“You may not get any money, but it would enable us to sell the company and cash out your mother and your sister. Your mother and your sister.” Evelyn decided not to comment on this appeal to family values. “I don’t see Bill living forever, and that land’s worth a fortune. Someday you’ll sell it and—ta da—you’re in San Juan Capistrano shaded up under a California oak, a margarita in one hand, a Palm Pilot with stock quotes in the other, just waiting for the fucking swallows to return.”
“You make a romantic case for liquidation, but in my version Bill gets to a hundred and I live in peace out there at least until menopause, at which point your plan might start making sense. But say all this happens. Where are you?”
“The usual place, trying to get back into your good graces. Natalie says I can use the spare bedroom once Stuart gathers up his sea boots and boogies. Then I’d have to look around for something to do, pretty good at selling myself.”
“You’ll need a fresh audience.”
“Could be, but what’s for you to think about is this company, which, despite its quantifiable value to others, seems to be caught in bad undertow. And, frankly, are you selling enough cows to support your mother? Not to mention the various treatment bills lying ahead for Natalie, given her deepening despondency — i.e., more than pissed and gone back to stealing, just for instance?”
After a moment’s thought, Evelyn said, “This is an absolute curse.”
“Maybe so, but I didn’t put it on you. Your father did. Remember, I’m not the devil.”
“You just work for him.”
“Really? I wonder why. The pay sucks.”
The doors were all closing. Paul’s mother called her that same night, undoubtedly tipped off by him to some perceived weakening. And knowing he would report to her probably kept Paul from going crazy. She claimed to be correcting papers but was, in fact, stinking drunk. “You’re not sufficiently aware of the value of continuity,” Mrs. Crusoe began in general garrulity, “or other long-run values that make your apparent need for some dreamed-of bliss shrink by comparison. Marriage is like the devoted study of a long, sacred document. Think of the Bible! Think of the Koran! What’s that other one? Where all parties are raised to sacramental heights by the dedication of their lives.” Evelyn’s attempts to interrupt were unavailing. She actually put the phone aside for as long as it took to put a few dishes in the sink. When she picked it up again, Mrs. Crusoe was winding down and growing confused. Finally, she demanded, “Who is this? With whom am I speaking?”
Natalie stood outside fastening her coat and determining if she’d left any lights on. The wind cut into her cheek while she took in the tidiness of the bungalow with both faint distaste and some alertness to maintenance issues. She recalled putting its little rectangle of a garden to bed as though it had been an act of complicity with seasonal forces that wished to make her colorless. She understood that she had to work this particular fear. She knew it was not reasonable when Stuart asked if they could move the boat from Canyon Ferry to Flathead Lake, and she’d replied that it made her want to kill herself. And it mattered less than it should have when Stuart made his little puzzle-face and tried to cheer her by describing the huckleberries west of the Continental Divide and the summer theater and shopping opportunities around Bigfork. Foolishness of this sort had once landed her in a karaoke joint lip-synching Tammy Wynette to gales of laughter and a booby-prize free pizza. Natalie was a Vassar graduate, and at the time this had seemed a very long fall indeed.
She was heartened by the surge of her Mustang as it pulled inexorably through the snow in front of her house, while a westbound train called through the storm. An old man with earflaps on his hat came down the sidewalk towing a sled with two bags of groceries beneath the bony outlines of snow-laden trees. A hundred fifteen thousand miles, and the Mustang still pulled like a Georgia mule. The weather report on the radio revealed a desperate picture from across Montana and through the Dakotas, sweeping south beyond Medicine Bow and threatening the faux-Indian village of the Denver airport; fatal strandings lay ahead, chained-up ghost ships on the interstate, and Natalie felt a commensurate desperation to be around people instead of standing at the kitchen window and watching the birdbath in her backyard turn into a colossal ice cream cone. With considerable irritation, she pictured Evelyn’s insouciance out there on the ranch, soldiering on when the shit hit the fan. That much virtue could choke a hog.
She pulled up in front of Just the Two of Us and parked between a motorcycle and a florist’s van, its ice-plastered corsage rapidly disappearing in the blast. The day her father died, Natalie had been busted for shoplifting a tortoiseshell comb in Jan’s, the in spot for out-of-towners, faculty wives and bureaucrats; the news made the papers, but her mortification failed to preclude visits to other shops, despite Jan’s small-scale but successful prosecution. Never done it before. Now she stole entirely from Just the Two of Us and because she was also a good “paying” customer, she felt a complex emotional game of cat-and-mouse whenever she prowled their aisles. She had had several allusive chats with Violet and Claire, leaving them with a somewhat cloudy view of her as an interesting person suffering an illness, and this, combined with normal competitive feelings, made them hate “the old sluts” at Jan’s for being too stiff to accommodate her small awkwardness. Plus, Natalie was a nice person. Never did she suggest to Violet or Claire that they were wasting the best years of their lives showing the wives of yokels how to accessorize or how to avoid looking a fright when Mr. Right appeared on the horizon. Nevertheless, Natalie thought that Evelyn rather overrated this duo simply because they’d grown up on ranches.
All of which seemed beside the point as Natalie entrusted herself to the store, knocking snow from her sleeves and breathing this perfumed comfort beyond the cold solace of the hearth, amid the scents and soaps and bibelots, under the beautiful tin ceiling of a former Dodge Garage which threw a gentle light on the stacks of blouses, sweaters, scarves and hosiery.
“Don’t say anything nice about this weather,” Natalie cautioned the two proprietors who stood shoulder to shoulder at this challenging appearance.
“We won’t,” said one or the other. These were mountain geishas, indistinguishable but for Violet’s hatchet jaw and Claire’s close-set eyes, which showed equal concern when listening or sorting rubber bands.
“Don’t worry about me,” said Natalie, “I’m just going to poke around.” The exchange of glances at the level of supper-club theater gave Natalie the sense the jig was up, and she cast a longing glance at the sensuous rows of merchandise.
Remembering dear, dopey Stuart coming to the police station to pick her up, she had the teeniest frisson that an involuntary joyride awaited her; but the tolerance of the shopgirls had the effect of tempering desire. She knew that wrong numbers floated from the murk of troubled selves.
“Girls, stick with me while I shop. I don’t want to have a slip.” And she didn’t. Violet and Claire, too, were disappointed at this lapse in Natalie’s dark wishes, reducing them all to spectators in a mountain storm. Now they went to the front window and commented on pedestrians. The motorcyclist was beating the snow from the seat of his machine with his hat. Across the street, ice fog had created rows of bodiless faces. All you could read of the movie marquee was a fragment—FESTI—and a steady, throbbing light was the little that showed of what perhaps was an arrest in progress.