by Sofia Grant
“You really are something, June Samples,” he said, taking the bucket from her and offering her his arm to escort her out of the home his mother had loved.
Chapter 47
Virgie
Virgie waited until late afternoon to go talk to Willy. She came to the door in a terry-cloth robe, her hair in big round curlers, her face weirdly featureless under heavy foundation and powder.
“Well, hello, Virgie,” she said. “Please forgive my appearance, but you’ve caught me halfway through my makeup.”
“You look fine,” Virgie said, trying not to stare. “Is this a good time to talk?”
“Sure,” Willy said. “As long as you don’t mind me getting ready. I could use the company, actually.”
“I don’t mind.” In truth, Virgie was secretly pleased; this was an opportunity to learn about makeup, a subject on which she was woefully ignorant.
The bathroom was a mess. Pots and jars and lipsticks littered the vanity, and there was a streak of rouge on the sink. As Willy peered at herself in the mirror, Virgie cleaned the streak with a bit of toilet paper.
“Thanks, hon. I wouldn’t be so . . . it’s just that I don’t know exactly when my date plans to pick me up and I need to be ready. He doesn’t like to wait.”
“Who’s your date?” Virgie asked, perching on the side of the tub. “Did you meet him at Gwin’s?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Willy said with a wink. “You’re such a clever little sneak, though, I probably shouldn’t say things like that.”
Virgie glowed with pride. “Even if I figure it out, I won’t tell anyone,” she said generously. “Every lady has her secrets.”
“You can say that again.” Willy picked up a funny little tool and carefully clamped it onto her eyelashes. “Now, what’s this big problem you need help with?”
“I didn’t say I had a problem,” Virgie said. “Just that I need to talk about something.”
“Forgive me.” Willy lowered the tool and gave her a serious look. “You’re absolutely right. So, tell me what’s going on.”
This was why Virgie had decided to talk to Willy—she didn’t treat her like a kid. She took her questions seriously and trusted her with adult matters, like going to see Dr. Peabody. Sending the anonymous letter to the police had helped, but it hadn’t taken Virgie’s guilt away about what she’d done.
“Did the medicine work, by the way?” she asked politely. “From Dr. Peabody?”
“Sure,” Willy said, rolling her eyes. “At least, it will soon enough. A modern miracle, and all that.”
Virgie wanted to know more about this miracle, but Willy had that look adults get when they think you’re too young to know the truth. Virgie couldn’t tell her the entire truth about her situation, either, so they were even.
“Let’s say that you found out that someone had done a bad thing,” Virgie said carefully, the way she’d practiced. “And the thing they did, it didn’t exactly hurt anyone, because the person they did it to—well, they couldn’t really be hurt by it.”
Willy set the tool down on the sink and folded her arms, giving Virgie a strange look. “Go on.”
“Okay, so in a way, the thing they did wasn’t even all that bad. But what if, before you knew the whole story, you thought they were a terrible person who probably ought to go to jail. Because you didn’t have all the facts. But then you, um . . . maybe you were watching them when they didn’t know you were watching them, or even just listening to them when they didn’t know—like when you were in the next room—and you heard them talking to someone who was making them cry and you realized that they probably had a good reason to do what they did, like they didn’t see any other way out. Not that it makes it right, exactly, but now you wish you wouldn’t have thought the bad things about them in the first place.”
“Virgie . . .” Willy motioned her to move over, and sat down on the edge of the tub next to her. “It sounds to me like you overheard some things that you weren’t meant to hear, things that someone your age couldn’t possibly understand. Not because you’re stupid—far from it, you’re smart as a whip—but because you haven’t had the life experience to see how it was. Someday, I feel sure you’ll look back and it will all make sense to you. The important thing now, though . . . well, there’s two things.”
“What are they?” Already Virgie was feeling relieved. It felt so good to have an adult take her seriously.
“The first thing is to keep everything you saw or heard to yourself. Like you said, it’s a confusing situation, and people could easily draw the wrong conclusion—just like you did.”
Virgie considered that. “But what about the police? I mean, aren’t they going to get involved at some point anyway, because of what she—I mean the person—did?”
Willy gave a funny little laugh. “Well. The thing is, it isn’t really a crime, is it? Because like you said, the person wasn’t really hurting anyone. I mean, not to take away from your very good observation, and I agree, in an ideal world things like this wouldn’t happen. But—and this is what I meant by things you’ll understand more later—life isn’t really fair. Some people are born lucky, and some have to fight hard for every bit of luck they can get their hands on. Those people, the fighters, they’d probably love to do everything the nice way—the proper way—but maybe they just never had the chance. And they had to decide, am I just going to accept my fate and be miserable, or am I going to try to make things better for myself? Especially if I have a chance to do it without hurting other people?”
“That’s kind of what I thought.” Willy was so much smarter than other adults. “So what’s the other thing?”
“Well, I think it would be best if you didn’t spy on this person anymore. So that you could avoid any further misunderstandings.”
“But I did something,” Virgie said. “I . . . took something from her. Something that’s worth a lot of money.”
