Juliet in August

by Dianne Warren

  Hank’s stomach growls and he checks the time once again. The early-morning regulars will be arriving at the Oasis for breakfast just about now. Lynn will be there, baking the pies she’s become famous for, serving breakfast, keeping her sharp eye on the time so she can start phoning if whatever high school girl she’s got working for her today doesn’t show up when she’s supposed to. Lynn has turned out to be a shrewd and successful businesswoman. When she bought the restaurant six years ago, Hank wasn’t convinced it was a good idea, but he’s convinced now. He’s had to do without his best hand thanks to Lynn’s entrepreneurial success, but he gets by with the help of neighbors like young Lee Torgeson, and when he has to, he hires a local kid to drive a tractor for him.

  Just as Hank is about to get in his truck and hit the road, he sees a red-haired woman in bright pink pajama bottoms, an oversized T-shirt, and bright green running shoes, walking into the campground along the access road. He watches her with interest as she approaches, wondering where in the world she might have come from. As she gets closer he sees that she is not young—approaching sixty if she’s a day—and the red hair is definitely a bottle job.

  “Morning,” Hank says when she gets close enough to hear.

  She stops and looks down at her pajama bottoms.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I haven’t escaped from anywhere.” She walks over to Hank’s truck and asks, “You haven’t by any chance seen a gray Arab horse?”

  “Ah,” Hank says, looking over at the trailer with its open door.

  “Yeah,” she says. “He’s done a runner. I guess I forgot to latch the door. Idiot. Me I mean, not the horse.”

  “I haven’t seen a horse,” says Hank. “It was dark when I pulled in, so I can’t say whether there was one about then or not.”

  “He shows up pretty good in the moonlight.”

  Hank shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says. “Where’re you from?” He’s already noted the Manitoba plates on her rig.

  “I’m not really from anywhere at the moment. Kind of between places. Damn it anyway. Should have pitched my tent closer, but I wanted to get some sleep. He bangs around in there like a bull in a pipe factory. Well, I guess I’ll talk to the locals. I can’t think what else to do.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Hank says. “You could put in a call to the Mounties. And there’s a restaurant up the road a ways. The Oasis. Maybe tack a notice on the billboard.”

  “Damn it all to hell,” she says.

  “Arab horse, you say. You know we’ve got the sand hills to the west. Maybe he’ll head thataway, do some hobnobbing with the camels there.” When she doesn’t respond, Hank says, “More likely he’ll stick to where the grass is good.”

  He can tell she’s not really listening to him. She’s staring at the trailer, her mind on her problem, thinking about her horse making tracks and how much trouble this day is going to be.

  “That horse has been nothing but a bother,” she says. Then she points to the Coleman stove sitting on the picnic table by her tent. She asks Hank if he wants some coffee. She can make coffee in a hurry, she says.

  He should get home, but a fresh coffee would really hit the spot. “I’ll take you up on that,” he says.

  They walk across the campground, and Hank settles himself at her picnic table while she scoops coffee into the basket of a stainless steel percolator and fills the pot with water from a plastic jug. He can see from here that the crew cab of her truck is filled with household items (he can make out a lampshade) and the box is loaded with suitcases, plastic storage bins, a bicycle, and what could be a La-Z-Boy recliner wrapped in plastic. She’s obviously not just out on a weekend horse camping trip.

  “So where’re you off to?” he asks casually.

  “I’m supposed to be moving to Peace River. Ever been there?”

  “Nope,” Hank says.

  “Neither have I. My daughter lives there. She took her father’s side in the divorce, decided she hated me, and went to live with him. No contact at all. This was years ago. Then out of the blue she calls me and suggests we meet for the weekend in Edmonton, and now here I am, moving to Peace River. Funny how your life can change, just like that. Not sure how it will work out, but we’ll see. She’s got two kids I didn’t know about. Both boys, just a year apart. My grandchildren. Hard to believe.”

  “That’s quite a story,” Hank says.

