“I really think you ought to consider giving that baby away, Phil.”
“Why? Hubbard says if we splint the legs, there’s every chance the fetlocks will straighten.”
“But you don’t know what you’re getting into.”
“So I’ll learn.”
“It’s a full-time job.”
“You can help me.”
“No. I won’t do that. Not with an orphan.”
“Orphans make it.”
“No!” The woman’s voice rose an octave. “You have no idea what it can be like. You’ll both suffer, and the horse ends up confused as hell and chock-full of vices. Jesus, look at me. I can’t go to work like this. I’m a bloody mess.”
“I think I’ve got a sweatshirt in my office. Come on.”
Finally they rounded the corner. Hank craned his neck to peek out the door. Phil Green, all six feet four inches of him, stood in his office doorway holding on to the back of a soaking wet blond in a pink sweatshirt that was covered in equal measures of rain and blood.
“Trouble?” Carver piped up.
“Take a look for yourself.”
Phil waved, but the blond’s back was to them now. “Cass dropped early. We were up all night with the vet.” He cleared his throat. “Looked like she might come around, but then she went all shocky on us and hemorrhaged.” He snapped his fingers. “Just died, like that.”
Carver whistled. “That’s terrible news, Phil. Really sorry to hear it.”
Phil’s grimy hands patted the woman’s back. “I even had the miracle worker on the job, but that wasn’t enough.”
She made a sound of protest and tried to pull away.
Phil grasped her shoulder. “You guys had better congratulate me or I’ll start crying again. I guess I’m a proud father, reluctantly. We delivered her colt.”
Hank said, “Sure. Congratulations. Anything we can do?”
Phil tried to laugh. “Not unless you happen to have a clean shirt.” He looked at the hall clock. “I have to give a lecture in ten minutes.”
Hank got up from his chair and retrieved the funeral shirt. He wasn’t all that keen to lend it—it would be miles too small for Phil—but the gesture was called for, and this way he might get a better look at the woman. “Sleeves will be short,” he said. “Roll them up, and it’ll get you through your class.”
“Thanks, Oliver, but—”
Hank cut him off. “De nada.”
But instead of Phil taking the shirt for himself, the woman intercepted it. She stripped off her bloody sweatshirt and let it fall to the office floor before the three men. Well, in truth, Phil, who was facing her, did look away, but Hank didn’t, not at first, and he felt reasonably certain that Carver was taking this freebie as well. No nonsense of bra to hinder the view, either. A muscled vista of freckled skin shone in shades of ivory and peach, contrasting with the drab hallway. As she swung her arm into the sleeve, Hank caught a brief glimpse of left breast, a pale half-moon a little wider than the span of his hand that swung maddeningly out of sight into his shirt. There was a scar, too, underneath her right shoulder blade. Had to be at least eight inches long. Pink stitch marks fanned out from it like a centipede’s legs, a hasty repair. Then it disappeared as she gathered the shirttails and knotted them around her waist. She wrung out dishwater-blond hair in one hand and turned to go, confronting their gaping faces for a moment. Her eyes were brown.
She stared at Asa’s smarmy grin. “You got to be pretty hard up if that got you off.”
Then she picked up the bloody sweatshirt, balled it, and handed it to Hank, giving him a half-smile born, he was sure, of an earned disgust with all men. “What do they do, pay you double to room with this jackal?” When she smiled, a chipped front tooth was exposed. Down the staircase her footfalls sounded slightly, and then she was gone.
Phil took the sweatshirt.
Asa laughed. “Interesting morning thus far, boys.”
They exchanged guilty smiles. Hank took a deep breath. “So. Vet think the colt will make it?”
“Touch and go, but yeah. Thanks for asking.” Phil waved, a flaring of long dirty fingers as he slowly descended the staircase, each cowboy bootheel knocking against the risers. “Think I’ll cancel my classes and get on back to him. I’ll keep you guys posted,” he called up.
“Do that,” Asa said.
Hank stared for a moment at the bloody swash across his hand.
Carver let out a hoot and punched him in the shoulder. “Better shut your jaw, Oliver, you’ll catch flies. Just who do you suppose that was? The war-torn Valkyrie come for your heart?”
