To this Ansel gave his head a bitter shake and she said, “He speaks well of you, you know. How you’re willing to go out with the picking crews at your age to help your family.” She paused and then seemed to have some trouble saying the next part. “He calls you a good example.”
Ansel didn’t know what the saddest moment in his marriage was, but that might have been it.
“I’m sorry, El,” he said.
It was quiet and he listened to the sounds of the oncoming night. The crickets were starting. The coyotes would be out soon, working together, screaming in chorus as they converged on a rabbit or cat. He took a breath and didn’t feel the catch of a cough. He could say more if he knew what to say and how to say it, but he didn’t, so he turned and started for the tree house, where he thought there might be a blanket.
“Good night, Ansel,” she said after him, and without slowing or turning around he said, “Good night, Ellie.”
67
Neva didn’t really like polishing and cleaning, but she liked the busyness of it all, her mother telling Charlotte and Clare what to do, and the trash going out into the alley and new things coming in the front door. She’d helped with the cleaning, but she’d gotten tired of it and pretended to be wheezy from it so she sat in front of the hotel on a little stool with Milly Mandy Molly and read a book, and if anyone walked by, she gave them one of the little cards that Mr. McNamara had made up. She loved the little cards. They said, Sleeping Indian Café at the top, and then:
Home-Style Food
Breakfast, Lunch, and Supper Specials
Ellie & Ansel Price, Proprietors
When people asked when they would be open, Neva had been instructed to say, “Soon! Keep watching for progress!”
More than once she’d heard herself compared to Shirley Temple.
Sometimes if she got tired of handing out cards, she’d go inside and climb the stairs and look out the window of the room that was going to be hers and Charlotte’s. It wasn’t the best room—Clare’s was the best, because it was right by the outside stairs and you could see the Sleeping Indian from one of his windows—but her and Charlotte’s room had a mirror on the closet door that was as tall as Charlotte. When they first saw the rooms, they were full of trash and things like dirty cups and empty bottles and soiled rags that made you think it was where the Murderous Hordes had stayed when they were passing through. But today her mother and father and Ida and Hurd and Clare and Charlotte and even Mr. McNamara came with barrels and shovels and brooms and cleaned everything out. Her father worked all morning and into the afternoon, but his coughing got worse and her mother made him go home. Mr. McNamara had perfect round beads of sweat popping up all over his bald head no matter how often he wiped it with his handkerchief but he and Clare were doing the hardest work and she was surprised how Mr. McNamara was always smiling and winking all day long, even after his shirt was wet and dirty and one side of it hanging out of his pants. “That was fun,” he announced at the end of the day when all the rooms were finally spic-and-span, and then winking at Uncle Hurd, he said, “We menfolk may have to go quench our thirst,” and off they went. Clare took Neva and went back to see if his father was feeling better. He was. He started to walk back to town to keep helping but they told him it was all done now.
From the window of her and Charlotte’s room, you could see Main Street down below and a line of fat palm trees across the street. The window faced east. Her father told her that. “Know how I know?” he’d said with fun in his voice, so she said, “No. How?” And he said, “Well, if I squint and look out that particular window, I can see Kansas.”
That was a funny idea so she’d asked what exactly he could see in Kansas and he said, “Everything,” so she asked if he could see Dorland and their house and their barn and Krazy Kat sleeping in the hayloft and he said yes to every one.
68
One afternoon after the westbound for Albuquerque had pulled from the station and the coffee urn had been cleaned and polished and the tablecloths were all smoothed and set for the next incoming train, Glynis approached from across the vast room. Aldine, refilling salt and pepper cellars, saw her coming and noticed at once the stiffness of her face. She was afraid someone in her family had died or fallen gravely ill, so she set everything down and met her in the middle of the room with the idea of offering consolation.
“What’s happened then, Glynny?” she said.
“I don’t know.” Truly, she was on the verge of tears. “It’s Mrs. Gore. She thinks you’re pregnant, but I told her you weren’t.” Her glistening eyes fell on Aldine’s. “You’re not, are you?”
Aldine took a quick breath, composing a lie, but she couldn’t do it. She let her eyes fall.
For a few moments there was nothing but the sound of the clinking and tinkling of the other waitresses going about their work. Then Glynis said, “Well, she says she wants to see you.”
69
School, as Clare experienced it in Fallbrook, was nothing like school in Kansas. The high school was a big handsome building the color of sand, a line of palm trees in front of it, straight and stately and foreign. There was, to begin with, the strangeness of seeing his sister coming out of the faculty room or the Practice House as a teacher while he was still a student. Queen of the Practice House, he’d heard someone call her, and The Big Cheese of Spic-and-Span. (She laughed when he related this, but he knew she was pretending.) The bigger surprise was how he took to the schoolwork, especially the algebra and the chemistry. At the country school, he’d always been the one helping the younger ones in math and science, but no one had remarked particularly on his capabilities. Now he was sitting with kids his own age, and he was doing very well.
There was a girl in Clare’s Latin class, Lavinia Gulden, whose hair was the same color as Aldine’s, though she was not as pretty. She had a long serious face and matronly clothes and fingers that were unusually long and white, like Aldine’s had been. In class each day, after writing down the daily quotation and the verbs to be conjugated, Clare looked at the back of Lavinia’s head and tried not to think of Aldine. Once, Lavinia turned around, saw Clare looking at her, and smiled. Clare smiled in what he hoped was a disinterested way and studied his Latin notebook.