  “Yeah. Just hope it works out. Nothing to lose, I guess. Other than the damned horse. I’ve got pictures.” She goes to her tent and comes back with an envelope containing school pictures. Two smiling boys with missing front teeth.

  “Good-looking little rascals,” Hank says.

  She nods and returns the pictures to the envelope.

  Hank finds himself scanning the horizon. It’s possible the horse is close by, but more than likely he’s spooked himself with his freedom and gone for a good run. Hank hopes he hasn’t run into wire, or found a pile of grain in a field.

  “The horse is going to Peace River with you?” he asks.

  “Presumably,” the woman says, “although it’s all a bit of folly on my part. My daughter lives on a farm up there at Peace River, one of those hippie farms. I asked her if her kids had a pony—all kids want a pony, right?—and she said no, they don’t have any animals except a budgie. She’s a single parent, not much disposable income. So I’m on the highway passing the auction mart a few weeks ago and I see a sign that says ‘Horse Auction.’ So I stop, just to look. Just to see how much ponies cost. And there’s a guy there buying up a whole bunch of horses, and the man next to me tells me the guy’s a meat buyer. The horse in the sale ring at the time was this pretty gray horse that had such a gentle look to it and the meat buyer started to bid and I couldn’t stand it. Up went my hand. So that’s it. I bought my grandkids a pony. Only I have no idea if he’s a kids’ horse. I’ve never ridden a horse in my life.”

  The coffee is percolating away on the Coleman and Hank thinks the woman is lucky she hasn’t been hurt, hauling a horse around with no experience at all. And the daughter is likely not going to be all that happy when her mother shows up with a trailer full of horse trouble, not to mention a money pit, and once the kids see the horse it’s going to be hard to say no, but Hank keeps quiet, none of his business.

  “My status as a mother is still pretty tentative. You go a little crazy when you get a call from the daughter you thought was gone from your life forever. And grandchildren . . . well, whoever would have guessed?” She pauses, then says, “She needs help with the kids. She wouldn’t have called me if she didn’t need help.”

  The coffee is ready and she pours Hank a cup and hands him a tin of milk. “Hope you don’t take sugar,” she says. She gets a tray of doughnuts from her cooler, but Hank turns them down. He knows Lynn will have something for him, and he should really drink up and be on his way. He takes a gulp of the coffee and burns his throat.

  “Have you got kids?” she asks.

  Hank nods. “Two daughters. Grown up and gone to the city. No grandkids. Working on their careers, I suppose.”

  “So you think I should get in touch with the police about this horse, do you?”

  “That’s what I’d do,” Hank says. “And talk to the locals, like you said. That can’t hurt.”

  At that moment, the girl from the pup tent crawls out, pulling her jeans up over her tanned legs. The boy’s hand reaches out and grabs her by the ankle, and she shrieks and dances away. Hank turns his head, embarrassed. “Oh to be young, eh?” he says.

  “Younger and smarter,” the woman says. “But those two things don’t tend to go together.”

  Hank finishes his coffee and says he’d best be going. “I should have been home yesterday,” he says. “I might find myself in the doghouse.” He winks. He’s not sure why. Old habit. The woman raises an eyebrow, but Hank doesn’t
elaborate. The story of his truck breakdown isn’t as interesting as what she might be thinking. He asks if she’s got a contact number just in case he sees or hears something, and she heads over to her truck for a piece of paper. He watches her comical pink rear end as she leans across the seat and retrieves her purse. She writes on a scrap of paper and hands it to him, then slips her pen and the photos of her grandchildren into her purse and zips it shut.

  “My cell number,” she says.

  He glances at her name—Joni—and the number, and shoves the paper in his back pocket. He warns her that cell phone coverage comes and goes in this country, and then he wishes her luck with her move to Peace River and finding her horse, and gets in his truck to make his way back to the highway.

