“You know what my dad said? He said, ‘Uh-huh, that’s part of the package. You city folk want to come in here and have us provide a free view. I’m not in the business of free views. I’m in the business of managing a ranch, and sometimes that includes dead horses.’ And he hung up on her.
“So then the banker calls and says, well, something has to be done. And Dad said, ‘Your ugly house has ruined my view. Your ugly house is equivalent to my dead horse. Only I’m a better neighbor, because mine is temporary. Now we’re even.’ Isn’t that hilarious? I think that’s hilarious.”
He looks so happy telling this story that I can’t help but smile.
“Dad ranted for hours about these new folks coming in, complaining about pigs smelling and slow tractors on the road. Why did they move here in the first place? This is the country, for godsake. Dad’s right. But anyway , the horse is not officially violating any codes, so Dad’s not going to move it. I told him, if your horse had to go, man, at least it went out causing a ruckus your horse had to go, man, at least it went out causing a ruckus to the end. Because that was an ornery, mean horse.”
“He wasn’t so bad.”
“Remember when we went riding? Bucked us both off.”
Derek smiles, because that was a fun day we had years ago, riding around bareback, and it’s nice to share a memory like that, a different version of us, floating, in its own time.
The song ends, but we stay on the dance floor and wait for the next one. When we’re moving again, Derek says, “Dad’s always going a bit overboard, but he’s got a point. He says, ‘Nobody ever unplows a Wal-Mart. Nobody ever gets rid of a subdivision. When this land is gone, it’s gone forever.’ It made me think, if I had some land I’d stay out here. But I don’t. I don’t want to be spending the rest of my life on the rig. I think I ought to get out of here.”
He sometimes says that; everyone around here says that occasionally. I don’t know what to tell him that I haven’t said already. So I say, “You know what Baxter told me once? He told me that every person, to be happy, has to create something that doesn’t die when he dies. For a rancher, he said, that’s easy. He leaves the land. A teacher leaves something important. An artist leaves something. But for the rest, it’s hard. They have to find something to create that matters, they have to do something beyond their own life.”
Derek leans down and whispers in my ear. “What’s that supposed to be for me, Libby?”
I turn my head slightly, so I can whisper into his ear. He smells a little like salt, like familiar skin. “I don’t know. For me either.”
We dance for a while and then I say, “Derek? Can I tell you something else? There was a message on the machine. Simon called while I was getting ready to come here tonight. He said he forgot to tell me something. I’m supposed to bring Amber to the hospital. They need some of her spit. They take some of Simon’s too, to prove he’s the father.”
Derek looks at me and nods and waits.
“I’m not going to take her to the hospital. Not yet. I gotta think.”
Something flickers in his eyes, and he shakes his head at me, no. “You can’t delay everything, Libby. Make a decision.”
I bite my lip, because I know what he’s saying, and I owe him that much—I do. An answer—for him, about him. I owe him an attempt to speak the truth, the same sort of truth I wish I would’ve gotten from Tess about whether or not she was going to stay. So I say it. “Derek, what would you do? Say you got along with someone, and you had terrific sex, and you had enough in common and were friends and all that, but it wasn’t love? It just wasn’t? What would you do? How long would you stick around?” And as I say that, I move closer to him, because I can’t stand to say something that’s real but that hurts, and I can’t stand to see him react.
The song winds down and our hearts beat and the dance floor feels quiet. Derek does the nicest thing, then. He leans forward, he whispers in my ear. “Okay, thank you. That’s enough.”
When we get back to the table near the bar, Miguel hands me my glass of beer and reaches out to shake Derek’s hand, and somewhere in between there, between all the motion, the glass slips. It happens during the silence between songs, and I don’t even realize I’ve dropped it till I hear the smash of glass on the hard floor.
Everyone in the room turns, and I’m blushing and trying to figure out what to do when some rancher at the next table over stands up and says, “Ah, what would all the glass makers do if nobody ever broke a glass?”
