“Those old bags?” Margaret asked. “Look who you’re talking to, Nina. I’m as old as any of them were.”
“You? You’re ageless, Margaret. Also more of a valise.”
Margaret snorted, but didn’t budge.
“Emily said her roommate left this morning,” Nina said. “The next one won’t be here until next week. She’s afraid she’ll cry all night if she’s not sharing a room with somebody. Please? Think of all the fun Emily and I could have together.”
Margaret’s face softened. “All right,” she said, “as long as Emily agrees.”
“I know she will,” Nina said. “It was her idea.”
That would have been news to Emily since, of course, it wasn’t.
By the end of the week Nina and Emily had become inseparable. Bent over a jigsaw puzzle in the library for hours, whispering. Sprawled on the porch roof underneath their bedroom window early in the morning before it was hot or along toward evening after the day cooled down, reading books from Nina’s duffel of canned remains. Carrying between them from barn to house a pail of milk I’d relieved our cow Katie of, like Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting playing milkmaid, sloshing out so much in transit that half the milk was gone by the time they handed Margaret the bucket.
I will not lie to you. There were times when I liked being around people who still had so much money that a half-spilled bucket of milk was nothing to cry about. Such carelessness almost made me feel like I had money, too. I’d only ever been small-town rich, of course, but small-town rich makes you the equal of a Vanderbilt as long as you stick close to home. If nothing else, working at the ranch gave me some perspective. A few years of fetching and carrying there taught me I wasn’t near as fancy as my mother had led me to believe.
I was shelling peas on the porch late one afternoon when I heard footsteps on its roof, followed by Nina’s voice. “The way they fixed the crossbars on the posts to hold up the roses makes it easy. Just don’t look down.” The climbing rose that perfumed the entryway started to rustle and shake as first Nina’s riding boots, then her britches and gun belt, and finally Nina herself appeared. Once she made it to the ground she stepped back and looked up expectantly.
“Shouldn’t you take your gun belt off before you do that?” I asked.
She didn’t seem as surprised to see me on the porch as she was surprised to be questioned about anything she did. “The bullets are in my pocket, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “The gun is just for show. To scare off wolves.”
“How do you scare wolves if the gun isn’t loaded?” I asked.
“Two-legged wolves are pretty easy to scare.”
The rosebush started shaking again and Emily’s voice tumbled down. “Ow,” she said. “It’s thorny.”
“Don’t grab the branches. Hold the trellis.”
“I’ll fall.”
“You won’t.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Teaching Emily how to leave a house by the bedroom window.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s never done it.” It was clear from Nina’s tone of voice that she considered my query idiotic.
The next day I was in the kitchen, wearing one of Margaret’s aprons while I dried cutlery on a towel, when Emily and Nina drifted through. They had the pinked skin and wet hair of children just out of the bath and were so sunk in conversation that neither seemed to notice me.
As they disappeared out the back door Margaret came into the kitchen carrying a basket of laundry she’d harvested from the clothesline. She put her basket on the counter and stood at the kitchen window, watching Nina and Emily climb into the hammock strung between shade trees at the side of the house. Margaret shook her head and tsked. “I like to think people come to us because they haven’t given up on finding their other half,” she said. “But that one says she’s not marrying again. Not ever.”
“Who? Emily?” I asked.
“Emily? No. The Emilys of this earth are always married.”
“Nina?”
Margaret tapped her nose and winked at me. “You could get work as a detective,” she said, then sighed. “That poor kid can’t catch a break.” She took a stack of folded kitchen towels from the basket, opened a drawer, and tucked in all but one. “You know, Ward, if I’ve learned anything in the last few years it’s that marriage depends on luck as much as anything. First of all you have to be in the right place at the right time to meet the person you’re meant for. What are the chances of that happening for anybody the first time? But everybody—almost everybody—goes in with such high hopes, sold on the best selves the person they’re marrying has shown them up until then. Some hit the jackpot, but others are just letting themselves in for a world of hurt. In my mother’s day the only way out of a bad match was feet first. Poor Mama.” She handed the towel she’d saved back to me. “I think the saddest thing of all is when two people who honestly believe they’re in love marry and then find out they can’t live with each other.”
