“Nice dress.”
She laughed, and I figured I was getting somewhere. She put her coffee cup down and folded her hands in her lap. “You must find all this a little strange.”
I shrugged. “A little.”
She pointed at my plate. “It started with an apple.”
“It always does.”
She laughed some more, a melodious sound that made me want to be funny. “I was stealing them from George.” She half-turned in her seat and gestured outside. “There’s a lovely little stand of apple trees off the path and up near the old cellar. I was there last fall and was picking apples for apple butter—that or looking for a tree tall enough from which I could hang myself.”
I said nothing.
After a moment of not looking at me, she continued. “He wasn’t angry—as a matter of fact I think he was surprised and pleased to see somebody. We talked, and he offered to get some paper grocery bags and help me carry the apples back home. The next week I brought him some apple butter.” She laughed again, without any prompting from me. “You know why I like George so much? Because he doesn’t apologize for anything; he just does what he pleases and doesn’t concern himself with what other people think.” She leaned forward and propped her chin up with the palm of her hand. “It seems like I’ve spent most of my life apologizing for things, and it seems to me that if I hadn’t been selected to absorb some of George’s sly yet beneficent spell, my life might now be quite different.”
She stopped talking, started to say something but then changed her mind. We sat there in the silence till I gave her an out. “Could I have some more coffee?”
“Why yes, of course.” She stood, smoothed the elaborate dress, and crossed to the stove where she plucked the white-speckled coffeepot from a burner she had turned to low. She refilled my cup, placed the pot on a knitted holder at the center of the table, and watched me drink. “I guess I should explain that hanging remark, hmm?”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s been a rough couple of years with Ozzie Senior dying.”
I fiddled with the handle of my cup. “I’d imagine so.”
“I mean, it wasn’t a surprise; he’d had health problems for quite some time.”
I smiled at her with all my heart or as much as was in my throat. “Mrs. Dobbs, you don’t have to explain any of this to me.” I sat back in my chair. “You see, I would file this under personal business. I learned a long time ago that matters of the heart are well outside my jurisdiction.”
She smiled with a little down-curve before the kick at the corner of her lips. It was similar to the smile that Vic had used to a devastating effect. “Thank you for that, Walter.” She looked down at the laced fingers in her lap. “Maybe I just needed someone to talk to about all this.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “In that case, I’m all ears.” I fingered the disfigured one. “Or ear and a half.” I smiled. “Does anybody else know about this relationship?”
She hugged herself and looked out the window, where condensation from the heat of the stove was clouding the view. “Ozzie Junior may have some suspicions, but that’s all.” She continued to try and see through the glass and finally got to the subject she was looking for. “Your wife died a few years ago, didn’t she?”
“Yes, six . . . about six years ago.”
She took a deep breath of her own. “If you don’t mind my asking, in what way did it affect you?”
I told her the truth, because I thought it was something she needed to hear. “I wanted to die, and I don’t mean that figuratively. They take a big chunk of you when they go.”
She nodded, but just barely. “Yes.”
“There’s a friend of mine, an Indian . . .”
She smiled. “Henry Standing Bear?”
I shook my head. “No, another Indian, half Cheyenne and half Crow, by the name of Brandon White Buffalo.” I paused to remember the words the large man had used while I’d eaten his carefully prepared breakfast sandwich in Lame Deer at the Sinclair station that bore his name. “He said that it’s like losing a part of yourself, but worse because we’re left with who we are after, and sometimes we don’t recognize that person.”
She sighed a soft laugh. “So, we’re lost to ourselves?”
“Pretty much.”
She poured herself a little more from the enameled pot with the clear, gemlike percolator top. “Do you still think about your late wife?”
“I do.”
“How often?”
I smiled weakly. “Used to be every minute, then once a day . . . I guess I’ve toughened myself so that I only think about her when I see something that reminds me of her.” She gripped her mug, and I noticed that the thin band of skin at her ring finger was still pale. “That give you hope?”
“Not overly.”
“Well, you might be tougher than I am—most people are.”
She didn’t smile this time, and it was as if the hard edges at the outside of her pupils had become sharper. “I don’t think I believe that.”
I shrugged. “Either way, I’d never be able to get away with a frock like that.” That got a laugh.
“I was wondering how long it was going to take you to get around to asking again.”
“It’s a very nice dress.”
“Thank you.” She was self-conscious now, so I waited.
“George likes it. He found it at the dump. It was in a bunch of boxes that the community theater had thrown out when they stopped doing their annual melodrama.”
I didn’t think I should follow that line any further and it was getting late, so I stood and pulled my pocket watch from my jeans as an indication: ten-thirty-seven. One of the dogs raised a red-rimmed eye to glance at me as I collected my hat from the adjacent chair. “I assume you’ve fed the naked bird and the raccoons?”
She looked out the window through her reflection. “I have.”
“Then I should be going.”
She looked up at me but didn’t move. “I was hard on you, wasn’t I? I mean in school, back when you were a student of mine. I was hard on you.”
I lied. “I’m afraid I don’t recall.”
“I do. I was always harder on the students I didn’t think were living up to their abilities.”
I wasn’t thirteen anymore, so I asked. “Their abilities or your expectations?”
She smoothed her hands over her dress. “I always had the greatest expectations for you, Walter.”
“I’m not so sure if I want to hear how I turned out.”
She patted the table in front of her. “Quite nicely, now that we’ve mentioned it.” Whether she was thinking out loud or assigning me a final grade, I figured the least I could do was respond. “Thank you.”
She continued to study me. “Do you feel old, Walter?”
I laughed and thought about my medical exam, only this afternoon. “I guess we’re not trading compliments then.”
“No.” She stammered. “No . . . I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. I think you’re a very handsome man, very attractive, and certainly younger than I am, but there is a certain melancholy about you.”
I decided to answer half of the question, if for no other reason than to relieve her embarrassment. “It’s relative. When I’m with my daughter, Cady, I feel aged. When I’m with my old boss, Lucian Connally, I feel like a spring chicken.”
She waited so long to speak again that the big dog’s eye slowly closed, and the large, lean head went back to the tile floor. “Is there anybody you love?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She smiled and quickly added, “You don’t have to answer, but I wonder how you feel when you are with them.”
I recognized the nine-year-old unit parked behind my truck. More important, I recognized the brunette sitting on my hood despite the frigid cold, her back against my windshield and her head tilted up to examine the silver underbellies of the clouds. The moon was hidden, but her light showed through the strips of cumulus that stretched to the horizon like the heavens had been harrowed.