[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “Which is damned little, if I remember right.”

  He’d stood, and was grinning, too, but when Gilbert extended his hand Ansel leaned back, smiling and appraising. “New mustache,” he said, softly knuckling his own upper lip, “and maybe a few new pounds”—he touched his own stomach—“down here.”

  “No!” Gilbert said. “Not an ounce! Well, maybe an ounce. But not a pound! Certainly not a pound!”

  The waitress with the 2 badge had again drawn close, as if waiting for an order, but taking everything in, too.

  Ansel glanced vaguely toward the window and remarked on the drought.

  “Drought, depression, wind, dust, death,” Gilbert said. He smiled and shook his head. “Maybe God doesn’t like us so much anymore.”

  That thought lay in front of them for a moment, and then the waitress said, “He don’t care so much about a girl’s tips, I know that.”

  Gilbert gave a small laugh and turned to Ansel. “So!” he said, changing subjects. “How is the beautiful Ellie?”

  “She’s good,” Ansel said. “She’s opened a café out in California that’s doing just fine.”

  “A café! Always the smart one, Ellie. It’s what I should do, but, no, it’s me and Fred Harvey till death do us part.”

  Ansel laughed and felt the tickle in his throat.

  “How many kids? Two?”

  “Three,” Ansel said and gave Gilbert the quickest summary. The waitress standing nearby made him feel funny talking about his family, he wasn’t sure why. “So, Gilbert, did you ever talk somebody into marrying you?”

  “Me? Nobody! Nobody thinks I’m a good bet! But I am a good bet!” He grinned at the waitress. “Tell my old friend Selmo, Glynis. Tell him that I’m a good bet!”

  The waitress gave Gilbert a thin smile. “I’d rather not fib if you don’t mind.” She had a strangely husky voice, which, along with her searching eyes, gave her an exotic aspect, as if she could tell fortunes or read palms.

  Gilbert grinned and shrugged. “Then bring my old friend Selmo some of your hot coffee, Glynis. And maybe an apple croquette.” He turned to Ansel. “Cook fried maybe a few too many and”—a wink—“we don’t want them lying around when Mrs. Gore comes in.”

  Once the waitress was gone, Gilbert said, “So, Selmo. This is unexpected. A pleasure of course, but an unexpected one.”

  Gilbert’s black eyes were curious, but unsuspicious. Ansel turned from them and regarded his own gnarled hands folded on the varnished wood countertop. “I’m going to check on the place,” he said, “but first I’m here for business.” He forced himself to look Gilbert in the eye. “Papers to sign at the bank, in front of a witness.”

  Gilbert began shaking his head. “The bankers!” he said. “I’d like to line them all up in front of a wall and shoot them!” Glynis was strolling toward them with a coffee urn and a small plate of crispy croquettes. “Tell the man, Glynis. Tell him how I would line the bankers up in front of a wall and shoot them.”

  To Ansel’s surprise, the waitress gave out with an actual laugh. “He even chose the wall,” she said.

  “Yes! I showed it to this girl so she’d know how serious I am about the bankers!” He began heaping sugar into his coffee. “So, Mr. California. Did you bring us some of your fancy avocados? I think you promised us fancy avocados.”

  “Wrong season,” he said. “Spring’s the best time for avocados.” He caught the waitress staring at him again. Maybe he looked ill. The Chinawoman on the train had herded her brood to the farthest corner of the car. But the waitress named Glynis merely said, “You’re from California, then?”

  Ansel nodded. “For now, anyway.”

  “Place called Fallbrook, right?” Gil asked.

  The girl said in a slow voice, “My old roommate used to get letters from there.”

  Ansel tried to keep his expression neutral. “From California, you mean?”

  “No, from Fallbrook.” Glynis kept her eyes fixed on him. “A Scotch girl. Name of Aldine. You wouldn’t know her, would you?”

  Ansel nodded at once, and said, “Yes, I do,” and took two sips of the boiling coffee before his throat felt wet enough for him to go on. “You a friend of Miss McKenna’s?”