  It’s another cloudless morning, the usual breeze from the west already hot, and he decides he’ll pick up hay bales from the ditches today. There wasn’t much to hay this year, but he’d been taught by his father to accept whatever nature offered because next year she might not offer anything at all. Maybe he’ll call young Torgeson and see if he could use a hand. Hank hasn’t checked on him in a while, and Lynn will have some baking she’ll send with him. She has a soft spot for Lee, and they both figure the kid must get lonely there on his own. He’s not like you were at that age, Lynn has pointed out to Hank a couple of times, still able to make him feel guilty after all these years.

  Ten minutes later, he passes the bullet-riddled sign WELCOME TO JULIET—POPULATION 1,011, and pulls onto the Oasis approach. He can just taste the slice of blueberry pie he’ll have for breakfast, unless Lynn gets on a healthy rant and makes him have something else, like bran flakes or oatmeal. A Greyhound bus is in the parking lot, ready to pull out, and Hank notices that one of its cargo flaps is still open. He honks to the driver, trying to catch his attention, but it’s too late. The bus pulls away and a cardboard box tumbles to the parking lot. It bursts as it hits the pavement, and paper—hundreds of small pieces of bright yellow paper—are caught by the bus’s tailwind and blown outward and upward, all over the parking lot. One of them slaps itself to his windshield and he sees that it’s a flyer. He can read what it says: THE END IS NEAR. It gives a date, which is, indeed, just around the corner. He watches the Greyhound bus through the flurry of paper to see if anything else falls out, anything that he should retrieve and take inside for the next bus that comes through, but nothing does, so he parks and turns off the engine. He gets out and pulls the flyer from his windshield. He examines it for more information, but there is none. As far as Hank can tell, it’s just an announcement, a headline. No advice on what to do.

  “Huh,” he says out loud. “‘The end.’ Well, that’s a bugger.”

  He shoves the flyer in his pocket along with Joni’s phone number and walks through the storm of paper to his wife’s restaurant.

  Sweetheart

  Vicki Dolson always says of herself that she is not really capable of understanding great unhappiness. On the worst of days, she sees, or at least tries to see, the best. With the exception of something having to do with the kids, like one of them getting childhood leukemia, she can’t think of anything that would make her mope for longer than an hour or two. It’s the way she was raised. So it’s hard for her to understand Blaine and the dark lens through which he sees the world these days. Not that she doesn’t understand the gravity of their situation and the extreme actions Blaine has been forced to take. He’d first sold off his herd of Charolais-Hereford cross cattle, and then the bank had insisted on the dispersal of his machinery, and then the sale of all his land but the home quarter. But Vicki’s position is that they should be thankful they still have their house, and they can rent out the pasture for a bit of income; every dollar helps. The bank did allow Blaine to keep an old stock trailer and one saddle horse—although not the good mare who would go all day for you, and Blaine claims the horse he kept requires an instruction manual to operate—so at least he can still drive up to Allan Tallman’s place on a Sunday for a little team roping. “There you go,” Vicki says to Blaine on occasion, “it’s not all bad.” Even as she knows this drives him crazy.

  Most mornings, Blaine is up well before Vicki. This morning he sleeps right through the radio alarm and Vicki decides to let him sleep for a few more minutes. She’s lying there listening to a voice tell her that a heritage building in Regina is slated for demolition and there’s a petition circulating, when she hears Blaine say, “My whole life has been slated for demolition and no one is organizing petitions about that.”

  She turns to him and says, “Good morning, you.” She can see right away that she’s annoyed him. He hates it when she talks to him as though he’s one of the kids.

  She throws back the covers and both she and Blaine notice that she’s wearing jeans under her nightie.

  “Oh,” Vicki says, “that’s odd.” She has a sudden memory of the plane, how she thought she was going to have to go out and look for it. “Did you hear me get up in the night?”

  “No,” Blaine says. “How the hell can you sleep with all those clothes on? It’s still hot in here from yesterday, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I heard a plane,” Vicki says. “It seemed pretty real, but I guess it was the dream.” She steps out of bed and slips her feet into her flip-flops.

  Blaine gets up, too, hurrying now. He prides himself on arriving at the job site ahead of most of the other men, including the foreman.

