From the name posted on the dashboard of the cab, he could tell the driver was Senegalese. There were quite a few of them nowadays and Robert always enjoyed blowing their minds by casually addressing them in Wolof or Jola. This young man was so amazed he almost drove smack into a bus. They talked about Dakar and places they both knew and the driving got so bad that Robert began to think the park might have been a safer bet after all. When they pulled up outside the apartment building, Ramon came down and opened the cab door and the driver said how grateful he was for the tip and that he would pray that Allah bless Robert with many strong sons.
After Ramon had given him an apparently white-hot piece of news about a star player just signed by the Mets, Robert took the elevator and let himself into the apartment. The place was dark and the clunk of the door as he shut it echoed through the lifeless labyrinth of rooms.
He walked through to the kitchen and found the supper Elsa had cooked for him and the usual note saying what it was and how long it needed in the microwave. He did what he always did and scooped it guiltily into the garbage. He'd left her notes thanking her but saying please not to bother cooking for him, he could get takeout or cook something himself. But there it still was every night, bless her.
The truth was, the aching emptiness of the apartment made him morose and he avoided being here as much as he could. He felt it most acutely at weekends. He'd tried going up to Chatham but the loneliness there had been even worse. It hadn't been helped by arriving to find that the thermostat on Grace's tropical fish tank had failed and all the fish had died of cold. The sight of their tiny, faded corpses floating in the tank had upset him profoundly. He hadn't told Grace, nor even Annie, but had pulled himself together, made careful notes and ordered identical impostors from the pet store.
Since Annie and Grace had left, talking to them on the phone had become the high point of Robert's day. And tonight, having tried for hours and failed to reach them, he felt a sharper need than ever for the sound of their voices.
He sealed the garbage bag so that Elsa wouldn't discover the shameful destiny of the supper she'd cooked. As he was dumping the bag outside the service door, he heard the phone and he ran back down the corridor as fast as he could. The answering machine had already clicked in by the time he got there and he had to speak loudly to compete with his own recorded voice.
'Hold on, I'm here.' He found the off-button. 'Hi. I just got in.'
'You're all out of breath. Where were you?'
'Oh, out partying. You know, doing the bars and clubs and things. God, it's tiring.'
'Don't tell me.'
'I wasn't going to. So how're things where the deer and the antelope play? I tried calling all day.'
'I'm sorry. There's just the one line here and the office has been trying to bury me in fax paper.'
She said Grace had tried calling him half an hour ago at the office, probably just after he'd left for home. She'd gone to bed now but sent him her love.
As Annie told him about her day, Robert walked through to the sitting room and, without turning the lights on, settled himself on the sofa by the window. Annie sounded weary and downcast and he tried, without much success, to cheer her up.
'And how's Gracie?'
There was a pause and he heard Annie sigh.
'Oh. I don't know.' Her voice was low now, presumably so that Grace wouldn't hear. 'I see how she is with Tom Booker and Joe, you know, the twelve-year-old? They get on really well. And with them, she seems fine. But when it's just the two of us, I don't know. It's gotten so bad she won't even look at me.' She sighed again. 'Anyway.'
They were silent for a while and in the distance he heard a wail of sirens out in the street, on their way to another nameless tragedy.
'I miss you, Annie.'
'I know,' she said. 'We miss you too.'
Chapter Nineteen
Annie dropped Grace at the clinic a little before nine and wove her way back to the gas station in Choteau center. She filled up alongside a little man with a face like leather and a hat brimmed wide enough to shelter a horse. He was checking the oil of a Dodge pickup which was hitched to a trailerload of cattle. They were Black Angus like the herd at the Double Divide and Annie had to fight the urge to confide some knowing remark about them based on the little she'd gleaned from Tom and Frank on branding day. She rehearsed it in her head. Good lookin' cattle. No, you wouldn't say cattle. Healthy-lookin' beasts? Fellas? She gave up. In all truth she had no idea if they were good, bad or flea-bitten, so she kept her mouth shut and just gave the man a nod and a smile instead.
As she came out from paying, someone called her name and she looked around and saw Diane getting out of her Toyota at the other row of pumps. Annie waved and walked over.
'So you do sometimes give yourself a break from that telephone after all,' Diane said. 'We were beginning to wonder.'
Annie smiled and told her she had to bring Grace into town three mornings a week for physical therapy. She was going back to the ranch now to do some work and would come back in at midday to pick her up.
'Heck, well I can do that for you,' Diane said. 'I've got a bunch of things to do in town. Is she up at the Bellview Medical Center?'
'Yes, but honestly, you don't want—' 'Don't be silly. It's crazy you driving all that way.' Annie demurred but Diane would have none of it, it was no problem she said, and in the end Annie gave way and thanked her. They chatted for a few more minutes about how things were going up at the creek house and whether Annie and Grace had everything they needed, then Diane said she'd better get going.
On her way back to the ranch Annie puzzled over the encounter. The substance of Diane's offer had been friendly enough, but the manner in which it had been made was something less. There had been just the faintest hint of accusation, almost as though she were saying that Annie was much too busy to bother herself with being a mother. Or maybe Annie was just being paranoid.
She traveled north and looked out over the plains to her right where the black shapes of the cattle stood out against the pale grass like the ghosts of buffalo from another age. Ahead on the blacktop, the sun was already making pools of mirage and she lowered the window and let the wind blow her hair back. It was the second week in May and at last it felt as if spring had really come and wasn't just kidding. When she swung left off 89, the Rocky Mountain Front loomed before her, topped with cloud that seemed squeezed from some galactic can of chantilly. All that was missing, she thought, was a cherry and one of those little paper umbrellas. Then she remembered all the faxes and phone messages that would be waiting for her when she got back to the ranch and realized a moment or two later that the thought had eased her foot on the gas pedal.
She'd already used up much of the month's leave she'd asked Crawford Gates to give her. She would have to ask him for more and she wasn't looking forward to it. For despite all his talk about how she should feel free to take off as much time as she needed, Annie was under no illusion. In the last few days there had been clear signs that Gates was getting restless. There had been a series of small interferences, not one of them on its own enough for her to make a real fuss about, but which, when viewed collectively, signaled danger.
He had criticized Lucy Friedman's lounge lizard piece which Annie considered quite brilliant; he'd queried the design team over two front covers -not in a heavy-handed way but enough to make an impression; and he'd sent Annie a long memo about how he thought their coverage of Wall Street was slipping behind the competition. That would have been okay, except that he'd copied it to four other directors before even speaking to her. But if the old bastard wanted a fight, so be it. She hadn't phoned him. Instead she wrote an immediate and robust reply, full of facts and figures, and copied it to the same people plus, for good measure, a couple of others she knew to be her allies. Touche. But God, it took such a lot of effort.