Better Luck Next Time

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  Emily clasped Nina’s hands in hers. “How about this?” she said. “How about we hold hands? That way you’ll stop playing with the bullets, and you won’t be able to bite your nails, either.”

  “Deal,” Nina said.

  Every time I stole a look at them in the mirror the rest of the way in they were still holding on to each other for dear life. Neither said anything else. I kept my trap shut, too.

  I don’t think Nina expected Hugh to be waiting for us in front of the lawyer’s office, but there he was, his bike propped against a lamppost. Emily marched straight into the office building so he and Nina could have a moment together. I stayed in the car, trying to make myself invisible behind the steering wheel.

  Hugh gave Nina such a hug that I heard a couple of her vertebrae pop. When they pulled apart, he said, “We did our best, didn’t we? Be brave.”

  Nina said, “I’m the bravest person you know.”

  “That’s true,” Hugh said. “You’re the bravest woman in the world.”

  “Bravest person,” Nina said.

  “Of course. The bravest. Period. No qualifications necessary.” He said it lightly, though I could see that he was crying just a little.

  Nina could see it, too. She palmed the tears from his cheeks and said, “Buck up. Worse things will happen to you than this.”

  “I hope not, but probably so,” Hugh said.

  Then Sam pulled up in the Chevrolet with the other ladies. Nina hurried into the office building so she wouldn’t have to stay and chat. After all the womenfolk had straggled inside, we three gents were left behind on the sidewalk, sharing an awkward moment. “So, Ward,” Sam said finally, “you want to split up this grocery list of Margaret’s? You take dry goods? I take meats?” Though he wasn’t looking at me or the list when he spoke. He was eyeing Hugh’s bicycle.

  Hugh saw what Sam was looking at, and asked, “Do you want to try it out?”

  “We got these errands we need to see to,” Sam said. “But I do appreciate the offer.”

  “Give me the list,” I said. “I know you’ve been itching to ride that bicycle, Sam.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Not a bit.” It was the least I could do. Poor Hugh was looking so hangdog and Sam was always such a tonic for what ailed you. Running the errands alone would also free me up to fall by The End of the Trail, Reno’s premier pawnshop, to do a little window-shopping. I wanted to see if, by chance, they had any diamond rings for sale there as convincing of the seriousness of my matrimonial intentions as the rock Big Howard had presented to Miss Pam when he’d asked her to be his wife. When push came to shove, financially-speaking, my mother had refused to part with her engagement ring. “Over my dead body,” she’d said. Well.

  For the record, I didn’t see any rings I liked that I could have afforded. I suppose my standards were too high.

  Chapter Twenty

  “The dead has arisen,” Zep said to Emily when she showed up at breakfast in her pajamas toward the end of her stint with us. The Zeppelin would be gone in a day or two, but Emily’s six weeks would be stretched to seven since she’d dragged her feet initially about filing her paperwork.

  Emily flopped into the chair alongside Nina and nabbed a corner of uneaten toast off Nina’s plate. “Am I too late for breakfast?” she asked.

  That was the way things went at the Flying Leap as our lodgers’ time with us wound to a close. They fell to eating off each other’s plates and turning up in their nightclothes at the breakfast table. Their hair still in pin curls, the anti-wrinkle warriors among them with what remained of the gobs of cold cream they’d smeared on their faces the night before. The Zeppelin, for example, laser-focused on her imminent return to society and constricting French corsets, had taken to wearing cold cream and pajamas day and night. She eyed Emily critically and said, “You aren’t looking quite yourself, my dear.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Nina said.

  Emily frowned at Nina. “Be nice,” she said.

  “Why start now?” Nina asked.

  Sam cycled into the room then, bearing a plate of eggs in one hand and a silver rack full of toast in the other. He positioned each on the sideboard carefully, adjusting their angle in relation to each other until it suited him aesthetically. As if it would stay that way for even half a minute after the ladies had descended on it.

  Emily leapt to her feet, filled a plate, and came back to sit with Nina.

  “Yowza,” Nina said. “Is half of that for me?”

