“Joey loves the hazelnuts.”
“Joey hates nuts.”
“We’ll get him the hazelnuts and Aunt Edie the walnuts.”
Billboards for the theme park had been on every highway: a playground to promote the local nut crops, with restaurant and gift shop and its own choo-choo train. As if in capitulation, she’d stopped. Now she wandered around the rocking horses and carousel, among the families on their way to Tahoe and Reno waiting for cocktails and burgers in the lounge or picnicking outside. She felt conspicuous, as if the already-wrinkled ivory sheath announced to them that she was on her way to neither the mountains nor the lake, that she had not packed for a vacation per se. She watched the families eat their peanut butter and jellies and drink their thermosed lemonade and tried to imagine herself as one of the mothers. Cajoling the children, scrubbing their dwarfed hands, dusting off their bottoms. But she couldn’t keep herself inside the smells, the textures, the gummy breath, the tiny eyelashes. She went into the gift shop.
“He loves nuts, I tell you, he lives for them,” the wife said. She and the husband both in loud prints. “He eats about a pound if I put them out before supper.”
“That’s not the Joey I know,” the husband said. “The Joey I know never ate a nut in his life.”
“We’ll get him the almonds then.”
She wondered what Joey really wanted. Did he want almonds or hazlenuts, or no nuts at all? Something about this line of thought and the rows of tightly wrapped cellophane packages done up in bows made the spinning come on quickly. She bought a bag of pecans and hurried out.
She ran back to the Mustang, thinking she must find the antler bone. To rub it or sit with it, so it might calm her. But when she sat in the hot air with the bone in her lap, the carsickness only increased. She turned the ignition and screeched out of the nut-theme parking lot toward the nut town’s main street and bank as if there wasn’t a moment to lose.
Her trembling slanted the writing on the check.
“I feel much better,” she said out loud.
The teller looked at her as if she understood. “That’s wonderful, ma’am. Enjoy your trip to Reno.”
Afterward, she pored over every detail: the chilled air on her flushed skin, the right angles of the teller windows, the teller’s movements like a soothing port de bras. The girl’s face, young and full, her two front teeth indented winsomely, a white Peter Pan collar and nude nail polish. And the shade of ivory on the walls that B. swore she had not seen in years, that had given way to the mustard yellows and lime greens exclusively, although she could not prove it.
She pored over these details because it was never the money she did it for.