BARBARAANNETTE THOUGHT, MY WHOLE adult life I’ve done exactly two completely foolish things. The first one was I married Bobby Quinn, and the second was I put myself in front of the whole wide wonderful world and offered one million dollars to get him back again.
Toagie was right. She was out of her fleeping mind. Art Dobbleman was right, too. She should withdraw the reward offer. And maybe she should go to church every Sunday and eat more fresh vegetables and join a health club. Maybe she should donate her lottery winnings to the federal government to help shrink the deficit. There were a lot of things she should do.
The phone began to ring again. Barbaraannette pretended it was coming from next door. She emptied the ashtray Toagie had used that morning, rinsed it and placed it atop the refrigerator. She might be out of her fleeping mind, but at least she didn’t smoke cigarettes anymore and it wasn’t as if she’d run somebody over with her car or showed up in front of her second-grade class buck naked—which reminded her, she had to teach tomorrow. That would be an ordeal, all the other faculty wanting to know every last blessed detail of her future life now that she was rich. Rich, but stupid. Only not so stupid as that Fred Nyes the music teacher who got caught bare-assed with fourth-grade teacher Wanda Johnson in the janitor’s room.
Thinking about Wanda Johnson and her large-breasted, wasp-waisted figure made Barbaraannette suddenly conscious of her own body. She had a momentary fantasy—no more than one second—of Art Dobbleman’s enormous hands circling her waist, lifting her as if she were weightless.
The telephone fell silent after a dozen rings.
Barbaraannette locked the front and back doors. She went to her bedroom and stripped off her jeans and the Minnesota State Lottery sweatshirt and unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor. She examined herself in the dressing mirror. A little soft, perhaps, but not bad for thirty-four. She frowned at the elastic waistband of her panties, which cut a tad deeper into her flesh than she would have liked. Her waist was only two inches larger than it had been in high school, but they were two very soft inches. She should not have eaten that slice of Cowboy Cake.
Her breasts, however, had remained nearly perfect. Perhaps even better than before. Regrettably, it had been six years since she’d permitted anyone to admire them. What a waste! She was reminded of a drawing class she had taken in college. The instructor had taught them to see the human form as a collection of geometric shapes. Barbaraannette saw herself as a collection of circles and ovals. She was all curves. Toagie, on the other hand, would be a clattery collection of triangles, whereas Mary Beth’s body could best be depicted by an orderly stack of solid rectangles.
The phone began to ring again. Barbaraannette flopped onto her bed and pulled a pillow around the back of her head, pressing the pillow hard against her ears, crossing her forearms over her eyes to block the light.
The truth was, she’d been letting herself go. Ever since Bobby left she’d done everything she could to make herself dull and uninviting. Dressing like a frump, no makeup, and avoiding situations where she might get asked out. Why? Barbaraannette was not entirely sure. Perhaps she was in mourning for her failed marriage, or punishing herself for being unable to hang on to her man. Or maybe she was simply uninterested in other men, and this was her way of keeping them at bay. The strategy, if that was what it was, was not entirely effective. Toagie was right—despite her efforts to put them off, there were still plenty of men interested in her. Every few weeks another brave soul would make his move, and Barbaraannette would shoot him down. None of them were Bobby Quinn. Barbaraannette closed her eyes and remembered his face.
For six years she had been thinking about what she would do if she ever saw him again. There were times when she saw herself making love to him, then breaking a lamp over his head. Sometimes the small bedside lamp in the bedroom, sometimes the brass floor lamp in the living room. Sometimes she hit him with another type of furnishing altogether. The sofa, for instance. Sometimes she hit him with something and then they made love. She even had fantasies in which he returned to her with some perfectly logical explanation of why he had disappeared and made love to her, repeatedly. Maybe the only reason he had left her was because his little dude ranch scheme had gone awry. He had fled Cold Rock to save himself from his investors. It had been a bad plan to begin with. Hugh Hulke and Rodney Gent, Bobby’s old high school buddies, should have known better than to give Bobby their money. It could be—it was possible—that Hugh and Rodney had scared Bobby off, and that he had planned to send for her but something had happened to distract him. Maybe he’d been hit on the head and got amnesia. Maybe he was dead. Or maybe he wasn’t and if he came back, if she had the chance to remind him of how good they were together, he would not be able to leave her again. He would have to be with her always.
