Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  The two of them knelt in the water at my feet and released the trio of launches onto the water. “The wax makes the paper waterproof,” Nina said. “Or at least more waterproof. My mother taught me how to make them when we’d picnic on the beach at our summer place at Lake Leelanau. I always got the hiccups because I ate my sandwiches so fast. I didn’t care about the sandwiches, but I couldn’t wait to make the boats. Mumsie always insisted I finish eating before we made them.”

  “I thought you didn’t get along with your mother,” Emily said as the two of them stood up again and readjusted their towels.

  Nina shrugged. “We were as thick as thieves when I was little.”

  “Portia and I used to be like that.” Emily sighed. “I guess I should count myself lucky for having those years instead of wondering why they couldn’t go on forever. Anyway, if by some miracle Portia starts speaking to me again, in ten years or so she’ll marry and I’ll lose her all over again.”

  “Ten years? Try four,” Nina said. “I ran off with my flight instructor when I was seventeen.”

  Emily closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her heart. “Please,” she said. “I can’t stand the thought of losing my baby. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “All right,” Nina said. “Look how beautiful our little boats are.”

  Emily opened her eyes. “They are, aren’t they? They remind me of that poem. The one about the owl and the pussy-cat, pushing out to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. I used to read it to Portia at bedtime, over and over, until she fell asleep.”

  I was about to pipe up with the fact that Miss Pam had read “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” to lull me to sleep, as well, when my stomach growled noisily.

  “Is that your stomach, Emily?” Nina asked. “You should have finished your sandwich, chickadee. Think of the starving Armenians. Cash, we’d better—”

  “Don’t call me Cash,” I snapped, so suddenly that all three of us were a little taken aback. In my defense, I was hungry. Of course, a reasonable person, Sam for example, might have said, “That was my stomach, ma’am. I’m a mite peckish.”

  Nina tipped her head to one side and studied me. “But you said you didn’t mind me calling you that,” she said.

  “I said I didn’t mind you calling me Cashmere,” I said, which only made me feel more foolish. I stumbled out of the water and back to the sheet, and sat heavily, not even exactly sure right then why I was so upset.

  The ladies knelt on either side of me, still wrapped up in their towels. “I’m so sorry, Ca—Ward,” Nina said. She reached for what I thought would be my shoulder, but her hand touched the tip of one of my wings instead. “I won’t call you that ever again. I promise. No more nicknames for any of us, fair enough? We’ll just be our own true selves from here on out.”

  I think all three of us were as startled by the sincerity of her apology as we had been by my outburst. “Fair enough,” I said.

  “You’ve taken such good care of us, Ward, and we’re so grateful,” Emily added. “Just look at the bower you’ve made for us. Exquisite.” She picked up one of the rocks I’d used to weigh the sheet down. “Every one of these rocks is embedded with a lovely fossil, isn’t it? Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

  “It’s true! When Emily started talking about fossils I thought she was trying to tell me that Zep had tracked us down,” Nina said. “Watch me make this old fossil skip.” She picked up a stone and winged it into the lake, torpedoing one of the little boats and swamping the other two. “Oh, well. We’d better go, hadn’t we? Margaret will be wondering what’s become of us.”

  She retreated into the pagoda, but Emily just stood there looking at me. “Can I help you with something?” I asked at last.

  “With so many things,” she said. “But what I need most of all right now is dry underwear.”

  In the end, Emily put her dress on with nothing on beneath it, à la Nina. I used the clothespins to clip her wet underthings to the archer crouched on the Pierce-Arrow’s hood so the breeze would dry her lingerie before we got back to the ranch. The plan was, we’d stop before we swung into the driveway and Emily would put it on again. It wasn’t seven o’clock yet, so we were sure to be home before dark.

  Unfortunately, all three of us forgot the plan by the time we got back to the ranch.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When we got back to the car I held the back door open for the ladies, the way a proper chauffeur would. Nina looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “Backseat driving is so much easier when you’re sitting in the front.” She opened the front door on the passenger side for Emily, and gestured for her to climb aboard.