  “Hands off,” Emily replied. “I can’t remember the last time I was this hungry.”

  Zep smacked the tabletop and Mary Louise steadied the coffee cup I’d just refilled for her. “There, Nina! You see?” the Zeppelin said. “I knew it. I am never wrong about these things.”

  Nina rolled her eyes. “Emily, will you please tell this old busybody that you aren’t pregnant?”

  Emily sat more upright in her chair and blinked. “Pregnant?” she asked. “Alas, no. I’ve been trying to get pregnant since Portia was two years old, but it seems my store closed for business early. It’s the desert air, I think. It makes me ravenous.”

  Indiscreetly, Emily looked at me when she said this. To distract the Zeppelin from interrogating Emily about the contents of her womb, or maybe just to get a rise out of her, Nina said, poker-faced, “I can’t find my nice set of lingerie I just bought at Woolworth’s. Has anybody seen it? Pink and frilly. I’m horribly worried someone has run off with it.”

  “It’s possible a thief nabbed your underthings off the clothesline,” Margaret said, “but more than likely they’re jumbled in with someone else’s wash. The one time the lingerie hanging out to dry got stolen, that sneak took every bit of it.”

  “Margaret’s probably right,” Zep said, “None of my French lingerie is missing, and French lingerie is irresistible. Or so the gentlemen tell me.”

  “My underthings are made by Spanish nuns,” Mary Louise said. “Have I mentioned that?”

  “Yes,” Nina said. She took Emily’s hand under the table and gave it a little squeeze.

  “That reminds me,” Mary Louise said. “I woke up thinking that I’d dreamed something, but now I wonder if it might have really happened.”

  “What’s that?” Margaret asked.

  “I looked out my window in the middle of the night and saw a prowler. Over by the corral.”

  Sam hesitated on his way into the kitchen with the emptied egg plate and toast rack. “Over by the corral?” he asked. “Was your prowler wearing a hat?”

  “Yes!” Mary Louise said. “Did you see him, too?”

  “Might of been my hat. I leave it sit on a post of an evening to air out. You might of took it for a prowler.”

  “I brought in the laundry before dark, anyway,” Margaret said. “So your prowler couldn’t have snagged Nina’s underwear. No, I’m sure there was just a mix-up. Ladies, please check your drawers for Nina’s drawers.”

  “My prowler?” Mary Louise asked. “Why is he my prowler? I don’t want a prowler. Now I’ll never get to sleep.”

  “It could be a ruffian looking for somebody rich to kidnap,” the Zeppelin said.

  Nina and Emily exchanged glances. Ruffian, Nina mouthed.

  “It really is such an inconvenience being wealthy sometimes,” Zep continued. “People are always looking for ways to get money out of you.”

  Nina snorted. “You know what’s even more inconvenient than having a lot of money?” she asked. “Not having any.”

  “As if you knew anything about that,” Zep said.

  “Ladies,” Margaret said. “Please.”

  “I can make the rounds in the night now and again, if that will make the ladies rest easier, ma’am,” Sam said. “Ward and I can swap out sentry duty, if need be.”

  “With a rifle propped up on your shoulder, like a palace guard?” Mary Louise asked. “I spent the weekend in a palace in Belgium once. That’s a town in France.”

  “It’s a co
untry, actually. Next to France,” Nina said.

  “Have you been to Belgium?” Mary Louise asked.

  “No,” Nina said.

  “Well, I have,” Mary Louise said decisively. She gathered the feathered border of her robe around her neck. “I didn’t care for it, or that castle, either. It was cold and the plumbing wasn’t up to snuff and there wasn’t a moat or a drawbridge or a palace guard armed with rifles on patrol at night or anything. It was very disappointing.”

  “Max don’t hold with keeping firearms on the property, ma’am,” Sam interjected. “He says guns make more trouble than they make go away. But he has a shovel I could prop up on my shoulder that might pass for a rifle in the dark, if what it looks like I’m toting is what matters to you.”

  I went back into the kitchen for a fresh coffeepot without hanging on to hear what they decided. Sam would fill me in on anything that mattered.

