“I…” Kristen could still feel Marydale’s lips on hers, like a flash of light imprinted on the retina. “Um.” She laughed. “I’m not…We’re roommates. I didn’t…”
But she had. She had felt the air tighten around them like static before a storm.
She touched her lips. “I’m not gay or anything like that. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression.”
Marydale hung her head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“You didn’t mean to?” Kristen didn’t know if she wanted Marydale to say that she meant the kiss or that of course she didn’t mean it; she was straight. They were friends. That was all.
Marydale stood up and walked to the porch railing, staring out at the dark yard.
“I won’t tell anyone. I know I get it wrong,” Marydale said.
Kristen thought she saw Marydale’s shoulders tighten.
“You’re a lesbian,” Kristen said.
It was obvious now. She heard the man outside the diner yelling, She’s not gonna to fuck you, if that’s what you’re thinking. She saw Grady tipping the brim of his enormous hat. Some people downright dislike her.
It was easy to forget there were places like Tristess. In Portland, everyone was gay. Even the straight men were gay, with their shoulder bags and their hair pulled up in man-buns. In Tristess, women were still females, and there seemed to be a rhinestone quotient that every woman was required to meet.
Marydale shook her head, but she wasn’t saying no.
“Hey.” Kristen stood up and put her hand on Marydale’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m straight.” It came out sounding like a question. “But it’s not a big deal. I know it probably is here, but it’s not in the rest of the world. Forget about it. I’m flattered, really.”
Kristen wanted to pull Marydale back into a kiss, not for sex but because Marydale looked so sad. Kristen wanted to say, Do you know how beautiful you are?
Instead she said, “I’m sure there’s someone out there for you.” She thought of the teenage waitress at the diner with her sweet, mean smile, and of the grim, heavy women who pumped gas at the Arco, and she thought of the books Marydale had tucked around the house. And she thought, Probably not. “I know it’s hard in Tristess. You could always move.”
Marydale ran her hands through her hair. Kristen could almost see her slipping into her persona, like the girl in the family portrait putting on her glittery, red smile.
“I can’t,” Marydale said. “But I understand…I understand if you need to.”
It took Kristen a moment to realize what she was saying.
“We’re roommates. It would be weird if we…you know. But I don’t have to move because you’re gay. If you knew how little stuff like that matters in Portland. Really,” Kristen said. “I’d be more upset if you started bringing some creepy boyfriend home. A lot of my friends…” She was going to say are lesbian, but in truth, the lesbians she knew at the law school had been an intimidating bunch, with their fauxhawks and their bracelets made out of old bike tires. “I like you as a friend,” she finished. “It doesn’t matter what you are.”
Back in her bedroom, Kristen stood in front of the dresser mirror. She took off her glasses and leaned in. Her shoulder-length hair looked professional, but it also looked matronly. When she was eighteen, people had told her she looked like a young Jodie Foster, but she had not grown up to be a twenty-seven-year-old Jodie Foster. She had grown up to be the kind of woman who left parties early to finish her laundry. But Marydale Rae had kissed her. Beautiful Marydale. She’s just lonely, Kristen thought. We’re just lonely. But still she replayed the moment again and again in her imagination. When she lay down, she slipped her hand under the hem of her nightgown and touched herself slowly, trying to remember every detail of their kiss.
8
Marydale sat in a plastic chair in front of her parole officer’s desk, a Bookmobile library book clasped in her hands. Behind her, the door was open to prevent false allegations of misconduct between parolee and parole officer. The office hummed with the sound of copiers and muffled voices.
“What do you think you’re up to?” Cody Densen folded his arms across his chest, obscuring the word parole stamped there in white block letters.
Marydale looked at the book in her hands and then back at Cody. They had gone to the same high school although he had graduated the year before she started. She had been in Future Farmers of America with his sister.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Cody asked.
“I report on Tuesdays,” Marydale said. “I’m reporting.”
The office was stuffy. A high, narrow window behind Cody’s head let in the sun but no view. Cody leaned back in his chair and twiddled a pencil between two fingers. His thinning hair was slicked with gel.
“I heard you were talking to that new DA.”
“I talk to all my customers,” Marydale said. “I’ve been demonstrating pro-social behaviors by maintaining regular employment and staying within the county lines unless in possession of written permission to travel.”
The last time she had left the county—by accident, because she’d forgotten that State Road 7 dipped into Harney County for two miles—Cody had sanctioned her to fifteen days in jail.
“Are you telling me how to do my job?” Cody demanded.
He had small, close-set eyes that made him look piggy, like an underfed American Landrace.
“No, sir,” Marydale drawled.
“Don’t you get fresh with me. I will sanction you,” Cody said. “Do you want thirty days? I’ll give you thirty days.”
“Cody.” Marydale sighed. “Sir. Mr. Densen. I’m reporting. What do you want?”
Cody’s lips tightened into a thinner line. “Don’t think she’s going to find some loophole and get you off supervision. You are on supervision. Period. You can’t bribe your way out of this.”
“Bribe?”
“You offered her a room.”
“I rented her a room.”
Cody pressed his palms to the top of his desk. “Ronald Holten found out that she turned down his rental to live with you. Does she know about you?”
