“He was just tired of walking,” Patty replied. “He was just trying to tell you he needed to take a break. He’s old.”
“I seem to recall hearing that somewhere,” Roseanna said, before rolling up her window and driving by.
As she did, she noted yet another gaggle of lookers at the fence.
“How about you go talk to them?” she asked Lance.
“Why me?”
“I’m done with them.”
“I thought you liked that meeting-of-the-minds thing.”
“I guess I thought I did, too.” She pulled up beside the barn and parked. “But it was based on the assumption that it would only be a brief meeting.”
“Got it,” Lance said, and jumped out of the truck.
“Do make it clear that we’re full up,” she called after him. “No room at the inn.”
“Count on me,” Lance called back.
Chapter Fourteen
When Your Wiper Blades Meet Somebody Else’s Intestines
“Mom,” Lance said, and shook Roseanna gently by the shoulder.
She sat up in bed and blinked at him in silence, still effectively asleep.
“I’ll be gone all day, Mom. I just wanted you to know.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to go back to the city and get some of my stuff.”
“Oh. That’s right.” She threw the covers back and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Pressed her feet to the hardwood floor. It was not even barely cool. It didn’t cool off much these summer nights. “You were going to do that yesterday.”
“Right. But then we had . . .” He allowed what seemed like a purposeful pause.
For a second or two, Roseanna literally did not know where he was going with that sentence. She’d forgotten.
“. . . Earnest,” he added, as if speaking to a kindergartner.
“Oh, damn.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’d forgotten about Earnest. I wish you hadn’t reminded me.”
“I made coffee,” Lance said.
There was a hopefulness in his voice that Roseanna could not quite parse out. It seemed bigger than any issue currently before them.
“Okay. I’ll get up and have some with you before you go.”
She rose and followed him into the kitchen in her nightgown. A robe would have been too heavy and warm.
“Actually,” he said, still walking and faced away, “I was hoping you’d come along for the ride.”
Roseanna stopped walking.
Lance reached the coffeemaker and poured two servings for them in the chipped cobalt-blue mugs. When he turned back to hand one to her, he seemed surprised that she was not right behind him. And also a bit perplexed by whatever he saw in her face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, walking the coffee to her.
She took hold of it. Let the smell rise into her nostrils. Something cold had solidified in her lower intestines. It was a sickening feeling, and she wanted it to go away. But she didn’t even know how to begin to get in to where it was hiding.
“Go with you?” she asked. As if he had asked her to go bungee jumping. From a plane, maybe.
“Yeah. You know. For the ride.”
“To the city?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because . . . ,” he paused, cuing her to remember on her own. She remembered nothing. “Because the idea was for us to spend time together. Remember?”
“Right. Right.”
“It’s almost a four-hour drive each way. It would give us so much time to talk.”
“Oh, honey. We’ll have every minute of every day to talk. As soon as you get back here.”
He was looking closely at her face, so she turned it away. She took her mug of coffee to the couch and sat, staring at the woodstove as though there were a lovely fire crackling in it and she couldn’t take her eyes off it.
A moment later she felt him sit down beside her.
“What’s the issue here, Mom? Afraid of motor vehicles suddenly? Worried the farm will be taken over by squatters the minute you walk out?”
“Of course not.”
“What, then?”
“It’s just . . . the city. I just don’t want it anymore.”
“Well, you don’t have to have it, Mom. I’m just suggesting you come for the ride. We’ll be in and out of the city in two hours.”
“Which is two hours more of the city experience than I’m willing to face.”
A long silence. In time she risked a glance over at his face. He looked peeved. Problematically so, as if Roseanna had unexpectedly sprouted another dog.
“You don’t have to get all angry and silent,” she said. “It’s not about you.”
“Right. It never is. It never was.”
“Oh, come on, Lance. I just have a . . . sort of a . . . thing about the city now.”
“You were willing to go back and get your own stuff.”
“Oh, no I wasn’t.”
“So how did it all get here? Bought its own bus ticket?”
“Nita brought the immediate stuff. The kind of stuff you’re going to fetch right now. Then I had a professional service pack up everything else and ship it out here. It’s mostly on pallets in the barn.”
They sipped their coffee in silence for a time. Utter silence. Normally there would have been commotion outside the windows by this time of the morning. But whatever the squatters were up to, they were doing it quietly. It made Roseanna feel as if she and her son were the only two inhabitants of a planet that might or might not have been Earth.
“That makes no sense,” he said after a time, clearly irritated.
“It doesn’t. Yet there it is.”
“You lived in the city for more than fifty years.”
“Therein seems to lie the problem.”
“But you can just . . . I mean, you don’t like it anymore. Fine. Whatever. You can put up with it for a chance to spend some time with me.”
“I wish I could, sweetie. But . . .” She paused. Poked around in that frozen wasteland of her gut. It was fear. Abject panic. There was no explaining it, but no denying its existence, either. “It’s like a PTSD sort of a thing. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that. Until I drove out with the intention of staying out, I had no idea how much I’d been hating it. I held it down for too long. Put it away so I could live there. But now it’s out and I can’t put it back away. It’s too big.”