  On the way back to the ranch Emily put her head on Nina’s shoulder and Nina wrapped an arm around her. They fell asleep that way, Emily tucked under Nina’s wing and Nina’s face mashed against the half-open passenger-side window. Every time I hit a pothole I stole a glance at them to see if the bump had waked them. They slumbered on.

  As we approached the ranch my stomach started growling even louder than before, and I felt annoyed all over about Emily eating half my sandwich and throwing the other half away. But I promise you that’s not why I forgot about Emily’s underthings clipped to the hood ornament. I just forgot.

  I pulled up to the stagecoach shed and put the car in park. Emily and Nina slept on even as I hopped out to open the shed’s double doors, climbed in again, and backed the Pierce-Arrow into its spot alongside the coach. I hated to wake them, but I had to figure they wouldn’t be happy if I left them in the car overnight. “Emily,” I murmured. “Nina. Wake up.”

  Nothing. I put a hand on Emily’s shoulder and was fixing to give it a little shake when I looked up and saw a girl framed in the open shed door, staring at me like a murderess fingering the blade of a newly sharpened knife. Right away I realized who she was. For one thing, she looked just like Emily. For another, I heard Margaret calling, “Portia! Where are you? I think your mother’s back!”

  Emily jerked awake, disoriented, and gasped, “What?”

  Nina bolted upright, equally out of it, put a hand to her hip, and said, “What is it? What’s going on? Where’s my gun?”

  The girl said, “Blindfolding the archer with your panties, Mother? Is this another of your stupid jokes?” She snatched Emily’s underthings from the hood ornament and flung them at the windshield.

  Are you familiar with the concept of the Hail Mary pass? It comes from football, a sport I’m not particularly fond of given all the broken bones and concussions I’ve been called to the emergency room to take care of over the years. However. In the 1930s there was a big game between a Catholic university and some state school, I forget which. A halfback on the Catholic side by the name of, get this, Bill Shakespeare threw a desperate, last-ditch pass in the final seconds of the game, a play that didn’t seem to have a prayer of succeeding yet resulted in a game-winning touchdown. One of the headlines trumpeting the game’s results summed it up like this: Church Beats State with Hail Mary Pass.

  This was in the middle of the Depression, when uplifting stories were few and far between, so some version of that event ran in all the papers. I was at Boulder Dam then and read every newspaper I could get my hands on from cover to cover, even articles I wasn’t much interested in. The papers were my only companions, see, as I wasn’t any better at befriending my fellow man there than I’d been at Yale. I’d learned the hard way not to mention my Ivy League past when I was working at the dam after someone who hadn’t had the opportunities I once had punched me in the face when I brought it up in conversation.

  The doctor who pushed my broken nose back into alignment prescribed aspirin, sleeping sitting up until the swelling went down, and keeping my year of fancy college education to myself going forward. “If anybody asks how this happened, tell them you were fighting over a woman,” he advised. I didn’t know near as much about women then as I was about to learn at the Flying Leap, so I decided I was better off not say anyth
ing. I really knew precious little about women until I got myself mixed up with Doorknockers. After that I guess you could say that Emily and Nina saw to it that I left the ranch with a graduate degree.

  Where was I? Oh, yes. I was telling you how Portia ended up at the ranch. Dropping her off to spend what should have been her mother’s last couple of weeks at the Flying Leap was Archer’s Hail Mary pass. If he couldn’t talk Emily out of divorcing him, he figured Portia might be able to.

  Emily climbed over Nina in her eagerness to get to her daughter. Nina pulled herself together and got out of the car in time to waylay Max, who was bearing down on me with the determination of a man ready to administer a tracheotomy with his thumbs.

