She’d had two children rather quickly but still looked young and vital. Since her husband Wes owned the Rexall—he was a pharmacist who’d inherited the place from his father—she worked the counter sometimes. She was shy as ever. There had always been a sad erotic quality to her shyness and sometimes now when I saw her on the street I felt not only lust but loss. I’d probably made a bad choice in passing her by.
She served us our coffees quickly, too busy to say much. The place was crowded. I glanced around. They’d redecorated a year ago. Everything was new and bright and plastic. I missed the old ice cream chairs and the crooked paperback rack that squeaked when you turned it around and the booths where you could sit on Saturdays and watch all the girls come and go. The sandwich counter was the last vestige of the old place. The booths were gone, replaced by glass counters filled with everything from watches to perfumes. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we can get as sentimental about places as we do people? Sometimes I walk around this old town of ours and I’ll see a hitching post where horses used to be tied, which I can still sort of remember. They kept them right up till the time of Korea. Or the grade school where I spent three years before they retired it in favor of a new red brick building. Or the ancient Rialto theater where your parents never wanted you to go because there were supposedly rats lurking in every dark corner—but it only cost eight cents and the holy trinity could be seen there regularly, Gene and Roy and Hoppy. We call them inanimate, all these places of our youth, but they aren’t really, not after we’ve invested them with memories and melancholy.
I said, “You want to make twenty bucks?”
“I get to play Shell Scott?”
“I thought you liked to play Mike Hammer.”
“I’ve been reading a lot of Zen stuff, man. Mike Hammer is too violent.”
“Maybe you should be Miss Marple.”
“Very funny.” He sipped his coffee. “Actually, I’d rather be Miss Marple than Hercule Poirot. He’s such a little twit.”
“Yeah; I like Miss Marple better, too.”
“Maybe I’ll be Philip Marlowe. I’m in a kind of Philip Marlowe mood lately.”
“Whatever that means. Can we get back to the subject?”
“You want me to dig up dirt on—whom?”
Kenny Thibodeau could make a lot more money as an investigator than he does as a dirty book writer. But I suppose it’s a matter of prestige. Just about anybody can be a gumshoe but very few among us could write Nympho Nurses. Kenny knows, or knows how to get, information on virtually everybody in town. I use him a lot. He really does like to play private eye.
“Start with Ross Murdoch.”
“You’re kidding. He’s going to be governor.”
I didn’t want to elaborate on that. “I’ll have some other names for you later. You’ll be busy for a while.”
“Maybe get some material for a book. I’m hoping one of these cases for you turns up some really raunchy stuff one of these days.”
He slid off the stool. “I still miss that paperback rack. The old metal one.”
“Yeah, so do I.”
“That new layout they’ve got over there—all those shelves and everything—it’s too respectable for people like us, McCain.”
“I agree.”
“God, we’re getting old, McCain.”
“Yeah, our mid-twenties. We’ll have chrome walkers before you know it.”
The way Mary kept glancing at me, I knew she wanted to talk. I was happy to wait around. In addition to somebody I daydreamed of sleeping with from time to time, she was pure, nice woman. She had to give up college when her dad got throat cancer. I never once heard her complain or feel sorry for herself.
“How’ve you been?” she said when the rush was over.
“About the same as the last time we talked. That was about fifteen years ago, right?”
She smiled. “Seems more like thirty. It’s just going so fast. We’ll actually be thirty one of these days. Do you ever think about it?”
“I’m too boyish to think about stuff like that.” Then: “I think about it all the time.”
She leaned forward and said, “Wes asked me for a divorce last week and I said yes. He met a lady pharmacist at a convention. He’s been driving to Des Moines to see her.” Her tone was flat. If she was sad about it, she hid it well.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sure I am, Sam. To be honest, I mean.”
“You have any suspicions beforehand?”
“Yes. I mean, by the end it got to be obvious. It’s funny—Pamela Forrest finally got her dream: you know, finally getting Stu Grant to marry her and now I hear she’s miserable. And Wes finally got his, getting to marry me, and now he’s found someone else.”
“So how do you feel about all this?”
She shrugged her slender shoulders. “Oh, you know, mixed feelings. It wasn’t ever much of a marriage. You know how jealous he is about everybody. If I wasn’t home doing housework or behind the counter here at the store, he was worried I was cheating on him. He accused me of it so much I almost called you a couple of times to make it true.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“So am I. I’m not the cheating type. He would’ve dragged me down with him.”
“So now what?”
“Well, his father’s really angry. His mother never liked me. Coming from the Hills the way I did …well, you know. She pretty much thought I was trash and that her precious Wes was marrying below his station. But his father and I always got along. He’s kind of cranky at the store here but you should see him when he’s with his two grandkids. One day he was so happy to be picking up Ellie, he just burst into tears.”
“Man, that goes into ‘Believe It Or Not.’”
“Right now, of course, they’re pretty mad at Wes, too. He’s pretty much taken over the pharmacy here. And they’re embarrassed by what he’s done. So they’re making sure he gives me the house and the second car and a decent amount of child support. I’ll keep working here with longer hours and they’ll pay for all my insurance. Knowing Granddad, he’ll also be buying clothes for the kids. He’s always shopping for them.”
A customer. Coffee and a Danish that was probably starting to dry out from the morning. But they’re good that way. Just a tad bit old. I got one for myself. She spent ten minutes subduing the new crowd. Then came back to me.
She asked me how the woman I’d most recently dated was doing. “I heard she moved to Rochester.”
“Well, I kind of thought that might turn into something. But she went up there so many times that she fell in love with her oncologist. They’re getting married in six months.” She’d been another girl I’d grown up with in the Hills, same as Mary and Pamela. She moved to Iowa City, worked her way through nursing school, and married a guy from Rock Island. Everything went reasonably well until she found out she had breast cancer. He couldn’t handle it. He finally just ran away. We dated for a couple of months and it was fun. She is a very good woman. The sex was wonderful. But then she started talking about this oncologist in terms that weren’t doctorly. How he reminded her a little of Tony Curtis. How he’d played quarterback at the U of Minnesota. How he had this really nifty frontier-style cabin on a lake up near the Canadian border. Wasn’t too hard to figure out what was going on. We hadn’t been in love. We’d been lonely and wanted to think we were in love but when she told me she’d decided to move up there, I think we were both relieved that our little charade was over.