Walking around Warren Miller’s house my mother looked pretty in her green dress and green shoes. I remember that very well. She had gotten warm standing over the furnace, and her face was pink. She was smiling as she looked around, touching things as if she liked everything that was there.
‘So,’ Warren Miller called out from the kitchen, ‘how’s your old man doing, Joe?’ He was talking loud, and we couldn’t see him, though we could hear him cooking, rattling pans and making noises. I wished I could’ve seen inside the kitchen, but I couldn’t.
‘He’s doing fine,’ I said.
‘Joe just talked to him on the telephone,’ my mother said loudly.
‘Did he say it was a tragedy out there? That’s what they usually say. Everything’s a tragedy when they can’t put it out.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say it was.’
‘Did he say he was coming home soon?’ Warren Miller said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mention that.’ On the table beside me was a cold cigar butt in an ashtray, and under it the book my mother had lent to him.
‘Women are fighting this fire,’ my mother said. ‘I read that in the paper.’ She was standing, holding a framed photograph of a smiling woman with a dark upper lip. She had picked it up off the piano.
‘Women are better at it than men,’ Warren Miller said. He appeared limping out of the kitchen door, holding three stacked plates with silverware on top of them. He still had the towel stuffed in his pants. ‘They know what you’re supposed to run from.’
‘You can’t run away from everything,’ my mother said, and she turned the frame so Warren could see it as he put the plates down on the dining table, which had an expensive-looking white tablecloth over it and was on one side of the living room. ‘Who’s this pictured?’ my mother said.
‘That’s my wife,’ Warren said. ‘Formerly. She knew when to run.’
‘I’m sure she regrets it, too.’ My mother put the picture back down where it had been, and took a drink of her drink.
‘She hasn’t decided to call up to say so yet. But maybe she will. I’m not dead yet,’ Warren said. He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps, as if something wasn’t funny.
‘Life, life, life, life,’ my mother said. ‘Life’s long.’ She suddenly walked across to where Warren Miller was standing beside the dining room table, put her hands on his cheeks, still holding her glass, and kissed him right on the mouth. ‘You poor old thing,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s nice enough to you.’ She took another big drink of her gin, then looked at me on the couch. ‘You don’t mind it if I give Mr Miller an innocent kiss, do you, Joe?’ she said. She was drunk and she wasn’t acting the way she ordinarily would. She looked at Warren Miller again. He had a red smear of her lipstick on his mouth. ‘Is something waiting to begin or has it already happened?’ she said, because neither of us had said anything. We hadn’t moved.
‘Everything’s in front of us,’ Warren Miller said. He looked at me and grinned. ‘I’ve got a big dago dinner cooked up in there,’ he said, starting to limp toward the kitchen. ‘We have to get this boy fed, Jeanette, or he won’t be happy.’
‘Not that he’s happy now,’ my mother said, holding her empty glass. She looked at me again and touched both corners of her mouth with her tongue, then walked straight to the front window of the house where you could see out toward town, and toward our house, empty back on Eighth Street. I don’t know what she thought I was thinking. Dislike or surprise or shock at her, I would guess — for bringing me here or for being here herself, or for kissing Warren Miller in front of me, or for being drunk. But I was only aware at that moment that things felt out of control and I did not know how to bring them back, sitting in Warren Miller’s living room. We would need to go home to do that. And I guessed she was looking out at the dark toward our house because she wanted to be there. I was relieved, though, that my father didn’t know about all this because he wouldn’t have understood it even as well as I did. And I told myself, sitting there, that if I ever had the opportunity to tell him about all this, I wouldn’t do it. I would never do it as long as I lived, because I loved them.
In a little while Warren Miller brought out a big red bowl of what he called chicken cacciatore and a jug of wine in a basket, and we all three sat down at the table with the white tablecloth and ate. My mother was in an odd mood at first, but she became better, and as she ate she began to find her good spirits again. Warren Miller ate with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar, and my mother said that was the old-fashioned way to eat, and he must’ve learned it in the old West, but that she didn’t want to see me eating that way. Though after a while we all put our napkins in our collars and laughed about it. Nobody talked about the fire. Once Warren Miller looked across the table at me and told me he thought my father had a strong character, and that he fought the circumstances, and that he was a man somebody would be lucky to have working for him, and that when my father came back from the fire he — Warren — would find a job for him, one that had a bright future to it. He said a smart man could make money in the car business, and he and my father would discuss that when the time came.
My mother didn’t talk much, though she was having a good time, I thought. She was affected by Warren Miller, by something in him she liked, and she did not mind me seeing it. She smiled and leaned on the table and talked some about Boise, Idaho, where there was a hotel she liked with a good restaurant in it, and about Grand Coulee where she had been fishing with her father when she was a little girl, and where Warren Miller had been. She talked about once seeing the Great Salt Lake from the air, and what that was like, and about Lewiston. She said it was never cold there because of the special climate, and that she wasn’t looking forward to the winter coming in Great Falls, because the wind blew for weeks at a time and that after a while, she knew, constant wind would make you crazy. She did not mention the Helen Apartments or about teaching at the air base, or even about working at the grain elevator. All that seemed to have gone away, as if it was a dream she’d had, and the only real worlds were back in Idaho where she’d been happy, and in Warren Miller’s house where she was happy to be at that moment.
She asked Warren Miller how he had made his money, and whether he had gone to college to start, because she wanted me to go to college. And Warren, who had lit a big black cigar by then and taken his napkin out of his collar, sat back in his chair and said he had gone to Dartmouth College in the East, and had majored in history because his father had been a college professor of that in Bozeman and insisted, but that Montana was not a place where an education made any difference to anything. He’d learned everything that meant anything, he said, in the Army, in Burma in World War II, where he had been a major in the Signal Corps and where nobody knew how to do anything right.
‘Other people’s incompetency is what makes you rich,’ he said, and tapped the ash off his cigar into an ashtray. ‘Money begets money based on no other principle. It almost doesn’t matter what you do. I came back from Korea and I was a farmer, and then I got into the oil leasing business and went to Morocco with that, and then I came back here and bought those elevators and the car agency and the crop insurance business. I’m not very smart. Plenty of people are smarter than I am. I’m just progressive.’ Warren pushed his big hands back through his glistening hair and smiled across the table at my mother. ‘I’m fifty-five years young, but I’m that smart.’