Juliet in August (34 page)

He decides to leave the stone the way it is, not to try again to blast it to pieces. Maybe the split will be enough to keep the kids out of his pasture since the stone no longer looks like a tabletop. He comes up with an official story:
What next? If it's not beer, it's blasting caps. Just lucky they didn't hurt themselves, or start a grass fire.
If you stick to your story, who's going to argue? Two people already know the truth—Lou and old TNT—but it's his pasture, he can say what he likes.

Hank walks back to his truck and cracks the last can in his six-pack of cola. He heads home, taking a shortcut across the pasture to the west, the truck bumping over the rocks and the gopher holes. He hopes Lynn is there. She stays in the restaurant as late as midnight if there are customers, but if it's dead she closes up early. Won't she be surprised, he thinks, looking at the rooster on the seat beside him. The fine-feathered present for his wife has settled in like a lapdog.

THE OASIS

 

Offerings

It's late, almost midnight, when the owner of the lost horse pulls into the Oasis Café for a bite to eat. The parking lot is pretty much empty, just two semitrailers and a half-ton, a car parked close to the door, a motorcycle in front of the Petro-Can. For a moment Joni worries that the restaurant might be closed, but then she sees the lights on inside and she picks out two men—probably the truckers—sitting at a table by the window. She steps into the foyer between the Petro-Can and the restaurant and stops to look at the bulletin board that is plastered with notices and ads: livestock sales, sports days, farm auctions, equipment for sale. There's an ad for taxidermy services, a plea for hay from someone in Alberta. She finds a pen in her purse but no paper, so she takes the hay notice and flips it over and writes:
Missing. Gray Arab gelding. Call Joni.
And then her cell phone number. As she looks for a good place to stick her note, her eye lands on a small, plain poster in black and white, with photographs of children who are missing. Several of the photos are identified as being computer-aged. She thinks about her grandchildren—the ones she's never met—as she studies the photos, and wonders if these posters do any good, if any of these children are ever found. Would she recognize a child from the poster, she wonders, if a car pulled up right now and the child got out and spoke to her, said hello, or asked for directions to the washroom or a pay phone? She wonders if she'd recognize her grandchildren from their pictures if they walked up to her on the street. Probably not.

There's a bare spot on the board next to the drive-in movie listings. Joni pins her missing horse notice there and then reaches into her purse and turns her phone back on, thinking it must be safe to do so by now. She sees a pink highlighter pen among the gum boxes and gas receipts and other detritus in her purse, and she decides to highlight her notice to make it stand out. At that moment, a woman with an apron comes from the restaurant and passes her on her way to the washroom, a middle-aged woman with roots in need of a touch-up. She's wearing pointed leather shoes that look like cowboy boots, and Joni wonders how her feet can stand them.

“Hello there,” the woman says, but she's all business so Joni doesn't bother to answer.

Joni draws a pink circle around
Gray Arab gelding
and then enters the restaurant. She's looking around, trying to decide where to sit, when her phone rings. She curses under her breath, then she reaches into her purse and turns the phone off again.

When she looks up, she notices an older man in a plaid shirt watching her from where he sits alone at a table. He sees he's been caught staring and says, “Damned phones, eh? A person could be up there in the Arctic, sitting on an iceberg, and someone would be trying to get him on the phone.”

“No hiding from the phone,” she agrees. She's been trying all day.

This restaurant is like an iceberg, she thinks, thanks to the air-conditioning, and she wishes she'd brought a sweater in with her. She chooses a table by the window and sits, thinking about what she should order to ease her hunger this late at night. She has sandwich fixings in a cooler in the truck, but it's too much trouble to get everything out in the dark. There's a menu on the table and she studies it, trying to decide between something reasonably light (soup du jour and a bun) and the full meal deal (a burger with fries and coleslaw).