“Don’t most people who marry believe they’re in love?” I asked.
She took my chin between her thumb and forefinger. She had a special fondness for the cleft in it. God’s thumbprint, she called it. “When you were fresh out of the oven up in heaven,” she’d explained to me once, fitting her thumb into that declivity, “He took hold of your chin and turned your face side to side like this.” She demonstrated. “Then He said, ‘This one’s perfect. Send him down the chute.’ Off you went, born to your mother. Because you hadn’t cooled off yet when He touched you, His thumb left its imprint there. It proves you’re special. That’s what the nuns used to tell us in Catholic school, anyway. That, and how you’ll fry in hell if you get divorced. So take that for what it’s worth.”
That day in the kitchen she repeated my question before she let my chin go. “Don’t most people who marry believe they’re in love? Oh, Ward. Sometimes I forget how young you are.”
I seem to remember Max was supposed to pick up the woman meant to be Emily’s new roommate at the train the following week when he drove a carload of glum-faced guests, Nina and Emily among them, into town to meet with their lawyers. That intended roommate never showed. Every now and then that happened. The threat of the packed suitcase by the front door would make an errant husband mend his ways. Particularly, as Margaret was fond of remarking, if the wife was the one with all the cash. Sometimes I wonder if everything might have worked out differently if Emily had ended up with that other roommate, some nice middle-aged lady who didn’t lie awake at night trying to think of fresh new ways to shake up the world.
That morning I was in Dumpling’s stall, going over his withers with a currycomb, when Nina came looking for me. Good old Dumpling. He was a short-legged, potbellied gelding with a wide, serrated blaze jagging down his forehead and white stockings on all four legs that rose above his knees, markings that hinted at some piebald mustang forebear. Dumpling may not have had a fancy pedigree or, heck, any pedigree at all, but he was a true gentleman, the most tractable and empathetic animal I’ve ever known. When I first came to the Flying Leap he went by Lightning, the name he’d been given as a colt based on that blaze or his speed or possibly both. By the time I joined the staff, though, that old boy could have been outrun by a turtle. However, he was a perfect love and we developed such a bond that I’d taken to calling him “Dumpling,” same as my mother had called me when I was a chubby-cheeked little boy. Soon I had everybody on the ranch calling him that.
While I was grooming my old friend that morning he took to swiveling his ears the way a dog lifts his head and sniffs when he realizes company’s coming. I straightened up and there was Nina on Dumpling’s other side, a folded note in one hand and Emily’s automobile keys in the other. She had on a ladylike dove-gray dress, her pearls of course, no gun belt. I’ll say this for Nina: she cleaned up good. She had her hair up in a French twist and looked as innocent as a Sunday school teacher back home in Tennessee, if that Su
nday school teacher had more money than God to spend on clothes. You know who she reminds me of, come to think of it? That actress who became Princess of Monaco. Grace Kelly. Grace Kelly, if she’d been stretched on a rack until she was almost as tall as Gary Cooper, who her character is married to in High Noon. There’s another reason to watch that movie. You could probably rent it on videocassette, if you have a player. Anyway. Nina’s ensemble was just the right amount of prim for visiting a divorce lawyer in Reno. Which is what I thought she was doing, so I was surprised to see her standing there with Emily’s keys.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Nina said. “I thought Sam would work just as well, but Emily said no. She wanted you. I don’t see what the difference is.”
“Sam’s three inches taller,” I said. “Ten years older. Blond. Aside from that our own mothers couldn’t tell us apart.”
“It doesn’t matter what you look like,” Nina said. “What matters is whether or not you know how to drive a car.”
“I know how to drive, ma’am. I started driving when I was eleven years old.”
“Last year, then,” she said.
