“Cynthia, you’re being very quiet back there. Perhaps you might like to contribute something here?”
“Not really. It sounds like Campbell knows what’s wrong with her story. It doesn’t have a realistic ending.”
“But taking the story overall, do you think that she did a good job of fleshing out her characters — creating a plausible narrative up to a point?”
“Yes.”
Cynthia didn’t elaborate. She didn’t know Campbell. She knew that Campbell had no window into her own life, yet it was uncanny how closely her own life story resembled that of Jocelyn Lucero’s. Cynthia even lived in the Albuquerque’s North Valley not that far from Candelaria.
It gave her pause. It gave her chills, actually. She was the youngest. She was left behind to take care of her mother — a mother who was constantly ill but never too ill not to keep plodding on, with the help of Cynthia’s filial love and attendance. It was a wonder that Cynthia was able to get away for the creative writing class she took two nights a week at UNM.
Cynthia liked the idea of a cruise. It served her escape fantasy.
Five days later that fantasy became a reality when Cynthia Baca bought a ticket for a Caribbean singles cruise and disappeared for a month. Her two brothers and two sisters were horrified, her mother devastated to be abandoned by her baby — someone who up until that point had been so dependable, so lovingly self-sacrificing.
Cynthia sent Campbell a postcard from the Bahamas in care of the school, thanking her for providing the impetus for her liberation, thanking Campbell for the chance to meet Paul in Freeport and then Kent in Nassau and then Danny in the midnight buffet line aboard ship. Because Cynthia had been transformed by this act of self-empowerment. At the age of thirty-eight she’d finally come into her own.
In Cynthia’s enthusiastic opinion, continuing education classes had the potential to be life-altering experiences.
“That ending is simply horrible, Anita. You can’t be serious about entering that story into the writing competition.”
“Dead serious, Sis. And I intend to win that all-expenses-paid trip to New York City, and Mama will just have to fend for herself. On second thought, you can drive down from Santa Fe and stay with her yourself. For once.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“And this is where it ends?”
“Yes.”
1994 CROONING AND SWOONING IN SOUTH DAKOTA
Just as she said she would, Mrs. Richman (“Oh, please, call me Natalia!”) arrived at 5:30.
“Is there anybody in America besides bakers and dairy farmers who gets up before 5:30?” Jeremy had groggily inquired as he pulled the coffee pot from the coffee maker.
“Mrs. Richman can hear you,” Erin said from the dining room.
“Oh, please, call me Natalia!”
Natalia looked around the room. It was everything Erin and her brother Jeremy had said it would be: a hoarder’s trove of Roy Rogers memorabilia. “Your grandfather had quite an extensive collection. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been doing estate sales for over twenty years.”
Natalia’s hand fell upon a framed, autographed portrait of all the members of the singing group, Sons of the Pioneers, which Roy had formed in the early thirties, back when he was still Leonard Slye of Cincinnati, Ohio. “How long did it take your grandfather to assemble this collection?”
“Almost fifty years,” said Erin.
“And where is he now — is he already in the nursing home?”
“As of a couple of weeks ago,” offered Jeremy, coming in from the kitchen, a cup of coffee in each hand.
“Thank you, Jeremy,” said Erin to her brother, taking a cup. “So Mrs. — I mean, Natalia, how do you think we’ll do?”
“Well, I’ve kept my fee down to twenty percent. That helps. But the fact that the sale will appeal mostly to collectors of Roy Rogers memorabilia—”
“Serious collectors.”
“True. It is limiting. On the other hand — and I’m definitely an ‘other hand’ sort of person — I’ve advertised all over this end of the state. And I’ll bet you there will be some Roy Rogers and Dale Evans fans who’ll get wind of it from as far away as Nebraska and Minnesota, so we’ll just cross our fingers for a good turnout. May I ask: is the collection complete?”
“Complete in what way?” asked Jeremy, who was now sipping from his own cup of coffee.
“Roy Rogers was famous for putting his name on everything. Nobody branded more merchandise in his heyday except Disney. Still, there are a finite variety of items that Rogers collectors are able to get their hands on. Did your grandfather tell you if he’d acquired them all?”
Erin shrugged.
Jeremy picked up a cowboy hat with Roy Rogers’ name stitched across the hatband and put it on. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Is that the only hat?” asked Natalia, pulling out her list.
“Hell no,” replied Jeremy.
Erin added, “There are at least a dozen more in the den.”
“Oh, goodness,” said Natalia Richman, with a slightly avaricious simper.
By sunup there was an orderly line of early-bird customers stretched down the front walk. Cars were continuing to pull onto the street. Mitchell, South Dakota, wasn’t a very big town. These people came from other places. Word was out; this had the makings of a good sale.
Natalia Richman understood people. She understood their totemic relationship to things. She also understood how much people of a certain age loved Roy Rogers and his wife, Dale Evans, and Roy’s horse, Trigger, and his German Shepherd, Bullet. And yet their popularity didn’t last forever. When ABC decided to give Roy and Dale their own comedy-western-variety show in the fall of 1962 (called, naturally, The Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Show), they got clobbered in the ratings by Jackie Gleason and were promptly cancelled — probably because all of Roy’s kid-followers had grown up and were busy raising kids of their own, kids who didn’t get Roy Rogers. Roy and Dale weren’t necessarily has-beens. There was still enormous affection for them throughout the country. But for a long while nobody was buying Roy Rogers — approved neckties and frontier shirts and kerchiefs and board games and trick lassos anymore.
It was different now. Now Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, both still living on their ranch in Apple Valley, California, were nostalgic. Nostalgia was a good thing for someone like Natalia Richman. A Long Island native in her late forties, Natalia had moved to Sioux Falls with her husband ten years earlier, and, now divorced, was still plying her trade running estate sales and an antique store in Yankton, and actually making a decent living at it.
“Shall we admit the hordes?” she asked Erin and Jeremy.
Both siblings nodded.
“And may I say,” said Natalia, going to unlock the front door, “how much I admire the two of you for taking care of your grandfather’s estate for him. I should be so lucky to have grandkids like you.”
“Thanks,” said Jeremy. “But we’re a little mercenary. He’s giving us a percentage.”
Natalia’s hand rested on the doorknob but she didn’t open the door just yet. “How did he feel, if you don’t mind me asking, about getting rid of his collection? I find that people as acquisitive as your grandfather are sometimes reluctant to let go of even a few items, much less their entire collection.”