the air. Corn roasting, he decided. A Kansas smell. He left the ladder and followed the smell. He heard footsteps behind him—his father was coming, too. Just beyond the windbreak of eucalyptus, a line of smoke rose and curled. In the shadows a rough hut had been assembled from discarded wood and tin, and a girl sat tending the fire with a baby in her arms. She wore a blanket over her shoulders in spite of the heat. The smoke and the crackling of the fire must have masked Clare’s approach, but when a long piece of tree bark snapped underfoot, the girl’s head jerked around, and for one fleeting instant he thought that this was an animal wrapped in a shawl; that’s how alarmed and darting and feral her eyes were.

  She stood to face them. The end of the long stick she held in her hand was blackened and smoking slightly. In her other arm, she held the wrapped baby. “Who’re you?” she hissed. Whatever his advantages in size and strength might be, they were lost to her ferocity.

  Clare nodded toward his father and the orange trees behind them. “We’re picking the grove, ma’am, is all. Me and my dad. And I just smelled the good smell from your fire.” He smiled in hopes of disarming the girl, but her expression was unchanged.

  “What’s your name?” she demanded.

  “Clare Price,” he said and thought some kind of recognition flickered in her eyes.

  “And that’s your father there with you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She seemed to be making some kind of calculation.

  Clare said, “I’ve got an extra ham-and-butter sandwich if you like that kind.”

  The girl ignored the question. She kept the baby in one arm and the smoking stick in the other hand and then, as if having made some kind of decision, she stepped toward him in a way that made him want to move back. He didn’t, though. He stood fast.

  “You want to hold my baby?” she said.

  He did not want to hold her baby, but he thought it would be impolite to decline. “I’m not sure I know how,” he said.

  “It’s easy,” she said. “You can’t hurt him.” She tossed the smoking, charred stick back toward the fire and taking another step forward, she presented the baby.

  It was swaddled in a dirty blanket and he could not bring himself to take it, but he didn’t have to. His father abruptly stepped forward. “I’ve held a few infants,” he said, and then, taking the baby and peeling away the blanket, he said, “What is its name?”

  “It’s Caleb,” the girl said, watching his father’s face. The girl’s eyes were bright. “Caleb Junior,” she added. “After his father.”

  Only later would Clare make sense of her words. At the moment he barely heard them. He was staring in shock at the baby in his father’s arms. It was wooden and bluish and unmoving. When he then looked up at the stricken set of his father’s face, he knew he was right, that the baby his father was holding was not alive. His father pushed it back into the girl’s hands and, stepping away, almost fell. Then Clare turned and began to run. Not just him. Even his father. Behind them, the girl’s calls and laughter did not seem human.

  64

  Hurd said, when Ansel described the whole horrible encounter in the grove, that the Teagarten girl had given birth to a stillborn baby at home, which could happen to anyone, but the rest of it you could lay at Caleb’s door.

  They didn’t say more about it because there wasn’t much else to say, and later Ansel took two sheets of onionskin paper from the desk near the time clock, folded them in threes, and slipped them inside his shirt. He meant to write his old friend Gil to find out about Aldine but as he walked, he thought, too, about one more letter to Aldine.

  At the post office counter Ansel asked Bart Crandall for a stamp and envelope.

  “Air mail or regular?” Bart Crandall asked in a neutral voice as if it made no difference to him, but it did. One meant This is routine and the other meant it was not. But Ansel didn’t care.

  “Air mail,” he said, and took the stamp and envelope to a far counter. He unfolded the onionskin paper—it was spotted slightly with sweat. He took out his pencil but just held it. He could feel Bart Crandall’s eyes on him from behind, but he didn’t care. He stared out toward the street. The last time he’d composed from a post office, it was in Dorland and he had written the advertisement that Aldine had happened upon in New York City and used to make her escape, and now look what he’d done with her. He, Ansel Price, who had thought himself an honorable man.

  For one long tantalizing moment, he thought he might think of what to say to her, but he could not. He addressed the envelope to Gilbert Dorado, of the Harvey House, Emporia, Kansas. Then he wrote:

  Dear Gil,

  Just checking on the new girl we brought you. Not much news about Kansas in the California papers. Everything all right there with Miss McKenna? Still got work for everyone? Plenty of avocados growing around here so let me know if Fred Harvey needs a case.

  Your old amigo, Ansel

  He sealed the envelope, licked the stamp, and rolled the heel of his hand over it to secure it. Then he dropped it through the brass mail slot marked Air Mail. Even before he reached the door he heard the scrape of Bart Crandall’s stool on the wooden floor, and Ansel didn’t have to see it to see it: Bart Crandall going over to the canvas bag that stood open under the air mail slot, stooping over, peering in, taking out the letter to see where it was off to.

  65

  Charlotte didn’t know what to do about marrying Mr. McNamara, so one day when she was alone in the Practice House, she tore out a page from a composition book and drew two columns. At the top of one she wrote, Plus; at the top of the other, Minus.

