“Well, I do. And McNamara knew she was knocked up almost before she did.”
The boy then rose and moved to one of the other tables, where the workers scooched sideways to make room for him while Clare ate alone. He saw the boy at work one more time, and then never again.
From then on, Clare had viewed Hurd’s round happy face differently, and Mr. McNamara’s, too. He hated seeing that grown man with Charlotte, hated it more than he could say. Why did grown men do that—chase after girls half their age? Clare squeezed his eyes tightly closed. He took a breath and began reciting to himself: “a sharp clip-clop of iron-shod hooves deadened and died away and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the purple sage . . .”
He opened the book to check. He’d gotten everything right but purple. The purple came in the next line, when Jane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy, troubled eyes.
62
Ellie regarded her hands, the skin cracked and the cracks dark with ink. This was the fourth straight day she had stayed late at the packinghouse pasting labels on boxes to earn extra money. It was almost eight o’clock when she punched out and walked alone down the steps from the loading dock. Ida would have kept something covered for her supper, but Ellie had worked her way past hunger. All during her lunch break, sitting away from the others on a crate in the east-wall shade of the packinghouse, she’d stared across the lots at the pink bricks of El Real, so now, instead of walking straight home, she stepped over the railroad tracks and picked her way through the weeds and broken glass of the vacant lots. The fennel weeds were five feet tall and bushy, each one as dry as a broom straw. She snapped off a gray cluster to roll the beads between her fingers and smell the sweet oil it left, a scent that was exactly like licorice. She glanced back at the packinghouse when she reached the El Real, to see if anyone was watching, and then she reached out to the doorknob. It turned, and she let herself in.
The sun was low in the sky and the light was horizontal. The wrought-iron curlicues on the window bars became serpentine shadows on amber walls above a short lunch counter and a stack of cheap wooden chairs. She’d thought more than once of asking Mr. McNamara whether he’d be willing to rent the building, but she wanted to see it for herself first, see if it was the sort of place where you could serve green tomato pie and Spanish cream.
She ran her hand over the varnished wood of the lunch counter. There was dust all right, but she knew how to clean up dust. She studied the dust on a six-burner stove. It was no Harvey House, but even with the dust, the chrome gleamed faintly in the twilight. The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard that would look smart when scoured. Truly, it was all much nicer than she’d imagined. She looked up at the stairs. They were solid and carpeted up the center and looked elegant, really, except for the leathery carcass of a mouse halfway up. She reached the top just as the gold light of the setting sun winked out and left the interior in shades of blue. The first door she opened went into a hotel room furnished with a dusty striped mattress, a pine wardrobe, a nightstand, and scattered black droppings of mice. There were four other rooms more or less the same, and bathrooms at each end of the hallway, so it could be an apartment, she thought, if she cooked the family meals in the café kitchen.
There was the matter of money of course, but June had been a good month at the packinghouse and she’d made three dollars most days, sometimes four. From that she had managed to save twelve dollars now.
She was checking the window latch in the back bedroom when she heard the door open downstairs. A liquid burst of fear shot from her stomach to her head. She stood perfectly still, smelling the crushed fennel on her fingertips, hoping that whoever it was had not seen her open the door and let herself in. She heard shuffling footsteps, then a man’s voice.
“As you can see, nothing’s been taken out. It’s just as it was the last time you looked at it.” It was McNamara’s voice, his quiet even modulation.
“What’s changed is the times,” another voice said, a man’s, as if calling across the room. His voice was gruff and unfamiliar. “Nothing’s what they were. Including rents.”
Mr. McNamara responded in a voice too low to be heard from this distance.
Ellie folded her arms across her stomach and shifted her weight to her left foot. She should never have sneaked into the building like this. She could hide out upstairs and hope they didn’t find her, but if they did, it would be the worst kind of humiliation. She took a deep breath and stepped forward to the head of the stairs.
“Hello? Is that you, Mr. McNamara?” she called down, trying to make her voice sound breezy. “I heard you were renting this place and I stopped by on my way home.”
The restaurant below was lit, and as she descended, Mr. McNamara stepped to the foot of the stairs and looked up with frank curiosity. She hoped her hair wasn’t frazzled.
“Well, well,” he said, but his tone was not unfriendly.
A stranger—cowboy boots, rodeo-style neck scarf, hat in hand—appeared behind him. As she made her way down with one hand on the rail, she felt vaguely as if she were making an entrance.
When they were all standing in the empty restaurant, she said, “I’d heard that you owned it and didn’t know what to do with it, and”—she glanced at the other man, who stared back without smiling—“I’ve always had the idea of running a café.”
Mr. McNamara was leaning forward slightly, smiling and nodding. “What kind of café?”
She glanced down and, seeing her chapped hands, held them behind her. “Breakfast and lunch,” she said. “Hearty foods and specialty dishes and desserts.”
Mr. McNamara was nodding thoughtfully. “And maybe hamburgers and malts for the high school crowd in the afternoon.”
It was quiet and the overhead chandeliers, only one of which was working, made the room seem golden. She’d almost forgotten the man in the rodeo scarf until he said, “All right, then. I’ll take it.”
Mr. McNamara turned to him. “Well, that’s just fine, Mr. Schutt.” He smiled through the briefest pause. “And you’ll be taking the hotel, too? Because I imagine that if Mrs. Price were to open her café she would be interested in using the hotel as apartments for her family, with maybe even a boarder or two, just to supplement.”
The other man’s expression sharpened. “You never said anything before about having to take the rooms, too.”
“I know that, Mr. Schutt,” Mr. McNamara said. His voice went beyond patience; it was condolence itself. “But you can see what an advantage renting the whole building would be for all concerned.”
The man took this in, then said, “I wouldn’t say for all concerned,” and, slapping on his hat, he walked out of the building.