  “Mmm,” Glynis said, glancing at Gil, then back at Ansel. “Really close friends.”

  Ansel looked at the girl, waiting for her to say more, but she said nothing more. The black coffee and rich croquette on an empty stomach were making him feel light-headed and queasy, but he sipped more just for something to do that wasn’t talking.

  “But you got my letter, right, Selmo?” Gilbert said, smoothing his mustache and looking both concerned and confused. “You know she’s not here anymore.”

  “I know,” Ansel said, determined to follow through. “I thought you might know where she went.” He didn’t know what to say. He wanted the waitress named Glynis either to tell him something or to go away, but she didn’t go away. “I feel—I feel responsible for her,” he said, and he knew that if his words didn’t give him away, the way he’d blurted them did. Still, this was what he’d come for. There was no going back. “She was in our house,” he said. “The school board couldn’t pay her and she had to come here. She had no money and nobody to look after her. It didn’t sit right with us.”

  Half-truths to hide a bigger truth. He felt the shame beginning to rise within him again. He looked out the enormous windows of the restaurant, hoping to see where he should go next, but the windows faced the train tracks and the loading docks, the stained gray buildings that had become even shabbier since he left twenty years before.

  Glynis said, “Is your name Selmo?”

  Ansel turned, but already Gilbert was saying, “I just call him that. From Anselmo.” He set a knuckled hand to Ansel’s shoulder. “His name if he’d been luckier with his place of birth.”

  “Anselmo?” Glynis said.

  “Ansel,” Gilbert said. “That’s his sorry gringo name.”

  Now the girl’s eyes were drilling into him. “Ansel,” she said. “Your name is Ansel?”

  “Yes,” Ansel said, not sure what he was admitting to, or how Aldine would have presented him to a friend. “Where is Miss McKenna now? Where did she go?”

  Glynis seemed to be considering her words. “I’m not sure,” she said, “but one time before she stopped working here, a man came in and talked to her. He seemed to know some of her family. She was really nervous around him so I asked Aldine about him after he left. He was a Mormon missionary who knew her family. So, you know, when she left, I asked if she was going to live with her family.”

  “And?” Ansel asked. Things like this worked out all right sometimes, with the baby passing as the child of the married relative. It might’ve been the safest thing to do.

  Glynis had been gazing out at the large empty room, but turned now to Ansel. Her eyes were indifferent and cold. “She said she’d rather die,” she said.

  Ansel felt a kind of agitation rising. “So where is she then?”

  He thought he saw a kind of defiance come into her face. “I don’t know,” she said.

  A lie. Ansel was sure this was a lie. He glanced at the clock on the wall and pushed away his coffee cup. “I’m going to have to get to the bank,” he said. He smiled at Gilbert. “How much are you charging for coffee and a croquette these days?”

  “Nada,” Gilbert said. “But maybe something more to eat, Selmo? You need your strength to deal with these insolente bankers.”

  Ansel was already standing. “How about a rain check?” he said. “I’ll eat better when I’ve finished my business.”

  Glynis leaned on her hands and said, “It’s nice to put a face with a name.”

  79

  Out of sight of the Harvey House, Ansel walked past the bronze doorplate of the Emporia Savings & Loan, smudged by many hands, and then went next door to a grocery, where he bought sardines and bread. He walked south in the cold air until the houses and sidewalks stopped, and he stood facing a
large new park planted with stubbly brown grass and young cottonwood trees, in the center of which a pond threw brightness back at the winter sky. Peter Pan Park said the carved plaques in each of the two pillars, which were made of stone in a style that suggested a child’s idea of a castle. The park had not been there when he lived in Emporia, and he was surprised to see groups of shabbily dressed men loosely gathered near a stone boathouse. Ansel walked to the far side of the pond and ate his sardines standing up under a rattling maple.

  He looked west, beyond the pale water. A few hundred miles in that direction his house stood unoccupied, his fields abandoned. He wanted to go there, see how things looked. He wanted to find Aldine, and take her with him. He had to talk to Glynis again, but away from Gil, who had driven all the way to Ellie’s father’s house to attend their wedding.