“My goodness,” Willy said, looking startled. She thought for a moment. “I wonder,” she said slowly, “if this thing maybe wasn’t worth as much as you thought it was? Like maybe it seemed valuable but it was a fake or something. Because I’m thinking that if the person hasn’t missed it yet, they’ve probably either forgotten they even owned it or didn’t care much about it in the first place. In which case I’d just keep it and not waste another minute worrying about it.”
“You really think it could be fake?” Virgie asked doubtfully.
“Oh, sure. It happens all the time. Even ladies who own expensive jewelry sometimes wear paste copies in public in case they get lost or stolen.”
“I didn’t say it was jewelry,” Virgie said, alarmed.
“No, of course you didn’t, that was just an example. What I was trying to say is that you’re being pretty hard on yourself, considering that you were trying to do the right thing all along. At this point I think it’s best that you forget all about it. And keep whatever it was as a—a souvenir, maybe.”
“I guess you might be right,” Virgie said, and sighed. “It’s just that I don’t know if I’ll be able to forget. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”
Willy nodded, and they sat without speaking for a while.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Willy finally said. “Let’s go sit in the other room—it’s silly for us to be cooped up in here.”
“But don’t you have to get ready?”
“Sure—in a minute. But I want to tell you a little story first.” They trooped out into her room, where Willy got a coffee cup from the windowsill that she’d been using as an ashtray and lit a cigarette. “Go ahead and sit, honey.”
Virgie took the chair, and Willy sat on the bed, tapping her ashes into the cup.
“This is the story of how I ended up here in Reno getting a divorce.” She took a puff and let it out slowly, staring at the curling tendrils of smoke. “I grew up in a town so small that all the kids fit in a one-room schoolhouse and our teacher had to teach all of us,
from kindergarten through high school. As you might imagine, it made it hard for us to learn much, but we all got to know each other real well. There was a boy in the same grade as me named Peter that I’d been friends with so long I didn’t even remember meeting him, because it happened when we were still babies. Anyway, Peter and I decided to get married when we were only five years old. And when we were seventeen—well, we ran off and did it.”
“That’s how old my mother was when she met my father!”
“Is that right. For some folks maybe it works out, and God bless them. But for Peter and me . . .” She was quiet for a while. “Everything was harder than we thought it would be. We dropped out of school right at the start of our senior year and moved into this little tiny two-room house on his parents’ land. He got a job baling hay and I helped his mother, cleaning and canning and doing the wash and anything else she needed done. We didn’t have any money for extras and half the time we didn’t even have enough to pay the bills. I worked harder than I ever had before, and my mother-in-law wasn’t even nice to me, not unless Peter was around. Anyway, Peter and I started arguing, he came home late from work sometimes, I didn’t know where he was going but I knew it wasn’t good. I started thinking maybe I made a mistake, wondering if I ought to just move home, maybe finish school. But then I got pregnant.
“That made us both grow up some, I think. Peter stopped staying out late, and he took overtime when he could get it. My mother-in-law helped me sew some maternity clothes and got her daughters to send over things their own kids had outgrown. But when I was about six months along, I went to the doctor for a checkup and my baby had died inside me. No reason they could give me, just that it happens sometimes.
“Now I’m not going to tell you all the details of what happened next, but just trust me on this, Virgie, there’s no kind of heartbreak like losing a child, I don’t care if you’re eighteen or eighty. I’ll never forget when the doctor told me it was a little girl—but I never got to see her, never got to give her a name or even bury her. Peter wouldn’t talk about it, and I couldn’t stand to have my mother-in-law anywhere near me. I went home so my own mother could take care of me while I recovered. It was only supposed to be a few days—but after a week I packed a few things and caught a ride to the train station and bought a ticket to San Francisco with the money I’d saved for the baby, and that was the last time I talked to any of them for almost two years. I sent my mother postcards now and then, so she’d know I was all right, but I didn’t want to think about everything I’d left behind. I wasn’t even twenty years old and I figured I’d been sad enough to last me a long while.”
“But what did you do for money?” Virgie asked. She’d thought about running away herself, plenty of times—but her imagination took her only as far as Sacramento, where her grandmother lived.
“Worked,” Willy said vaguely. “What anyone does for money. Some jobs were worse than others, but I got by. But here’s the part of the story I want you to pay attention to. A lot of times since I left home, I’ve found myself with a few not-very-good choices and no way to choose among them other than to take my best guess. I tried to focus on the next meal or the next rent check or the next job, and I made plenty of mistakes, and there were days I didn’t think I’d make it. I was still too sad to fall in love, and I felt guilty about leaving Peter without explaining myself, but men came along anyway, and sometimes I had a little fun with them.
“The thing I came to figure out—and maybe there are girls who figure it out quicker and they’re probably better off for it—there’s only a few kinds of men. There are the ones to steer clear of—plenty of those, honey. I wish it was different, but you’ll learn soon enough. And then there’s the ones who want to take care of you, and you learn how to make them believe it was a good idea, to make them feel like their generosity makes a difference, so they keep being generous.” Willy stabbed out her cigarette and picked up the pack to shake out another. “And then every once in a while, a man comes along who can’t do one blessed thing for you other than make you laugh, help you forget your troubles for a night or two. Now, there are those who’d call me a sinner, but if you ask me you ought to grab hold of that kind of chance whenever you can. Life’s short and fun is where you find it—no one hands it to you.
