Yellowcake (8 page)

Lily got rid of all the furniture she had shared with Sam. There are still a few pieces from her and Rosy's childhood—an old birch coffee table that they'd secretly inscribed as kids, crawling underneath to crayon their names and, as teenagers, boys' names; the chrome dinette table that had been the family's kitchen table; a clawfoot bathtub that had been in their grandparents' home. There's a mountain of boxes full of junk. Lily has always been a collector. As a girl and after she married, she kept scrapbooks with relics from every important event—pictures of her and Rosy dancing with Sam and Ryland at Grange Hall dances, pressed leaves, the first colors of fall each time fall came around, a pressed mum—the first corsage Sam gave her. She has no pictures of Sam in her house. No pictures, no scrapbooks, just the bills for the storage unit.

Ryland's file cabinet is just inside the door, along with several cardboard boxes full of mill stuff. Lily's own file cabinet, a smaller one, is full of important documents: old tax returns, old bank statements, her birth certificate, her divorce papers. Which Lily never filed and which she will not worry about today. She has wasted enough of her life worrying and feeling guilty. Yesterday Fred talked to her about her useless feelings of guilt. She'd been telling him how she was blindsided by Sam's infidelities. How could she be married to a man for nearly twenty years and never know he had affairs? Was she an idiot? Fred said that some people are just expert liars and it wasn't her fault. She disagreed. She believes in her heart that she knew but just ignored her instincts and that she's guilty of betraying herself. Fred asked her how long she was going to blame herself for her marriage, because, he said, if it was going to go on for much longer, he would probably be spending less time with her, which he didn't want to do. "I like you, Lily." That's what he said. And he is right. She has spent far too much time beating herself up over her divorce.

Except technically she's not divorced. Lily shudders, glancing at her little file cabinet half buried under a pile of boxes.

She opens the top drawer of the large cabinet from the mill. She stares at a row of faded yellow file folders with color-coded tabs. The folders are dated and labeled: Budgets, Contracts, Transportation, Equipment. But they are all empty. She closes the top drawer and opens the second. Personnel files. Her name, Behan, leaps out at her. Sam's file. She flicks the file open with her fingernail, peering in. Empty. Someone has cleared these out. Lily laughs silently. Like her marriage. Empty.

She supposes she figured at the time that given all the lies, she'd never had a real marriage, so why should she have a real divorce?

Overhead the neon light flickers soundlessly. On the Muzak channel Engelbert Humperdinck blends seamlessly into John Denver, who sings about sunshine on his shoulders.

It's not that she deliberately didn't file the papers. It's that Sam wanted out so fast. They agreed on the terms, signed the documents, and he gave her a cashier's check for half of his pension from the mill—ten thousand dollars. Then he left, taking the truck. Left the papers with her to file. Left her to do the packing. Left her stranded on the reservation without a vehicle. She had to rely on Ryland and Rosy for transportation. It was horrible, having to make arrangements to get places, go through paperwork and memorabilia from twenty years of marriage. And then pack it all up, haul the boxes to Durango, find a place to live, get the utilities hooked up and the phone started—and she had to do everything by herself, which her sister has never done. Rosy has never found her way in the world alone. She complains that she's tired, but she doesn't know tired. She chose Ryland, a good man, a man who would never do what Sam did. Though Rosy doesn't say that, it's implied. Actually, it seems to Lily that Rosy chose Sam for her. He was Ryland's good buddy...

No. She is not going to fret about Rosy today and she is not going to feel guilty.

She closes that drawer and opens the third, which has no folders but is packed full of loose papers. Mostly numbers and charts. She flips through them to bound stacks underneath, some of which seem to be data collected for the Atomic Energy Commission, letters from scientists, physicists, people she doesn't know, never heard of, studies, all with different dates, some as early as 1946.

