“Hello, Aunt Grace?” he said. “It’s Sean.”
“Sean?” she said. “I can barely hear you. Where are you? Are you still in California?”
“I’m in New Mexico now.”
“New Mexico! What’s—Jordan, please stop poking him with that, now he asked you to stop, so stop.” There was a pause, a clatter of silverware, a young girl’s despairing voice. Covering the mouthpiece with her hand or her breast, his aunt said, “Right, young lady, just keep that up till I get angry, okay?”
The boy drew on his cigarette and sudden pain lanced into his knee, deep between the bones. White hot and twisting. He shifted his weight to that leg to force the blade back out.
His aunt said into the phone, “Ugh. I’m sorry. Are you there, hello—?”
“I’m here.”
“New Mexico!” she said again. “What’s in New Mexico?”
“I’ve got some work,” he said.
“You should come home, Sean. You can do that kind of work here,
can’t you?”
He knew that if there were news from Colorado his aunt would have
said so.
“Is Mom around?” he said, and for a long moment it seemed the connection had failed. At last his aunt said: “Sean, haven’t you talked to your dad?”
He said nothing. Then he said, “Why?” and his aunt said, “Seanie, your mom’s back in the hospital.”
He saw a dim phantom of himself in the face of the soap-dispensing machine.
“When?”
“Two weeks ago. She took too many pills.”
“She tried to kill herself.”
“No, she didn’t, Seanie, it was an accident. She was just taking too many of those damn pills.”
“Do the doctors think it was an accident?”
“The doctors are . . . cautious. They want to watch her for a while, that’s all.”
Behind him a harsh alarm sounded and the little woman opened the dryer and began hauling laundry hand over hand into a wire basket on wheels. Next to the soap-dispensing machine was a corkboard thick with fliers and ads: trucks and farm equipment for sale, offers of trash hauling and babysitting. Reflexively he looked for his sister’s face among them.
“Sean—?” said his aunt, and he drew soundlessly on his cigarette. Tapped ash to the dirty floor.
“Is she okay?”
“Yes. I mean, what’s okay?”
They were silent.
“She’s safe,” said his aunt finally. “She’s resting.”
They hung up and he spread the remaining quarters in his palm, tallied them, and dropped two more into the phone. He punched in a number from the corkboard and watched the little round woman backing herself through the glass door, her body rocking with the weight of two swollen garbage bags at the ends of her arms. “You ain’t got the right to smoke in here,” she said, pinning him with her black eyes. “You ain’t got the right to give other people your cancer.”
18
Grant left the sheriff and drove back over the divide and down again to meet the climbing dusk. He exited the freeway while still high above the city and took the county road back into the foothills, to the old mining town that lived on though the copper was long gone.
Inside the Whistlestop on his way to the back a man reached out to grab him. “Where’s the fire, mister?” It was Dale Struthers, the old veterinarian who owned the ranch down the road from Emmet’s. He and the wife, Evelyn, smiling up warmly. They told Grant to join them and he glanced at his watch and said he couldn’t, he only had time for one cold one and then he had to go see what kind of trouble Emmet had got up to.
“We were going to stop by on the way here, see if we could feed that old bird,” Struthers said. “But then we saw Billy’s car there and, well . . .”
“We didn’t want to intrude,” Evelyn said.
“He been back long?” said Struthers.
“A few days,” Grant said, and the old man said, “That right?” and put his silverware in order as if for surgery. His wife patted Grant’s arm to free him.
He continued back to the bar and sat down, nodding to Jack Portman and to the man Jack was serving whom he did not know. He got out his cigarettes and then remembered and put them away again. Jack drew him a pint of beer and poured a shooter. Grant tossed back the shooter, chased it, nodded for another. He sat watching the bar and the restaurant beyond in the backbar mirror. He used the mirror to study the man a few stools down. The man’s face was ordinary and revealed nothing of his character.
Maria Valente came into view in the glass, stopping before a booth of high school kids to take their order. For a moment, before she returned to the kitchen, Maria seemed to look in Grant’s direction, but her face was obscured by a large silver cataract in the old glass.
He thought about ordering another shot and another beer. He rubbed his thumb over the blunt ends of his two fingers and looked in the glass again for the man with the ordinary face. The man was gone. Grant ordered another shot and another beer.
“IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?”
Maria was there, at his left, her dark eyes finding his in the mirror. She got onto the stool and set the plate of food between them. “I got the big steak and extra fries,” she said. “Here’s some silverware.”
“No, that’s your dinner.”
“Are you kidding? Look at the size of this thing. It should’ve come with a deed.” In her voice, the way she formed her words, were long-ago scenes of a little girl in Italy. Grant knew he tended to watch her mouth.
“Are you off?” he said, and she shook her head.
“Debbie-Lynn called in sick. Otherwise known as a hot date. How about you?”
“How about me?”
“Big plans tonight?”
“Sure.” Grant took up a French fry. “Me and Emmet are throwing a party out to the ranch. Gonna be a hootenanny. You should come by.”
“Really. A welcome-home party for Billy?”
He looked at her and she said, “He was in earlier. With that Gatskill girl who likes to French-kiss in public.” She watched him in the mirror, then picked up her knife and began sawing into the meat. After a few minutes he joined her.
They had just finished the steak when Maria’s daughter appeared at her side, planting her elbows on the bar and levering herself forward for a look at the bloody plate. “That is revolting. Did you even cook it?”
“Carmen, tesoro—you remember Mr. Courtland?”
“Yes. Good evening, Mr. Courtland.”
“Good evening, Carmen.”