whatever Mattie was reading, I presumed. I looked up, saw her looking back at me from the kitchen, and flicked her the V-for-Victory sign. ‘Noonan, the winner by a technical knockout in the eighth round,’ I said.
Mattie dried her hands on a dishtowel and came over. ‘Give her to me.’
I stood up with Kyra in my arms instead. ‘I’ll carry. Where?’
She pointed. ‘On the left.’
I carried the baby down the hallway, which was narrow enough so I had to be careful not to bump her feet on one side or the top of her head on the other. At the end of the hall was the bathroom, stringently clean. On the right was a closed door which led, I assumed, into the bedroom Mattie had once shared with Lance Devore and where she now slept alone. If there was a boyfriend who overnighted even some of the time, Mattie had done a good job of erasing his presence from the trailer.
I slid carefully through the door on the left and looked at the little bed with its ruffled coverlet of cabbage roses, the table with the doll-house on it, the picture of the Emerald City on one wall, the sign (done in shiny stick-on letters) on another one that read CASA KYRA. Devore wanted to take her away from here, a place where nothing was wrong — where, to the contrary, everything was perfectly right. Casa Kyra was the room of a little girl who was growing up okay.
‘Put her on the bed and then go pour yourself another glass of wine,’ Mattie said. ‘I’ll zip her into her pj’s and join you. I know we’ve got stuff to talk about.’
‘Okay.’ I put her down, then bent a little farther, meaning to plant a kiss on her nose. I almost thought better of it, then did it anyway. When I left, Mattie was smiling, so I guess it was okay.
I poured myself a little more wine, walked back into the scrap of living room with it, and looked at the two books beside Ki’s fairy-tale collection. I’m always curious about what people are reading; the only better insight into them is the contents of their medicine cabinets, and rummaging through your host’s drugs and nostrums is frowned upon by the better class.
The books were different enough to qualify as schizoid. One, with a playing-card bookmark about three quarters of the way through, was the paperback edition of Richard North Patterson’s Silent Witness. I applauded her taste; Patterson and DeMille are probably the best of the current popular novelists. The other, a hardcover tome of some weight, was The Collected Short Works of Herman Melville. About as far from Richard North Patterson as you could get. According to the faded purple ink stamped on the thickness of the pages, this volume belonged to Four Lakes Community Library. That was a lovely little stone building about five miles south of Dark Score Lake, where Route 68 passes off the TR and into Motton. Where Mattie worked, presumably. I opened to her bookmark, another playing card, and saw she was reading ‘Bartleby.’
‘I don’t understand that,’ she said from behind me, startling me so badly that I almost dropped the books. ‘I like it — it’s a good enough story — but I haven’t the slightest idea what it means. The other one, now, I’ve even figured out who did it.’
‘It’s a strange pair to read in tandem,’ I said, putting them back down. ‘The Patterson I’m reading for pleasure,’ Mattie said. She went into the kitchen, looked briefly (and with some longing, I thought) at the bottle of wine, then opened the fridge and took out a pitcher of Kool-Aid. On the fridge door were words her daughter had already assembled from her Magnabet bag: KI and MATTIE
and HOHO (Santa Claus, I presumed). ‘Well, I’m reading them both for pleasure, I guess, but we’re due to discuss ‘Bartleby’ in this little group I’m a part of. We meet Thursday nights at the library.
I’ve still got about ten pages to go.’
‘A readers’ circle.’
‘Uh-huh. Mrs. Briggs leads. She formed it long before I was born. She’s the head librarian at Four Lakes, you know.’
‘I do. Lindy Briggs is my caretaker’s sister-in-law.’
Mattie smiled. ‘Small world, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s a big world but a small town.’
She started to lean back against the counter with her glass of Kool-Aid, then thought better of it.
‘Why don’t we go outside and sit? That way anyone passing can see that we’re still dressed and that we don’t have anything on inside-out.’
I looked at her, startled She looked back with a kind of cynical good humor. It wasn’t an expression that looked particularly at home on her face.
‘I may only be twenty-one, but I’m not stupid,’ she said. ‘He’s watching me. I know it, and you probably do, too. On another night I might be tempted to say fuck him if he can’t take a joke, but it’s cooler out there and the smoke from the hibachi will keep the worst of the bugs away. Have I shocked you? If so, I’m sorry.’
‘You haven’t.’ She had, a little. ‘No need to apologize.’
We carried our drinks down the not-quite-steady cinderblock steps and sat side-by-side in a couple of lawn-chairs. To the left of us the coals in the hibachi glowed soft rose in the growing gloom. Mattie leaned back, placed the cold curve of her glass briefly against her forehead, then drank most of what was left, the ice cubes sliding against her teeth with a click and a rattle.
Crickets hummed in the woods behind the trailer and across the road. Farther up Highway 68, I could see the bright white fluorescents over the gas island at the Lakeview General. The seat of my
chair was a little baggy, the interwoven straps a little frayed, and the old girl canted pretty severely to the left, but there was still no place I’d rather have been sitting just then. This evening had turned out to be a quiet little miracle. . at least, so far. We still had John Storrow to get to.
‘I’m glad you came on a Tuesday,’ she said. ‘Tuesday nights are hard for me. I’m always thinking of the ballgame down at Warrington’s. The guys’ll be picking up the gear by now — the bats and bases and catcher’s mask — -and putting it back in the storage cabinet behind home plate. Drinking their last beers and smoking their last cigarettes. That’s where I met my husband, you know. I’m sure you’ve been told all that by now.’
I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I could hear the faint tinge of bitterness which had crept into her voice, and guessed she was still wearing the cynical expression. It was too old for her, but I thought she’d come by it honestly enough. Although if she didn’t watch out, it would take root and grow.
‘I heard a version from Bill, yes — Lindy’s brother-in-law.’
‘Oh ayuh — our story’s on retail. You can get it at the store, or the Village Cafe, or at that old blabbermouth’s garage . . . which my father-in-law rescued from Western Savings, by the way. He stepped in just before the bank could foreclose. Now Dickie Brooks and his cronies think Max Devore is walking talking Jesus. I hope you got a fairer version from Mr. Dean than you’d get at the All-Purpose. You must’ve, or you wouldn’t have risked eating hamburgers with Jezebel.’
I wanted to get away from that, if I could — her anger was understandable but useless. Of course it was easier for me to see that; it wasn’t my kid who had been turned into the handkerchief tied at the center of a tug-of-war rope. ‘They still play softball at Warrington’s? Even though Devore bought the place?’
‘Yes indeed. He goes down to the field in his motorized wheelchair every Tuesday evening and watches. There are other things he’s done since he came back here that are just attempts to buy the town’s good opinion, but I think he genuinely loves the softball games. The Whit-more woman goes, too. Brings an extra oxygen tank along in a little red wheelbarrow with a whitewall tire on the front. She keeps a fielder’s mitt in there, too, in case any foul pops come up over the backstop to where he sits. He caught one near the start of the season, I heard, and got a standing O from the players and the folks who come to watch.’
‘Going to the games puts him in touch with his son, you think?’
Mattie smiled grimly. ‘I don’t think Lance so much as crosses his mind, not when he’s at the ballfield. They play hard at Warrington’s — slide into home with their feet up, jump into the puckerbrush for the flyballs, curse each other when they do something wrong — and that’s what old Max Devore enjoys, that’s why he never misses a Tuesday evening game. He likes to watch them slide and get up bleeding.’