In Reach Read online

  “Have I told you about this ring on my left hand?” she asks.

  Wayne shakes his head. He has wondered. A big diamond ring. An inheritance, he supposed. He’s heard that there was family money. This high-quality furniture came from somewhere.

  “I was engaged,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “I was young, once.” Her sharp tone. That teacher voice that made kids not like her. He shouldn’t have acted so surprised.

  “It was during the war,” she says. “I lived in Cheyenne, then. I was teaching school and living in a boardinghouse. I met him through mutual friends.”

  “The war separated you?”

  “We had one last evening. I had decided to break it off. I loved him, but something was missing.”

  “So, did you?”

  “We had dinner at the Plains Hotel. We drank wine and laughed. He was a lovely man, curly dark hair.”

  She stops to adjust her knitting, gather her thoughts. Wayne says nothing. He’s working hard to picture Mary young, with a man, drinking wine.

  “He walked me back to my hotel. I tried to work up the courage to tell him, and then in the lobby, he took both my hands in his. There was another young couple kissing in front of the elevator. She wore a green hat with three white feathers and a rhinestone ornament. I was thinking how fine I’d look in that hat when he said, ‘Mary, I have to tell you something. I love you, but I am not in love with you. I don’t think I’ll ever be in love with a woman.’”

  Wayne’s hands go numb. He fights the urge to curl his arms across his chest. Hide, hide, rings in his head, but there’s nowhere to go. He shifts his weight to stand, when her voice goes on.

  “He told me to keep this ring. He said, ‘When you wear it, remember that I love you.’ I didn’t know what to tell our families and friends, so I said nothing. He was killed at Normandy.”

  Wayne waits, but she has stopped talking.

  “Lucky he died,” Wayne says. He cannot keep the bitterness out of his voice.

  “Do you think so?” She doesn’t look up. Her fingers slide along the needle, counting stitches.

  Three weeks after he’s been fired, halfway into December, Wayne decides to go to Denver for the weekend. He packs a small suitcase and drives south.

  The air is heavy and dull, an anvil-colored sky that presses on the plains. Feeling low, he stops in Kimball at a truck stop. A bell attached to the diner door clangs when he opens it. A tired waitress looks up from behind the counter. She’s white-headed, heavyset, wearing glasses. He’s seen a million like her. He picks out a booth along the outside wall and runs his hand along the underside of the table, checking for fresh wads of gum before he sits, having once ruined a good pair of pants.

  The waitress brings him a steaming cup of coffee, a murky film skimming the top. He orders a plate of eggs and bacon, why not? Patsy Cline sings mournfully in the background, amid static. Gray outside. Puddles of muck and dirty boot prints on the floor.

  Wayne sips his coffee and looks around. In one corner, a woman huddles in a brown coat, leafing through a stack of bills piled in front of her. Occasionally, she tugs at her hair, then back to fingering the envelopes. A trucker sits at the counter, beefy hands cradling a coffee cup, eyes bloodshot and glazed with road hypnosis, an inch of hairy skin revealed by low-slung jeans. A teenager (shouldn’t she be in school?) occupies the adjacent booth, her back against the window, legs slung up on the seat. Heavy mascara fringes her eyes, black blobs gummed on the lash tips, her lips red as an overripe plum. The aging waitress brings her a cup of coffee, a carton of half-and-half in her other hand. She stands and creams the coffee for the girl, then walks away. There’s a dog, too, lying on the floor, a black Lab with one foot missing.

  Wayne lets out a long breath and slides into a strange, unsettling calm. He knows these people, even the dog. The way they leave the radio on at night to trick themselves into thinking someone else is in the room. The stickiness of spilled syrup, left to dry on the kitchen counter. The sweating hands when they check the mail, the answering machine. Ask them, any one of them, who’s waiting for you at home? He knows the answer. Like him, they find rest in these gray walls, the broke down look of this place, the knowledge that people come and go, come and go, nobody stays, because this isn’t supposed to be home. Nobody pretends that they belong. Here, where everyone is transient and anonymous, nobody betrays you.