Should she take all of this stuff? There's so much to carry. It really would be better if Rosy came and looked for herself, though Lily knows that Rosy's plate is full now, what with getting ready for Maggie's wedding, plus she can't leave Ryland alone for long. He has fallen twice in the last six months. Poor Rosy. Lily thinks that pretty soon Rosy will have to face the fact that she cannot take care of Ryland by herself. Ryland is failing, it's clear. She will have to start looking into long-term-care options. Which they cannot afford. She's not good with money. Rosy and Ryland have never been good with money.

Lily is good with money. She and Fred are alike in that way. They are financial equals. Lily invested her half of Sam's pension in real estate here in Durango, a very good investment, as it turned out. She now owns a string of apartment buildings up near Fort Lewis College, highly desirable, a steady ninety percent occupancy, and she employs property managers who do their jobs and don't bother her. Fred likes that about her. "Do you know how many women your age are looking for husbands to take care of them? They find themselves divorced or widowed and have no idea how to support themselves. Not you, Lily." He said he wanted a woman who can hold her own in all things, a true equal, financially, emotionally...

Lily has tried to talk with Rosy about what she's going to do if Ryland needs expensive long-term care. Rosy says she'll piece something together. Lily suspects she's figuring on her sister's nest egg as a large part of the piece.

Oh, she hates herself for thinking this way. Rosy would do anything for her, Lily knows this.

She pulls several of the reports out, drops them on the floor, closes the drawer, and opens the fourth. She just hopes Ryland holds on for another few years. She wants to travel, and Fred wants a travel partner. He's just about where he wants to be financially and is planning to retire in November, while he's still young enough to enjoy it. He wants to see the Yucatán. He's something of a history buff, he told her. He wants to explore Mayan ruins, see Chichén Itzá. He showed her pictures in his
National Geographic.
It looks so exotic, and now Lily can't stop thinking about it. He's thinking November. He asked her if she's free then.

The fourth drawer has notebooks in it, several of them tied together in twine, daily logbooks. These, she supposes, might be useful. She drops them on top of the reports. There's also a photograph of the old tailings pile in Durango. Sam poses on a wooden walk at the top of the pile. He had seeded the pile with grass, and for a few years the pile looked like a grassy knoll. He looks so young, a sleepy-eyed, hollow-cheeked miner, serious and sad. His gaze so cool. A mask for his lust. Her stomach flutters. In those days he was always at her. She couldn't wash his smell off, he was in her so much—before his shift began, then again the minute he got home, and in the middle of sleep she'd wake to him in her. There were no other women then. There could not have been.

Now the grass is gone, the pile is gone—everything that used to be is gone. Where the mill once was there are office buildings and shops. The old rope bridge across the Animas that she and Rosy used to play on, that's gone. They'd grown up in a house across the river from the smelter. As children they'd go to the middle of the rope bridge, jump, and set it bucking. It was great fun, and often they'd cross to the other side of the river to pick blackberries. But one day—she was a teenager then—Lily crossed the bridge and was stopped by an armed soldier. Overnight the army had come in, and that side of the river was suddenly off-limits. They turned the smelter into a mill for uranium. And so Durango did its part for the war effort, and when the soldiers came home from the war, the army sold the mill to private industry, and the soldiers all had work in uranium, which was, they thought at the time, so much more profitable and cleaner than fossil fuels.

When they married, Rosy and Ryland moved uptown, five miles from the mill, but Sam and Lily converted the upstairs of her parents' house into an apartment, where they lived for ten years, and every time the wind blew, they were directly in the path of the windborne tailings. Had she only known.

There should have been two babies. There almost were two. In 1957 she carried one for six months, a little girl, buried at the foot of her grandmother's grave. She lost the other at three months. Sam was so sweet about that. "There will be more, Lil, don't worry."

But there were no more babies. They tried and tried. That's when she should have paid attention to her instincts, because everything changed. After a while there was no more lust, no appetites, just a quiet, almost pitying politeness, as if something was wrong with her. He had done his part. He had gotten her pregnant. She couldn't do her part.

She tosses the photo of Sam back in the drawer, then picks it up again. She'll burn it. She blinks, loosening tears, swallowing. No. She won't cry for Sam Behan. Never again.