  Hugh, Nina, and Portia roared off on the motorcycle together soon after that, having told Emily some plausible fiction about their destination—the hot springs, a ghost town, the golf links over in Reno. Off the hook once again for entertaining her daughter, Emily went upstairs to sleep and I took care of outdoor chores. As the shadows lengthened I set out to the barn with the milk pail. I tipped a little feed into the cast-iron pot inside the cattle stanchion and Katie obediently stuck her head through to get at it. Good old Katie. Always giving and not getting much in return aside from food and shelter. I wondered sometimes if she ever wished for another calf. I said as much to Sam once, and he laughed at me. “Have you ever seen a cow birth a calf, city boy?” he asked. “Don’t look like much fun to me.”

  I was latching the slat of wood that held Katie’s head in the stanchion when Emily waltzed into the barn. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said.

  “What exactly did you have in mind?” I asked. “I can’t keep Katie waiting long for her milking.”

  “Oh, goodness, not that.” She blushed. “I was just wondering. If Sam’s patrolling tonight, maybe I shouldn’t come to see you. Also I could use a good night’s sleep.”

  “All right,” I said. “Although I’m not sure how much patrolling he plans to do. I think he just said that to make Mary Louise happy. Sam sleeps with one eye open already, so if we had a prowler, he’d be the first to know.”

  Emily considered this for a minute. “Does he know about us?” she asked.

  “Yes. He took me aside and warned me to watch my step.”

  “Oh, dear. Does Margaret know?”

  “If Margaret knew, I wouldn’t be sitting on this stool right now, milking Katie. I’d be out on my can.”

  “Good. That means Sam won’t squeal on you before we leave. You being gone makes more work for him.”

  Her assessment of the situation rubbed me the wrong way. “That’s not why he won’t squeal on me,” I said. “Sam is my friend. The only reason we’ve gotten away with this as long as we have is because I know I can trust Sam, and Max and Margaret think they can trust me. I don’t feel good about putting Sam in an awkward position, or about how those two would react to me betraying their trust. They’ve been good to me. Like a second set of parents.”

  That angle of my duplicity hadn’t struck me until I said it. If I ran off with Emily I might never talk to Max and Margaret again. Sam, either. It was crushing to consider how cavalierly I planned to sacrifice them on the altar of romance, and so soon after losing the family I’d been born to. Here I’d been feeling morally superior to Archer, though I was as much an infidel as he was when it came to betraying loved ones.

  “They’ll get over it,” Emily said. “I can guarantee that.”

  “Oh?” I said, eager to hear her plan for making things right with everybody again. “How do you know?”

  “I’m leaving all the staff here such a juicy tip.”

  I wasn’t so sure that would set things straight. Sure, a juicy tip might help pay the mortgage, but it doesn’t do much for the soul. That’s something common to so many rich folks, though. They assume the approval of everybody they come in contact with can be bought.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  My stolen nights with Emily had me keeping vampire hours, so once I was given that night off I found I couldn’t fall asleep. Eventually I got tired of rolling around alone in my bed. Got up and dressed, hat and all, and ambled outside to enjoy a little of what folks these days call “me time.” Now, of course, I get more time to myself than I know what to do with; but in those days, between all the fetching and serving and chatting and dancing and whatnot with our guests, I didn’t get many moments to call my own.

  The ranch really was at its best in moonlight. All silvery light and deep shadows, like an art-house film shot in black and white. I don’t know how it is for you kids who grew up with movies presented in what they used to call “living color,” but in my youth it was easy to imagine yourself the star of your own picture in a landscape lit up by the earth’s nocturnal gaffer, the moon.

  I remember thinking I should wander the predawn hours more often, little realizing that would be my lot in life once I became a small-town doctor. When I was on emergency call I was summoned to the hospital regularly, sometimes three times a night, to deal with the bloody business of life and death. Honky-tonk stabbings, car wrecks, childbirth. The roller coaster of joy and sorrow. Delivering babies, now, I do miss that. As long as there aren’t complications, nothing on this earth is more gratifying than catching a newborn as it comes down the chute. I know I’ve mentioned that I never did have a child of my own, but at the same time I had so many, and all without a single bill for college tuition turning up on my desk.

