by Laura McNeal
The girl acknowledges that it is.
“Forty-eight or forty-nine?”
“Forty-eight.”
“It’s got that fluid drive,” Clare says, and the girl cracks a smile and says, “That’s right. Fluid drive.”
She’s even prettier when she smiles, and even more familiar. “That a friend waiting for you there in the car?”
“My mother,” the girl says. “She likes to ride along, but she doesn’t like to come in.”
Geneva asks if she’d like to take her out a Coke or a glass of iced water, but the girl says no.
“And photographs,” the girl says, as if just remembering. “If you have any photographs of you and your parents . . .”
“Sure we do,” Geneva says. “We have an album. You can’t take them with you, but you can look at them. Our sister, Charlotte, took lots of pictures.”
“Is she nearby?” the girl asks. “Maybe I could interview her, too?”
Clare and his sister exchange grins. “You might,” Geneva says, “but Charlotte moved to La Jolla and keeps a pretty full dance card.”
Clare says, “If you do go see her, we’ll send along a picture so she’ll remember what we look like.”
This strikes the girl as funny, or maybe she just needs the relief of a laugh. A pleasant laugh, though. One he bets her husband likes.
She asks how she could see the album, and Geneva, peaches and cream, says it’s right upstairs. Would Clare mind running up and getting it?
He slides from his stool. It’s funny how mindful of his walk he suddenly is, crossing the linoleum floor. Everyone in town is used to the way his right leg swings out in a little arc, so he rarely gives it a thought, but now he feels the girl’s eyes on him, taking it in. Top-heavy. Once, when they were out with another couple, a girlfriend in a laughing voice had called him top-heavy and then when she’d seen his fallen look, she added, “You know that’s a compliment, don’t you?” but he knew it wasn’t. Stubby legs, one of them bad, and then the shoulders that compensated, the torso he was careful and some would say vain about. He’s glad to go through the back door, close it behind him, and mount the stairs.
Clare finds the old leather album where it always is, in Geneva’s living room on top of the TV console, and he carries it back down the staircase.
What happens next is disorienting. The girl has seated herself at the counter, and when Clare draws close and lays the album in front of her, he takes in a scent that makes him feel almost dizzy. It isn’t perfume or shampoo, he’s sure of that. It’s the smell of her hair or skin. He leans back on the nearest stool to steady himself. He stares at her, but she seems not to notice. She sits perfectly still, staring down at the album, at the green coarse-grained leather cover, edged in gold, the word Photographs embossed diagonally above a silhouette of an Indian paddling a birch-skin canoe.
Geneva has marked all the photographs in her delicate hand. The home place. Favorite layer Goosey. Our old tree house. Mom (Eleanor Hoffman Price) at Fair. Geneva & Clare, Spelling Bee. Ferris Wheel, Hutchinson. The girl turns through these, and then, at the next page, she stiffens, and slowly leans forward. Dad (Ansel Price) on the home place. Dad at packing plant. Dad when he was a cook at the Harvey House. The largest photograph is of his father laughing about something in front of a pen of pigs. A man & his pigs, Geneva has written. The girl leans closer still and—this gives Clare a turn—runs her finger slowly around his father’s face. It’s like a blind person reading braille.
Clare touches the girl’s arm and she jerks her hand away from the photograph. She looks at Clare, and her eyes are moist. She says, “I’m sorry. I’d better go.”
“Who are you?” Clare whispers and when the girl starts to give the name she’d given before, he stops her and says, “No, who are you really?” and even before he’s finished the question, he knows its answer. He gets up and walks out the door of the café and crosses the street to the green DeSoto parked in the shade of the palm with the woman waiting inside. He doesn’t care how he walks. He doesn’t care how he looks. He needs to hear the woman speak.
She watches him pass in front of the car but she doesn’t turn to him when he comes to the door window.
“Hello?” he says to her.
For a moment she continues staring forward; then she turns her face to his. “Hello, Clarence.”
He hears it as he’d always heard it. Clay-dance.
Later she would tell him that the first thing she thought was, What a dead handsome man our Clare has become.
He opens the door. He puts out his hand. When he feels her touch, it seems to go a long way into him and a long way back. Seizeth. Breatheth. He doesn’t think these words exactly. He doesn’t hear them. They have come as images, as he has seen them written. He opens his eyes. “Come inside,” he says. “Neva will want to see you. You should come inside.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am humbly in debt to the following people: my husband, Tom, whose loyalty, encouragement, and love have given me everything I have ever wanted, including the time and means to write this book. The friends who had unwavering faith in this story, including Janet Reich Elsbach, Sorayya Khan, Lily King, and Jane Morris. My undaunted agent, Emily Forland, my insightful editor, Carmen Johnson, and my compassionately ruthless copyeditor, Rebecca Jaynes.
I could not have imagined these places or characters without the Fallbrook Historical Society; the Kansas Historical Society; Linda and Mike Kesselring of the High Plains Homestead near Crawford, Nebraska; my mother-in-law Barbara Hall McNeal Myers; and those who have kept Harvey Houses alive (or brought them back to life) throughout the western United States. Many texts provided historical details and inspiration, including the Texas State Journal of Medicine, Annals of Surgery; and the Indianapolis Medical Journal, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis by Thomas Dormandy; In the Shadow of the White Plague by Elizabeth Mooney; The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald; Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History by Sheila M. Rothman; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel; Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 by Leslie Woodcock Tentler; The Harvey Girls by Lesley Poling-Kempes; The Harvey House Cookbook by George H. Foster and Peter C. Weiglin; Model Ts, Pep Chapels, and a Wolf at the Door: Kansas Teenagers, 1900–1941, edited by Marilyn Irvin Holt; Farming the Dust Bowl: A First-Hand Account from Kansas by Lawrence Svobida; and Spatzies and Brass BBs: Life in a One-Room Country School by Dr. Ken Ohm.
Lastly, I would like to remember the late Doris and Jack Reeder, who paid my rent every month in graduate school; my mother and my late father, who paid for my education and loved me uncritically; and the many Mormons who, like them, protected and inspired me with their faith when I was growing up.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © Kel Casey
Laura Rhoton McNeal holds an MA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and is the author, with her husband, Tom, of four critically acclaimed young adult novels, including Crooked (winner of the California Book Award in Juvenile Literature) and Zipped (winner of the Pen Center USA Literary Award in Children’s and Young Adult Literature). Laura’s solo debut novel, Dark Water, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives with her family in Coronado, California.
