They put miles on it. If the slightest urge took them— and it took them about three times a week—they went to town. To see a show, watch a softball game, buy some blue grapes, get a sack of Bing cherries, whatever. Why hell, they even started to drive out Saturday night to dance at the Holt Legion. There they’d be, Edith sipping gimlets and Lyman nursing Coors beer in a corner booth, until Shorty Stovall and the boys struck up their rendition of the “Tennessee Waltz,” and then they would rise and slide slow around the floor in a kind of funeral two-step, her hand on the padded shoulder of his houndstooth suit coat. Also they drove to Denver, went to Elitch’s Amusement Park, viewed the summer show at Central City, toured Estes Park, ate the trout dinner at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, watched the buffalo herds trot across the highway in the Black Hills. By God, where didn’t they go? It got so they were a regular traveling concern.
And you understand, before this time Edith had never once seen a thing of life beyond the Holt County border? Not a thing, not once. Now the whole of this Rocky Mountain region was hers. She only had to mention an interest, hint that she wanted to see something—”Lyman, how far down do you suppose it is from the Royal Gorge Bridge?”—and they would take off to find out. Lyman himself was ready to go; in the previous twenty years he had grown used to traveling on any impulse. Gasoline was cheap, his Pontiac was new. On an urge, then, usually Edith’s, they would shut the back porch door and leave, see themselves some new sight, and then come back tired but satisfied, and the next day Lyman would hand wax his green car while Edith finished unpacking and fed the chickens and began to listen for the next urge to take her, tell her what it wanted her to see. During that six-year period they must have passed this house at least a thousand times—going places. I’d see them at any time of the day or night, driving, the windows rolled down, the dust rolling up behind them. Lyman would always be at the wheel in his dress shirt and tie, as solemn as if he was going to trial. Beside him would be his sister, Edith Goodnough in a pale lavender or blue dress, waving at me like a girl as she passed my house on the way out.
But I don’t suppose they were off traveling all that time, because they also began to fix up that old frame house, which their father had constructed by himself with wagon-hauled lumber from town before either one of them was born. He had kept the house up all along but had never seen any reason to do much extra; it was tight and kept out the wind, which was what he required. To do more would have been too much. So sometime in there Edith and Lyman painted it a bright canary yellow and had the Wilky brothers from west of town give it a new shingle roof. Inside, they bought some new carpet for the downstairs living-room and parlor floors. They had me over to see the carpet.
I admired it, then Lyman brought me back to the kitchen. “Look there,” he said. “What do you make of that thing?”
“Looks like a Kelvinator dishwasher to me,” I said. “But what do I know? Maybe it’s a new form of TV.”
“Watch this.”
“Oh, now, Lyman,” Edith said. “Sandy doesn’t have time for this too.” She swatted at him.
“Course he does,” Lyman said.
“Course I do,” I said.
And I did. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank soda pop while their new dishwasher worked through the entire soap and rinse cycles.
“There. That click means it’s done,” Lyman said. “Now won’t she get lazy with that thing in the house?”
“Lazy as a hog,” I said.
“Never you mind,” Edith said. “Either one of you. Who knows—I might take a notion to get fat too. Then what will you say?”
“Nothing. Good,” I said.
Together they were having such a hell of a fine time of it. It was fun to watch them.
SO IN THE SUMMER of 1963 I got married. Or, to be more accurate, I should say Mavis Pickett decided she was not going to wait any longer.
“Aren’t we ever going to be married?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “I was just waiting for you to pop the question.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No, it is not.”