Of course, she knew that was a load of crap. But she thought about it. She’d had six years to develop a wide variety of theories, some of them actually believable. Most of the time she thought he’d taken up with some other woman. Or women.
Barbaraannette had formulated hundreds of plans based on dozens of reunion scenarios, but winning the lottery and offering a one-million-dollar reward had never been one of them. As she had confessed to Hilde, that had been an unplanned, impulsive act. Staring into the television cameras, she had been as surprised as anyone to hear the words coming out of her mouth.
Art Dobbleman was probably right. They were all right. She should withdraw the reward offer. If Bobby wanted to come back to her—assuming he was even alive enough to do so—he would come back on his own.
But that was not the way Barbaraannette Quinn did things. She had made the offer, and she would stand by it. She would see it through. Her marriage was unfinished business. If the reward offer resulted in Bobby’s return, she would decide then and there what to do next. She would take him back, or she would divorce him. Either way, she could finally get on with her life. And if he did not come back? Well, she’d be that much richer.
The muffled ringing of the telephone cut through the pillow. It had been ringing for a long time. What if it was Bobby?
She was not ready for him. Squeezing the pillow hard against her ears, she lay there until the ringing ceased.
This time, Phlox let the phone ring twenty times, hot Oklahoma wind whistling through the phone booth, before slamming the handset back on its cradle. She stomped back to where Bobby was pumping gas into the pickup.
“No answer,” she said.
Bobby looked up; a gust of wind snatched his Resistol. His arm shot out and caught the hat by its brim. He screwed it back onto his head and said, “Maybe she’s not home.”
“Thanks, Kojak. Maybe you gave me the wrong number.”
Bobby shrugged. “Or she changed it.” The pump clicked off; he removed the nozzle and screwed the cap back on the tank. “Doesn’t really matter. We’ll get there eventually. Nobody else is gonna be turning me in, right?”
“I just think we should tell her we’re coming.”
“You can call again later, next time we fill up. Hey, you hungry?” Bobby pointed at a small cafe across the street. Phlox followed his gesture. A yellowed sign in the window read, Same Cook Since 1946.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Well I am.”
“I don’t know how you stay so skinny, all you want to do is eat. You must have a tapeworm the size of a rattlesnake.”
“Got to keep my strength up.”
Phlox sighed.
The anticipation was almost sexual. Art’s hands shook as he tightened the laces of his trainers. He planned to do the creek run this afternoon, a fifteen-miler. He stood up, shook out his long arms, pulled the brim of his baseball cap low over his eyes, loped down his driveway toward the street. The early evening air cut through the fabric of his singlet and raised goosebumps on his shoulders and legs. It wouldn’t last. He picked up his pace once he reached the river, and was warm by the time he crossed the third bridge.
It took Art twenty minutes to run the six bridges, crossing and recrossing the small but swift North Rock River that ran through the center of Cold Rock. At the last bridge, a half mile north of town, he turned into the overgrown trail that led to Easton Creek. The thin branches of saplings slapped his bare arms, flensing the tensions of the day. He reached the creek and turned at the dirt path, heading upstream. His soles hitting earth sounded like an extra heartbeat; his breathing became steady and deep. He gave himself to the sensations of silky cool air passing over his flesh, blood racing through dilated arteries. He settled into a steady eight-minute-per-mile pace and fixed his eyes on a point thirty feet in his future. Like a seal underwater or an albatross in flight, Art Dobbleman’s everyday awkwardness gave way to grace and efficiency. His anxieties crumbled as he became one with his motion; new thoughts formed and came into sharp focus. He considered buying a pair of the new running shoes from Saucony, and promised himself to call his sister in St. Paul. He remembered that his friend Steve’s birthday was coming up, and he made a mental note to send a thank-you to his aunt for the book of Christian meditations she had sent him last month. He decided to change long distance providers, and to cancel his subscription to the Minneapolis paper. Slowly, as the miles fell away, the tiles of his life sorted themselves and fell into place. At mile twelve, heading downstream on the other side of Easton Creek, his mind soft and clear as aspic, he allowed himself to consider Barbaraannette.