“Yes,” Ansel said, not sure what he was admitting to, or how Aldine would have presented him to a friend. “Where is Miss McKenna now? Where did she go?”
Glynis seemed to be considering her words. “I’m not sure,” she said, “but one time before she stopped working here, a man came in and talked to her. He seemed to know some of her family. She was really nervous around him so I asked Aldine about him after he left. He was a Mormon missionary who knew her family. So, you know, when she left, I asked if she was going to live with her family.”
“And?” Ansel asked. Things like this worked out all right sometimes, with the baby passing as the child of the married relative. It might’ve been the safest thing to do.
Glynis had been gazing out at the large empty room, but turned now to Ansel. Her eyes were indifferent and cold. “She said she’d rather die,” she said.
Ansel felt a kind of agitation rising. “So where is she then?”
He thought he saw a kind of defiance come into her face. “I don’t know,” she said.
A lie. Ansel was sure this was a lie. He glanced at the clock on the wall and pushed away his coffee cup. “I’m going to have to get to the bank,” he said. He smiled at Gilbert. “How much are you charging for coffee and a croquette these days?”
“Nada,” Gilbert said. “But maybe something more to eat, Selmo? You need your strength to deal with these insolente bankers.”
Ansel was already standing. “How about a rain check?” he said. “I’ll eat better when I’ve finished my business.”
Glynis leaned on her hands and said, “It’s nice to put a face with a name.”
79
Out of sight of the Harvey House, Ansel walked past the bronze doorplate of the Emporia Savings & Loan, smudged by many hands, and then went next door to a grocery, where he bought sardines and bread. He walked south in the cold air until the houses and sidewalks stopped, and he stood facing a large new park planted with stubbly brown grass and young cottonwood trees, in the center of which a pond threw brightness back at the winter sky. Peter Pan Park said the carved plaques in each of the two pillars, which were made of stone in a style that suggested a child’s idea of a castle. The park had not been there when he lived in Emporia, and he was surprised to see groups of shabbily dressed men loosely gathered near a stone boathouse. Ansel walked to the far side of the pond and ate his sardines standing up under a rattling maple.
He looked west, beyond the pale water. A few hundred miles in that direction his house stood unoccupied, his fields abandoned. He wanted to go there, see how things looked. He wanted to find Aldine, and take her with him. He had to talk to Glynis again, but away from Gil, who had driven all the way to Ellie’s father’s house to attend their wedding.
He rolled the uneaten portion of the bread into its paper bag and walked back toward the Harvey House, past groups of bundled-up people hurrying past him in clouds of their own chilled breath. They were leaving offices and shops, he supposed, and the cold reddened their faces and turned them inward. Few looked at him, and those who did gave him only the quickest glance before again looking away.
Near the platform, within the covered archway, Ansel leaned against the cold stone wall and waited for Glynis to come out, or for the train to come, or for a better idea to present itself, whichever, he thought, came first. The architects who’d added the covered archway had only made a cold place colder. He was miserable, his fingers and toes registering what it was like to be on the plains with winter coming on. The wind bit at his ears. He began to cough his deep raking cough. From the nearby shadows something large was suddenly moving—a man who had been crouching there, still and unseen by Ansel, silently rose and moved away.
Minutes passed, perhaps a half hour. Numbness crept over him; even when he coughed, he didn’t feel the customary pain in his ribs. Finally the door of the restaurant flashed gold in the wintry sun, and Glynis came out, her head wrapped in a bright green scarf and her chin snugged down inside the collar of a dark coat. She was alone.
The moment he stepped from the shadows, Glynis saw him. He raised his chin in greeting and she nodded, a letter in her gloved hand. She didn’t seem surprised to see him.
“Thought you were going to come back and eat,” she said.
“There might not be time,” he said. “But I wanted to ask if you know anything else about where Aldine is.”
She looked not so much at him as into him. Her brown eyes narrowed and her thin, finely shaped eyebrows drew together. “Are you still married?”
“Yes,” he said. “But—”
She cut him off to say, “And you think you’re in love with Aldine?”
To Ansel, this sounded less like a question than an accusation. What this girl—what was her name?—seemed to mean by love was something sneaky and side-doorish and vulgar.
“No,” he said, “not the way you mean it. It was more like . . .” Like what? A father? A brother? But it wasn’t like that, either. “It was . . . more like my heart went out to her,” he said.
The girl’s cold eyes settled on him. “You felt sorry for her, you’re saying, and then you had your way with her?”
“No,” he said, “that wasn’t how it was—”
But the girl was done talking. Her worst expectations had been met. Her face had again gone bland. “I need to get to the post office before it closes,” she said.
He walked in the direction she walked, his open mouth pulling the biting-cold air into his lungs. He stopped to cough, then had to trot to catch up.
“Do you have pneumonia or something?” she said over her shoulder.
“Just a bad cold.” He gulped air. “I’ll be fine.”
The girl said nothing, but she did slacken her pace. Still, he had a hard time keeping up.
They stepped off the street and his foot broke through a brittle skin of ice into a shallow puddle of frigid water. “I just wanted to know how she is,” he said.
She kept walking steadily forward. “Yours weren’t the only letters, you know. They came from both of you. But I could tell by the way she treated your letters that you were the one she loved, not the boy.” She glanced at him. “Clare, right?”