Juliet in August (23 page)

She turns back to the toy section, where another young clerk is in the aisle with the kids, giving them instructions as though she's their teacher and they're on a field trip.

“Put one toy back before you look at another,” she instructs. “You wouldn't leave things lying all over at home, so you don't do that here, either. And I hope at least one of you is planning to buy something.”

Normally this would make Vicki mad, but right now she doesn't have time to be snippy with the girl. She tells the kids to put the toys back where they found them, which they do without arguing.

“Okay,” she says. “One more place to look and then we have to head home.” She herds them out the door and then down the block for one last stop at Jackson's Hardware. She decides that if Shiloh hasn't found them by the time they're done, she'll drive home without him and let Blaine deal with him later. It wouldn't hurt Shiloh to stew for a while, anyway, although she doesn't imagine being left behind will teach him much. It will just give him another reason to be irritated with her. Well, at least she can use his disappearance as an excuse for her extended stay in town.

As they enter the hardware store, old George Varga from up north is just leaving, positioning what looks like a new hat on his head. He holds the door for Vicki and the kids, and as soon as they're inside the kids head for the back. There aren't any small toys here, but there are plenty of tricycles, bicycles, and other riding toys, and a bright red plastic wagon that the twins have their eyes on. The store is air-conditioned, and Vicki feels the relief from the heat outside. Mrs. Jackson, a middle-aged woman (who dresses very well for a day of standing behind the till in a hardware store, Vicki thinks) is admiring her newly manicured fingernails. Vicki guesses that she's had them done at the new place in Swift Current, called Pretty Pinkies. The young girls get wild patterns and rhinestones, but Mrs. Jackson's nails are just plain red.

She asks Mrs. Jackson if she has blanchers in stock.

Vicki sees Mrs. Jackson's eyes leave her new nails and dart around the store trying to fix on the kids. Why does this happen everywhere they go? Vicki wonders. Her kids are not bad. They don't steal. There are a lot of them, but what's wrong with that? She and Blaine are keeping the numbers up in the Juliet School. The twins will be a bonus in the fall, a double addition to the kindergarten class. She and Blaine should be thanked for having so many kids.

“I'm sorry, Vicki,” she says, “they're all gone. I didn't bring many in from the warehouse this year because of nobody having any garden. My own garden went to the grasshoppers. They just devoured it. I'm especially sorry not to have any green beans.”

Vicki considers telling her she knows where she can get some, but says instead, “I just happened to be in town today, you know, and thought I would pick up a blancher.”

Mrs. Jackson says she can have one in for her by tomorrow afternoon, and Vicki is about to say that will be too late—even now she's going to need ten stoves and forty blanchers to get the beans done before Blaine gets home—when a loud crash comes from the back of the store and a child starts to howl at full volume.

“Mom,” Martin shouts. “Daisy's broken something.”

Vicki assumes that means a limb. Mrs. Jackson assumes it means a piece of merchandise. They're both right. Daisy had been climbing up and down the cans in a pyramid-shaped display of barn paint. She fell from the fourth row and landed on her wrist. The cans luckily fell the other way, but one of the lids came off and paint is now spilling out in a widening pool of deep red. The paint has already run under a refrigerator and an apartment-sized clothes dryer by the time the two women get to the back of the store. Vicki's first thought is that the paint is the same color as Mrs. Jackson's new fingernails, even as Daisy is screaming loudly enough for the whole town to hear. Vicki tries to examine Daisy's arm, but Daisy won't let her touch it. Mrs. Jackson grabs a package of paper towels off the shelf and tries, unsuccessfully, to stop the paint spill from spreading. The other four kids stand in a row and watch, their eyes wide.

“You're in trouble now, Daisy,” says Martin. “The lady has paint on her trousers.”

Vicki wonders where Martin got the word
trousers
; what a funny word for a child to use. She glances at Mrs. Jackson and, yes, she has paint on the hem of her beige pants, and on her shoes as well. It's a disaster. She feels so bad, but she doesn't know what to do, and she doesn't know whether Daisy is really hurt or just crying because she's afraid she'll catch heck for spilling the paint. There are no bones sticking out, but still, something could be broken in there. She decides she'd better get Daisy to the health center and have her arm checked by the doctor. Mrs. Jackson thinks so, too. Vicki doesn't have a clue what to do about the paint.

