“I know that,” I said. “I'll be on my own when the school year's over.”
“You're on your own right now. School doesn't determine that,” Doris said. “And I'm not your mother. You know that, too, don't you? I'm your aunt. A technicality. It doesn't matter to me what you do. You can move right back to Great Falls tomorrow if you want to. You can live with me. That'd be an innovation.” Doris cut her eyes at me, still indignant. I thought she might invite me to have a drink of schnapps, but I didn't want it. I remembered a little tattoo she had on her shoulder, a blue-and-red butterfly I'd seen the summer before, when she was around the house and spending time with my father. “You're like a bird in a glass cage, aren't you?”
“I won't stay there much longer,” I said.
“We'll see about that,” Doris said, staring out into the snowflakes. “Did you buy your mother a nice present?”
“I'm going to,” I said.
“Did your dad give you a lot of money, now that he's collecting a big check?”
“I had some already,” I lied, thinking that nice stores would probably be closed in Shelby. I pictured the main street, where I'd only been once, with my father, when my mother had taken the train back from the Cities, and all I could remember was a row of bar and motel signs with Route 2 running through the town toward Havre. “I worked at the elevator in the harvest,” I said.
“Is Don still off the drink?”
“Yes, he is,” I said.
“And you two get along just great?”
“Yes,” I said, “we do.”
“Well, that's wonderful,” she said. Out in the snow and fog haze I could see faint yellow lights all in a string at the bottom of a hill. It was Shelby. “I used to think your father'd married the wrong sister, since we all met at the same time. You know? I thought he was too good for Jan. But I don't think so now. She and I have gotten a lot closer than we used to be since she's been out in Seattle. We talk on the phone about things.” Doris let her window down and poured out the schnapps she had left. It hit the back window and froze. “She's pretty wonderful, did you know that? Did you know your mother was wonderful?”
“I knew that,” I said. “What do you think about Dad?”
“He's fine,” Doris said. “That's how I feel about him. I don't particularly trust him. He's not equipped to care for things very much — he's like a cat in that way. But he's fine. You can't go back on your important decisions.”
“Are you sorry you didn't marry him?” I said. I thought she was wrong about my father, of course. He cared about things as much as anybody did, and more than Doris did, I felt sure.
“Put it like this,” Doris said, and she smiled at me in a sweet way, a way that could make you like her. “If I had married him, then we wouldn't have you here, would we? Everything'd be different.” She tapped me on the knee. “So there's good to everything. That's a belief Seventh-Day Adventists hold.” She scratched her fingernails on my knee and smiled at me again, and we drove on into town, where it was snowing still, and almost dark except for lights down the main street.
CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS were already up in Shelby, strings of red and green and white lights hung across the three intersections, and little Christmas trees on top of the traffic lights. Plenty of cars and trucks were on the streets in the snow, and all the stores looked open. We drove past a big lighted Albertson's, where the parking lot was full of vehicles and people carrying packages. I saw a drugstore and a card shop and a western-wear on the main street, all with their lights on and customers moving around the aisles inside.
“Something's physically odd about Shelby, don't you think?” Doris said, driving slowly along and looking out at the business signs and Thanksgiving cutouts in the store windows. “It has a foreignness. It just seems pointless somehow up here. Maybe it's being so close to Canada. I don't know.”
“Maybe I can get out and go buy something now,” I said. I'd seen a Redwing store and thought about buying my mother a pair of shoes, though I didn't know her size. I remembered some green high heels I'd seen her wear, and it surprised me that I didn't remember more than that.
“You want to eat Chinese food in town, or dine in the dining car?” Doris said.
“I'd rather eat on the train,” I said, because I wanted to get out of the car.
“I want you to enjoy yourself when you're under my protection.”
“I'm enjoying myself,” I said. We were stopped at a light, and I turned and looked back. I wanted to get back to the card store before it got too far away.
“Can you find the train station by yourself?” Doris glanced at the traffic in the rearview mirror.
“I'll ask somebody,” I said, and opened the door and slid out onto the snowy pavement.
“Don't ask an Indian,” Doris said loudly. “They lie like snakes. Ask a Swede. They don't know what a lie is. That's why they make the good husbands.”
“I will,” I said, and closed the car door while she was talking.
People were on the sidewalk and going in and out of stores. There were plenty of cars and noises for a small town, although the snow had softened everything. It was like a Saturday night in Great Falls, and I walked in a hurry down the block in the direction we'd just come from. For some reason, I didn't see the card shop where I thought it would be and didn't see the western-wear shop, though there was a Chinese restaurant and a bar, and then the drugstore, where I went in to look.
The air was warm and smelled like Halloween candy inside. A lot of customers were in the store, and I walked down the three aisles, looking for something my mother might like to receive from me and trying to think of what I knew she liked. There was a section that had pink and blue boxes of candy, and a wall that had perfume, and a long row of cards with Thanksgiving messages. I went around the center section twice, then looked at the back of the store, where the pharmacist was and where there were footbaths and sickroom articles. I thought about something for her hair — shampoo or hair spray, but I knew she bought those for herself. Then I saw there was a glass display of watches with mirrored shelves you rotated by pushing a silver button at the bottom. The watches were all around thirty dollars, and what my father had given me was fifty, and I thought a watch would be better than perfume because my mother wouldn't use it up, and I liked the way the watches looked revolving behind the glass, and I was relieved to have almost decided so fast. My mother had a watch, I remembered, but it had been broken since sometime in the spring.
I walked around the store one more time to look at anything I'd missed or to find something else I wanted, but I didn't see anything but magazines and books. Some boys my age, wearing their maroon-and-gold Shelby jackets, were standing looking at magazines and talking to two girls. They all looked at me when I went by but didn't say anything, though I knew I wouldn't have played football against them in Great Falls, because Shelby was too small. My own football jacket was at home in a back room in a box, and wouldn't have been warm enough for that night. The girls said something when I had gone by, though none of them seemed to register seeing me.
I passed a section with ladies’ bedroom slippers in clear plastic cases. Pink and yellow and red. They were ten dollars, and one size fit all. But they looked cheap to me. They looked like something Doris would put on. And I went back down to the watch case and pressed the button until I saw one come by that was gold and thin and fine-appearing, with a small face and Roman numerals, which I thought my mother would like. I bought it from a saleslady and had her wrap it in white tissue paper. I paid for it from the bills my father had given me, and put it in my coat pocket and felt that I'd done the right thing in buying a watch. My father would've approved of it, would've thought I had good instinct and had bought a watch for a good price. Then I walked back outside onto the cold sidewalk to begin looking for the train depot.