“Will I always be able to see Peter?” Arnold sobbed. Mary was crying, too. But she knew where to put her pain. She had her boy to think of, and where to put pain was a skill she’d learned early on.
“The house is yours, of course,” Arnold said with a brave, generous smile that suggested he was unaware that he was speaking to a loan officer who had already begun to do the numbers in her head. She couldn’t help it. It was her latest version of tough.
“Thank you, Arnold.”
“And my owning the bank with my mother means that your job is assured.”
Mary loved Arnold, but this airy way of dispensing justice hurried her agenda.
“Don’t you find that a little informal?”
“You must mean divorce.”
“I’m not the one going to San Juan Capistrano. You are.”
“No doubt we’ll have to get something written up.”
“This is a no-fault state. When couples split the sheets, they split them fifty-fifty.” Mary laughed heartily. “I could keep you on at the bank, Arnold, but not from California.”
He’d let Mary see his origins, and Mary had reminded him of hers. Arnold sighed in concession.
His mother was not pleased when she learned of her new partnership. Her mouth fell open as Mary explained the arrangement, but Mary reached across the conference-room table and gently lifted it shut. News of all this was greeted warmly as it shot around the bank.
Mary learned more about banking every day. Mrs. Tanner, despite her claims at the beauty parlor, however, knew nothing except how she had come to acquire what equity she had, and she spent more and more of her time and money on increasingly futile cosmetic surgery. As a figurehead at board meetings, she wore costumes and an imitation youth that contrasted with the professionalism of Mary Elizabeth Tanner, who ran the bank with evenhanded authority. Over time, there came to be nothing disreputable about Mary whatsoever. Wonderful how dollars did that, and Mary had a little gold dollar sign on a chain around her pretty neck.
Considering the hoops he had to jump through, Arnold did his very best to be Peter’s father, virtually commuting from California. This was even more remarkable once he had sold his share of the bank to Mary, since this occasioned a rupture with his own mother. Peter was consoled by the fact that his parents were now sleeping together once a month, and Arnold called him Pedro at intimate moments. He never let on to his friend in California how much he enjoyed these interludes of snuggling with Mary.
Peter was already a star at little-guy soccer. Mrs. Tanner came to the games, and Peter ran straight to Grandma after each game, which softened the smirk on her well-stretched face. Finally, Arnold and his mother reconciled, under the leafless cottonwoods shadowing the battered playing field, during a 3–1 win over the Red Devils of Reed Point, Montana. All the fight went out of Mrs. Tanner, who never made another board meeting but spent her life estate as she saw fit, letting her face sag and reading bodice rippers on her porch, from which she could watch the neighbors during the warm months, and by the pool in San Juan Capistrano during the cold.
Arnold got out of banking and into business, at which he did well. Arnold always did welclass="underline" no one was more serious about work. Peter had a girlfriend, Mary’s hair was going gray, and Arnold’s domestic arrangements were stable most of the time, except during the winter, when his mother interfered.
“She’s driving me nuts,” Arnold complained to Mary.
“You’ll have to stand it,” Mary said. “She’s lonely, she’s old, and she’s your mother.”
“Can’t Peter do winter sports? What about basketball?”
When Mrs. Tanner’s advancing dementia and prying nature made Arnold’s companion, T.O. — tired of her referring to him as a “houseboy”—threaten to leave, Arnold popped her into assisted living, and that was that. Mrs. Tanner did not go easily; as T.O., a burly Oklahoman, drawled, “She hung on like a bulldog in a thunderstorm.”
“She’s my mother!” Arnold cried without much feeling.
Before Peter left for college, Mary decided to take him to see the place where she had grown up. This was a reward, in a sense, because Peter had always asked about it. No doubt he had heard rumors concerning his mother, and he wanted to confirm her ranch origins. This was straightforward curiosity, as Peter was the furthest thing from insecure. Well brought up and popular, he was the first in his family to trail neither his past nor his proclivities like a lead ball.
They set out in the middle of June, in Mary’s big Lincoln, heading for the great, nearly empty stretches of northern Montana, where underpopulated counties would deny the government’s right to tax them, attempt to secede from the Union, and issue their own money in the form of scrip. Some radicalized soothsayer would arise — a crop duster, a diesel mechanic, a gunsmith — then fade away, and the region would go back to sparse agriculture, a cow every hundred acres, a trailer house with a basketball backboard and a muddy truck. Minds spun in the solitude.
Peter said, “Where is everybody?”
“Gone.”
“Is that what you did, Mom?”
“I had to. We lost the place to the bank. I liked it where I was. I had horses.”
“Don’t you wish you’d gone to college?”
“I got an education, Peter, that’s what matters. And now I can send you to college. Maybe you can go to college in California, near Pop.”
“Where did your brothers go?” Mary understood that Peter would have liked to have a bigger family.
“Here and there. They didn’t stay in touch.”
“Did you ever try to find them?”
Mary didn’t say anything for a moment. “I did, but they didn’t want to stay in touch with me.”
“What? Why’s that?”
“They had their reasons.”
“Like what?” Peter could be demanding.
“They didn’t like what I did for a living.”
“What’s wrong with working at the bank?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, a bank took away our home.”
Peter said, “I still think it’s totally weird. They’d better not be there.”
Mary glanced over from the wheel, smiled a bit, and said, “It was a long time ago, Peter.”
She watched him as he looked out the window at the prairie. She thought that he was beautiful, and that was enough. It didn’t hurt that the car was big and smelled new and hugged the narrow road with authority. She said to herself, as she had since she was a girclass="underline"
“I can do this.”
The Good Samaritan
Szabo didn’t like to call the land he owned and lived on a ranch — a word that was now widely abused by developers. He preferred to call it his property, or “the property,” but it did require a good bit of physical effort from him in the small window of time after he finished at the office, raced home, and got on the tractor or, if he was hauling a load of irrigation dams, on the ATV. Sometimes he was so eager to get started that he left his car running. His activity on the property, which had led, over the years, to arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, one vertebral fusion, and mild hearing loss, thanks to his diesel tractor, yielded very little income at all and some years not even that — a fact that he did not care to dwell on.
He produced racehorse-quality alfalfa hay for a handful of grateful buyers, who privately thought he was nuts but were careful to treat his operation with respect, because almost no one else was still producing the small bales that they needed to feed their own follies. They were, most of them, habitués of small rural tracks in places such as Lewistown or Miles City, owners of one horse, whose exercise rider was either a daughter or a neighbor girl who put herself in the way of serious injury as the price of the owner’s dream. Hadn’t Seattle Slew made kings of a couple of hapless bozos?