Hank didn’t answer. He wiped his hand on the student’s paper in front of him. Here’s a little something else about The Odyssey.
Carver laughed until his breath was emptied. He took a gasp. “Man, are you going to have dreams tonight.”
Suddenly cold, Hank reached for his jacket. He felt the subtle ache of serious change beginning in the marrow of his bones, shrewdly working each cell. She had his shirt.
CHAPTER
5
Raw skin chafed beneath the shirt she’d taken from Phil out side his office. What the hell was she thinking? She’d taken her sweatshirt off in front of those men. The faces were a blur—the one with the mustache—he was cute, the way he looked down, pretending he hadn’t seen. They couldn’t know the stench of blood seethed in her pores, that nothing on earth could make her feel quite as claustrophobic; she would have marched naked in a parade rather than endure the smell. A few tears puddled in her eyes, and she admonished herself. Crying will do you a hell of a lot of good. Next time, have the foresight to slap on a bra when somebody gets you out of bed after midnight. Plans were always what you made after you blew it. Now she’d have to work her shift at Wedler’s braless, her nipples growing sore with each swipe of rag across the greasy formica.
She hadn’t expected to pull an all-nighter. Or that Hubbard would arrive so unforgivably late, or that the mare would cash it in. That was a puzzle. The baby—well, maybe he would follow his mama, and Phil’s problem would be just one more gaping wound waiting for the stitch of time passing to heal it up.
Ordinarily she relished walking under the dripping, forty-foot eucalyptus trees, breathing in the just-washed, cough-drop smell of their seedpods, the tail end of a good winter rain washing her face. The college campus was like a well-tended park without the stock of crazies that tended to gather in a green place. The student parking lot was a sight to behold: all those cars lined up in ranks, mostly new models. The money in one aisle alone could set you up for life.
Students rushed past her, their backpacks stuffed full or arms lugging notebooks. They were all talking, too, as if they had so much to say there might never be enough time to say it in between classes. The idea of attending college seemed to come naturally to them. A few sleepier students staggered by her into those automatic-opening doorways, just like the supermarkets. Some of the students grasped striped coffee cups from the vending machines. She and Phil were going to get coffee. That had been part of the plan, but somewhere between the barn and his office, time had butted in and reminded them they both had jobs to attend to. She felt the pocket of her skirt hopefully, seeking wayward change. Nothing. Her wallet was in the truck, tucked into the glovebox. Well, ten minutes and she would be at work, where coffee was free for the taking. Rich Wedler threw in ground vanilla bean he stored in canisters of sugar. He thought it was that touch alone that kept the customers coming back. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t even his cooking. Wedler’s was an old-time diner, different specials daily, but basic cooking with none of this nouveau art-on-a-plate nonsense. Coffee was fifty cents, a plain hamburger alone $1.75. Lunch for $3.75, and you’d go away full. For Chloe, it was free, and her one meal a day. She’d learned to wait.
She threaded her way through the horticulture gardens, snagged an orange off a dwarf tree, peeled and ate the sections as she took the long way around the barn to her truck. Chicken-shit detour, but she didn’
t want to set eyes on that colt, listen one more minute to his pitiful cries for a mama that was by now piecemeal under Gabe’s scalpel.
Motherhood. You waited all those months and put your body through irreversible agony. For what? Chloe had never seen her own mother, not that she could remember. Thirty-three years ago babies weren’t the commodity they were today. The deal was not to get pregnant. Nobody was out there with lawyers and thousands of dollars, hoping to snap up your mistake. Briefly, she considered her oldest fear that there was some grotesque history to her file that the courts and the orphanages had kept hidden from her. Sometimes, on a slow after noon at Wedler’s, she might sit with the Register and read one of those stories about natural mothers reunited with their given-away babies. Instant kinship. A mass of missed Christmases made up for in no time. All those happy endings. Was it like that for everyone? She never tried to find out.
Even without dwelling on the subject, many times she had dreamed abut her mother. She was never the one with the monogrammed stationery lightly scented with Chanel, with the soft hand that caused a deeply buried memory of comfort to surface. She was a thing, obese, barely recognizable as a woman, who had slaughtered dozens of babies on her way to state prison. When the dream-Chloe introduced herself to the refined lady in endless strands of perfectly matched pearls, the lady would smile apologetically, pat her hand, softly insisting there’d been a mistake. Then she’d point to the harpy in the muumuu and say she was the real one.