“What a mess” is all she can think of to say.

Mrs. Jackson is thinking the same thing, but she hustles the family to the front of the store, saying, “Never mind that. Just get her to the center. Poor little thing. I hope the doctor is in.” There's only one doctor, and he covers the health centers in three communities. Vicki says that she'll come back to clean up the paint, and Mrs. Jackson thinks what a circus
that
would be, Vicki and her kids cleaning up all that enamel paint.

“Don't give it another thought,” Mrs. Jackson says. She's hoping the appliances aren't damaged. If they are, she certainly can't ask Vicki and Blaine to contribute to their repair; from what she's heard, it's a wonder Vicki can afford to buy a blancher. Anyway, how can she be angry when the little girl is crying so hard she can't catch her breath? How can one little girl make so much noise? It's causing her ears to ring. If all the Dolson kids screamed at once, the whole town would go deaf.

“Drive carefully,” Mrs. Jackson says as Vicki hurries the kids to the car.

“If you happen to see Shiloh,” Vicki calls to her, “tell him to wait here on Main Street. I'll come back for him.”

Mrs. Jackson has no idea who Shiloh is. Another of the many children, she supposes. She can still hear Daisy screaming as Vicki turns off Main Street at the corner. Mrs. Jackson thanks her lucky stars that she and Mr. Jackson weren't blessed with children. She just could not have stood it.

“Daisy,” Vicki says as they turn the corner and head toward the center, “I know you're hurt, but you're going to cause me to get in an accident.”

“I'm the one who was in an accident,” Daisy manages to say between wails. “It was an accident, I promise.” Then crying again.

“I know it was an accident,” Vicki says. Then, before she can stop herself, “Everything that happens to us is a bloody accident.”

“You said ‘bloody,'” says one of the twins. He has to shout to be heard over Daisy's crying. “I'm telling Dad.”

“Nobody tell Dad anything,” Vicki says. “Leave that to me, if you don't mind.” She doesn't know what she'll tell him about today. One thing is for sure: He'll be furious.

“What's bloody?” Lucille asks, her tiny voice a squeal as she tries to raise it above the racket. “Is Daisy's arm bloody?”

“All of you,” Vicki says, raising her own voice. “Shut up. Shut the bloody hell up right now.”

The silence in the car is instant. Even Daisy stops. Vicki never yells. The children look at her in shock.

There are at least ten seconds of blissful quiet before Daisy starts up again. With renewed vigor.

Temptation

When Blaine's crew shuts down for the day, Blaine sits in his truck, parked in the ditch, and watches the rest of the men get into their vehicles and leave the construction site. He can see that Justine is doing the same thing he is, sitting in her car, waiting. When they're the only two left, he watches as she tries to start her car, to no avail. He navigates his truck up out of the ditch and pulls alongside Justine, the vehicles facing and the driver windows side by side.

“Problem with the car?” Blaine asks.

“It always does this,” she says.

“Want me to have a look?”

“That's okay. It'll start eventually. You have to ask just right.”

“Must be a woman, then,” Blaine says.

“Ha ha,” Justine says.

There's an awkward silence, and then Blaine says, “Hop in if you don't feel like waiting around. I'll give you a lift into town. If you're sure you don't want me to have a look.”

Justine rolls up the windows in her car before getting out and into Blaine's truck.

“It'll still be here tomorrow,” she says. “You can look then. Or maybe someone will steal it, which would actually be great.”

Blaine backs off the approach, puts the truck in gear, and guns it. They fishtail along the unfinished stretch of highway.

“Yahoo, cowboy,” says Justine, laughing.

Blaine tries to think what he can talk to her about, now that they're alone together. He wonders if there's any chance she engineered this ride to town with him, and the possibility makes him nervous and eager at the same time. Maybe too eager. He stands a chance of making a fool of himself.