  He stays as long as he can without drawing attention to himself. Eventually, he tears himself away, gets in his car, and stops at the top of the driveway, unable to decide what to do. He can’t show his face in Reach, the whole town buzzing over his loss of job. If he goes on to Denver, he could get a fresh start, but does he even know where to begin? It won’t be any different in Denver than it is in Reach. Everywhere he goes, he takes his damn self, and for him, the likes of him, there is no coming home.

  When he hears the knock on his window, he mistakes it for a gunshot. He feels for the wound, his hand moving around on his chest, the pain real, searing, and then he hears a man’s voice.

  “You all right in there?”

  He rolls the foggy window down a few inches and leans back to peer out. It’s the trucker from the diner, a leather jacket thrown over his plaid flannel shirt, a toothpick riding his lower lip. Snot dribbles from his nose, and the man wipes at it with the back of his hand. “You been sitting there a while. Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” Wayne says.

  “You goin’ to Denver?”

  “I thought about it.”

  “Because that kid over there wants a ride.”

  The man hitches his thumb toward the teenager hunched by the diner’s front door. It’s the girl from inside. She looks mad as hell and scared, her eyes glassy. She’s on something, meth probably, these kids today.

  “You can’t take her?” Wayne says.

  “Nah. I’m headed to Sidney, to Cabela’s. She asked me, but I ain’t goin’ that direction.”

  The girl sees them talking about her. She looks down, scuffs her feet, then turns and disappears back inside the diner. She’s standing in the outer foyer, between the gumball machine and a bulletin board with tacked-up notices of garage sales. Through the window, they can see she’s pulled out a cell phone.

  “Probably had a fight with her boyfriend,” the trucker says.

  “Or her parents,” Wayne offers.

  “Yeah.”

  The girl is gesturing wildly, her fingers splayed, hands tense. She whirls around. The two men watch her and don’t speak, and finally, she cries with heaving sobs, her head propped against the window.

  “Well, I guess she’ll be all right, then,” the trucker says.

  “I suppose.” Wayne knows what the man is thinking. Someone is on the other end of that phone line.

  “Well,” the man says, looking toward his truck.

  “Go ahead,” Wayne says. “I’ll wait.”

  The man nods. He moves away, and without turning his head, lifts his hand behind him in a farewell wave.

  Wayne sits in his car, engine running, for what seems like a long time. The girl has snapped her phone together and stands in the entryway, eyes dark and watching. A beat-up Chevy pulls into the parking lot, one fender bent like a potato chip. The driver is a woman, middle-aged, her hair a frowsy mess. Without bothering to turn off the car or close the door behind her, she catapults inside the diner. He watches her fold the girl in her arms, pat her on the back. The girl is taller than the woman, but she manages to slump down, turn her face into the woman’s neck, clench her arms around the woman’s waist. The two of them maneuver out to the Chevy, jerky but together, like dancing circus bears. The girl doesn’t look up, so he puts his car in gear and heads out.

  He threads his way through a few streets. That girl has the same problems she had two minutes ago, make no mistake about that. One hug isn’t going to fix whatever’s wrong. Still. Someone cared enough to come after her. He’s thinking about Mark accusing him of being afra
id. All along, he thought leaving was the coward’s way out. He sees now, you can run away even if you stay in one place.

  He’s staring at himself, down a long corridor with shut doors, and none of them have doorknobs. He sees how it will be. He’ll pack away the lamp that belonged to Mary and Dave’s mother because it reminds him, of what? That they know what they must have always known? That he isn’t worthy of their friendship? Dave will die, and he’ll be too proud to attend the funeral, too afraid that Mary will see him and reproach him for his absence. Not long after, Mary will be gone, too. He’ll walk by their house and wonder, did she mean to be his friend? Did she tell him that story to say, I see you and I don’t care. Or did she tell him, as he had thought at the time, as a warning. What was she saying, come close or stay away? For him, it has always been stay away, until by now, he walks himself away and shuts the gate after.

  He’s sitting in his car, idling at a stop sign, thinking about a strange girl who turned her head into the soft neck of someone and cried. He could, he is thinking, show up on Mary’s doorstep with her mother’s lamp. He could hold it out to her, an offering. He has no idea what she would do or say, that’s a risk. But he could do this one thing. He could give it back to her. Restored.