Lance rose and dumped the rest of his coffee down the sink drain.
“Fine,” he said. “Whatever.”
He strode toward the door.
“Can you please not leave mad?”
He paused briefly, one hand on the knob.
“Can you please make me the priority for a change?”
He gave her a space to speak, but not a very big one. Her hesitation seemed to tell him everything he was waiting to hear.
“Right, I didn’t think so. Well, I like the city. And if nothing’s changed with you, and I’m still not that important, maybe I’ll just stay there. Maybe I won’t come back at all.”
Then came an even briefer pause—her split second to rescue the moment. And possibly their entire relationship. She fumbled it again through hesitation.
Lance slammed the door hard on his way out.
It took Roseanna nearly an hour to realize she would have to go into the barn and bring Earnest a flake of hay. Having not been a horse owner the previous morning made that chore something short of her established habit.
She found the mangy-looking beast in the barn where she had left him, standing far too close to her Maserati for her liking. The place now held the distinct and pungent odor of horse manure.
She walked close to Earnest with the flake of hay, allowing him to get a good look—and sniff—at her offering. Then she walked into a far corner of the barn, away from her beloved car, and dropped the hay on the dirt floor. Earnest moved in to devour it, bumping Roseanna with his bo
ny shoulder and nearly stepping on her foot.
On her way out of the barn she looked at her car and noticed something odd. One of the windshield wipers was standing up, away from the windshield. As if someone had been washing her car windows before suddenly abandoning the task.
She moved closer.
Just as she was reaching out to set the wiper arm back in place, she noticed another alarming development. There was no wiper blade on the arm. Someone had pulled it off and taken it. She checked the other wiper arm, which was in its proper place against the windshield. But it had no rubber blade, either. Roseanna lifted it slightly, as if the blade might be hiding underneath somehow. She noticed a small nick in the windshield where the bare metal clip had apparently snapped back into place and struck the glass.
Roseanna felt a redness and heat building up around her ears.
She stomped out of the barn and made her way to the gate, where she rang the bell loudly and consistently. It’s what she did when she wanted all of her squatters to come in for a meeting, pronto.
“I want to know who took them,” Roseanna said. “And I want to know why.”
They all stood in the barn together. Roseanna. Patty and Willa. Martin. Nelson David. Melanie, though her husband, Dave, was not in attendance. Off property, apparently, which made Roseanna suspect him.
“They’re worth hardly anything,” she continued, more rage in her voice than she meant to betray. “Maybe one of you just needed a pair for your own car, though I’m not even sure how interchangeable they are. But that’s not even the issue,” she added, as though correcting herself. “Here I am opening this place up to you and not outright chasing you off, and one of you has the gall to steal from me? Granted, it’s not a big-ticket item, but it’s a damn nuisance, because there’s not exactly a Maserati dealership on the next block, if you catch my drift. And if I can’t trust you with those smaller items, how can I trust you with anything that’s actually valuable? Am I going to walk into the barn next and find my car gone? And why does the phrase ‘No good deed goes unpunished’ keep coming to mind? I expect all of you to at least have the good sense to limit your thieving to those who haven’t shown you a significant kindness.”
Roseanna felt the little girl tugging at her sleeve. She brushed her away again.
“Please don’t, Willa,” she hissed. “I’m trying to make a point here.”
“But—”
“Later, honey.”
“But . . . is this your wiper thingy?”
Roseanna looked down.
On Willa’s miniature palm lay a small scrap of rubber. Maybe an inch and a half or two inches in length. One end was blunt and clean, the other raggedy. Chewed-looking.
Roseanna took it from the girl and eyed it more closely. It was indeed a piece of a wiper blade. But not a very large piece.
Her squatters crowded in more closely to see.
They all stared at it for a moment. Then they looked up. Looked around at each other. Patty turned her head and looked at Earnest. A second later all eyes fell on the mangy beast.
Earnest whipped his long neck around and stared back at them, with a look in his eyes that seemed to say, “What?”
Roseanna sat cross-legged in the distinctly uncomfortable dirt at the summit of CPR Hill. While Lance’s line rang—probably enough times to put her in voicemail territory—she looked out over her property, and the Maserati. She had parked it outside the barn for obvious reasons.
When she first heard his voice, she thought for a split second it was him. The words “This is Lance” sounded like his live voice. The “I’m not here right now—leave a message” made her heart fall down into the pit of her stomach. Quite a bit lower than she thought a heart could go.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “I’m just . . . I just need to . . . Oh, crap. Bad start. Lance, you were absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong. And it’s been brought to my attention that in the past I haven’t been the best at admitting such things. So . . . just to show you I really am changing, I’m admitting fault, even though I realize I’m admitting it into a recording device. I do have this weird paranoia about having to go back there. But I should have just done it. No matter how bad it felt. I should’ve just pushed through it. For you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Now I’m sitting up here on top of CPR Hill with my eyes closed and picturing myself riding in your car with you, talking the whole way. And it’s such a beautiful thing in my head. So that’s how I know I really effed things up. I’m not just saying it so you’ll come back, either, even though I hope you will. It’s just been such a crappy morning. You leaving mad, and now I feel terrible about it, and then the horse ate my windshield wipers, and when I’m done apologizing to you I have to go apologize to everybody I accused of stealing them, which is damn near everybody who lives here. And I thought if I could talk to you, I might feel better. But I guess not. That’s not to make you feel guilty. It’s my own fault.”