She spit out the last of the orange—it was green and tasted bitter—and found a trash barrel for the peelings. The stupid mare was to blame for bringing all this foolishness to the surface—she and the rain. A good night’s sleep would refresh her. It was best to discard such thoughts. They were like credit card come-ons. Before long, all the nice talk was out the window and you were getting pay-up-now-or-else phone calls. Everything was best done alone, pay as you go. She was who she was, singular, standing here laced into her own two shoes. She could take inventory from now until next week and this day, with all the awful truths counted out before her, would have to be lived through, loss or gain. Nobody had chosen her. She had traversed the court system for years, entered and left more than twenty foster-care situations before the age of seventeen. When the men started coming into her room at night, breathing beer into her face and poking fingers under her nightgown, she’d hop out a window and hitchhike back to Orangewood, bang on the glass doors until a security guard let her in. And there were the times that she failed to live up to the Kate Greenaway dresses and dead daughters whose void she was supposed to fill. She’d heard it countless times from more kinds of mothers than there were molecules to air: Chloe Morgan, you are not an easy child to love.
Maybe not. But I’m living proof that you can get by without love, and that most of us do. The difference is, I’m honest about it.
She tucked all that into an envelope and sealed it up after she went to the Gilpins at age sixteen. They were different. They fed and clothed her, gave modest advice, were patient when it came to wresting kindness from the hard child she’d become. Eventually, she saw that in their own quiet way, they admired her. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have kids of their own; they’d had three.
When she tried to run off from them, bull-headed over a ten-o’clock curfew, Ben sat her down and told her some things. It was a baseball scorecard between them and God, he said: God, three; Gilpins, zip. Vietnam, car accident, and leukemia, respectively. A run of bad luck. We just got lonely, that’s all. Won’t you keep us company? Chloe tried to believe she wasn’t there to replace any of the photos they had on top of the piano. She understood that if she ran away from them, God’s score would up another point, take all hope out of these two gentle human beings. So she stayed.
Her truck was parked under a larch tree. Even from a distance, she could see there was a yellow ticket on the windshield. The truck had at one time been that Aqua-Velva blue popular in the early fifties. Now it was mostly Bondo and welder’s-torch gray, save the white fender she’d picked up last month in a lucky junkyard foray. English riding spurs hung off the rearview mirror, the chrome catching sunlight. She and Ben had taken apart and put back together the engine of this truck so many times that she knew its every idiosyncrasy.
But Ben was dead now, Margaret living with a sister in Florida.
Hannah, her white German shepherd of indeterminate age, was not in the truck bed. Chloe felt panic bubble into her throat. The dog had run off before, and it had taken Chloe weeks to locate her, bribing shelter attendants to set her free. Please, not this on top of everything else. The dog sat up in the passenger side of the bench seat and groaned, stretching her front legs and thumping her bent tail. With every beat, damp white fur flew.
Chloe retrieved the ticket and tore it in half, threw it into the trash, and cupped her hand around a match and lighted a Kent 100. She eyed the wet dog, who was trying her best not to leap from the truck and lather her with glad kisses. “You are a bonehead,” she said to the dog. “I told you to stay in the bed.” The dog quit panting, cocked her head, and looked penitent. At once Chloe opened the door, bent over, and gave her a fierce hug.
“Morgan, your hair looks like creamed shit on gravel. You living in your car again? You’re not wearing a bra. How many fucking times do I have to tell you? Trying to drive me insane. You and every other female on the face of the earth.”
Chloe ignored Rich Wedler, who studied her from the supply room where blue-and-white Smart and Final Iris labels winked cheerfully from gallon cans. She sat on a fifty-pound sack of flour, sipping her coffee and looking out the screen door into the alley. The borrowed shirt hung on deer antlers above the pay phone. She had tucked a new Wedler Brothers Café T-shirt into her denim skirt, and tied a clean apron over that. It looked enough like a uniform to get by.
“Those shirts are for the customers. I’m docking you five ninety-eight plus tax.”
