“I think she meant that you were great too, that’s what I think she was saying.” Pete moved his feet around the cans that were on the floor there.
They drove in silence for many miles. From the corner of his eye, he watched his sister; he thought she was a good driver. He liked her bulkiness, the way she filled her seat and drove with such authority. He wished he could tell her this; he wished he could say something more than that she was great. He finally said, “Vicky, we didn’t turn out so bad, you know.”
She glanced at him and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right,” she said. Then she said, “Well, we’re not out there murdering people, if that’s what you mean.” She gave a brief laugh that seemed to rise up from the deepest part of herself.
Pete wished the ride could go on forever. He wished he could sit there next to his sister while they drove and drove.
But he recognized where they were now; the roads were narrowing. He saw the top of a maple tree that had started to turn pink; he saw the fields that surrounded the Pedersons’ barn. And then finally they were back; Vicky pulled in to the road, and then the driveway, and there in front of them was the tired little house with its blinds open. Vicky turned the car off. After a moment, Pete said, “Hey, Vicky, do you want that rug?”
Vicky pushed her glasses up her nose with a finger placed in the middle of them. “Sure, why not?” she said. But she made no move to get out of the car, and so they gazed at the house, in silence, and sat.
Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast
They were from the East, and their name was Small.
This Dottie always remembered, because the husband was so big, and he wore a look of fixed irritation that must have come, at least partly, Dottie imagined, from a lifetime of responding to comments regarding his name. Which of course Dottie took no part in—not one bit!—at all. Mrs. Small had made the reservation over the telephone, so Dottie knew they weren’t young. Not only Mrs. Small’s voice told her this, but most people did things online now. Dottie was, in fact, a bit older than Mrs. Small, but Dottie had taken to the Internet like a paddlefish waiting for water; she was sorry it hadn’t arrived when she was a younger woman, she was certain she could have been successful at something that made use of her mind more than the renting out of rooms for these past many years. She could have been rich! But Dottie was not a woman to complain, having been taught by her decent Aunt Edna one summer—it seemed like a hundred years ago, and practically was—that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt beneath the fingernails of God, and this was an image Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge. Dottie was a tiny woman, prim, with the good skin of her Midwestern ancestors, and all things considered—and there were many things to consider—she appeared—to herself and to others—to do just fine. In the event, the reservation was made for Mr. and Mrs. Small, and two weeks later a tall—big—white-haired man stepped through the door and said, “We have a reservation for Dr. Richard Small.” Dr. Small’s announcement was apparently large enough to include his wife, who came in right behind him, without any mention of her at all.
Standing at the front desk, he did the registering with terrible penmanship, irritation oozing out of him, while Mrs. Small—who was very thin and had a look of general nervousness about her—glanced politely around the lounge, and then became interested in the old photographs of the theater that were on the wall, and she seemed to especially like a photograph of the library that was hanging near them. The photo showed the library back in 1940 looking brick-and-ivy old-fashioned, so Dottie had a sense about this woman—and her husband!—right away. Of course, in Dottie’s business she would have a sense about people right away. Sometimes of course Dottie had been very wrong. With the Smalls she was not wrong: Dr. Small complained immediately about the room having no luggage rack for him to place his suitcase on, and naturally Dottie did not say that’s what happens when you have your wife call and ask for the cheapest room. Instead she said she had another room at the end of the hall that might serve them better; it was the Bunny Rabbit Room—that’s what she called it due to the fact that in the past she’d had a habit of collecting stuffed toy bunnies. Her husband had given her one each holiday, and friends had too, so later Dottie put them all in one room, and, really, people went crazy for them sometimes. Women did. And gay men. They got quite imaginative with all those bunnies around, having them talking in different voices and so forth. Dottie used to have a Comment Book until people wrote things about seeing ghosts in the Bunny Rabbit Room and other foolishness. But the Bunny Rabbit Room had two beds and a low chest on which Dr. Small could place his suitcase, and that evening Dottie heard through the walls a constant thin-voiced monologue coming from Mrs. Small, with only once or twice a short answer from her husband. Dottie could not make out many words, but she understood that he was here for the cardiology convention and was not staying in the large hotel in town where the meeting was taking place, most likely, Dottie thought, because he was getting old and was no longer really respected. And he could not stand that, could not put up with seeing younger colleagues laughing together in the evenings, and so he had come here, to Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast, where he could be not noticeably unimportant. “A physician,” she imagined him saying at breakfast, because this is what all male doctors said when they didn’t want you to think they were academics, to whom, Dottie had come to understand, physicians seemed to feel very superior. Dottie didn’t care one way or another, anymore, whom anyone felt superior to, but in this business you did notice things; even if you kept your eyes squeezed shut, you would still notice things in this business. And the time of Dr. Small, Dottie thought, his own personal history in time, his own career, had passed, and he couldn’t stand it. She was sure he made huge fusses about computerized records, the cost of the practice, the fact that he no longer made as much money. Well, she did not feel sorry for him.
But his wife surprised her.
When Dottie saw couples like Mr. and Mrs. Small, she was sometimes comforted that her painful divorce years earlier had at least prevented her from becoming a Mrs. Small—in other words, a nervous, slightly whiny woman whose husband ignored her and so naturally made her more anxious. This you saw all the time. And when Dottie saw it, she was reminded that almost always—oddly, she thought it was odd—she seemed a stronger person without her husband, even though she missed him every day.
But in fact, Mrs. Small, during breakfast—her husband was not talking to her but instead looking through a binder that perhaps contained his materials for the day—broke into song. She had been glancing through a stack of old theater programs Dottie kept in a basket, and while she was waiting for her toast she called out, “Oh, I love that Gilbert and Sullivan,” and she started singing a chorus from H.M.S. Pinafore—with two other guests sitting a table away. Dottie thought Dr. Small would stop her, but he sang a few bars with her and that warmed Dottie’s heart. It did, though she was always nervous, naturally, about the comfort of other guests, but the others didn’t seem to mind, or even really to notice, people being, as Dottie knew, mostly very involved with themselves.
Oatmeal for Dr. Small and whole wheat toast for his wife—who Dottie noticed was wearing all black—and in a few minutes his wife said, “Richard, look. Annie Appleby! Look, it says right here, she was Martha Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, eight years ago. Look.” She gave the program a little punch with her finger, then he took the program from her.