One great thing about covering your windows with tinfoil is the surprise you find when you open the door to last night’s moon and this morning’s sun hanging together in the sky. As I walk toward the road, I see Robert in his driveway, inspecting the side of his truck.
“Hey,” I say. “That wasn’t my father’s best side you saw this morning.”
I reach into the bag slung over my shoulder and grab the preplanning papers.
“Thank you,” he says as I hand them over, though there’s still a touch of prickliness to his voice.
And now I see what Robert had been inspecting so intensely—the long, deep gouge on the side of his truck.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“People can be so petty when it’s not a time for pettiness.”
“I’m close with the sheriff,” I say. “I’ll mention it to him.”
“I don’t have a lot of time left with my ma,” he says. “I can’t waste it arguing about the paint on my truck.”
“How’s she doing?” I ask.
“She’s tired,” he says. “Short of breath if she does too much. It’s worse if she lies down.”
“My pop says she wasn’t a smoker.”
“Just bad luck,” he says.
“I knew her a little from when she worked at the school.”
“Was she a good teacher?”
“I didn’t take chorus,” I say. “But I’d see her at all the holiday performances.”
“Shame she can’t sing anymore,” he says. “She tries. But she doesn’t like how her voice has changed.”
“You took off work for this?”
“I don’t want her to die alone.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “About your mom and the truck.”
From his driveway I can see into the backyard. For many years, Doris would be out there, throwing grain to her chickens, the yard in constant motion. All day they clucked and left their droppings across the yard.
In the end, they were too much work for her, but the yard is still a maze of wire mesh. Beyond the unused hutch, I see something I hadn’t noticed before: a little tree house is built into the gnarled crabapple, still standing after so many years.
Robert looks at the papers in his hand. “I ought to get started on these,” he says and offers a half smile.
“Yeah, I have to get going, too.”
The preplanning forms I gave Robert don’t appear controversial: Who should take custody of the body? Where will the body be buried? How will the ceremony be conducted? Who will be invited? Who will make a speech? But Pop always cautions me how quickly simple decisions can turn contentious in our business. Family members are often surprised by their feelings of jealousy and entitlement, weighing who was most loved and who carried the greatest burden.
As I near the diner, men slouch against the wall nearest the stairs—letting you know they’re available for any odd jobs. Sometimes they’re old men. Sometimes they’re my age and younger. My father likes to stop and talk with them.
He tells me that, in their hearts, all these years later, so many of these men remain train conductors, grain elevator operators, gas station attendants, oil drillers. But what becomes of them when there are no trains, no grain elevators, no gas stations, no oil wells? The jobs they had, the skills that defined their worth are gone. Perhaps they lie in bed at night and ask of dark ceilings, Who am I now? The question rubs against who they once were and the fear of being irrelevant. Set aside. Lost.
I don’t have my father’s urge to talk with these men. Still, I try to smile as I pass the lowered caps, taut mouths and chins. They look up to see who’s here, if there’s an offer of work, then look down again, most chewing something . . . gum, tobacco, cheek.
The Pipeline Diner is the social hub of Petroleum and the only place to eat in town. It’s even the nightlife scene here. At 8 p.m., they turn off the overhead lights and turn on strings of colored bulbs, converting the diner to a bar. You can still order hotcakes, but after hours you can have them with whiskey.
Pop has encouraged me to join the late-night crowd at the Pipeline. Join anything. Get out of the basement. Make friends. He brings it up casually, as if it’s not something that nags at him. But I’ve overheard his phone calls, asking the person on the other end, Did I cause this? Will she always be alone?
The sign for the Pipeline groans on metal chains with each push of the wind. I pull open the door. The diner is warm and smells of bacon and mud, and most seats by the window are filled. One wall displays the local cattle brands, seared right into the wood.
I feel the stones clack as I step inside, and when others look up, I wonder if they’ve heard them too.
“Mary, what a nice surprise.”
So Martha Rudd has this morning’s shift. This may be why Pop suggested coming to the diner. She steps behind the counter to pour juice into a pitcher and holds up one finger to say, Be with you in a minute.
