46
Ansel didn’t think anymore. He wanted to hold her as he had held her in his truck, with a love he could call pure and protective, but this time she didn’t tuck herself against him. She looked into his face as he pulled her up, and this look drew them into a kiss. He touched her hair and pressed her closer to him, and it was as blissful as the dream. What he saw in Aldine’s eyes was not rebuke or annoyance or boredom or fatigue. She wanted to be near him, part of him. He could be what someone wanted again. He moved his lips from her mouth to her neck, from her neck to her shoulder, then back again. There was no wind rattling the barn. There were no crops dying in the fields. There were no hogs dead in the ground. There was no family asleep in the house.
47
When he woke up on the last morning he would ever spend in Kansas, Clare didn’t know what to do with his Straight Shooter ring. My last morning here was the way he thought of it even though his father said things about returning. That sounded to Clare like the kind of thing a person would say when he needed to believe that the everlasting change he was about to make wasn’t really everlasting. Clare went over to the nail sticking out of his wall and tugged on it. It slid out easily, dribbling crumbs of plaster on the floor. The wall was chalky underneath the yellow paint, and he fingered it, then hacked at the plaster with the nail. There was horsehair in the plaster. His father had told him it was there for binding and strengthening. He’d always thought his father was trustworthy and now he knew he wasn’t. This knowledge was like a hand and the hand was wrapped around a fact. The fact was that Aldine cared for his father. Clare dug into the wall with the nail until the hole was big enough for the ring. Once he had pushed the ring into the hole, he pushed the nail into the palm of his hand again and again until he broke the skin and a small bulblet of blood formed. Then he set the nail on the windowsill, back behind the curtain, and went downstairs.
His mother was awake and busy, trying to get the last of the edible food together for breakfast and for the car. “Just eat a biscuit,” she said to Clare. “And there’s a little bit of preserves we need to finish.”
He nodded. Normally he would have happily eaten a biscuit and he would have happily finished the preserves. The kitchen was clean as a whistle. It seemed strange to him that his mother would feel the need to leave it just so.
“Where’s Miss McKenna?” Neva asked. Neva was wearing her good dress for reasons unknown. Her wrists stuck out of her coat sleeves and her hair puffed out on one side but not the other. She had decided to take her Shirley Temple paper dolls with her, he noticed, along with Milly Mandy Molly and she was eating a biscuit that dropped crumbs on the pile of paper clothes she held in her lap.
Ellie wiped out the biscuit pan with a towel and put it back in the cupboard, then removed it and put it on the counter. “Your father already dropped her off at the station. She’s off to be a Harvey Girl.” She opened the cupboard and put the biscuit tin inside it once again.
Neva began to wail and Clare’s back prickled all over with chills. “But she didn’t tell me good-bye,” Neva said. “She said she would tell me good-bye. And I want to go to the Harvey House, too. You promised we would!”
“And we will,” Ellie said, folding the towel into thirds and hanging it on the towel bar as she always did. “But we’ll go to a different one. Where Aldine’s going is east, and we’re going west.”
Neva kept crying. His mother opened the cupboard and peered into it without comment.
“Where’s Dad?” Clare asked.
“Barn.”
Clare went out to the porch with a cold biscuit to avoid hearing Neva. The air was freezing and the car was parked out front, facing the road. Wind whipped at his face and tore at the wooden trailer, packed with quilts and crates, including the one that said Lofty Lemons. The crate that had once enclosed the new radio had been lined with a horse blanket for Artemis. Krazy Kat would come, too. The other cats were staying behind. The hogs and chickens were dead and the cows were sold, so that was it. Opal had told Neva she would take care of her goldfish until she came back. Artemis wasn’t in her crate yet, and she came walking up to him, nosing his hand with her wet black nose. “We won’t leave you,” he told her. The dog began licking the drying blood on his hand.
While he petted her, he heard a fluttering sound. A stone had been set on the porch, a round rock that they’d brought back from a trip to the Arkansas River and used sometimes for home plate. The little beret for Neva lay underneath it, finished, along with a scarf. A piece of paper had been folded into the brim, and Aldine had written in her schoolteacher script, Please give these to Neva, my favorite student. Aldine. He brought the small beret to his nose. It had the faintly yeasty scent he associated with her hair. Inside, he could hear Neva crying and beginning to cough. He took the hat and scarf and note inside and set them beside her.
“There,” Ellie said, her face hard the way it got when Neva coughed, or maybe because the beret reminded her of Aldine. “You see? She did say good-bye in the best way she could.”
Neva pulled the hat over her puffed-up hair and smiled a little.
“Clare’s going to take you out to the car, Neva,” Ellie said, deliberately smoothing her voice. “We’re almost ready to go.” She took off her apron, hung it on the nail where it always hung, then seemed to think better of it and tied it back on.
“I hate California,” Neva said, and rubbed at her wet cheek. “I don’t want to go there.”