The cold air makes her shiver, and it hits her how tired she is. She wishes she were in Peace River, or at least Edmonton, instead of freezing in an over-air-conditioned restaurant in a town she's never heard of.
If it weren't for that damned horse
, she thinks, although it had been her own rash act that had put the horse in her possession in the first place, and she should have known that it would sprout feathers and turn into an albatross. As she searched the countryside around Juliet, she'd been tempted by the idea of leaving without the horse, selling the trailer cheap to the first dealer she could find, stopping somewhere to buy appropriate gifts for the children—Legos, books, video games—and then carrying on unencumbered. But she was worried about the horse, that he'd been chased by coyotes or whatever chases horses, or got tangled in a fence, and she couldn't just leave, so she'd driven the grid roads and had somehow ended up at a surprising stretch of yellow sand that rose in dunes as far as she could see. She remembered the old cowboy in the campground mentioning the sand hills, and then the woman in the post office had waxed on about them as though they were a wonder of the world that shouldn't be missed. Joni hadn't paid much attention. She'd passed several such promises on her way through Saskatchewan, aimed at making people stop on their way to somewhere else: mysterious tunnels under Main Street, country mansions built and abandoned by old-world gentry, the longest bridge over the shortest span of water.

Still, the sight of the dunes had tempted her enough that she'd parked her truck in the yard of an old schoolhouse and found a faint trail to follow on foot. It was mostly covered over by sand, but she could make out the two vehicle tracks worn into the surface and it was enough of a trail that she could stick to it and not risk getting lost. When she left the trail to climb one of the dunes and looked to the west where the sun was shining hot on the waves of sand, she'd thought,
The woman in the post office was right; these hills are a wonder
. The landscape was so vast and simple, reduced to sky and grass and sand. Yet, in the surface at her feet, she saw patterns as intricate and complicated as the veins in an insect's wings. The discovery of this spot was almost worth the aggravation of the missing horse.

A rogue gust blew sand in her eyes and she had to turn away, blinking, her eyes watering. When they cleared, she slid back down the dune, and when she got to the bottom she saw something at her feet, mostly buried in the sand, a leather strap, so she reached down and pulled on it and it came loose. It looked like an old halter. The leather was warm in her hand from the sun and cracked and dry as toast, but it was in one piece, still buckled as though whatever had been wearing it had sloughed it off and wandered on without it. She wondered what else was buried under all this sand. She thought of taking the halter with her, but she laid it back down to be covered up again.

She'd returned to her truck then and driven more miles around the countryside, checking herds of horses in pastures, stopping at farmhouses to inquire. She came to a Catholic church out in the middle of nowhere and, across the road, an old woman named Anna working in her flower bed. When Joni asked her about the horse, she nodded and said, “You talk to that boy, Lee Torgeson. He might know something about your horse.” Joni had imagined a ten-year-old. Then Anna had insisted she come into the house for coffee, and Joni couldn't say no and ended up telling Anna about her grandchildren and showing her the school pictures, and Anna had gushed appropriately over them. When Joni finished her coffee, Anna had provided directions to the Torgeson place, back the way she'd come, but when Joni got to the farm there was no one there. Just a black-and-white dog that barked a few times and then came and rolled at her feet. More driving around until after dark and the hunger pangs got to her, and she'd seen the Oasis sign and pulled in.

Joni makes up her mind to stick with the soup du jour, whatever it turns out to be, because it's too late to be eating a big meal. Potato soup would hit the spot. She could hope for potato. When the woman in the apron comes back into the restaurant—the waitress, Joni assumes—she closes the menu to indicate she's ready to order. She should maybe ask what kind of soup the du jour is just in case it's clam chowder. Seafood that's been sitting on a warming plate for hours is not likely a good idea.

The waitress doesn't make a move toward her table, and Joni begins to wonder if this is the kind of place where you help yourself, like a cafeteria, or maybe go to the counter to place your order. She looks around and doesn't see any kind of buffet table. She holds up her menu. The waitress just stares at her, or perhaps
glares
would be a better word. Joni wonders if maybe she missed seeing a
CLOSED
sign hanging on the door, and is about to get up and ask if she's too late to get a bite to eat when the woman strides over to her table and says, “What can I get you?”

“Just soup. Du jour. And a bun. What is the soup? I guess I should ask that.”

“Beef barley.”

She wants to ask about potato but is afraid to, the way the waitress is looking at her. “Beef barley's good,” she says. “I'll have that. And a bun.”

“A bun. So you said. You can help yourself to coffee.” The waitress turns and goes through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

Before Joni can get up to help herself to coffee, the man in the plaid shirt says, “I'll get that. You just sit.” He gets a mug and the pot from the burner and carries them to Joni's table, where he sets the mug down and fills it without saying anything else.