  “Are you going to do those beans today?” he asks as he pulls on his jeans and tucks in a gray T-shirt.

  Not the beans already, Vicki thinks, but she says, “Yes, Blaine. I’m going to do the beans. I’ve set aside the whole day.”

  “You’re not planning to go into town then?” Blaine says.

  “Why? Did you want me to pick something up for you?” Vicki asks, teasing, trying to turn Blaine’s already-bad mood.

  “No,” Blaine says. “I want you to do the beans.”

  Vicki goes to the kitchen, still in her nightie and jeans, to perk Blaine’s coffee for his thermos. She discovers that there’s hardly any coffee left—just enough for half a pot.

  “Sorry, hon,” Vicki says when Blaine arrives in the kitchen a few minutes later. “We’re all out of coffee. I forgot my list when I picked up groceries last week.”

  “Never mind,” Blaine said. “I’ll drink water.”

  As Vicki half fills the coffee pot, she can’t keep her mind off the dreaded beans and what a pain in the neck a garden is. She makes a commitment to herself to get the beans done, if for no other reason than to get them out of her head. And Blaine is right, they won’t keep long sitting in tubs in the basement, where they’ve been for the two days since she and Shiloh picked them off, sweating in the hot sun, because Blaine had said, “God dammit, Vicki, if you don’t pick those beans today I’m taking away your car keys. We’ll see how far you get without a car.”

  “We can at least wait for a cooler day,” she’d protested. “Anyway, I’d be happy to give them away. I could put up a sign in the café.”

  Blaine had given her one of his looks, and Vicki had felt instantly sorry for being flippant. She doesn’t know what she has against the idea of preserving garden produce. Maybe it’s the work, when it’s so easy to buy frozen vegetables. Or maybe she’s just trying to let Blaine know that she’s not his mother and never will be. Whatever the reason, they go through this every year: Blaine harping about the garden and Vicki putting off the freezing and canning for as long as possible.

  When she sees Blaine’s lunch box on the counter, she realizes she forgot to make his sandwiches the night before. There’s no ham—Blaine’s favorite—so she grabs a jar of jam and slaps together some sandwiches and pours the half pot of coffee into Blaine’s thermos as the kids begin to wander into the kitchen for breakfast. Blaine grabs the lunch pail from her as soon as she closes the lid.

  “I’m not kidding, Vicki,�
� he says as he heads for the door. “We can live on jam for a few days. Don’t go getting any ideas. You get those beans done or else.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Vicki says. “You’re talking to me like I’m the hired help.”

  “Pretty bloody useless hired help,” Blaine says.

  Vicki stands in the porch with the door open and watches Blaine cross the yard to his truck. It won’t start. He gets out, fiddles with something under the hood, then slams the hood down. He gets back in the truck, starts it, then leans out the window and yells, “Don’t you dare go to town today, Vicki.”

  Vicki blows him a kiss. “And don’t you take any wooden nickels,” she calls; she doesn’t even know why.

  Seven-year-old Daisy has come to stand beside her. “What does that mean,” Daisy wants to know, “‘don’t take any wooden nickels’?”

  “Nothing,” Vicki says. “It’s just a silly thing to say, like ‘don’t let the bedbugs bite.’”

  Blaine fishtails out of the yard, driving too fast, and Vicki and Daisy sit on the step and watch his trail of dust. The morning sky in front of them is pink.

  “Look at that sky,” Vicki says to Daisy. “Aren’t we lucky to live where we can see that right out our door, every single morning if we want? It’s better than a movie, don’t you think?”

  Daisy starts to list all the movies that it’s not better than.

  “Okay, okay,” Vicki says. “I get it. But you have to admit, it’s pretty.”

  “We should spray Bucko for flies,” Daisy says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at him.”

  Vicki looks. Blaine’s horse is kicking at his belly as though he’s got a horsefly biting him.

  “You’re right,” Vicki says. “After breakfast. You remind me.” She can see the spray bottle hanging on the fence. “I guess we can’t sit here all day, can we?” she says. “We’d better get at those beans.”