She couldn’t have been more than a handful of years older than I was. “I’m twenty-five, almost,” I said, then felt like a four-year-old telling a five-year-old that I was four and a half. “Is Max back from town with all the other ladies?”
“No,” she said. “The two of us came back early in a taxi. Max said we could take a cowboy and Emily’s car and clear out until the crisis passes, as long as we’re home in time for dinner.”
“I’m glad to oblige, ma’am, but why do you need me?” I ducked under Dumpling’s neck to come around to her side. “I know Emily doesn’t like to drive much, but can’t you do it?” I confess I was more excited at the prospect of driving the Pierce-Arrow than I ought to have let myself been. They don’t make those cars anymore, and even in those days they didn’t make a lot of them. Only the cream of the elite drove them. Presidents. Princes. John D. Rockefeller. Orville Wright, Babe Ruth. You get the picture.
“I never learned to drive,” Nina said.
“You can fly an airplane, but you don’t know how to drive a car?”
“Any imbecile can drive a car,” she said, and handed me the keys. “Here you go.”
Dumpling twisted his head around to see who I was talking to and Nina suddenly brightened. “Why, it’s Lightning, isn’t it?” she asked.
“That’s right,” I said. “Except now we call him Dumpling.”
“I’ve known this horse since we were both hardly more than babies.” Nina took the gelding’s face between her hands and nuzzled his forehead with her nose. “Hello, old friend,” she said. “How’s my favorite boy and why are these silly cowboys calling you Dumpling?”
“He isn’t as fast on his feet as he used to be,” I said. “Calling him Lightning had started seeming disrespectful.”
Nina stepped back and looked the gelding over. “Well, I guess time is hanging a little heavy on him around the middle. Happens to the best of us. It hurts to think my sweetheart here is an old man already. He’ll always be my favorite.”
“Dumpling still has plenty of good years left in him, knock wood.” I rapped the stable wall with my knuckles. “He’s my favorite, too,” I said as I tucked Emily’s keys into my pocket. “Worth all the others put together, even if he’s getting on in years.”
“How about that,” Nina said, nodding and eyeing me speculatively. “You have good taste. Emily told me you weren’t as stupid as you look.”
“I hope not, ma’am,” I said. “By the way, my name is Ward.” I extended a hand for her to shake. She put the folded note in it. Maybe I was as stupid as I looked, after all. “What’s the big crisis?” I asked as I unfolded it.
“Emily is having second thoughts. Only made it as far as the front door of the lawyer’s building. Couldn’t bear to go inside. Some of those old biddies told her cold feet were a sign she’s still in love with Archer. As if being in love with anybody was ever enough. What a lot of idiotic Hollywood rubbish.”
Of course, I owed my job to idiotic Hollywood rubbish. Margaret had been hot to hire me because I reminded her of that young actor playing the beefcake innocent in her favorite movie, a Mae West comedy called She Done Him Wrong. Cary Grant, yes. The very one. “He has that twinkle, Max,” Margaret had said of me as I put my shirt back on and buttoned it after my interview was finished. “Twinkle’s hard to come by in a boy as muscled-up as this young man is. It’s hard to come by, period.” I think of Margaret every time I pass a pet shop and see a puppy twinkling beseechingly at me through the window, every wiggling inch of dog assuring me that he’s worth the money, that he’ll never let me down if I’ll just give him a chance. When I watch an old gangster movie on the late show—Scarface, Public Enemy, White Heat—I remember Max. “Such beautiful suits,” he always said after seeing one of those films over in Reno at the Majestic. “The artistry in the tailoring, only to be shot full of holes in the end. It makes a person think.” Of what, I never asked.
Do what this woman says, Max’s note read, and nobody will get hurt.
Chapter Four
When we got to the shed where the Pierce-Arrow was stored, the car was still under the tarp and Emily was nowhere to be seen.
“I told her to wait right here,” Nina said. “I should have known she’d chicken out.”