  Judgment Day

  Esther Paxton can’t stand to see Leland sitting there in his overalls, his hands worrying the crocheted doilies on the recliner’s armrests. It’s Tuesday, and Leland sat there all day yesterday. Sunday, and Saturday, too, and the week before that. Leland’s sat in that chair all the way back to June 13, when the Reach Gazette printed the story. The phone has stopped ringing, or else Leland leaves it off the hook. She doesn’t care. Who is there to talk to anyway, unless Rosalee calls, but she won’t, because Larry’s still threatening to sue.

  Esther’s a strong-looking woman, a no-nonsense face and body to go with it, glasses and sturdy hands. Her lips clamp down tight. She wears low-heeled shoes, no jewelry, no makeup. Can’t be bothered with it. She’s let her hair go gray. When she taught the Bible class at the First Baptist Church, people admired her, but they didn’t speak up much, and that has been the story of her life. She’s outside of things, and she doesn’t know why.

  She opens a box of Raisin Bran and gets milk from the refrigerator. Her mouth feels dry and she craves orange juice, but she’d have to go to the store. Everybody’s heard by now. The story is all over the panhandle, their bankruptcy, unpaid farmers, rumors of embezzlement. The thing is to stay strong until they can hold their heads up again. Leland sits there, not even trying. She can’t forgive him for this final betrayal, never mind everything else that’s come. She has no patience with that kind of indulgence, languishing in a leather recliner in the spacious den they built three years ago, not even opening the blinds, breathing in the foul air he breathed out yesterday, expecting her to rally and bring him food. She’s in this too, in case he can’t remember, but he’s always been like that. He’s taken a lot of fuss, coddling, wants his meat loaf without onions, the collars of his shirts starched. She didn’t mind when the little extras made him notice her, but now he’s oblivious to everything. She’s hidden his gun.

  She’s tired of calling him to the table. She’s given up on that. Oh, it’s amazing the things you can adjust to, like chipping ice to wash up mornings or eating nothing but eggs through a winter. Or Leland not touching her for years. She missed that at first, an awful fire claiming her sometimes, leaving her spun out, ragged and desperate, but slowly that faded, too. She still visits a tiny grave in the Oregon Trail Cemetery. Grief pinned her to the ground once, but that was a long time ago, and she got used to the emptiness. She could eat bugs or roasted mice if she had to.

  She sets the tray on the coffee table, two cereal bowls, two cups of coffee, cream and sugar for him, black for her. She can’t guess what’s in his head. He’s never been what you’d call a deep thinker, not like her. She can remember painting rooms with him when they were young, her head off and running against the monotony of dip-brush-dip, but he reported nothing. Blank slate. She can’t imagine that trick.

  She forces herself to eat in the den with him. It’s enough to make her puke, the way the air is stale and the darkness and his silence. “C’mon, Hon,” she says, and she puts the bowl in his hands, and like a robot, he eats. So far, so good. He won’t starve, and the judges won’t come and carry her away for neglect or whatever they call it when a wife refuses to feed her voluntarily comatose husband.

  He doesn’t bother with the TV anymore. She’s stopped trying to talk to him. The paper comes and she throws it out, but not before her eyes scan the headlines. Yesterday she saw that Ron Blake and Todd Birkham have declared bankruptcy. All those farmers getting foreclosed on, it’s like finding another rotten plank in the flooring. Nobody will believe them if they say that’s exactly what they tried to prevent. They only doctored the books to buy time. In the grain elevator business, things are never that exact. There’s always borrowing from one column to another. It’s just numbers, a few jagged lines on paper.

  She looks at Leland sitting there, empty bowl in his hand, his mouth gone slack, and worries how he’ll get through the preliminary hearing. She can’t imagine how he’ll pull it together to talk to a judge. She’s disgusted with him, look at the drool on his shirt, his thin hair greasy, plastered to his scalp. Most nights, he sleeps in the chair. She’s worried about him, but she thinks he could snap out of it. Where’s his famous sense of humor? After forty-three years, she’s surprised to find that she doesn’t know him. He does this to her, makes her hate him while she feels sorry for him. Mostly, she doesn’t know what to do.

