This was more than a surprise. “And what do you tell him?”
“I don’t tell him anything. I don’t say yes and I don’t say no.”
“And what does he say to that?”
Just below the surface of Charlotte’s face brimmed something looking very much like pride. “He says he’ll just go on asking every Sunday until I say yes.”
They walked on a bit before Charlotte, sensing something, drew up and looked behind. Perhaps thirty yards back, Artemis sat staring at them, looking abashed, but not taking another step.
“Tired,” Charlotte said.
“We’ll have to put her down soon,” Ellie said. She watched as Charlotte returned to the dog and led her to a shady spot under a lemon tree. She and Ansel. He was always putting off shooting a dog, too.
“We’ll come back this way, girly-girl,” Charlotte was saying to the dog. “You can go home with us then.”
Artemis looked at her and, without otherwise moving, let her tail thump the earth.
Ellie said nothing as they walked on. She already had more to chew on than she could readily process. But after a time it was Charlotte who said softly, “What would you do? About Mr. McNamara, I mean.” And in that tender voice Ellie heard the Charlotte that she had once been, the girl who still wanted guidance from her mother.
Ellie wasn’t sure how to say what she wanted to say, which was that a certain amount of pragmatism in such matters was no sin, so finally in a small, tired voice she said, “Well, Lottie, I would marry the man who can provide what will make you happy.”
Charlotte waited and then asked, not in a challenging voice, but with a slight tremor, “Is that what you did?”
Ellie reached down and picked up a stone that she pretended to study. She had thought so, and she had been wrong, but she couldn’t say that. What good would it do? Mr. McNamara was nothing like Ansel; Charlotte was not Ellie. “I trust you,” Ellie said decisively, pretending that was an answer to the question and trusting that Charlotte didn’t really want to know. “You know what will make you happy, and you’ll find it for yourself, with or without Mr. McNamara.”
61
Clare had built the tree house for Neva but she hardly ever used it. It wasn’t really a tree house, anyway. It was just a series of wooden cleats leading up to a planked platform, but it was a shady place to sit in the evening or on Sunday and no one ever came there. Clare could sit high up on the platform, lean against the smooth trunk of the eucalyptus, stretch out his legs, and read one of his Zane Greys. Once a hawk had glided into the eucalyptus and alighted not ten feet away, sitting there hunch shouldered and watchful before swooping away with a keen beating of wings. Clare had watched any number of creatures pass beneath the tree house—roadrunners, rabbits, coyotes, a bobcat—all of them unaware of his eyes upon them from above. Sometimes he would make his hand into the shape of a gun, aim with his index finger and, bringing his thumb down, whisper, Ka-blam. Just that little whisper was enough to still a rabbit and cock the head of a coyote. Sometimes Clare would smoke a cigarette stolen from his father’s stash. He’d smoked his father’s leftovers, too, when they first got here, but his father no longer allowed it. He might have bronchitis, he said, and he didn’t want Clare to get it, too.
On this particular day Clare had finished Tonto Basin, as he knew he would, so he’d also brought Riders of the Purple Sage, which he’d read so many times that he knew the first lines by heart. It was still his favorite and its familiarity was reassuring to him. It made him feel safe. He pinched a leaf from a branch, crushed it with his thumb, and held it close to his nose so he could take in the lemony smell. Silver Shred was what she called it. He wondered how he might buy a jar of Silver Shred. He could ask the librarian, Mrs. Goddard. She was nice to him even if nobody else much was. Living in California and closer to town, he thought he would have friends, but he didn’t. He’d never really had them in Kansas. He didn’t know how to go about finding them. When he went to town, people either seemed to think he was invisible or, if they did look at him, it was warily, as if he might be some kind of predator. It was true that some of the girls smiled at him but he was too shy to smile back so they soon quit. Only Mr. McNamara ever waved to him on the street and he was almost afraid to wave back, because of who might see him. Once, when they needed extra workers at the packinghouse for a day, Clare had been chosen, and at the noon whistle, he took his lunch bucket out to the tables where he supposed his mother would be, but she wasn’t. There were three wood-plank tables set beneath the massive sweet-smelling pepper trees. Two of the tables were packed full of workers, but the only one sitting at the third table was a boy just a little older than himself whose name Clare knew to be Caleb. Clare sat down and nodded across the table at the boy, but he didn’t nod back. Clare’s mother had told him that as a newcomer in town, if he wanted to find friends, he needed to put his best foot forward, so he persisted with, “You’re Caleb, right?” The boy still said nothing. His small eyes were set in a wide, tapering face that put Clare in mind of a possum. He kept staring at Clare with that possum’s face, and Clare began having a hard time enjoying his sandwich. Finally the boy said, “Is that Hurd your uncle?” Clare nodded. The boy again said nothing for a time. Then—it was as if so many words and thoughts had collected in his brain that he could no longer keep them there—he said, “Well, McNamara is a scroungy, pitiless son of a bitch and your Uncle Hurd is his stooge, which is just exactly how come you and your family have yourselves all the plum jobs.”
Clare felt dazed. It was like he’d been hit hard in the face. All he’d managed to say was, “What do you mean, his stooge?”
The boy’s face, already drawn pink, drew pinker. “I mean he’s the fat orange-haired mick that watches and watches to see if anybody falls down drunk on Saturday or misses church or sneaks in late to work or takes home a couple of punked avocados, and if he does, McNamara knows by Sunday. Because you know what Sunday is?”
Clare said he did not. He was trying to get his bearings.
By now an older woman from the other table had hurried over and put her hand under the boy’s arm as if to escort him away. “Shush now, Caleb, just shush now,” she said, but the boy would not be shushed. He shook his possum head and spat onto the wooden floor. “He knows by Sunday because besides being the day of the Lord, Sunday is when McNamara goes out to your fat uncle’s place and gets all the fat-face gossip.” He stood and swung his leg over the bench to leave, but checked himself. “Do you know Olive Teagarten?”
Clare shook his head.