“I didn’t chicken out!” It was Emily’s unmistakable croak, but so muffled it sounded as if it were coming from underneath a pile of blankets. “I’m here!”
When Nina snatched the tarp off the car I realized it had been a mistake not to roll up the windows and close the roof before I’d covered it. I’d been so mesmerized by the beauty of its insides—the dimpled fawn upholstery, the sinuous silver knobs on the burled wood dashboard, the ebonized circle of steering wheel—that I hadn’t thought that business through. Now a tortoiseshell cat was nursing a litter of newborn kittens on its back seat.
Other than the cats, the car was empty.
“Where are you?” Nina called. “For Pete’s sake, Emily. We’re in a hurry.”
The stagecoach door popped open and Emily emerged, a moth-eaten white boa draped over her shoulder. “How could you think I’d chicken out?” she asked. “Not half an hour ago you were telling me what a hero I am.”
Right away I noticed a long scratch on her left cheek I hadn’t seen before. Then I realized the boa was the giant, scruffy tom who’d appointed himself king of our barnyard cats.
“Isn’t it a little hot out to be wearing fur?” Nina asked.
“Please. I’m wearing purr,” Emily replied, strumming the animal’s length, producing a pretty faithful imitation of a locomotive engine going full blast. Emily sniffled and rubbed her eyes. “My friend here was fighting with a gray cat under the coach, so I broke it up and shut this one in here with me. We’ve done a wonderful job of calming each other down but I think I may be allergic to it. The cat, I mean, not calming down.”
“That’s Caterwaul,” I said, relieving her of the beast and shooing him outside. “He’s one for wailing when he’s riled. Or whenever he feels like crying.”
“No wonder we like each other,” Emily said, and sneezed.
I fished out a bandana and handed it to her. “We call him Wally, mostly. He’s the resident ladies’ man. I expect he was trying to romance the cat you caught him fighting with. More than likely he’s responsible for those kittens in the back seat of your car, too.”
Emily stopped dabbing her nose with the bandana. “There are kittens in the back seat of my car?”
“See for yourself,” I said. While she looked I rested my left hand on the seat back, then rubbed a thumb over the upholstery. It reminded me of a sweater my mother had given me when I left for college in the East. “Is this cashmere?” I asked.
Nina had been lounging against the stagecoach, trying not to look impatient. “Cashmere!” she hooted. “Listen to you, cowboy.”
Emily ignored this. “Yes. Archer—my husband—chose it. First he insisted on buying a Pierce-Arrow because the hood ornament is a little man with a bow and arrow. Then he said we couldn’t have it unless it was upholstered in cashmere. I said leather was more practical. Then he said, ‘Practical? That’s rich, coming from you.’”
“Sorry about the mess,” I said. “Cats like to kitten in dark places.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “When I get back to San Francisco I’ll buy another.”
Huh. Until this very moment it had slipped my mind how easily Emily tossed that off when I brought up the damage to her upholstery. Not, “It will take a lot of elbow grease and prayer to get those stains out.” Or, “When I get back to San Francisco I’ll have the back seat reupholstered.” At the time I just thought I couldn’t have heard her right. “Buy another what?” I asked.
“Another car,” she said. “Nina, come and see the kittens. Aren’t they the cutest things?”
“If you like cats,” Nina said, not looking. She’d been shifting her weight from one foot to the other for a while by then and couldn’t take it anymore. “Emily, please. You have to change before we leave.”
Emily looked down at her funereal black visiting-the-lawyer outfit, now tinseled with silvery filaments of Wally. “It’s just cat hair,” she said.
“It’s not the cat hair, it’s the dress. I’m changing, too. Pants. Come on. We need to hurry.”
The variable in their escape plan, the “flaw in the ointment,” as a beloved malapropism-prone guest of yore had been fond of saying, was the imminent return of Max and the other ladies. While Emily and Nina changed I busied myself with the kittens. Soon I was sunk in a battle of wills with Taffy, née Catastrophe, over the relocation of her brood.
Better Luck Next Time Page 3