She paused, and opened her eyes, wondering if she had time to wrap up her message before the recording cut her off.
“Well, I’ll tell you the rest in person when I talk to you. If I ever get to talk to you again. Love—”
But before she could say the word “you,” she heard the second beep. The one that says you’re done, whether you thought you were done or not.
That was the most important part of the whole thing, she thought. Why the hell didn’t I say it first thing out of the gate?
She bumped into Patty on her walk back to the house.
“I was wondering if I could borrow your phone,” Patty said.
“Yeah. Sure. Where’s Willa?”
“She’s with Martin. They’re stacking firewood.”
“Damn it! How many times do I have to tell that man I don’t want him doing all that strenuous work on my property? He’s eighty.”
But she reached the phone out to Patty all the same.
“Thanks,” Patty said, and took it from her. “He seems to be in pretty good shape. For a guy his age, anyway.”
“Yeah. Right. Everybody always seems fine. Until the moment they drop dead.”
A pause. Roseanna looked into Patty’s eyes and realized she needed to tone herself down a bit. Not only was her mood toxic to others, it wasn’t doing her much good, either.
“Well. Anyway,” Roseanna continued, attempting a more friendly tone. “You go make your phone call. I need to go back and apologize to everybody for this morning.”
“Oh,” Patty said, and seemed to brighten a bit. “I think they would like that.”
“I’m sure they will,” Roseanna said. “The only one who won’t enjoy it is me. So, tell me something. Is this a normal thing? For a horse to eat rubber? I mean, I know a billy goat will eat anything, but a horse?”
“Mostly they don’t,” Patty said. “No. Earnest is unusual.”
It seemed like enough of an understatement to draw a comment from Roseanna, but she was too tired and depressed to bother.
It was twenty minutes and four apologies later when Patty came to the door to bring Roseanna back her phone.
“Thank you,” Roseanna said.
Then she was ready to close the door, but Patty didn’t seem to want to move out of the way.
“Don’t you want to know what the vet said?” Patty asked.
“What vet?”
“The vet I just called.”
“I didn’t know you were even calling a vet.”
“Oh. Did I forget to mention that?”
“Apparently so.” Roseanna waited a beat or two, then sighed. “Well, I guess you’d better come in and tell me all about it.”
Patty stepped inside and walked around her living room, looking at Roseanna’s scant belongings. Maybe comparing every single one of them to what Macy had kept in that same location. Then again, maybe not. You never know what someone else is thinking.
“So why did you call a vet?” Roseanna asked when she grew tired of waiting for
the information to be volunteered.
“To make sure Earnest’ll be okay.”
“And will he be?”
“We don’t really know. The vet said if he chewed up the rubber pretty good, it might go through him without any trouble. But if he swallowed it in big pieces, well . . . it could get twisted up in there and then stop food from going through it, and the next thing you know he could have a bowel obstruction. And that would be very bad. The only thing you can do about a bowel obstruction in a horse . . . well, you can try pumping him with mineral oil, but that either works or it doesn’t.”
Everything either works or it doesn’t, Roseanna thought. She didn’t say so.
“If that doesn’t work,” Patty continued, apparently sure Roseanna wanted every single veterinary detail, “then the only thing left would be surgery. But it’s really expensive, and besides, the vet’s not going to do surgery on a thirty-eight-year-old horse. He probably wouldn’t survive it, and even if he did, it just wouldn’t be fair to the poor old guy. And if he swallowed any of the metal clips that hold that rubber blade in place, then it’s game over for Earnest.”
Roseanna plunked down onto the couch and waited in silence. After all that detail, she felt strangely sure there must be more.
“So what do we do?” she asked, when no more was forthcoming.
“We’re supposed to listen for gut sounds.”
“I hope you know what that means. Because I don’t.”
“Yeah, I can show you. Come on.”
Then Patty was at the door, and then out the door. Before Roseanna could gather herself up to say how much she didn’t want to go, Patty was halfway to the barn. So Roseanna just gave up. It was easier that way.
She sighed deeply, and followed.
Earnest looked up at them with soft and soulful eyes as they stepped into the barn. She’d never seen that look from him before. Roseanna wondered if horses manipulate people with such gazes. She also wondered why she hadn’t put the horse out of the barn and kept the car in.
“You just put your ear to his side,” Patty said. “Like this.” She demonstrated. Earnest swung his neck around and nibbled on her hair. “Oh yeah. I can hear it. That’s good. It sounds kind of gurgle-y. Want to try it?”
Heaven Adjacent Page 16
