“We need provisions,” Marchie said in her scratchy voice. “Cakes and things.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Ida said. “Well, let’s see here,” and Charlotte was afraid that Ida would see her standing there at the counter, so she hurried quietly back up the stairs while Ida’s heels clopped across the linoleum.
Charlotte positioned another square of satin in the button press, picked up a shank, and tried to take pleasure in the poof. She didn’t know what to make of her mother’s eerie calm, but she definitely agreed with her on one point: the date was set. Mister was planning on it. She was planning on it. She would absolutely hate waiting one extra day, let alone a month, to move into her own house and reclaim Artemis, who was living with Ida and Hurd because there was no place to keep a dog in an apartment over a café. When Charlotte walked back into her classes on Monday, November 27, she intended to be wearing a genuine diamond ring. She wouldn’t be the Big Cheese of Spic-and-Span; she would be Mrs. James McNamara. If they put off the wedding, then what? Pity—and, yes, smugness—in the eyes of girls barely three years younger than she was, and all of them wondering just where her father was, and what the real reason was that the wedding had been postponed.
Another thought, much worse, came to her as she popped out a button like a mushroom cap. If they waited, and her father stayed away, what would Mister begin to think of their family?
She’d thought the Aldine business was over. She knew she shouldn’t have written that silly note, but Aldine had no reason to assume a married man wrote her a love note, for God’s sake, and her father should not have held Aldine’s foot in that pitiful besotted way, either.
As far as Charlotte knew, that’s all that happened. But maybe her mother had seen something else. Maybe it would be like that Norma Shearer movie The Divorcee, and her mother, eyes lowered with vengeful lust, would teach her father a lesson by sleeping with Robert Montgomery, although of course there wasn’t anyone in Fallbrook who looked remotely like Robert Montgomery. Dr. Quigley, maybe. Charlotte considered him briefly, his elegant chin and polished shoes, then wondered what made her think such thoughts.
No. Charlotte should marry Mister on the day they planned, while her family still had a chance of seeming normal. If her father came back to lead her up the aisle, she would hold his arm and believe him blameless. And if he didn’t come back, well, then, Uncle Hurd could give her away.
89
When a week had passed without discovery, Aldine tried not to think of the car or Ellie. She would have the baby, and Ansel would return the car, and then everything else could be worked out. A light snow fell and Ansel spread out a broken-down carburetor on the dining room table so he could work near her instead of alone in the barn. Krazy Kat, locked in as she was, began to use for her relief the corner of the basement where remnants of coal had once been swept. This meant the cat made sooty tracks that were hard to clean in her state. The cat was a good mouser, but she often left behind a bloody head or tail, which Ansel disposed of, though again there was a stain left behind, and she couldn’t always find the energy to mop and scrub.
“What did you say it’s called?” she asked Ansel. “The Progress House?”
“What?” he asked. It was pleasant to work on the machine, a thing whose purpose and nature he understood, while she was sitting nearby, stroking the cat as he worked, especially now that everything outside the window was outlined with the finest, lightest, purest snow.
“The little cottage for teaching girls how to be housemaids.”
“Practice, I think.”
“I’m no good at it,” Aldine said. “I’d be a poor pupil.”
“I like it this way,” he said. “You don’t need any practice.”
Later that day, when every bit of the snow had melted, Aldine was upstairs lying beneath layers of quilts, trying to keep warm, when she heard an approaching car.
Ansel was out working, but Aldine didn’t know if he was in the barn or the field. She didn’t know if he would hear the car. Aldine went to stand by the window, keeping herself out of sight, eyes fixed on the dried husks of the cottonwood leaves, a few of which clung stubbornly to high branches. She could see, too, the rusted edge of a white tin cup one of the children—Neva probably—had left in the rickety tree house. A black car pulled to a stop under the tree and a man got out. It wasn’t a police car, Aldine was sure. But it wasn’t a neighbor, either, at least not one that she had ever seen.
She froze beside the curtain, printed all over with open-mouthed flowers. The man’s feet thudded and scraped on the porch, and she stiffened herself for the knock of his fist on the door.
Instead she heard Ansel’s voice, and when she allowed herself to look through the window again he was striding across the yard, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Western Union,” she heard, and Ansel’s voice saying thank you, and a few other comments she took to be about the weather. She stayed where she was as the man got back into his car, as the car door shut, as the tires went once more over dirt and loose stones. She stayed where she was as Ansel opened the front door and walked in, as he stood, she was certain, to peel open the envelope and read whatever was inside. She waited in the stillness. The cottonwood branches scraped against the window, and the dead leaves made a whispering sound.
His boots shuffled and she waited for him to call her. “Aldine?” he said.
Still she couldn’t move. “Up here,” she called.
He was heavy sounding on the stairs, and the old excitement of hearing him approach, the skin response to his nearness, was still there beside the dread.
His irises were like glass. “It’s about Clare,” he said. In one hand he held the cable; the other he rested on the doorknob. “He crashed a truck the day I left.”
She waited.
“Ellie says he broke his leg.”
“Is he all right?”
“I don’t know. They brought the cable out once before,” he said, holding the paper up, “but no one was here.”
She swallowed and took this in. “Why did they come back?”
“Someone mentioned seeing a light on.”
They were both quiet. When the car had approached, she’d forgotten her swollen feet, but they were again making themselves felt. She needed to sit down, and she walked to the bed. She was aware again that she was cold and hungry, or cold and dizzy, she wasn’t sure which. She sat on the smooth edge of the bed and made herself say it. “Will you go back now?”
Ansel shook his head. Ellie hadn’t asked him to come back. Her telegram just said horrible accident and broken leg nailed together. But she would expect him to come back, he thought. That’s why she sent the news.