Juliet in August (35 page)

Joni takes a tentative bite. The lime flavor dances on her tongue. “Wow,” she says. “Very tasty.”

“That seems to be the general opinion,” the waitress says. “It's going on the menu. Anyway, I'll leave you to your coffee. I've got some cleaning up to do in the kitchen.”

She looks so tired and depressed that Joni says, “Hey, don't worry about the phone calls. It doesn't matter. Really.”

“You're not about to run off with my husband, are you,” the woman says. It's not even a question.

“No,” Joni says, “definitely not.”

“Christ, I don't know what's the matter with me. Well, for one thing, my feet hurt. I do know that.”

Joni looks down at the woman's feet, the pointed leather shoes, and then sticks one of her own feet out from under the table, showing off her new green cross-trainers.

“Running shoes,” she says. “I never wear anything else anymore.”

“Just one more sign that you're on the downward slope. Practical footwear. Not that those are especially practical, not the color anyway. No offense.”

“Why don't you sit down?” Joni says. “Take a load off.” She should probably just leave and let the poor woman go home to bed, but the way she's standing by the table, she looks as though she would dearly love to get off her feet.

Joni's assessment is right. The waitress—Lynn is her name—pours herself a cup of coffee, refills Joni's cup, and sits across from her.

And then Joni can't stop herself. She asks Lynn if she has any grandkids, and when Lynn says no, Joni takes out the pictures of her own grandchildren. In spite of the fact that Lynn harassed her with phone calls all day long and behaved so rudely before revealing her motive, Joni tells her the reunion story. She knows there's no reason for Lynn to be interested, but she just can't help talking about her newfound family, proudly showing off the school pictures when she doesn't know yet whether she has a reason to be proud. But these children are her blood. Whatever is in the past between her and her daughter, she tells Lynn, whatever happens when they meet again, maybe she can help in some way. She wishes she had more money. That's likely what her daughter needs more than anything.

Lynn expresses the opinion that the boys are fine-looking kids, and Joni agrees and puts the pictures away. Lynn looks out the window, at the truck and trailer under the light in the parking lot.

“That must be your rig out there,” she says.

“Unfortunately,” Joni says. And she tells Lynn the rest of the story—the foolish purchase of the now missing horse.

And then, a development Joni could not possibly have predicted when she walked through the restaurant door: Lynn says, “Tell you what. I'll buy that horse from you, and when I track him down, I'll find him a good home. Someone around here will want him.”

Joni is stunned. “Why would you do that?” she asks. “For a stranger?”

Lynn says, “I'd like to say it's because I'm a good old-fashioned nice person. But I'm not. I'm hard to get along with—just ask the girls who work for me—and most of the time I can't be bothered doing favors for people.” She looks out the window again and nods at the truck and trailer. “What I really want is your trailer. If I buy the horse, I assume you won't need the trailer anymore and you'll be open to offers.”

It's such a relief, Joni can't believe it, horse trouble dissipating just like that. Lynn goes for her checkbook, and Joni is free of the burden she's been dragging around since the auctioneer said “Sold” and pointed in her direction. And then Lynn surprises Joni again by laughing. At the circumstance that put the trailer in her possession—the phone calls, the ridiculousness of it all—and Joni thinks how Lynn looks like a different person when she laughs, how laughing makes everyone look better, and she should remember to do it herself, often, when she's with her daughter again, because there hadn't been much laughing in those last ugly years before the girl left to live with her father. And she should laugh right off when she meets her grandsons, she thinks, to make a good impression.

“Well,” Lynn says, looking at the clock on the wall. “It's been nice doing business, but I suppose it's time to get this placed closed up.” She asks Joni if she has an e-mail address so she can let her know about the horse, one way or the other, but Joni doesn't have one. She says, “You've got my cell number,” and they both have a good laugh about that. Lynn walks out to the lot with Joni and helps her with the trailer hitch, and then Joni pulls away, free of the trailer, and heads back to the campground for the night.