  Yes, I did try to figure out once how many babies I’ve delivered. At least a thousand, I decided, give or take. So many little faces smiling out of snapshots pinned to the corkboards that ran the length of my office hallway. I have delivered the children of children I delivered, and a few times brought forth their grandchildren. Sure, sometimes I think it would be nice if a fraction of that thousand came to visit me of a Sunday, but everybody is so busy with their own lives and families. That’s why it has been such a joy to have these nice long visits with you.

  That night, that night, yes, that night, wandering the Flying Leap. I crossed paths with Caterwaul on the prowl for mice and members of his harem and saluted Sam’s hat airing out on the post. When I reached the corral I saw Hugh’s bicycle propped against the fence. He must have loaned the thing to Sam to learn on while Hugh was getting around via motorcycle.

  I’ve always believed fragrances are richer late at night, though that’s not something I know for a fact. That’s why I hiked up to the ranch house porch, paused by the trellis, and closed my eyes while I took in a noseful of that rose’s aroma, a little self-consciously I’ll grant you, imagining myself a true poet along the lines of Keats or Shelley or Byron. I always was a sucker for the Romantics. Thought of myself in those days as some sort of sensitive genius, instead of as exactly what I appeared to be, an ignorant hick cowboy with boots that smelled like sour milk.

  I hadn’t been there long enough to exhale when I got beaned by something that like to have knocked my hat clean off. I was about to light out for the shed to arm myself with Max’s shovel when I noticed a leather pouch with lengths of ribbon as long as my arm attached lying at my feet. What the heck?

  I picked the thing up, hefted it in my palm, and peeked inside. A chunk of gravel was in there for ballast, and a folded piece of paper. The moonlight may not have been bright enough for me to see what color ink that folded note was written in, but it was bright enough to read by. Look up, the piece of paper said.

  I looked up. Nina’s head and shoulders were sticking out beyond the edge of the porch roof. I’d been working at the ranch long enough by then to be prepared to expect the unexpected, so this wasn’t the surprise it might have been out in the real world. Nina held a finger to her lips, shhh, then motioned to the trellis. She seemed to be suggesting that I climb up and
join her on the roof so we could have a confab.

  I stepped back to get a better angle on her face and shook my head. Motioned for Nina to come down the trellis. She made an exasperated gesture and got to her feet, so close to the rim of the porch that it made my innards clench. I saw then that she was wearing the fairy costume, wingless, and holding a book with her thumb stuck in it to keep her place. With her other hand she gestured at what she had on and shook her head.

  I saw her point. Emily would have her hide if Nina make confetti of all that gauzy fabric she’d gone to such trouble to piece together again. I held up two fingers pointed downward and made a gesture that conveyed, I hoped, the act of two legs walking down a flight of stairs.

  Nina put her book down, shuffled around a little while looking at her feet in a way that suggested she’d stuck a toe in it to hold her place, then grabbed the hem of her costume and lifted. “No,” I hissed, gesticulating frantically to signal stop. I jerked a thumb in the direction of the house and made the sign for walking down steps again. “Stairs,” I stage-whispered.

  Oh, she mouthed. She nodded once, pointed at me, and held up a finger.

  I tiptoed up the porch steps and waited. Nina wafted wraithlike out that front door, gentled it shut behind herself so that it closed without a click, grabbed the pouch out of my hand, and used its ribbon to mark her page.

  “What is that thing?” I murmured.

  “Message bag,” she murmured back. “My plane isn’t fitted with a radio, so if I need to be in touch with someone on the ground, I can write a note, shove it in the pouch, and toss it over the side. The ribbons make it easier to track while it’s falling. They also make it an excellent bookmark. When I’m on the ground, of course. I don’t read novels while I’m flying.” She took my hand and dragged me to the shadows at the far end of the porch where two chairs were tucked away. “I didn’t want to wake Portia turning on the lamp, so I was out on the porch roof, reading. A Tale of Two Cities. Do you know it?”