That makes everyone laugh, and then a woman at the next table stands up and yells, “Yeah, and better a broken glass than a broken heart.”
Everyone cheers at that, and the music starts up again. Before I even get a sorry out, the bartender’s come and gone with his broom and dustpan. Derek’s smiling at me, and Arlene brings Amber over. Pretty soon she’s talking to Derek and Miguel about the tornado that passed through Limon a few years back, how it tore up all the gravestones and took away the cemetery office and its maps, meaning that nobody quite knows where anyone is anymore, and the other story about how there was a woman living in a trailer, and her son picked her up to get her out of there, and as they were driving away part of her trailer landed in the back of the very pickup they were driving.
Amber’s listening to it all, taking in this news of a world that spins cows into feed stores, and feed stores into silos. For some reason, she’s as happy as can be. Seems like the more chaos around, the quieter she is.
I look away from them to find Frank walking toward me, fast. “Libby,” he says, and before I even have time to be surprised, he grabs my arm and pulls me a step away. “Listen, Kay left a message at the store. Baxter had a stroke today. She’s taken him to Pueblo. Well, first to the hospital here, and then to Pueblo.”
“Pueblo? He had a stroke?”
“Get the details from Kay. She’s with him. She’d fed the animals already, but for the next few days you’re in charge. I got it all written down. Bulls, horses, calves up front, canary, roosters, donkey, peacocks, chickens. How many animals does Baxter have, anyway? Can you do all that? I’m glad I saw your car out front. Thought Arlene said something about coming here. Listen, you take off whatever time you need from the store, of course, and you’ll have to leave early to feed at night.”
“I’ll figure it out. I can do it.”
“Well, ask for help if you need it.”
“I will.”
“Here’s the list of chores. Also the number at the hospital, and a number at a hotel where Kay’s staying. Why don’t you come in for a half day tomorrow? If you can find someone to watch Amber, that is. Or bring her in. Anything you or Kay need.” Then he bows his head, but he keeps his eyes on mine. “Because I owe you, you know. I owe your family. So ask.”
I nod. With our eyes, we’re talking about an unspoken thing.
It was my father who found Frank’s fiancée, Dawn, twenty years ago. My father was driving back from a bar one winter night, and he saw a car going fifty down the highway slam right into a semi-truck the very second that it started to jackknife on ice, and there wasn’t a thing either driver could have done because it was just one of those split seconds where a person can’t see what’s coming and no amount of preparation or careful driving would have made a difference.
Kay said my father was pretty worried about getting in trouble himself, being drunk and all, particularly since he had several DUIs, but he stayed standing by the car, by Dawn’s mangled body, until the police got there. The truck driver had a concussion and was slumped over in his truck, but he was fine. “That was a nice thing your father did,” Kay told me. “He reached in and kept his hand on this young girl’s bloody head until the police came, because it just wasn’t right to leave a body like that alone, even if it meant he’d go to jail. Every once in a while, he did something decent.”
There’s so many people who die out here in their cars. Cancer or cars. Every once in a while, there’s news of a farm accident, or a heart attack,
or a drowning at the dam, but it seems that most people die in their cars, and the only thing that makes the stories different is how the cars crashed—was someone taking a corner too fast, or hit ice, or came across loose gravel, or got hit by a snowplow?
I didn’t know Dawn, of course, and I didn’t know my father much. But I think about my father and her sometimes, and her blood on his hand. It’s incredible that a life can just end, just disappear from you, a snap of your fingers and it’s gone, and all that’s left is some wispy connections.
I look out the window, into the raining-down sky. Please don’t let this happen to Baxter, I ask of the clouds. Don’t let him wisp away before I had time to love him the deepest that I could, which is not something I’ve done yet—I never even tried—but I will, I will, I promise, if you don’t take him from me yet.
