He sealed the envelope, licked the stamp, and rolled the heel of his hand over it to secure it. Then he dropped it through the brass mail slot marked Air Mail. Even before he reached the door he heard the scrape of Bart Crandall’s stool on the wooden floor, and Ansel didn’t have to see it to see it: Bart Crandall going over to the canvas bag that stood open under the air mail slot, stooping over, peering in, taking out the letter to see where it was off to.
65
Charlotte didn’t know what to do about marrying Mr. McNamara, so one day when she was alone in the Practice House, she tore out a page from a composition book and drew two columns. At the top of one she wrote, Plus; at the top of the other, Minus.
In the Minus column she wrote, Leaving everybody, though truthfully when she thought of leaving her parents and Neva and Clare, it didn’t seem so bad, really, and Closing Other Doors, by which she meant all the other lives that would never be hers, not if she married Mr. McNamara.
His Christian name was James but she’d never called him that, and he’d never asked her to. So she kept calling him Mr. McNamara until it just seemed normal to turn Mister into a nickname. “I’d like to nibble your ear off,” he might say, for example, and she would say, “I happen to need that ear, Mister.” Or he might say, “I’d like to undo this particular button right here,” and she would say, “Not tonight, Mister.” Once when they were at a diner and he needed cheering up, she leaned forward to take his hand and say, “You’re my funny, sweet Mister, aren’t you?” and he said yes, and that he was glad he was.
In the Plus column she wrote Car (she loved riding in the Packard and she loved the way people looked at you even when they were trying not to) and Goddess-ness (the first time she went riding with him he said he wanted to treat her like a goddess and from then on, he pretty much had) and House (he would build her one on a knoll at the top of an avocado grove) and Job (because the last thing she wanted to do was stay home cleaning that house) and Resolution (because, well, you got married and that would be that).
She knew she’d left out two important things but she didn’t know where to put them. Finally she made a new column and wrote Irrelevant at the top and below it, in place of Love and Sex, she wrote X & X.
She laid down her pencil then and looked for a long time at the page and its three columns. She did not mind that she would not be seeing him that night. He had driven to Los Angeles and wouldn’t be back until Thursday. She never knew quite what he did on these excursions. It didn’t matter whether he was going to Los Angeles or San Francisco or, as he did once, Mesa, Arizona, he merely said that he was going to go “look into something.” She liked that he went away like that; it made him mysterious, and it gave her a little breathing room. She took up her pencil and wrote that as a last addition to the Plus column: Breathing Room.
66
There was a hummingbird that kept mistaking Ida’s blue bottles for flowers. Ansel had come to know the hummingbird by the motorized whir of his wings and his sudden precipitous dives. The bird pierced lavender stalks with his hypodermic beak, his throat a flashy crimson, the luminescent green of his back almost reptilian, his aim greedy and precise. He drank and then he whirred away, returning at least once to hover in confusion above a bright, impenetrable vial of blue glass.
Ansel liked being out here, beyond the reach of Ida’s voice, and Ellie’s, too. He could still hear them talking, but he couldn’t make out the words, which was fine by him. Usually Ellie stayed inside once they’d finished the dishes, playing cards or listening to the radio, but tonight he heard the back door squeak and footsteps heading his way.
“I heard you coughing clear from the kitchen,” she said.
There was no chair near him, so he stood up and stepped on the stub of his cigarette, waving his hand toward the chair to offer it to her, but she shook her head.
“You’ve had a long day,” she said. “Sit and rest.”
“I thought I might sleep outside tonight,” he said. “Because of the coughing. I know it wakes you and the kids. Probably Ida and Hurd, too.”
“Ida says you ought to go see the doctor.”
“It’ll pass,” he said. “Colds always do.” The hummingbird had left when Ellie walked up. Now dozens of crows were flying above the low, dusky hills, calling to one another, gliding down into the tallest of a knot of oaks.
Ansel felt the quick tightening of his chest and then the thickness gathering there like some horrible phlegmy stew bubbling, beginning to boil, and then all at once he was bent over in a convulsion of thick, raking, bilious coughs that finally subsided. Sitting back down in his chair felt like a concession, but there was no getting around it. He inhaled and daubed the tears in his eyes. “See?” he said in a hoarse, broken voice, forcing a smile. “Better to sleep out here until it does.”
Ellie looked away from him and snapped off a stalk of lavender and ground the blossom between her fingers to release its aroma. She was always picking plants and shredding them, as if that was the way she figured out what they were. In Emporia, on one of their first walks, she kept leaning down to pick dandelions, running the palm of her hand over the fluff instead of setting it free with her breath.
She said, “I think we should move, Ansel.”
He turned to her. “Back?”
She didn’t look at him. “No. To town. Mr. McNamara has offered to rent us the hotel on Main Street, and I think we could open the café together, you and I. Everything’s there already—the equipment, the tables, the pots and pans. We can start over, in our own place, and it’ll be like the Harvey House.”
It would never be like that for him, and that wasn’t the time he wanted to go back to, anyway.
“Ansel?”
“I can’t, Ellie. I came out here for Neva, but this place isn’t ours. It isn’t mine, anyway. It’ll never be home.” Her face stiffened even before he finished.
“I’ve signed a lease,” she said.
“What kind of a lease?”
“I’ve rented the whole thing—the restaurant, the rooms upstairs, everything.”
“With what?”
“I’ve been saving,” she said.
He understood. He was sure he understood. “And writing to your father.”
But she said evenly, “My father has no hand in it, Ansel. Mr. McNamara is putting up the seed money and he’s given us terms that are more than fair.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He thinks we’re the kind of family that can make the town better,” she said. “And he thinks the town needs a café.”