“You’re too young to understand how this all connects, but it was a little of all three kinds of men that got me here, to Reno. I’m not asking for anyone’s pity, but I’m not going to let anyone shame me either. The bad men taught me to be careful, the generous ones taught me to be grateful, and those good-time fellows . . . well, one of them sent me to Dr. Peabody, truth be told. There’s people in this town who think I’m lower than a snake, but your mother treated me well when I needed a little help. I think she and I understand each other. So I’m going to go on this date, and I’m going to act like I haven’t got a care in the world, and when I come home, if my feet hurt from dancing and my face hurts from smiling and my heart hurts from telling lies, well, it still beats standing in my mother-in-law’s kitchen with a washboard and sweat pouring off my face and no idea when my husband will come home.”
Virgie waited, but that appeared to be all there was to the story. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to have learned from it, but Willy was watching her expectantly, so she said, “I hope your date is nice. Maybe he’ll turn out to be nicer than you think he is.”
Willy laughed. “Oh, he’s plenty nice. Would you like to know a secret?”
“Sure.”
Willy got up and went to the closet and removed a large white dress bag, which she hung from a hook on the door. She unzipped the bag and a confection of frothy white lace spilled out.
“That’s a wedding dress!” Virgie exclaimed, as Willy took it out of the bag. It had a simple satin bodice with tiny cap sleeves, and layers and layers of tulle skirts. “Are you getting married?”
“It certainly looks that way,” Willy said with a smile. “He asked, and I said yes, and if all goes well, I’ll be married the same week my divorce goes through. I’ve even picked out the chapel—the Three Bells.”
“That’s a good one,” Virgie said with an air of authority. “They have real flowers there, not plastic.”
“I’m glad you like it. There’ll be a photographer and a dinner after in a restaurant, maybe even a private room. We’ll have a very small wedding party, I expect—I may ask a couple of friends from back home to be witnesses—and then we’re going to California to drive along the coast all the way to Mexico for our honeymoon. We’re going to swim in the ocean and buy those big straw hats and eat fresh strawberries anytime we feel like it.”
“That sounds really nice.”
“Maybe . . .” Willy looked at her speculatively. “You’re a little old to be a flower girl, but what would you think about being a junior bridesmaid?”
Virgie thought it was a fantastic idea, but she didn’t want to seem too excited. “I think that would be lovely.”
“Well, then.” Willy crushed her second cigarette out and stood. “I think we have a deal. Once we get the date figured out, maybe you and I can go pick out a dress for you, what do you think?”
Virgie got up too. She couldn’t wait to write in her diary about this. She only knew one girl at school who’d been a junior bridesmaid, and it was only for her sister, so that wasn’t near as good. She’d have to ask Willy for a photo of the wedding party, so that when school started up in the fall, she’d have it to show the other girls.
“I think that will be fine.”
“And about the other thing . . . just remember what we talked about. Mum’s the word—keep your souvenir and put the rest of it out of your mind.”
Virgie nodded, but her mind was on the wedding. “I should go. But thanks, Willy.”
“My pleasure, Virgie. I’m glad we had this little talk.”
Chapter 48
Charlie
Charlie was waiting in the lobby, showered and dressed in a sport coat and one of the
two good shirts he’d brought, when Harry and Frank arrived. They took one look at him and burst out laughing.
“What’d you do, try to protect some girl’s virtue?” Frank had asked, while his father had clapped him on the back and congratulated him. “Finally decided to stick up for yourself, eh? It’s about time!”
A bellboy came toward them, loaded down with their luggage.
“Watch where you’re going with that suitcase,” Harry scolded. “That’s top grain leather. Probably cost more than you make in a month.”
“Long drive?” Charlie asked his brother quietly.
“You don’t know the half of it. Barely said a word since Tonopah,” Frank muttered, rolling his eyes. “I offered to drive, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Nearly ran a chicken truck off the road just outside of Hawthorne.”
“Been up since goddamn dawn,” Harry groused, joining them. His shirt was wrinkled and his tie hung limply around his neck. “I need a nap, but I need a drink worse.”
“There’s time for both,” Charlie said diplomatically. “That is, unless your dinner plans are on the early side . . . ?”
“Nah, they’ll hold,” Harry said, lurching toward the check-in desk. While his sons trailed behind him, he explained that he was meeting up with a former client who happened to be in town and might have another job for them.
Charlie had his doubts. The frantic days leading up to the grand opening of Atomic Marvel Tours would have left his father no time to court new business.
But Charlie was accustomed to his father’s fibs and excuses, and frankly wasn’t interested in knowing what Harry was really up to. “You don’t have to, Dad. Frank and I would understand if you want to get to your dinner.”
“Nonsense. Dinner can wait—I’ll just tell Arnie I’m having a drink with my sons first,” he said. “He’ll understand—he’d better, anyway. Time like this, people need to show some goddamn respect.”