Marydale tried for her best competition smile. “I thought you’d be happy. I’m not supposed to associate with criminals. If I get out of line, she can have me tried and convicted without leaving the house.”
“Does she know?”
“I don’t know,” Marydale said. “I don’t have to tell her. That’s not a condition of my parole.”
Did she know? The question was like bad news in an unopened letter. She knew it was there; she just hadn’t looked. When truckers came through the diner for a coffee and a shortcake, they’d glance at her, then lean in to the waitresses and whisper, Heard she was the rodeo queen for three years running. Youngest queen west of the Rockies, and she did six years out at Holten Penitentiary. That a true story? Then Glenda or Janice or Frank would fold their arms and say, Her mother was a good woman, bless her. It was a way of saying yes and we don’t talk about it all in the same breath. And Marydale was always meant to overhear.
“She wouldn’t be looking at renting a room from you if she knew, unless she’s looking…” False realization dawned on Cody’s piggy face.
“It’s not like that,” Marydale said quickly. “She’s not.”
She thought of Kristen’s kind refusal. I’m flattered, really. Her body ached.
“She better not be. You know the conditions of your parole.”
Marydale clutched the book in her hands. “I’m not allowed to enter into a relationship without your permission.”
Somewhere in the building a phone rang and rang. In the hall outside, two women laughed, and one said, “I swear I’ll go crazy if I don’t get to Disney soon.”
“You are not allowed to enter a female relationship without my permission,” Cody said.
“I know,” Marydale said. “But you can’t stop me from renting a room to a respectable citizen. Even if Ronald Holten doesn’t like it
.”
“You may be out, but you are not a free woman.”
“I know!” Marydale said.
“You better. And she better know about you and not some whitewashed version you want to tell her, because I might come by and pay you both a visit. Remember, I can come in your house any day, anytime, and I will tell her the truth.”
“I’m sure she knows! Everybody fucking knows!”
“Watch your language.”
Marydale’s heart raced in her chest.
“She’s the DA. They’ve got Aaron Holten’s name on the courtroom and on every bench on the square.”
“There are two benches on the square.”
“Yeah. The Aaron Holten Memorial Bench and the Other Aaron Holten Memorial Bench. I can’t believe they haven’t made a bronze cast of him doing the Heisman.”
“You shouldn’t talk about him that way. He was a good man.”
“I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about my life. She knows!”
Marydale’s truck skidded to a stop in the gravel outside the Pull-n-Pay. She leaped out of the cab and banged through the gate and into Aldean’s shed.
“She doesn’t know!” Marydale cried.
Aldean was kneeling on the concrete floor, an acetylene torch in one hand and a piece of scrap metal held in a pair of tongs in the other. He thumbed the gas, and the torch fizzled out. He pushed the welder’s hood away from his face.
“What?”
“Kristen Brock. She doesn’t know about Aaron Holten. She doesn’t know about me.”
Outside the autumn sun was right overhead, and the little shed held the heat and the smell of paint thinners and gas.
“You asked her to live with you, and you didn’t tell her?” Aldean stood up and set his torch down on the workbench. “She’s the DA. Mary, what were you thinking?”
Marydale sat down on an empty metal drum. It tipped precariously. “I thought somebody’d probably told her.”
“And you didn’t check?”
“No. I didn’t,” Marydale said glumly. It had just felt so nice to be Marydale-the-waitress, not Marydale-the-felon, Marydale-the-pervert. “But they didn’t tell her, did they? Because of my mother, bless her damn heart.” Marydale leaned her head back against the wall. “I’m such a fucking idiot. I knew she didn’t know. How could I not know? She would never live with me if she knew. She would never talk to me if she knew.”
Aldean ambled over and stood beside her. “Aaron was an asshole. If she knew that…”
“It doesn’t make it okay.”
“Only it kind of does.”
Marydale kicked the heels of her boots against the metal drum.
“Careful of those.” Aldean pointed toward the metal pieces on the floor near her feet. “They’re hot. I’m working on the reflux for the still.”
“It looks like a muffler fucking a drainpipe,” Marydale grumbled.
Aldean lit a cigarette, insensitive to the faded warnings on the acetylene tank.
“So she doesn’t know. You served your time. You paid your debt to society, right?”
Marydale hesitated. “I kissed her.”
Aldean took the cigarette out of his mouth. “I knew I’d lose this one!” He slapped her shoulder.
“She said no.”
“Don’t they all say no to you?” Aldean affected a soprano. “Oh, Marydale, I can’t. What would Jesus do? Well, okay, maybe just this once.” He blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. “Damn, girl, I lost a lot of tail to that we’re-just-girlfriends-who-really-love-each-other routine back in the day.”
Marydale couldn’t bring herself to laugh.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” Aldean said.
“She said no, but she was cool about it. If she finds out…”
“You got to just get in there before she does, do what you girls do, and get out. Then you can tell her. Maybe she likes it a little rough,” Aldean suggested. “Maybe she watched that Netflix show, and now she wants to feel what it’s like to do it with a criminal.”