“I’ll wash it and put it back. When’s the last time somebody asked to see one? Purple and green. Who thought up your color scheme? Stevie Wonder?”
He flung a spatula into the sink and turned on the hot water full force, causing the dish soap to hiss into furious bubbles. “Say it was my grandmother, Chloe. My dead grandmother thought it up and even as you slur her memory she writhes in her grave.”
She laughed. “You don’t have any female relatives, lizard boy. You hatched under a rock. What’s today’s special?”
Rich wouldn’t answer. His olive skin darkened to a husky sunburn when he was angry. Coal black hair stood out from the back of his head bound in a two-inch-long ponytail, thick as an Indian woman’s braid. He wore Wedler Brothers T-shirts seven days a week, and slim-cut Levi’s that hung on his bones like drapery. At least he had no tattoos.
“Roadkill,” he finally answered. “I ran over a crow out back in the alley and tossed it into the black bean soup. Let’s try it out on Hannah.”
At the sound of her name, the shepherd lifted her head in the doorway.
“Go back to sleep,” Chloe said. “Say you quit scheming to murder my dog, Wedler. Stick to the weapons you know. Home fries and gravy. Slow death by saturated fats.”
He wagged a slotted spoon in her direction. Suds trailed down his arm and disappeared into his T-shirt sleeve. It would be hot, Chloe reasoned; dishwater didn’t cool that fast. But Rich wouldn’t pop a bead of discomfort if it meant showing her he felt pain. “I’m warning you,” he said. There was a sound of crashing crockery from the dining room.
She stubbed her cigarette out in her saucer. “Warning me what? That you’re going to replace me with nimble Lita?”
“She’ll be okay once she gets broken in.”
“That’s if you don’t drive her to quit.”
“Out of here,” he said. “Out of my kitchen.”
The Wedler Brothers Café was a cult hangout that served more than one master. In the early mornings, they fed truckers and fishermen, regulars Chloe knew by name and menu prefer
ence. A little later, frustrated telemarketing salesmen fed on farmhand’s breakfasts, the poor man’s Valium. Much later, kids from the junior college filtered in and out, the second generation of hippies who’d grown up on their parents’ Grateful Dead albums, the metal-heads dressed predominantly in black, pins through their ears and, in one unforgettable case, through the cheek and nose, connected by a silver chain from which dangled tiny silver skulls. What the hell do you do when you get a head cold? Chloe wanted to ask the girl, but didn’t want to lose her tip. They formed a community over food, ordering greasy sides of bacon and grits with those meadow-in-a-box herb teas or sugar-free soda. Chloe got them what they asked. Wedler’s had a truly gifted lunch menu—nine kinds of soup daily, generous sandwiches on homemade bread Rich kneaded with his own hands. Lunch was often standing room only. The whole business ended at three, when Rich would emerge from the kitchen and tell everyone it was time to go home. Every couple of months the diners drew up petitions requesting longer hours and dinner menus.
Rich patiently delivered them the same speech: “If I was planning to serve dinner to make a profit, I’d be down on the peninsula selling alcohol to drunks in boat shoes.”
“It’s your wallet,” Chloe always said, shrugging.
“Success is a phase, Morgan. Tomorrow? Who ever knows? Even stock markets are transient.”
Through every bank deposit (which he didn’t trust her to make), Wedler remained convinced that at any moment the café would go under. The city was talking redevelopment somewhere down the line; where would those petitioners be when that shit hit the fan?
In the back of her mind, Chloe thought maybe Rich should give lithium a run for its money, but might a positive attitude turn him ambitious? Would he start making her wear a hairnet and some rank poodle skirt like a fifties throwback café? Put in a jukebox and drive the customers to the nearest McDonald’s?
Two gray-haired seniors sat down at a window booth. They looked expectantly toward the kitchen, and Chloe scanned the room for Lita. The new girl was nowhere, so she took menus over and grabbed a coffeepot on the way. The woman was striking, mid-seventies, wearing a turquoise necklace. The man was a little older, his face scarred in places. He stared hard at the television screen mounted above the counter corner. Rich had it set on an exercise show featuring spandex-clad ladies performing suggestive push-ups.
Hank & Chloe Page 4