  He rolled the uneaten portion of the bread into its paper bag and walked back toward the Harvey House, past groups of bundled-up people hurrying past him in clouds of their own chilled breath. They were leaving offices and shops, he supposed, and the cold reddened their faces and turned them inward. Few looked at him, and those who did gave him only the quickest glance before again looking away.

  Near the platform, within the covered archway, Ansel leaned against the cold stone wall and waited for Glynis to come out, or for the train to come, or for a better idea to present itself, whichever, he thought, came first. The architects who’d added the covered archway had only made a cold place colder. He was miserable, his fingers and toes registering what it was like to be on the plains with winter coming on. The wind bit at his ears. He began to cough his deep raking cough. From the nearby shadows something large was suddenly moving—a man who had been crouching there, still and unseen by Ansel, silently rose and moved away.

  Minutes passed, perhaps a half hour. Numbness crept over him; even when he coughed, he didn’t feel the customary pain in his ribs. Finally the door of the restaurant flashed gold in the wintry sun, and Glynis came out, her head wrapped in a bright green scarf and her chin snugged down inside the collar of a dark coat. She was alone.

  The moment he stepped from the shadows, Glynis saw him. He raised his chin in greeting and she nodded, a letter in her gloved hand. She didn’t seem surprised to see him.

  “Thought you were going to come back and eat,” she said.

  “There might not be time,” he said. “But I wanted to ask if you know anything else about where Aldine is.”

  She looked not so much at him as into him. Her brown eyes narrowed and her thin, finely shaped eyebrows drew together. “Are you still married?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But—”

  She cut him off to say, “And you think you’re in love with Aldine?”

  To Ansel, this sounded less like a question than an accusation. What this girl—what was her name?—seemed to mean by love was something sneaky and side-doorish and vulgar.

  “No,” he said, “not the way you mean it. It was more like . . .” Like what? A father? A brother? But it wasn’t like that, either. “It was . . . more like my heart went out to her,” he said.

  The girl’s cold eyes settled on him. “You felt sorry for her, you’re saying, and then you had your way with her?”

  “No,” he said, “that wasn’t how it was—”

  But the girl was done talking. Her worst expectations had been met. Her face had again gone bland. “I need to get to the post office before it closes,” she said.

  He walked in the direction she walked, his open mouth pulling the biting-cold air into his lungs. He stopped to cough, then had to trot to catch up.

  “Do you have pneumonia or something?” she said over her shoulder.

  “Just a bad cold.” He gulped air. “I’ll be fine.”

  The girl said nothing, but she did slacken her pace. Still, he had a hard time keeping up.

  They stepped off the street and his foot broke through a brittle skin of ice into a shallow puddle of frigid water. “I just wanted to know how she is,” he said.

  She kept walking steadily forward. “Yours weren’t the only letters, you know. They came from both of you. But I could tell by the way she treated your letters that you were the one she loved, not the boy.” She glanced at him. “Clare, right?”

  He nodded, and she seemed pleased by her own abilities of recall. “I remembered it because it’s a funny name for a boy. It’s a nice enough girl’s name but I’d never give it to a boy.”

  The sky was pink as she pushed on the door of the post office. It was a surprise that Clare had written her letters, and yet it was not, but he couldn’t think of that now. He needed to say the words that would allow this girl to trust him. She walked ahead of him into the big tiled room and stood behind two others waiting in line. It surprised him to remember the post office so well: the black-and-white pattern of the tiles on the floor, cracked near the counter where something heavy had fallen once, the brass edges of the counter deeply buried in the wood, like fingernails in flesh. The door behind them opened and another patron joined the small line, nobody speaking. When it was Glynis’s turn, she pushed a letter across the varnished oak counter. There was something almost fierce in the gesture, and he looked down to see the words McKenna and Salt Lake City, Utah. The postman touched a stamp to a wet sponge, pressed it crookedly down, and then canceled it, saying, “That’ll be two cents, miss.”