Pop has a soft spot for waitresses. His own mother worked as a waitress here, before she moved on to assisted living in Agate. Pop and Martha seem to have gotten together a couple of weeks ago. At first their conversations were the same as he’d have with anybody in town. Then, he started bringing up her name for no reason and I’d notice her lingering behind our house.
I grab a stool at the counter, take off my coat, set it on the seat to my right, gloves and shoulder bag on the seat to my left. Someone may still ask to sit beside me but, at least now, they’ll think twice.
Martha reaches for a place setting. “Why don’t you take that sunny table by the window?” she suggests.
I wonder if she and Pop have been talking about me, Why is it so hard for her? It’s like she tries not to make friends.
Martha hangs up my coat as I move toward the new table. I sit among three extra chairs as if I’m waiting for friends. Maybe an old classmate, who used to ring my doorbell for kicks, will take a seat and we can have a good laugh about our school days.
I come across people I’d gone to school with all the time. They’re polite. They’ve grown up. We say hello and nod. Sometimes we share a sentence or two about the weather. But it’s not until they come to me draped in a sheet that our guards drop. This past year, I embalmed Jenny Johnson, one of my high school classmates, and we never got along so well as the day I fixed her hair with rollers and painted her nails crimson, like the school’s colors.
“If you’d like a stack of hotcakes,” Martha says, pouring me coffee, “you’d better place an order quick. We’re running out.”
“Sure,” I say, trying to act casual, except my voice sounds like someone’s squeezing my throat.
I study our ad on the paper placemat. I hate sitting alone in public. Pop’s words are in my head. Don’t just sit there. Don’t look down. Don’t wait for other people to speak to you. The don’ts are the only things I can think of. Don’t share your private thoughts. They’re private for a reason. Don’t talk about work. Don’t ever talk about work. And try not to look bored.
I know he gives this advice because he loves me. I hear in his words a desperate plea, Be like them so they’ll include you. It’s exhausting. I have to think before I speak, smile when I don’t feel like it.
A man sits at the next table, takes off his hat, and sets it down like a centerpiece. I wonder if he remembers when we went on a school trip to a nearby ranch to study the constellations. Our class lay in the back of a pickup and drove through the pasture. But my memory was the boy’s boot pressed against mine, his fingers gently sweeping my arm. Boys only reached out to me in secret—a note slipped through my locker, a touch in the dark.
He and I are the same age, but he has the lined face and rough hands of someone who works outdoors. As he looks over my shoulder and out the window, I see no memory in his eyes of lying together in the bed of that pickup, as if I’d imagined it all.
Once I thought of leaving Petroleum. I imagined a world where people didn’t already have an impression of me. I could be anything, maybe try my hand at art. I’d even collected brochures from colleges in faraway cities, a secret I shared only with my art teacher, who had shepherded me through all twelve years.
Paging through those catalogs, I glimpsed a bigger world—dense canopies of trees, students of all sizes and colors with outrageous clothes and hairstyles. Nothing like the people of our town. The world beyond Petroleum seemed to follow a completely different set of rules.
I applied to two colleges. The first turned me down, and as for the one that accepted me, I didn’t have the nerve to ask my father to help pay. I felt ashamed for acting so selfishly. Who was I to think I deserved such an extravagant life? Besides, art, when I thought about it, wasn’t a realistic pursuit. What can art even do? It just sits there.
In the end, it was easier to stay put. I’d developed an expertise in my work, and staying in Petroleum allowed me to keep an eye on my father. After a while, my dream of being an artist seemed so far in the past, it was as if it belonged to someone else. Though sometimes at night, I would sweat, just thinking of the life I might have lived. What if I had gone away? Where would I be? What would I be doing?
Martha brings out an order of hotcakes. “More coffee?” she asks.
I shake my head no. Now that I’ve switched seats, I’m conscious of the sound of chewing and the fork scraping my plate.
The door opens, and before I see my father, I recognize the tune he likes to whistle. Pop turns to each table.
“Gentlemen. Good morning.”
“Allen,” Martha says. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
Pop gives his weird, too-big smile that shows his top gums.
He and Martha are friendly, but carefully so, because the fact that she’s married to Tim Rudd complicates everything. Tim, like all the other men here except for my father, is a rancher.
Pop takes the seat across from me and I smell cologne.