Once she's gone, Lynn goes inside and carries the last remaining plates and coffee cups to the kitchen and washes them and wipes down the tables and, finally, turns out the lights. As she leaves the dark restaurant and looks across the lot at the trailer, she's pleased that she has a surprise for her husband. A present—a little rusty, but good enough—to make up for the fact that she had, briefly, lost faith.

Cowboy

Sometime after midnight Lila hears Kyle's truck on the street in front of the house. The sound is unmistakable. The truck stops, a door slams, and Kyle's boots thump up the steps. The doorbell.

Lila quickly goes to the door before the bell wakes Rachelle. When she opens it, Kyle teeters on the top step. She can see that he's left the lights on in his truck.

Kyle looks terrible, worse than she does, Lila thinks. She'd like to believe that when Rachelle told him she wasn't going to marry him—she assumes Rachelle was the one who broke it off—Kyle drank himself into this state out of hurt and heartache, but then she remembers the night before, Kyle passed out in the backyard, and a few other times that she was pretty sure he'd been drinking, even though she'd argued with Norval that Kyle was a responsible boy who wouldn't dream of getting behind the wheel of a vehicle with alcohol in his veins. Maybe Norval was right: The wedding had been a mistake from the beginning. She is suddenly so very sick of the soap opera of her daughter's love life.

“You can't drive home in that state,” Lila says. “You just can't.”

Kyle asks if he can see Rachelle, and Lila thinks he is saying something about being sorry but she can't make it out, his words are so slurred.

“How could you allow yourself to drive?” Lila says. “You could have killed someone. No one would forgive you for that, Kyle. No one. It would haunt you for the rest of your life.”

He stares at her, as though he just can't process what she's said.

“Get in here,” Lila says.

Kyle steps inside and the smell of alcohol fills the foyer. Kyle struggles to get his boots off without falling, and when he finally does, he starts for the stairs to where the bedrooms are.

“No,” Lila says. “Not that way.”

Kyle stops and looks at her. She points down, to where there's a basement recreation room with a pool table, a pullout couch, and a bathroom. “You can talk to Rachelle in the morning. She's going to need you then, Kyle, if that means anything to you at all.”

Kyle obediently turns and stumbles past Lila and goes down the carpeted stairs to the basement. She thinks about leaving his truck lights on all night to teach him a lesson, but then she thinks again about morning and how she and Rachelle will need all the strength they have to get through the day, and Kyle's truck with a dead battery will be just one more impossible detail. She goes outside and switches off the lights, and on her way back up the walk she notices again Norval's lawn. It's a dense, green, beautiful lawn, even if it is overgrown. She's been lobbying for some kind for xeriscaping, which she read about in a garden magazine. This would entail getting rid of the grass entirely and installing materials in its stead that require no watering. And, of course, no mowing. She wonders why this had seemed like a good idea when Norval had so loved his lawn and the act of mowing. She doesn't understand herself.

She steps back into the house and locks the door, then decides she'd better go downstairs and check on Kyle. She finds him passed out on the pool table, curled into a fetal position like a little boy, although he is far from little. These children, Lila thinks. These foolish, ignorant children. How in the world will she deal with them without Norval? She flicks off the light and climbs heavily up the stairs to the living room, where she sits once again in the armchair and takes up her box of Kleenex, knowing that she must be brave, she must tell Rachelle, she cannot put it off much longer. She turns on the television, which is on Norval's favorite channel, and watches the weather forecasts for the Atlantic provinces and the Far North and Mexico and Russia and the south of France.

For the first time she understands the appeal of the weather channel, the lulling monotony of weather. She will let it soothe her for a time, she decides, a short time, and then she will wake Rachelle and lead her—or drag her, if need be—through the door to adulthood.

Your father loved you very much
is how she will begin.

Wreckage

When Vicki hears the plane this time, she is positive she's awake. She hears a hiccup, and another one, and then silence, a long, awful silence, and the sound of a crash. Close by. It had to be, or she wouldn't have heard it.

She shakes Blaine, switches on the bedside lamp, shakes him again.

“Blaine,” she says, “I just heard a plane go down. I'm not sure where, but close.”