  Don’t get the wrong idea about Max. He was one of the most genial men I have ever known, at least until you crossed him. I only saw him angry twice: once when a liquor supplier tried to cheat him, and the second time when a cast-off husband showed up at the ranch and made a show of bullying one of our ladies into going back to him. When Max was angry he didn’t turn red in the face or yell. He went icy, like one of the cold-blooded killers from a gangster movie he styled himself after sartorially. He refused to keep firearms at the ranch, however, not even a rifle for shooting coyotes, as he felt gunplay was not only hell on tailoring but also always made bad situations worse. When a crisis cropped up, he strolled into the thick of it with a keen spade propped on his shoulder like a baseball bat, looking you over as if he were trying to decide the best way to cut you up so that your parts would fit into a compact hole. Let me tell you, neither of those men stuck around long enough to find out if Max actually intended to dismantle them.

  Max hadn’t picked up the spade yet when Nina intervened, but it was clear he wasn’t happy. Of course, it was all Nina’s fault that I was in trouble in the first place.

  “Max, Max, Max,” she said, grabbing his wrist and intertwining her fingers with his. “Don’t be mad at Ward. I told him I’d ask Margaret if he could escort us to the lake this afternoon but I got distracted and then I forgot. I am so very sorry. I hope we didn’t inconvenience anybody.”

  Max glanced from her face to mine. I’m sure I looked as startled as I felt, although I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear this. His expression softened and he wagged a finger at her. “I should have known you had something to do with this,” he said. “Well, you’d better run tell Margaret. She’s at her desk right now, writing out a listing to send to every paper in Nevada to advertise for Ward’s replacement.”

  Nina threw her arms around Max’s neck and kissed his cheek. “Of course, you darling,” she said, and trotted off across the barnyard. She was still wearing that ridiculous fairy costume. Or maybe it wasn’t so much ridiculous as custom-made for her, given the power Nina wielded over people thanks to a magic combination of good looks and great personal charm, backed up by lots of money. As for me, a humbled-by-circumstance working stiff, I was shaken to the core by my close call with unemployment. I had been both idiotic and too trusting. I swore nothing like that would happen to me again.

  “He was smote,” Mary Louise said to me when I hustled into the house to find out what was going on with Emily and Portia. She was in the front hall at the phone table by the stairs, her fingertips resting on the receiver she’d just returned to its cradle and a single tear trailing cinematically across her lovely cheek.

  “Who was smote?” I asked.

  “My husband. He had a heart attack while he was breaking one of God’s commandments.”

  “Which commandment?” I asked.

  “‘Thou shalt not cover thy neighbor’s wife.’”

  The urge to laugh bubbled up inside me while I fought to maintain my poker face. “Cover” was just a consonant away from “covet,” after all. Instead of laughing I managed, “Your husband—is he all right?”

  “If by all right you mean dead as a doornail, yes, he’s fine. I’ve been wishing that old fool would die ever since he threw me away so he could marry that harpy he’s been covering once our divorce goes through. A schoolteacher. In her forties. Now that he’s dead I don’t know how guilty I’m supposed to feel about it. Him up and dying is my fault, after all.”

  “Whoa there, ma’am,” I said. “It is not your fault. Hearts give out. Particularly older ones.”

  “It is my fault,” she insisted. “Remember the barnstormer? And the girl in line who was so sure she was going to marry him? I wished them both dead, and look what happened. All I have to do is pray on it and the Almighty takes over for me. Dammit.” Then she let loose a flood of tears that the Boulder Dam itself would have been challenged to contain. “I’m going to miss that old fool,” she wailed.

  “Now, now,” I said, and patted her shoulder. “The Almighty has his hands too full with war and pestilence to drop everything to smite one fornicating old man for you.”

  You’re right. I didn’t say that last bit. Only thought it.

  Mary Louise wiped her face with her palms. “At least now I get all his money, instead of just some lousy settlement. He was too busy slipping it to the neighbor to change his will and I wasn’t about to remind him. I can afford to marry anybody I want to next time. Heck, I could marry you.”

  Portia tore past us then and pounded up the stairs. She must have been sprung from Margaret’s office, because Emily and Nina came out the office door soon after. “Which way did she go?” Emily asked.

