“She’s also the fattest cat you’ve ever seen,” Mrs. Murphy growled.
“Don’t be ugly,” Harry warned the tiger.
“Don’t be ugly.” Pewter mocked the human voice.
Mrs. Murphy paced the counter. A mail bin on casters rested seven feet from the counter top. She gathered herself and arched off the counter, smack into the middle of the mail bin, sending it rolling across the floor.
Maude squealed with delight and Fair clapped his hands together like a boy.
“She does that all the time. Watch.” Harry trotted up behind the now-slowing cart and pushed Mrs. Murphy around the back of the post office. She made choo-choo sounds when she did it. Mrs. Murphy popped her head over the side, eyes big as eight balls, tail swishing.
“Now this is fun!” the cat declared.
Pewter, still being petted by Maude, was soured by Mrs. Murphy’s audacious behavior. She put her head on the counter and closed her eyes. Mrs. Murphy might be bold as brass but at least Pewter behaved like a lady.
Maude leafed through her mail as she rubbed Pewter’s ears. “I hate that!”
“Another bill? Or how about those appeals for money in envelopes that look like old Western Union telegrams? I really hate that.” Harry continued to push Mrs. Murphy around.
“No.” Maude shoved the postcard over to Fair, who read it and shrugged his shoulders. “What I hate is people who send postcards or letters and don’t sign their names. For instance, I must know fourteen Carols and when I get a letter from one of them, if the return address isn’t on the outside I haven’t a clue. Not a clue. Every Carol I know has two-point-two children, drives a station wagon, and sends out Christmas cards with pictures of the family. The message usually reads‘Season’s Greetings’ in computer script, and little holly berries are entwined around the message. What’s bizarre is that their families all look the same. Maybe there’s one Carol married to fourteen men.” She laughed.
Harry laughed with her and pretended to look at the postcard for the first time while she rocked Mrs. Murphy back and forth in the mail bin and the cat flopped on her back to play with her tail. Mrs. Murphy was putting on quite a show, doing what she accused Pewter of doing: wanting to be the center of attention.
Harry said,“Maybe they were in a hurry.”
“Who do you know going to North Carolina?” Fair asked the logical question.
“Does anyonewant to go to North Carolina?” Maude’s voice dropped on “want.”
“No,” Harry said.
“Oh, North Carolina’s all right.” Fair finished his Coke. “It’s just that they’ve got one foot in the nineteenth century and one in the twenty-first and nothing in between.”
“You do have to give them credit for the way they’ve attracted clean industry.” Maude thought about it. “The state of Virginia had that chance. You blew it about ten years ago, you know?”
“We know.” Fair and Harry spoke in unison.
“I was reading about Claudius Crozet’s struggle with the state of Virginia to finance railroads. He foresaw this at the end of the 1820’s, before anything was happening with rail travel. He said Virginians should commit everything they had to this new form of travel. Instead they batted his ideas down and rewarded him with a pay cut. Naturally, he left, and you know what else? The state didn’t do a thing about it until 1850! By that time New York State, which had thrown its weight behind railroads, had become the commercial center of the East Coast. If you think where Virginia is placed on the East Coast, we’re the state that should have become the powerful one.”
“I never knew that.” Harry liked history.
“If there’re any progressive projects, whether commercial or intellectual, you can depend on Virginia’s legislature to vote ’em down.” Maude shook her head. “It’s as if the legislature doesn’t want to take any chances at all. Vanilla pudding.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” Fair agreed with her. “But on the other hand, we don’t have the problems of those places that are progressive. Our crime rate is low except for Richmond. We’ve got full employment here in the country and we live a good life. We don’t get rich quick but we keep what we’ve got. Maybe it isn’t so bad. Anyway, you moved here, didn’t you?”
Maude considered this.“Touch?. But sometimes, Fair, it gets to me that this state is so backward. When North Carolina outsmarts us and enjoys the cornucopia, what can you think?”
“Where’d you learn about railroads?”
“Library. There’s a book, a long monograph really, on Crozet’s life. Not having the benefit of being educated in Crozet, I figured I’d better catch up, so to speak. Pity the railroad doesn’t stop here anymore. Passenger service stopped in 1975.”
“Occasionally it does. If you call up the president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and request a special stop—as a passenger and descendent of Claudius Crozet—they’re supposed to stop for you right next to the post office here at the old depot.”
“Has anyone tried it lately?” Maude was incredulous.
“Mim Sanburne last year. They stopped.” Fair smiled.
“Think I’ll try it,” Maude said. “I’d better get back to my shop. Keep thy shop and thy shop keeps thee. ’Bye.”
Pewter lolled on the counter as Harry put the Cokes in the small refrigerator in the back. Mrs. Murphy stayed in the mail bin hoping for another ride.
“Are these a peace offering?” Harry shut the refrigerator door.
“I don’t know.” And Fair didn’t. He’d gotten in the habit, over the years, of picking up Cokes for Harry. “Look, Harry, can’t we have a civil divorce?”
“Everything is civil until it gets down to money.”
“You hired Ned Tucker first. Once lawyers get into it, everything turns to shit.”
“In 1658 the Virginia legislature passed a law expelling all lawyers from the colony.” Harry folded her arms across her chest.
“Only wise decision they ever made.” Fair leaned against the counter.
“Well, they rescinded it in 1680.” Harry breathed in. “Fair, divorce is a legal process. I had to hire a lawyer. Ned’s an old friend.”
“Hey, he was my friend too. Couldn’t you have brought in a neutral party?”
“This is Crozet. There are no neutral parties.”
“Well, I got a Richmond lawyer.”
“You can afford Richmond prices.”
“Don’t start with money, goddammit.” Fair sounded weary. “Divorce is the only human tragedy that reduces to money.”
“It’s not a tragedy. It’s a process.” Harry, at this point, would be bound to contradict or correct him. She half knew she was doing it but couldn’t stop.
“It’s ten years of my life, out the window.”
“Not quite ten.”
“Dammit, Harry, the point is, this isn’t easy—and it wasn’t my idea.”
“Oh, don’t pull the wounded dove with me. You were no happier in this marriage than I was!”
“But I thought everything was fine.”
“As long as you got fed and fucked, you thought everything was fine!” Harry’s voice sank lower. “Our house was a hotel to you. My God, if you ran the vacuum cleaner, angels would sing in the sky.”
“We didn’t have money for a maid,” he growled.
“So it was me. Why is your time more valuable than my time? Jesus Christ, I even bought you your clothes, your jockey shorts.” For some reason this was significant to Harry.
Fair, quiet for a moment to keep from losing his temper, said,“I make more money. If I had to be out on call, well, that’s the way it had to be.”
“You know, I don’t even care anymore.” Harry unfolded her arms and took a step toward him. “What I want to know is, were you, are you, sleeping with BoomBoom Craycroft?”
“No!” Fair looked wounded. “I told you before. I was drunk at the party. I—okay, I behaved as less than a gentleman … but that was a year ago.”
“I know about that. I was there, remember? I’m asking about now, Fair.”