  She tugs at the bowl in his hand. He hangs on, odd, he still has that strength. Is he trying to tell her something? Sad eyes, she’s seen enough of that. She plucks the bowl from his fingers and sets it on the tray. He hasn’t touched his coffee, hasn’t for days, but she brings it anyway, pours two cups as part of the daily ritual.

  She’s known Ron Blake and Todd Birkham all their lives. Once, they were snot-nosed kids in Sunday School. Todd was in Rosalee’s class at the high school, puffing his cheeks out playing tuba while Rosalee threw a baton. Their wives are probably frantic. And they have children, too. Todd’s oldest must be looking at college. She pictures Todd’s family sitting around a kitchen table, nothing on it but a bowl of boiled eggs, fingers drumming on the Formica top. She lingers over the picture too long and hears Todd saying it’s her fault, hers and Leland’s. We raised a good crop, goddamnit, Todd says, and his boy, the one who might have to postpone his education, slaps the tabletop with open hands, and the eggs bounce out of the bowl, raw eggs now, splatting on the floor, and among broken eggshells and slimy yolks, the wife starts to cry.

  Esther stands abruptly. “Guess I’ll clean up, then, and go upstairs and do some sewing,” she tells Leland, like she does every day. He knows she’s working on that quilt for Natalie, who will graduate from high school next spring. She might have to mail it. Larry says they’re never going to see their grandchildren again.

  “Leland,” she says. She doesn’t know if he hears her. He doesn’t raise his head or blink an eye.

  She walks out on him, why she thinks in those terms, she doesn’t know. Good God, nobody could require her to sit there, too, nobody expects a wife to go that far, share the same miserable mudhole as if they were two pigs. She rinses the dishes at the kitchen sink, piles them on the drainer, wipes her hands, and goes upstairs to a small world where she has choices, fabric swatches of purples and greens, a variation on Drunkard’s Path that she designed herself, and when she sits to her needle and thread, she fills her mind by humming old hymns, “Standing on the Promises” and “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and she sticks with it until time for lunch.

  She’s in the kitchen making tuna sandwiches without lettuce. She can’t remember the last time they had something fresh from the store, but people can live on canned and frozen goods. She hears stirring in the den and takes it for a good sign. He’s up and a
bout, although the door is closed. Maybe he’s decided to stop feeling sorry for himself. She shouldn’t have given up on him so soon. People respond to things differently, like Reverend Fowler coming round, pretending concern when all he wanted to know was whether they’d have to stop their tithe. You can’t predict what people will do.

  Through the window above her sink, Esther spots Janet Nichols picking beans in her garden. She’s a lucky woman, that Janet, a widow. Besides, everybody likes her. She has friends all over town, and the Baptist Church practically revolves around her, why not, she’s perky and friendly the way Esther would like to be but isn’t, no ma’am. Esther wills Janet to look up at her window. She’s planned this, how one day Janet will look up, and Esther will wave at her. She’s lived across the alley from Janet for fourteen years, and they’ve never neighbored except over the fence or when they ran into each other at the Jack & Jill. It will have to be a different kind of wave, a signal, not a plea for pity. Esther doesn’t want that. It will be a little flick of the wrist wave, an almost beckoning, a come hither, a “drop whatever you’re doing and rescue me” kind of wave, but she doesn’t want to look over-anxious, either. In the mirror, when she’s practiced, the wave looks right to her, different than a casual greeting but not frantic.

  Esther focuses all her attention on Janet, but Janet doesn’t look up at the window. She’s intent on picking beans, stupid cow, unaware of anything around her but herself. If she were any kind of neighbor, she’d know they’re having a hard time over here. A good neighbor would know how to care without intruding, the way Esther had done when Janet’s husband died. She sent a card, kept a discreet distance, watched for opportunities, picked up a dropped shirt from Janet’s clothesline, deadheaded the irises that bordered the alley. She doesn’t like to poke her nose in other people’s business, hovering the way some women do. Instead, Esther left hints: I’m here if you need me. That’s all she wants now, some sign beyond the hasty message scrawled in the margins of their newspaper—“Traitors”—or the dead robin someone laid out on their front stoop, its wings stiff and splayed open, nothing a cat could have done.