  In the Minus column she wrote, Leaving everybody, though truthfully when she thought of leaving her parents and Neva and Clare, it didn’t seem so bad, really, and Closing Other Doors, by which she meant all the other lives that would never be hers, not if she married Mr. McNamara.

  His Christian name was James but she’d never called him that, and he’d never asked her to. So she kept calling him Mr. McNamara until it just seemed normal to turn Mister into a nickname. “I’d like to nibble your ear off,” he might say, for example, and she would say, “I happen to need that ear, Mister.” Or he might say, “I’d like to undo this particular button right here,” and she would say, “Not tonight, Mister.” Once when they were at a diner and he needed cheering up, she leaned forward to take his hand and say, “You’re my funny, sweet Mister, aren’t you?” and he said yes, and that he was glad he was.

  In the Plus column she wrote Car (she loved riding in the Packard and she loved the way people looked at you even when they were trying not to) and Goddess-ness (the first time she went riding with him he said he wanted to treat her like a goddess and from then on, he pretty much had) and House (he would build her one on a knoll at the top of an avocado grove) and Job (because the last thing she wanted to do was stay home cleaning that house) and Resolution (because, well, you got married and that would be that).

  She knew she’d left out two important things but she didn’t know where to put them. Finally she made a new column and wrote Irrelevant at the top and below it, in place of Love and Sex, she wrote X & X.

  She laid down her pencil then and looked for a long time at the page and its three columns. She did not mind that she would not be seeing him that night. He had driven to Los Angeles and wouldn’t be back until Thursday. She never knew quite what he did on these excursions. It didn’t matter whether he was going to Los Angeles or San Francisco or, as he did once, Mesa, Arizona, he merely said that he was going to go “look into something.” She liked that he went away like that; it made him mysterious, and it gave her a little breathing room. She took up her pencil and wrote that as a last addition to the Pl
us column: Breathing Room.

  66

  There was a hummingbird that kept mistaking Ida’s blue bottles for flowers. Ansel had come to know the hummingbird by the motorized whir of his wings and his sudden precipitous dives. The bird pierced lavender stalks with his hypodermic beak, his throat a flashy crimson, the luminescent green of his back almost reptilian, his aim greedy and precise. He drank and then he whirred away, returning at least once to hover in confusion above a bright, impenetrable vial of blue glass.

  Ansel liked being out here, beyond the reach of Ida’s voice, and Ellie’s, too. He could still hear them talking, but he couldn’t make out the words, which was fine by him. Usually Ellie stayed inside once they’d finished the dishes, playing cards or listening to the radio, but tonight he heard the back door squeak and footsteps heading his way.

  “I heard you coughing clear from the kitchen,” she said.

  There was no chair near him, so he stood up and stepped on the stub of his cigarette, waving his hand toward the chair to offer it to her, but she shook her head.

  “You’ve had a long day,” she said. “Sit and rest.”

  “I thought I might sleep outside tonight,” he said. “Because of the coughing. I know it wakes you and the kids. Probably Ida and Hurd, too.”

  “Ida says you ought to go see the doctor.”

  “It’ll pass,” he said. “Colds always do.” The hummingbird had left when Ellie walked up. Now dozens of crows were flying above the low, dusky hills, calling to one another, gliding down into the tallest of a knot of oaks.

  Ansel felt the quick tightening of his chest and then the thickness gathering there like some horrible phlegmy stew bubbling, beginning to boil, and then all at once he was bent over in a convulsion of thick, raking, bilious coughs that finally subsided. Sitting back down in his chair felt like a concession, but there was no getting around it. He inhaled and daubed the tears in his eyes. “See?” he said in a hoarse, broken voice, forcing a smile. “Better to sleep out here until it does.”

  Ellie looked away from him and snapped off a stalk of lavender and ground the blossom between her fingers to release its aroma. She was always picking plants and shredding them, as if that was the way she figured out what they were. In Emporia, on one of their first walks, she kept leaning down to pick dandelions, running the palm of her hand over the fluff instead of setting it free with her breath.

  She said, “I think we should move, Ansel.”

  He turned to her. “Back?”

  She didn’t look at him. “No. To town. Mr. McNamara has offered to rent us the hotel on Main Street, and I think we could open the café together, you and I. Everything’s there already—the equipment, the tables, the pots and pans. We can start over, in our own place, and it’ll be like the Harvey House.”

  It would never be like that for him, and that wasn’t the time he wanted to go back to, anyway.

  “Ansel?”

  “I can’t, Ellie. I came out here for Neva, but this place isn’t ours. It isn’t mine, anyway. It’ll never be home.” Her face stiffened even before he finished.

  “I’ve signed a lease,” she said.

  “What kind of a lease?”

  “I’ve rented the whole thing—the restaurant, the rooms upstairs, everything.”

  “With what?”

  “I’ve been saving,” she said.

  He understood. He was sure he understood. “And writing to your father.”

  But she said evenly, “My father has no hand in it, Ansel. Mr. McNamara is putting up the seed money and he’s given us terms that are more than fair.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He thinks we’re the kind of family that can make the town better,” she said. “And he thinks the town needs a café.”