Suddenly she wants to be quit of him. For good. She closes the drawer, scoops up the logbooks, and struggles to her feet, her legs achy and stiff from kneeling. She's cold, chilled to the bone in this artificially cooled building.

She will make an appointment with her lawyer. But how can she ask him openly? She can't bear for anybody to find out about the divorce papers. God, she
is
an idiot. Why didn't she file them?

Well, she'll just pose a hypothetical situation to the lawyer. A vague question. She has to see him this week about some investments. Just inquire about the legalities. That's what she'll do.

What would Fred say if he knew she wasn't actually divorced?

He'll never know. She'll make sure. Blinking, she slides the door open and walks into the gray light of the windowless hall.

B
ECKY SPENDS
FRIDAY
morning at the bank processing loan applications. She's just getting ready to stop for lunch when she looks up and sees Delmar in the customer's chair on the other side of her desk.

"I want to apply for a loan," he says.

She doesn't smile. It's one o'clock, an hour past her usual lunch break, and she's hungry. But she doesn't want to tell him it's time for her lunch, because Delmar will want her to buy him lunch. She says nothing.

"Let me borrow your truck," he says.

"No."

"C'mon. You don't need it. You're working."

"You don't have a driver's license."

"I'm not going to wreck it. C'mon."

"Why?"

He grins at her. "So I can go cruising."

She just looks at him.

"I've got a job interview." He's wearing ratty blue jeans and a white T-shirt.

"You have a job," she says. His job is helping their grandmother with the farm. That was a condition of his parole.

"I don't," he says.

Becky stares at him. He smiles. She had gone with her aunt Alice and her grandmother to the parole hearing last January. That was just before her father's relapse, and her grandmother was still speaking to her. She watched her aunt go into action, making a case for Delmar's release, pleading on behalf of her half-blind seventy-year-old mother, who she said needed looking after. Alice had been living with her mother, but it was rodeo season, and she wanted to be on the road. Delmar was the only one in the family not doing anything, just sitting there in prison. Alice described the farm as a desolate, prisonlike place, which it isn't—it's on good land near the river. For her part, Becky's grandmother sat as regal as a queen, her walking stick between her knees, legs covered by her green velveteen squaw skirt, and wearing her weight in turquoise, all decked out for her trip to the city. It was probably having her there, acting blinder than she really is, that made the case.

"
Shimá saní
and
Shimá
don't mind," Delmar says. "They think I need my own money."

"You're not going to get a job dressed like that."

"It's a gardening job," he says. "They don't care how you dress. C'mon. I'll have it back here by five, when you get off. Really. I'll put gas in it."

"Why can't Aunt Alice drive you?"

"She took
Shimá saní
to the eye doctor in Durango."

"How'd you get here?"

"Hitched." He's wearing transparent brown shades that seem to magnify his eyes—the yellow-brown of a coyote's eyes. He's cunning, Delmar. She knows she'll give him the truck. She doesn't have a choice. She's a little afraid of him, though he hasn't given her any real reason to be since they were little. When he was very young, he had a terrible temper, would kick and scream and throw punches when things didn't go his way. Once, just after his mother had dropped him off at Becky's house and taken off for Florida, Delmar went into a rage and bit her, breaking the flesh on her arm, the bite so deep it could have been made by fangs; she still has four little white scars on her forearm, plus she has the memory of pain from the bite and from the tetanus shot she had to get. He seemed to outgrow his temper as he got older, to develop a sweetness that she has never quite trusted. In junior high he was solitary. He loved to sing. She sometimes followed him on his walks in the desert, listening to the songs he sang just under his breath, songs he heard on the radio. He didn't tell her not to follow him, he just ignored her. He once told her that being with her was like being with nobody, which was why he liked her.

"What gardening job?" she says.

"Landscaper. I promise I'll take good care of it and not go cruising. Pretty please?" He blinks at her.

Becky shakes her head, but she reaches for her purse. She imagines her beautiful truck, which will be paid off in a year, a tangle of chrome and metal. She hands him the keys. "Two hours," she says. "No more. Be back by three. I get off at three." This isn't true; she gets off at four.