“Take care of everything?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say and push my menu to his side. “Did you get your calls done?”
“Some,” he says. “And I ran into Fritz. His hand’s just fine.”
“Good.”
I’d forgotten about his hand.
“I saw the obituary you wrote in yesterday’s paper,” Martha tells Pop, stopping with the coffeepot. “You’re a very good writer.”
“I thank you for the compliment,” he says in a voice that sounds too formal for breakfast.
“Was it a nice service for Mr. Mosley?” she asks, setting out another placemat and flatware.
She seems to know we refer to the dead by their formal names.
“Yes,” I say. “They gave him a ride through the ranch in a hay wagon before they buried him.”
Men at other tables have turned their ears or chairs toward us as we talk about Mr. Mosley. His story is theirs in many ways. Every day walking, climbing, chasing, riding, lifting, falling. Muscles cramping. Blisters opening. Knees, shoulders, back, and hip clicking. And they walk it off. No break because it’s the weekend, no break because of the weather.
These men think of the year in terms of the rancher’s four seasons: calving, branding, haying, and shipping. They don’t clock hours but simply work until the work is done, with the financial payoff several pages away on the calendar. On the big payday, after the ranchers have returned from the shipping pens and sold their steer calves to feedlots and auctioned half their heifers and pocketed the earnings for a year’s work, the whole town celebrates.
“Nice man,” she says. “I hope he enjoyed his ride.”
“You’ve always got a cheerful outlook,” Pop says.
He nods to me as if to say, Isn’t she so cheerful?
“You knew him well?” Pop asks her. “Mr. Mosley?”
“Sure. Our families drew elk tags last fall so we got to do some hunting together,” she says. “And, of course, Tim would see him at the cattle auctions.”
I watch to see if my father stiffens at the mention of her husband.
“I almost forgot to order,” Pop says.
“We’re out of hotcakes and blueberry muffins,” she says.
“In that case, an omelet and bacon.”
“And no toast,” she says, smiling.
She strikes me as too meek to stray, but maybe it only takes being lonely.
A man at the far end of the counter picks a piece of straw out of his shirt collar and sets it beside his plate. When Martha comes closer, he says, “I could use some aspirin, if you’ve got any.”
Lots of customers come here sore. A shelf behind the counter is stocked with medicine. Some days the whole place smells like BENGAY. Martha passes him a bottle. Like Mr. Mosley, I imagine this man has calloused hands and swollen knuckles. I listen to pills clatter into his palm.
“Anyone else?” she calls, holding up the bottle.
“Sure, I could use some over here.”
“Here, too.”
To ask for this is as much as they will speak about their pain. One rancher after another swallows a few pills, then hunches over his plate again, grateful, it seems, for a time when he doesn’t have to move or think.
I swirl a wedge of hotcake into syrup. I’ve been looking out the window over Pop’s shoulder, and now I see a black pickup go by. A wild beating begins in my chest as I recognize the deep scratch down the side of it. My foot taps from nerves. I wonder if Doris is in the truck with him. If Robert’s coming or going.
“See who just went past?” someone asks.
“The guy coming back here is like giving us the middle finger.”
“Coincidence he comes back now. Only time he’s bothered to see her all these years.”
“Probably wants to make off with her money and furniture.”
“That money was going to go to the school.”
“What’s this?”
“I heard she was going to give her life savings to the school. And this one’s come to take it all.”
Over the years, Robert’s role in the accident has grown. The boy with the lazy work ethic has become someone who rejects this culture, who thinks he’s better than we are, who willfully destroyed this town.
“Bought himself a fancy truck. You see it?”
“Probably drives an automatic.”
“It’s money he should have given to Petroleum.”
You can hear something old and sour rising like bile, the loss that has never eased, the disgust aimed at Robert.
“Did you know someone scratched the side of his truck?” I ask Pop.
“This isn’t the place, Mary.”
“You should tell Pete next time he stops by.”
“Leave it be,” Pop says. “It doesn’t concern us.”
“Even if he’s our customer?” I ask.
“He isn’t, really,” Pop says. “I thought we had an understanding.”
My father looks at his omelet. And I pretend to read the ads on the place mat again. I have a neck ache from staring at this place mat.