I’ll figure out how to be truer: to let people go if they need to be let go of, and to hold on tight if that’s what’s called for. I will pay attention, so I can cross each human heart that comes across my path, cross it as true as I can.
Kay doesn’t have much to tell me. I call her from Miguel’s place, since he’s got long distance, but all she’s got to say is that Baxter’s alive and tests are scheduled.
She’s more interested in giving me the details of chores: to check Luz’s left front foot, to spread the bulls’ hay all the way down the trough or they’ll fight for it, to make sure I turn off the water when I’m done filling the water tanks, to make sure the canary gets new water and seed, and water later in the day because he sometimes likes to take a bath in the first water, do I understand?
By the time I hang up, Miguel’s half asleep on a futon on the floor. He was trying to be polite, not going to bed and all, but he was tired. As I listened to Kay, I watched him come out of the bathroom changed into sweats, check on Juan, sleeping in his toddler bed, and then on Amber, who’s sleeping in, of all things, a cardboard box, which doesn’t bother me since it’s clean and looks about as cozy as a bassinet. Then Miguel put down a futon mattress and a blanket and fell asleep himself, though as soon as I hang up he wakes up enough to motion me over.
“Tell me,” he mumbles. “Baxter okay?”
I sit next to him and tell him what little there is to say. There’s a silence, then we speak at the same time. I say, “I want to sleep here tonight,” and he says, “Just sleep here tonight.”
He pulls me down onto his chest with one arm and holds my hand with another. Something about the way he does this tells me he doesn’t want to do anything but sleep, and in a moment that’s exactly what he’s doing. His body jerks a little as he drifts off, first his leg and then his shoulder twitches, and with about every third breath he makes a small grating noise. That makes me smile, because it makes him more human, to see him this way. But I know staring at him might wake him, so I turn my head back down, toward his chest.
I bite my lip and sigh and think, No, Libby, don’t. Don’t go there.
But I make myself a list anyway: One, I’m curious. Two, I want to see what love is about. Three, I want to know what there is besides Derek. Four, I just want to throw the dice and see how it turns out. And five, he is somebody, he’s a man, and now that Shawny is gone and Derek is gone he’s not so off limits.
But don’t, I tell myself. Don’t try, because it will mess up this friendship. And don’t do it because you’ll get turned down. I gotta trust what I know. Which is that Miguel is not interested, he’s just not. In that secret, silent way that people talk to each other all the time, Miguel has already told me that we’re going to be friends, and that’s all, and I need to listen to that.
I’m about crazy for someone right now, though, that’s the truth. And in the morning, I’ll probably still try to catch his eye to see if he’d like to sleep with me in another way. I wonder how he’ll signal to me that that’s not what he wants. And then we’ll make some breakfast, and we’ll talk kid talk, and I’ll try to be glad for this friendship, and we’ll both start our days.
Because that’s how I know it’s going to go, I prepare myself for it, and then I fall asleep. All night, I wake up to find us holding on to each other, our legs or hands touching, and then I drift off again, sleeping a deep sleep, a deep sleep that comes with feeling safe, with having another body next to me. Somehow, I know I’m sleeping with a smile on my face, and I know I’m sleeping with the feeling of the deepest thanks, and that even if I want more, this seems like a lot, and this one night is going to last in my heart for a good long while.
TWELVE
“Whatcha doing?”
When I hear Frank’s voice, an “Ooohhhhfuck” comes out my mouth before I can stop it.
Frank cocks his head. “Libby?”
I don’t even try to find the words that will explain why I’ve just thrown a twelve-pack of beer into a trash can.
“Libby?”
“Oh. Hey, Frank.”
We speak at the same time. I let down the trash bag so that it rests on the floor, and then my hands fall to my side.
“Well,” he says after a moment. “I think I understand.”
I look up for just an instant, then look right back down.
“Well, I never would’ve thought.” He doesn’t say what he never would have thought, though, and for some reason him not saying reminds me of all those times he used to say “noble.”
