“Water? Jesus Christ. What else did he say?”
“Nothing. Only for me to say he would send back money for the pickup when he found a machine job.”
“But I don’t care about the pickup. He can have the goddamn pickup. I want to know why you didn’t go with him.”
“Because,” she said. “He never asked me.” She was talking very woodenly; she might as well have been repeating a ten-year-old market report or reciting Dick and Jane, something as indifferent as that. “I was waiting for him to,” she said, “but he never said so.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t know what you think of me. Maybe you still like me some—I don’t know; we’ve had some good times—but whatever it is, you love him, don’t you? You want this baby you’re having to be his, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t want no baby. Not no more.”
“Yes, you do. You will. Here, listen now: I want you to go to Denver for a week or two. I want you to take yourself a motel room. Rest up, see some movies, buy some clothes, whatever you’re going to need. Then I’ll come there and see you have enough money so you can go to Oregon. Will you do that?”
“It won’t make no difference.”
“Yes, it will. It’s the only way, Twyla.”
“I’m just sorry,” she said.
But later that day Twyla allowed me to take her to Denver and to install her in a Holiday Inn near the Stapleton Airport. Then I came home and went about selling the remaining quarters of farmland my dad had accumulated. I take no pride in that. I had to sell some land anyway to pay off the bad debts I had run up through constant partying and buying red pickups and by acting as if I was so rich and so smart that any form of steady discipline could go to hell. Anyway, in part because of my debts, I decided to make a clean sweep of it, so I sold those last quarters and kept only the pastureland, the native grass and the hayfields, so I could still run cattle, and then I returned to Denver and put Twyla Thompson on the plane with fifteen thousand dollars in her purse.
All of that took longer than I expected. It was more like a month than two weeks. But by the time I checked her out of the motel Twyla looked quite a lot better. She seemed almost cheerful again, like a big wonderful farm girl, and her stomach was starting to show. “Sandy,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “Take care of yourself. And tell Clevis . . . Just tell him hello for me.”