“Idiot,” she said, and led Scram back to the corral while thinking that Bill could turn into a bitter old man in trying to mind her business for her, but this was an excessive reaction to someone being untalkative.
To Evelyn’s great relief, Alice Whitelaw never stayed over when she came to visit and was careful she spent as much time with her daughter as with her husband of long ago. She’d seen Paul around the place, and Evelyn was anxious to avoid conversation that might entail any elucidation of her own marital status. Alice Whitelaw reserved most of her matriarchal concern for Stuart, “—the most wholesome, earnest, steady young man” she’d ever met.
“But, Mother, evidently not the right fellow for Nat.”
“Oh, but dear, I know you’re going to miss him.”
“He’s not going anywhere. He’s doing fine at Eco Fizz.” Evelyn was completely exasperated by her mother’s crooning lament, but soon that tone would change.
“So many years have passed since my days out here. I was just a girl, but I have never been out of touch with Bill.”
Evelyn wasn’t about to ask something crazy — such as, were she and Bill in love? — and mostly wanted to snap her fingers and move this thing along. She thought her mother’s leaning across the hood of a pickup truck to have a heart-to-heart was an affectation.
“But my God! He lives like a dog! Did I live like that? I must have.”
“I’m not sure I know wh—”
“Surely I had furniture!”
“Yes, you must’ve had furniture,” said Evelyn dully.
“I suppose that wallpaper in the house was always there. What is it, flocked? And I do hope it wasn’t you who supplied that swag effect over what passes for a dining room table. I told Bill the only thing that was keeping him from falling into the cellar was that greenish linoleum!”
“Could it be that in thirty years your standards of comfort have gone up?”
“I am the same person,” her mother said levelly, “I have always been.”
“I don’t think so,” Evelyn said.
Alice Whitelaw straightened up from the hood of the truck and, with a preoccupied air, got into her Buick Riviera and drove away. It was the first of many things to go wrong.
“What did you say to Mother, Evelyn?” Natalie was driving slowly alongside a car dealership, trying to see if there was anything she wanted to buy. She just wanted to be outside. She’d spent days on end chasing the channel changer until general disgust had set in.
“God, Nat, I just blurted. I’ll have to go straighten this out somehow. Mama was talking about how she was the same girl who married Bill, and I said that I doubted it.”
“Oh.” She was staring right past her sister, out the window. “See anything you like?”
“They’re all covered with snow. What are they?”
“Audis. Maybe she thinks she hasn’t changed.”
“I’m sure she does. And I’ve just got to get over my irritation and apologize. It’s not her fault she’s an airhead.” A small truck shot past, Hey Culligan Man! on its tailgate.
“I like the idea of all-wheel drive. I want to blast through this shit with German power. I hate winter. I hate it here. I wish to be saved by Germans.”
Evelyn just looked at her. “Wait till the snow melts before making your choice.”
“It’s never going to melt. I want a new car. Tell them to blow the snow off. Get on my cell phone and tell them we’re circling the block and will buy anything they blow the snow off of.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Me too! This weather makes me snack day and night. I’m getting a huge ass, and with Stuart gone I can’t have some new guy facing a wall of cellulite.”
Evelyn sighed. After dropping Natalie off at home with an armload of car brochures, she drove to their mother’s house. The visit proved especially painful because Alice was her usual cheerful self, and Evelyn had to bring the insult up all over again in order to apologize for it. Alice brushed it aside. “I know you’re upset with me.”
“No—”
“Evelyn, you are, and I accept and understand it. But think of what I’ve been though. I know I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’ve waited a long time to see my Bill again, to see him like this. And he’s just as dear to me as he was when he was eighteen. I never understood whether I was right to have married him or not. I knew there were too many mouths at our table, and my mother and father practically pushed me right out the door before there was a chance we’d marry. But after your father’s death it all came back, how Bill wouldn’t budge, how on a ranch you don’t budge or the ranch and the land will beat you, so you don’t budge and then all the rest of life beats you.”
“You must think Bill’s beaten.”
“I think he’s been beaten for a very long time.”
“Maybe if you don’t know it, you’re not.”
“You of all people know how the ranch stayed afloat.” She adjusted her voice to a complicitous murmur. “Your father was a hard man. Maybe bad. I can live with that. He certainly didn’t mind ruining people — but if he was bad, he had a good streak. He made sure you girls went out to the ranch often, from an early age. You spent more time while you were growing up with Bill than you did with your father.”
Alice had touched upon something for which Evelyn was thoroughly grateful, her often fabulous girlhood, and she was happy to recall even her most outlandish cowgirl posturing, the barrel-racing mania of her adolescence. As with her mother, it lasted until the appearance of a charismatic male of whom she had yet to rid herself and who had presently, if only in the urgencies of the flesh, rekindled the possibilities.
Evelyn, at least, knew why Bill wouldn’t budge, for she had long seen into the congeries of belief that abided him through illness, injury and failure. Bill’s piece of ground was a mystery machine that, like soil and weather, occasioned vigilant respect. She unconditionally realized that cattle, buildings, fences — the “improvements”—were stays in the face of general impermanence even as they shared as a principal characteristic the ongoing likelihood of dying or falling down. Alone of her family, Evelyn understood horses and their use, and also that however far back in the legends of horsemanship Bill’s talents reached, they were most definitely his gamble against eternity. Perhaps he kept cattle so that the horses would have something to do. If by some now vanished compact he had gotten children by Alice Whitelaw, Evelyn believed that it was only right that at least one of those children should understand his faith.
Had she pursued these intuitions, she might have seen that Bill would have to do something about Paul.
Evelyn moved all her belongings to the ranch and turned her apartment over to Paul. Where else was he going to live, she asked herself in rhetorical indignation as though responding to querulous busybodies. He’d saved nothing of his quondam executive’s salary, and his last remaining stake was whatever he shared, as Evelyn’s husband, of the ranch when Bill was gone. He sold his Crown Victoria too and bought a pathetic gray Chevette that looked too short for his legs. But it gave him some walking-around money, as he said. Which is what he did: walked around and talked to Majub on the cell phone. Because of the accumulated tensions of recent months, Paul felt he was losing his flexibility and so he signed up for Pilates at the community center. Natalie paid for the lessons on the grounds that any money spent on good health was money well spent. There was also the feeling that getting rid of lower back pain would allow him to put his best foot forward while interviewing for jobs, should he be reduced to that, God forbid.