Usually Marydale would give Aldean a friendly punch. Now she just stared at the ground. A few shards of shattered windshield glass had made their way into the shed, and now they reflected the light from the door. She slid off the drum, picked one, and held it up to her eye so the shed fractured into a dozen visions of itself.
“I want more than that.”
“I know,” Aldean said quietly.
Marydale thought about how many hours she’d spent in the junkyard with Aldean, playing as children, sneaking beers as teenagers, crying in his arms the night before she had to report to court.
“I think she liked it,” Marydale said finally.
“That’s right.” Aldean put his arm around her, enveloping her in the smell of cigarette smoke and burnt acetylene. “You know why I’m not a happily married man?”
“Because you’re a slut.” Marydale leaned against him.
“It’s because the only woman who’s really worth having won’t play for my team.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
Aldean laughed. “Well, if she doesn’t fall madly in love with you, she’s an asshole and a damn fool.” He squeezed her a little closer. “Just don’t get your hopes up too high. Okay, princess?”
9
The next week passed uneventfully, the hot weather breaking and then getting hot again. Marydale left for work early and came home late, and the house on Gulch Creek Road felt empty. When she and Kristen did cross paths, Marydale would offer her a little wink and a “hey, gorgeous,” but then she’d disappear into her bedroom or whistle to Lilith and vault up into the cab of her truck.
On Monday Kristen went back to work feeling, as she often had in Portland, that there was something she wished she could have done, someplace she wished she could have been. But instead of a vague yearning for something out there, it was Marydale. Marydale singing as she cooked. Marydale reading in an easy chair while Kristen watched TV. Marydale sitting on the porch railing, a little jam jar of whiskey dangling from her fingers.
In the courtroom, Kristen barely heard Douglas Grady,
“You still here, Law School?”
“Yeah,” she said, staring at the clock above the judge’s bench.
“What’s it been, a month and a half?” Grady added. He made it sound both too long and not long enough to be proud of. “I don’t know why you brought this case.”
Kristen didn’t know either, especially when Relington had passed over two domestic-violence cases that had landed the victims in the Burnville walk-in clinic.
“Ask your friend Boyd,” she said.
“Boyd Relington’s no friend of mine.” Grady glanced at his client, a dark-haired man in a plaid shirt. He looked like a boy compared to Grady, in yet another pearlescent, off-white suit. Grady looked back to Kristen. “This is a bullshit case, and you know it.”
She cared, but she was thinking about Marydale.
The arrival of Judge Kip Spencer interrupted their talk. Grady stood, resting his hand on the enormous white hat on his table. Kristen rose also.
The case was a simple bicycle theft. She hadn’t wanted to prosecute. The price of the trial could pay for a hundred ten-speeds. But Relington had called it a gateway crime and had demanded that she prosecute.
Kristen called her first witness. The woman confirmed the details in the police report. She had seen a Latino man riding the bicycle at dusk on the night it was stolen. She later identified the defendant in a photo lineup.
Grady crossed and shuffled a stack of photographs in front of the woman. She picked one with confidence.
“Mrs. Peterson,” he said with overdone courtesy. “Thank you for taking time out of your day to be with us here. Can you tell us a little bit about what it’s like to live out on Old State Post Highway 10?”
“Objection, irrelevant,” Kristen said.
Judge Spencer glanced at her over the expanse of his handlebar mustache. “Really, Miss Brock? Been watching Law a
nd Order? I’ll allow it.”
The woman described life on a small ranch where her family had lived for three generations.
“Off the main road, aren’t you?” Grady asked.
“About half a mile.”
“Hard to know if you’re looking at Mr. Juan here.” He shuffled the photos in front of her. “Or Mr. Jose.”
“Objection. This isn’t a shell game,” Kristen protested.
“Withdrawn,” Grady said, and ambled back to his seat. “Your turn, Law School.”
Kristen called a man named Old John who had found the bicycle behind his transmission repair shop.
“Would you say that Mr. Ortega is a frequent visitor to your shop?” she asked.
“Yep,” Old John said, managing to look and sound exactly like a man smoking a cigarette, without actually having one in his mouth. “But he didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know who did.”
“Okay. Who did it?” Kristen asked.
“The Holten boys. Adam and Jackson. Ronald Holten’s grandsons.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because that’s what they do. They stole Mrs. Ellington’s grill. The plates off Mr. Fisher’s scooter. We didn’t used to have kids like that in Tristess, but kids’ll do anything if they can get away with it.” He chewed his invisible cigarette.
“Did you mention your suspicions to the police?”
“I did,” Old John said, folding his arms.
“A compelling legal argument.” Grady clapped his hands slowly. “Old John is right and, by the way, Mrs. Peterson, Mr. Ortega’s photo is not in the stack.” He held up the photos. “I got these off something called Flickr. Judge, I move to dismiss this case.”
“You can’t just dismiss in the middle of a trial,” Kristen protested.
She was waiting for Judge Spencer to invite them to the bench, but he called out across the floor.
“Ms. Brock, are you going to pursue the Holten boys if I dismiss?”
“If the evidence suggests they’re involved.”
“We’ll proceed with the trial,” Judge Spencer said.
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