“Thanks,” she says.

He responds with a nod. Then he fills his own cup before he puts the pot back on the burner.

Joni shivers and wraps her hands around the hot mug, wishing again that she'd put on a sweater or even a jacket. The waitress comes back through the kitchen doors and slaps Joni's soup down in front of her. The broth slops over the edge of the bowl and splashes the bun.

“Thanks,” Joni says. She's thinking how strange this is, this bitchy waitress, but the soup smells good and she would have dipped the bun anyway.

The two truckers stand up from their table and make their way to the cash register.

“Sorry,” one of them says to the waitress, “nothing smaller than a twenty.”

“I thought you were a big tipper,” she says, following them.

“Not that big.”

After they leave, Joni can see the waitress is watching her again from behind the till. It's unnerving.

When the man in the plaid shirt says, “I wouldn't mind another slice of that pie,” the waitress goes through the swinging doors and returns with a plate of something lime green.

“This is the last piece for you, Willard,” she says to him. “You'll be turning green.” She sets the plate on the table in front of him and asks, “So how's the movie business, anyway?”

“Marian's doing the movie tonight,” he says.

The waitress goes back behind the till counter and begins replacing the menu inserts with new ones for the next day. Joni finishes her soup and pushes the plate and bowl aside. She watches as the man Willard eats the pie, wondering if she should maybe try a piece. As soon as he's done, he slides away from his table and stands, searching through his pockets. He checks one pocket, and the next, and the next, and then an expression crosses his face that clearly means he's realized he has no money with him.

“I left the house in such a hurry,” he says.

“Don't worry about it,” the waitress says. “If I can't trust you, I might as well pack it in right now and give up on humanity.”

Still, he stands there.

“Everything okay?” the waitress asks.

Willard licks his lips. “That pie was good all right,” he says. And still he stands.

“Willard,” the waitress says, looking worried. “If there's something wrong . . .”

And then he quickly turns on his heel and leaves, muttering something about Marian and the drive-in and all those kids who need a man to keep them in line. Through the restaurant window Joni can see him hurrying across the parking lot. He backs his truck out and onto the highway so quickly, he hardly looks to see if another vehicle is approaching.

Joni is now alone with the waitress in the restaurant and she decides it's time for her to leave, too. She reaches for her purse, but then the waitress approaches Joni's table, stops right next to it, and says, “Just turn your damned phone on.”

“Excuse me?” Joni says.

“Your cell phone,” the waitress says. “Turn it on.”

Joni would love to tell this rude woman to go to hell, she can keep her green pie, it's probably not real food anyway, but then the waitress sighs deeply, and when Joni looks at her face she sees that the glare is gone and the woman looks very tired, just the way she feels herself. Joni reaches into her purse, takes out her phone, and switches the power on. The waitress takes her own phone out of her apron pocket and dials a number. Joni's phone rings. Once. Twice. The waitress switches her own phone off and the ring tone stops.

“What the hell?” Joni says.

“Yeah. What the hell.” The waitress turns to walk away.

“Wait a minute,” Joni says. “You're the one who's been calling me all day?”

“Looks that way.”

“Why? And how did you get my number?”

“I got your number out of my husband's back pocket.”

“Well, frankly,” Joni says, “that doesn't make sense. I'm not in the habit of handing out my phone number . . .” She stops, remembering that she gave her number to the cowboy in the campground that morning. “Wait a minute.”

“Never mind,” the waitress says. “No explanation needed. I read your notice out there. The mistake was mine. I thought I had a missing husband, turns out you had a missing horse. So, sorry about all the calls. I went nuts for a while. There's a story, but you don't want to hear it.”

“I might,” says Joni.

“Well, I don't want to tell it.”

The waitress goes through the doors to the kitchen again and Joni thinks that's that, but then the woman returns with a slice of the green pie.

“On the house,” she says.

Joni isn't altogether sure she should eat the pie given the waitress's suspicion about her cheating husband, but the woman says, “Don't worry, I'm not planning to poison you. It's a new recipe. I've been trying it out on my preferred customers all day. I figure I owe you at least a slice of pie. Like I said, I don't know what got into me.”