  Glynis pushed the two cents across the counter and the letter was gone.

  When they had gone out into the cold blue twilight, he said, “I thought she told you she’d rather die.”

  “People say that,” Glynis said. “But they wouldn’t.”

  “So she’s gone to her sister’s,” he said, full of despair instead of the relief he expected—after all, her sister would take care of her. But that wasn’t what he truly wanted. He wanted her to be with him.

  Glynis kept walking, and Ansel kept walking with her. “The other letters,” she said after a time, “the ones from Clare, she left in a drawer. Yours she put in a little box. I used to hear her crying when she read them, especially as it got plain, you know, what had happened to her.” Glynis shrugged her black woolen shoulders and touched her red nose with an embroidered handkerchief.

  “Please give me her address,” he said. “I do love her. In the purest way. I want to find her and make it right.”

  She stopped under a streetlight and studied him again. He was aware, this time, of her smallness beside him. She was looking up at his face, and he was looking down into her determined eyes. A car went past them, popping through ice that had glassed a pothole. She came to some conclusion but said only, “Well.” She removed a stubby pencil from her bag and then a scrap of paper, which she held against the brick wall of the post office as she wrote an address for him.

  80

  Mrs. Odekirk always went to bed early, but on that Tuesday night Aldine was sewing a crooked yellow blanket stitch along the edge of a cream-colored flannelette baby jacket and wondering if she could sneak a tarry. She felt as heavy as a turtle and dragged herself like one. Her swollen feet even looked like fat old turtle feet. She dreamed some nights that she had fallen over the rail of an ocean liner and was plunging through pale green freezing water, her belly a cannonball. She was prone to little nightmares even when she sat working on the tiny frocks Mrs. Odekirk had set her to making. She’d be sewing, and then she’d be dreaming, and that’s why Glynis’s soft knocking seemed at first like a subterranean noise. But when she hoisted her turtle body and scuttled to the window, there was a person on the back step, and that person was Glynis, her breath coldly visible as she turned her face toward Aldine.

  “I saw him,” Glynis said and walked right in, taking Aldine’s wing chair even though the pincushion was right there on the footstool. Glynis had crocheted a pair of booties for the baby last month, and before that, a yellow bib.

  Aldine lowered herself onto the stiff velvet love seat and pointed at Mrs. Odekirk’s closed bedroom door. “Asleep,” she whispe
red.

  Aldine liked Mrs. Odekirk, and had visited her several times before Mrs. Gore fired her. When she was turned out of her quarters, she’d come here, and Mrs. Odekirk, without asking any questions, had offered her a room.

  “I saw him,” Glynis repeated in a whisper that was almost a hiss.

  “You saw who?” Aldine assumed it was some man Glynis didn’t like. The giver of the randy postcards came to mind.

  “Ansel,” Glynis said.

  “Here? You saw Ansel here?”

  “This afternoon. He came to look for you at the Harvey House.”

  The words pulled her like river water. “Where is he now?” she asked, holding herself fast against the love seat.

  “He’s gone. He went off.”

  “Went off where?”

  Glynis let her gaze slide away. “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “What did you do, Glynis?”

  “He wanted to know where you were,” she said, her words trailing off. Her air of dramatic regret made Aldine want to shake her.

  “Didn’t you tell him that I’m here?”

  Glynis shook her head. She touched a snag on her skirt with the green finger of her gloved hand.

  “Why not?” Aldine stood up and as she did so reflexively touched her belly.

  “I don’t know. I thought you’d be better off. But then later he did seem to care so much that I felt maybe I’d done wrong and that’s why I’m here now.”

  “What did you tell him? You’re not making any sense!”

  “I wrote to your sister,” Glynis said, looking up tearfully. “I knew you wouldn’t do it, that you were too ashamed, but I know how it feels to be looking for someone. I thought she should have the chance to help you. After Ansel came to the restaurant and I told him I didn’t know where you were, I decided to write to your sister. Then he—Ansel—found me on my way to the post office, but that was when I was still thinking he should just let you be.”