  To this Ansel gave his head a bitter shake and she said, “He speaks well of you, you know. How you’re willing to go out with the picking crews at your age to help your family.” She paused and then seemed to have some trouble saying the next part. “He calls you a good example.”

  Ansel didn’t know what the saddest moment in his marriage was, but that might have been it.

  “I’m sorry, El,” he said.

  It was quiet and he listened to the sounds of the oncoming night. The crickets were starting. The coyotes would be out soon, working together, screaming in chorus as they converged on a rabbit or cat. He took a breath and didn’t feel the catch of a cough. He could say more if he knew what to say and how to say it, but he didn’t, so he turned and started for the tree house, where he thought there might be a blanket.

  “Good night, Ansel,” she said after him, and without slowing or turning around he said, “Good night, Ellie.”

  67

  Neva didn’t really like polishing and cleaning, but she liked the busyness of it all, her mother telling Charlotte and Clare what to do, and the trash going out into the alley and new things coming in the front door. She’d helped with the cleaning, but she’d gotten tired of it and pretended to be wheezy from it so she sat in front of the hotel on a little stool with Milly Mandy Molly and read a book, and if anyone walked by, she gave them one of the little cards that Mr. McNamara had made up. She loved the little cards. They said, Sleeping Indian Café at the top, and then:

  Home-Style Food

  Breakfast, Lunch, and Supper Specials

  Ellie & Ansel Price, Proprietors

  When people asked when they would be open, Neva had been instructed to say, “Soon! Keep watching for progress!”

  More than once she’d heard herself compared to Shirley Temple.

  Sometimes if she got tired of handing out cards, she’d go inside and climb the stairs and look out the window of the room that was going to be hers and Charlotte’s. It wasn’t the best room—Clare’s was the best, because it was right by the outside stairs and you could see the Sleeping Indian from one of his windows—but her and Charlotte’s room had a mirror on the closet door that was as tall as Charlotte. When they first saw the rooms, they were full of trash and things like dirty cups and empty bottles and soiled rags that made you think it was where the Murderous Hordes had stayed when they were passing through. But today her mother and father and Ida and Hurd and Clare and Charlotte and even Mr. McNamara came with barrels and shovels and brooms and cleaned everything out. Her father worked all morning and into the afternoon, but his coughing got worse and her mother made him go home. Mr. McNamara had perfect round beads of sweat popping up all over his bald head no matter how often he wiped it with his handkerchief but he and Clare were doing the hardest work and she was surprised how Mr. McNamara was always smiling and winking all day long, even after his shirt was wet and dirty and one side of it hanging out of his pants. “That was fun,” he announced at the end of the day when all the rooms were finally spic-and-span, and then winking at Uncle Hurd, he said, “We menfolk may have to go quench our thirst,” and off they went. Clare took Neva and went back to see if his father was feeling better. He was. He started to walk back to town to keep helping but they told him it was all done now.

  From the window of her and Charlotte’s room, you could see Main Street down below and a line of fat palm trees across the street. The window faced east. Her father told her that. “Know how I know?” he’d said with fun in his voice, so she said, “No. How?” And he said, “Well, if I squint and look out that particular window, I can see Kansas.”

  That was a funny idea so she’d asked what exactly he could see in Kansas and he said, “Everything,” so she asked if he could see Dorland and their house and their barn and Krazy Kat sleeping in the hayloft and he said yes to every one.

  68

  One afternoon after the westbound for Albuquerque had pulled from the station and the coffee urn had been cleaned and polished and the tablecloths were all smoothed and set for the next incoming train, Glynis approached from across the vast room. Aldine, refilling salt and pepper cellars, saw her coming and noticed at once the stiffness of her face. She was afraid someone
in her family had died or fallen gravely ill, so she set everything down and met her in the middle of the room with the idea of offering consolation.

  “What’s happened then, Glynny?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” Truly, she was on the verge of tears. “It’s Mrs. Gore. She thinks you’re pregnant, but I told her you weren’t.” Her glistening eyes fell on Aldine’s. “You’re not, are you?”

  Aldine took a quick breath, composing a lie, but she couldn’t do it. She let her eyes fall.

  For a few moments there was nothing but the sound of the clinking and tinkling of the other waitresses going about their work. Then Glynis said, “Well, she says she wants to see you.”

  69

  School, as Clare experienced it in Fallbrook, was nothing like school in Kansas. The high school was a big handsome building the color of sand, a line of palm trees in front of it, straight and stately and foreign. There was, to begin with, the strangeness of seeing his sister coming out of the faculty room or the Practice House as a teacher while he was still a student. Queen of the Practice House, he’d heard someone call her, and The Big Cheese of Spic-and-Span. (She laughed when he related this, but he knew she was pretending.) The bigger surprise was how he took to the schoolwork, especially the algebra and the chemistry. At the country school, he’d always been the one helping the younger ones in math and science, but no one had remarked particularly on his capabilities. Now he was sitting with kids his own age, and he was doing very well.