He just stands there for a long time, looking at me, and me looking at the floor. I imagine what he sees: me with my jeans, baggy T-shirt, blue apron, glasses, frizzing hair falling out of a ponytail, trash bag at my feet. After a while, he walks over to the black plastic bag, bends over, and takes the beer out. He puts it back onto the stack behind us. Then he walks out of the room, leaving the bag at my feet, wads of toilet paper and scraps of trash tumbling out the top.
I walk to the bathroom. I sit on the toilet for a good long while, mostly thinking nothing and then trying to think what to do. Finally I take off the apron and hang it on a peg. I rinse my face and glare at myself in the mirror.
Amber’s been here the whole time. There’s nobody to watch her and so I figured I’d just get in as much work as I could while she was napping. And get some beer while I was at it. She’s in her car seat, sleeping still, and I pick her up in one hand and grab a cup of ice in the other.
Frank and Arlene are talking to each other up front. That’s what makes me sick is seeing Arlene turn and look at me. It takes everything I’ve got to look up at her. She’s not giving me a you-lame-ass look, though. She actually looks sorry for me, and like she’s trying to smile at me, secret-like, so that Frank won’t see. That look means everything. It means that she understands, at least a little bit. It means that for some reason she’s willing to let it go.
I walk right up to them and turn to Frank. “Sorry,” I say. “I really am.”
“Surprises me, Libby.”
I nod.
“If you’re having hard times—I mean, I know you’re probably having hard times now. But I don’t think I understand. I’ve never had a kid work like you do.”
“Sure,” I say. “I guess I’ll be leaving now.”
“Libby, I don’t know what to say—”
“Thanks for everything you’ve done, Frank. And I’m sorry. Really sorry. See you around, Arlene.”
I push the glass door open and push myself through it.
Strange, to be leaving work when the light’s still shining, without my eyes stinging and feet aching. I swing Amber’s car seat a little as I walk to my car, and I look up at the blue, hard arc of sky.
The letter is on regular white paper, with no return address.
Dear Libby, listen to this: sticky spruce, prickly pine, friendly fir. Get it? You can tell the type of tree by the needles. Spruce needles are sticky, pines are prickly, firs are friendly. Neat, huh?
Well, I’m moving.
I lost the weight the baby put on me. And my boobs quit hurting! I think it’s all over now, I’m feeling better. For a while, I felt low. But
I learned something from you. Remember how once you were standing below Baxter’s barn window and I was trying to open it to throw out a rope to you and I pushed on the pane of glass and it fell right toward you and I yelled, “Heads!” and you ducked just in time and the glass broke on your head and shattered all around you and you looked up at me and smiled and said, “Well, that was exciting,” and that’s how I’m trying to be. Just duck when I need to and stay calm, and smile. You were a better teacher than I ever realized. I love you, Tess.
I sit in my car outside the post office and find my notebook and write like crazy.
Tess, I don’t have your address. And why won’t you tell me anything real—where are you and what’s going on in your life? This letter won’t get to you. We’ve been trying to track you down, and Kay’s called the police, she doesn’t know that you’re driving illegals, which I do know, so watch out.
Please come back and help me figure this out.
Do you want Simon to have the baby?
Will you be mad at me if I give Simon the baby?
At first Amber just slept and cried and went through the diapers. When she sucked at the bottle she reminded me of a baby pig, which I mean in a complimentary way. Now she makes cooing noises and I call her my little pigeon. When she opens up her mouth wide, she reminds me of a hippo.
Some days I don’t know what I feel. I feel nothing. I feel numb. Some days I feel panicky, like I got to get her and me out of here. My heart is beating too hard. It’s going to explode. Some days I think I hate you. Some days I think I hate Amber.
I feed her when she’s hungry. I shake a rattle when she’s awake. I take her outside, I take her on walks. I’m trying to be a good mom, but it’s too hard.
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