Blaine stares at her, uncomprehending. His eyelids flutter, then close.

“I'm sure, Blaine,” she says, shaking him awake. “We have to look.”

“Not the damned beans again,” Blaine says, rolling away from her.

“Not beans,” Vicki says, poking him with her foot. “An airplane.”

“You look for it. And turn that light out.”

Vicki slides her bare feet into the easiest things, her worn old plastic flip-flops. She switches off the light and leaves the bedroom, slips through the kitchen and out the door, from one darkness to another, and stands in the yard looking, trying to decide which way to go. She can't believe this has really happened after all the years of dreaming, that she is really heading out to look for a downed plane and its pilot, passengers if there are any. She has no idea where to turn. The sound had been overhead. Right
inside
her head, in fact; directionless. She scans the horizon, looking for lights or fire. Nothing. She listens. Nothing but silence. She takes a step toward the pasture fence, thinking she will try that way.

But before she is across the yard it all fades—the sound overhead, the crash, the dread. She can feel it fading, becoming less and less real, and in no time at all it's turned into the same pleasant sensation she felt in her old dream about paddling across the lake in a canoe. No droning sound of a falling plane, just the splash of her paddles. She stops. She's aware now of dew in the grass; she can feel it through the plastic straps of her flip-flops. She listens to the sound of a cricket, leaves rustling in the stiff breeze that's come up, an owl somewhere to the east. Not the sounds of mayhem. Perhaps she just doesn't want to go looking, she thinks. She doesn't want to find burning debris, or worse, human remains. But in no time even these thoughts are gone and she's left standing in the yard, feeling foolish.

She returns to the house in a sleepy stupor, shakes the flip-flops from her feet, and crawls back into bed. She rolls up against Blaine's warm back, but he mumbles “too hot” and gently pushes her away. She knows, because Blaine told her, that he'd poured kerosene on the beans and burned them, and the thought of all those beans reduced to ash makes her want to whisper in his ear:
Thank you, sweetheart.
Which she does before she obligingly rolls back to her own side of the bed.

Beneath Vicki and Blaine, in his second night in his own room, Shiloh lies awake, his light shining on the rodeo poster of the bull rider with the purple and gold chaps. He imagines the cowboy flying off his bull and landing hard on a hip or a shoulder, can just feel him flying through the air, feel the pain as he hits the dirt. Or maybe he gets hung up in the well as the bull spins, struggling to get his hand free from the bull rope, his life depending on his ability to stay on his feet, his arm practically pulled from its socket, until he's free from the rope, the suicide wrap, and he makes an adrenalin-fueled dash to the chutes to grab a rail and hoist himself up and out of the bull's way. Dropping down into the arena again once the bull is heading for the gate, a tip of his hat, now feeling the hurt, now on his knees in front of all those people, the breath sucked right out of him, until he's helped to his feet by another pair of cowboys.
Let's make this young bull rider feel a little better about bein' bucked off,
the announcer says,
show him that you appreciate his effort.
And the fans applaud.

He, Shiloh Dolson, got bucked off a horse today. His hip hurts where he landed and he's already got a huge black bruise that he won't be showing to his mother, not to anyone. He's proud of that bruise, though. He hopes it lasts for a few days at least, a secret that he alone knows about. He rolls over onto his sore hip just so he can feel the bruise. It's the first time in his life he's been bucked off a horse. He's fallen off a couple of times, soft landings in the dirt, but Blaine never put a kid on a horse that he didn't trust. He wouldn't let the kids, not even Shiloh, ride Buck.

Shiloh's hip hurts too much and he has to roll over again and take his weight off the bruise. He wonders if any other parts of his body will hurt tomorrow. He imagines himself walking up the alley behind Brittney Vass's house, wearing chaps—maybe not purple, though—bruised and limping and dragging a bull rope, the cowbell clanging as he walks. Brittney watching him over her backyard fence. But he won't look her way, not even a glance, won't let on that he knows she's there. It's pleasing, this vision of himself. He closes his eyes.