  I pointed upstairs just as clothing started raining down the stairwell like manna from Saks Fifth Avenue. I recognized some of Emily’s dresses and blouses as they fluttered into the stairwell. A pair of peach silk panties settled themselves onto the newel post and tilted jauntily to one side, a lingerie beret.

  “Portia isn’t wasting any time helping you move out of Coyote,” Nina said.

  “I guess I should go talk to her,” Emily said.

  Nina laid a hand on her arm, shook her head, and went upstairs instead.

  Mary Louise, meanwhile, plucked Emily’s drawers from the newel post and peered at them. “Hmm. Store-bought,” she mused. “I have all my underclothes handmade by Spanish nuns. Also my husband just dropped dead.”

  I think Nina was as grateful to have an excuse to go after Portia as Emily was to stay behind to gather up her store-bought unmentionables and offer condolences to the freshly widowed Mary Louise.

  “Thank you,” Mary Louise responded after Emily had administered the usual platitudes. “But the old boy had it coming. I loved him, but he was an infidel. That’s why I had to file for a divorce, you know.”

  After some rapid-fire blinking, Emily asked, “Because of his infidelity?”

  “That’s right,” Mary Louise said. “He was a cheater. Like all men are.”

  Reflexively, the two of them turned their eyes on me. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, you don’t count, Ward,” Mary Louise said. “I meant real men, like Emily’s husband.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, “I suppose he is an infidel.”

  “Cheaters cheat,” I said. “It’s what they do.”

  I wasn’t in on the negotiations with Margaret over the new sleeping arrangements at the Flying Leap. All I know is that Emily moved into Scorpion and Portia took over her mother’s berth in Coyote. “We’ll let Nina work her magic on her,” Margaret explained to me later. “She’ll have that girl eating out of her mother’s hand in no time.”

  I thought of Nina charming Emily into scrambling down the trellis and skinny-dipping and stealing costumes and drinking schnapps to excess. Of Nina’s revolver tucked under my bed.

  “And Emily was all right with this?” I asked.

  “Not just all right. Relieved,” Margaret said. “She’s at her wit’s end with that child. Emily’s in a delicate situation, you understand. Portia is Archer’s daughter, too, so it would be wrong to bad-mouth him to her, no matter how much he may deserve it. Nina’s confident she can talk some sense into the kid. Rebellious daughter to rebellious daughter.”

  “I guess th
at could work,” I said. Who was I to judge? I had no children of my own. Never did, alas. Not that I know of, anyway, ha ha.

  In retrospect, Portia’s arrival at the ranch was like somebody tossing a lit match on a stack of dry kindling. I’ve always wondered if what happened between Emily and me would have come about if Portia hadn’t shown up to stir the pot. Because before Portia had been at the Flying Leap a week, Emily and I were covering the bejesus out of each other.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Can I tell you a secret?”

  It was an unfamiliar female voice, and just past sunup. I was on my back on the floor of the empty stall next to Dumpling when I heard two sets of footsteps coming along the breezeway that ran down the middle of the barn.

  Well, give me a minute and I’ll tell you why I was lying on the floor there. We had more stalls than we had horses, so I’d swept the pounded-dirt floor clean in the unused enclosure next to Dumpling and converted it into a kindergarten for Taffy’s kittens. The shoulder-height walls kept them from straying into danger while their mother was out hunting, and the slats that ran the rest of the distance to the ceiling were widely spaced enough to let Taffy slip through when she came home to give them breakfast. Before my day got started, I’d been coming to spend a few minutes with the kittens so they wouldn’t grow up feral.

  “A secret? Sure. Who doesn’t love a secret?” I heard Nina say, then realized the other voice must belong to Portia. The pair of them had stopped in front of Dumpling’s stall, just a couple of feet away from my head. From where I lay I saw Dumpling’s ears pass the slatted part of the wall between us like the periscope of a submarine as he shuffled to the front of his stall and poked his head out to greet his visitors. I couldn’t see Nina and Portia, so I was fairly confident they couldn’t see me. I started picking kittens off my shirtfront so that I could stand up and announce myself.