“So, how's the job?” he asks.

“Kind of boring,” she says. “But a job's a job.”

“The guys treat you all right? Some of them are a little rough.”

“They're all talk,” she says. “Anyway, I'm just the flag girl. Not much of a threat. Might be different if I was the foreman. That might not go over.”

Blaine laughs. “You're right about that. I'd have a little trouble with you as the foreman myself.”

“Well, I'd do a better job than the alcoholic hobbit,” she says. “He's so pathetic.” Her tone is completely dismissive. “Anyway, someday I
could
be the foreman of a crew like this. Then they'd have to watch their own asses instead of mine.”

Such confidence, Blaine thinks. Only the young. They reach the end of the construction and Blaine angles the truck around the barricade and onto the pavement.

“Do you want to grab a cold beer somewhere?” Justine asks, as though they were old friends.

Well, they are, sort of, he supposes. Still, he doesn't know what the suggestion means. She might be playing with him. He decides to ignore the question.

“So, you're a university student,” he says. “How'd you end up in Juliet?”

“I applied on that government Web site for summer jobs and this is what I got. I don't mind. I'm staying with a pretty nice family. Room and board.”

Blaine asks her what she's studying and she tells him engineering.

“No kidding,” he says.

“There are girls in engineering these days, you know,” she says. “I heard they have a quota, but I'm not sure if that's true.”

“Hey,” Blaine says. “You're in Juliet. It's going to take us a while to catch up, guys like me, anyway.” He adds, “Old guys like me,” with emphasis on the word
old
.

He half waits for her to tell him he's not old, but then is glad when she doesn't.

She says something else, though, that makes him doubt his own hearing. She says, “We should just keep on driving. Or maybe head south. We could go across the border into Montana for a beer.”

“Why would we want to do that?” Blaine asks. Carefully. Something is coming back to him here, some knowledge of a game he hasn't played since he started dating Vicki. There's a skill to checking out a situation like this without committing yourself.

“No reason,” says Justine. “Just for something to do. Something crazy.”

Blaine looks at Justine and thinks how young and pretty she is. She's wearing lightweight coveralls with her white T-shirt underneath, stretched tight across her small breasts. The T-shirt is so white, it's practically luminescent even though it's dusty from her day on the highway. Is she young enough to be his daughter? He calculates. Yes, she's that young. Or he's that old, depending which way you look at it. If she's genuinely asking him to take off down the road with her—and she appears to be—he's in the middle of a serious wet dream. Either that or a beer commercial.

“I'm a married man, Justine,” he says.

“I know that,” she says. “I asked around. Kids, too. Anyway, I've seen your wife and kids in town. You're lucky.”

Blaine snorts; he can't help it. “If you think I'm lucky, you've got a shingle flapping on the roof. If I were lucky I'd have a million dollars instead of a pile of debt.”

“Oh,” Justine says. “I see. Well, I'm pretty lucky. You can hang around with me for a while and see if it rubs off.”

When they get to Juliet, Blaine turns onto the access road into town.

“Where do you want dropped off?” he asks.

“So we're not going to Montana, I guess,” Justine says. “Too bad. You can drop me at the post office, then. I'll pop in and get my mail. That will have to be fun enough for today. Maybe I'll have a letter from my boyfriend.”

“You have a boyfriend?”

“Wouldn't you like to know?” she says, and then, “No, of course not.”

Blaine doesn't know what
of course not
means, why she said that. He angle-parks in front of the post office and turns off the ignition. Justine makes no move to get out. It's like they're teenagers parked out in the country on a side road, only they're in the middle of downtown Juliet. Blaine gets self-conscious, sitting on Main Street in full view of the world with Justine sitting next to him. If she stays in the truck, it's more than just a ride. To anyone walking by, there's something going on.

Justine says, “It's just that you're the only one out there who seems to have a soul. The others are all about, well, you know, watching my ass.”

All Blaine can think of to say is “You'd better get out. People talk.” He doesn't mean to sound rude but it does sound that way, at least to him.