The Watch

The words mortal wounds keep popping into Lee’s head. Astrid used to tease him when he was little by saying “I think it’s a mortal wound” whenever he would acquire a cut or a scratch needing her attention and a Band-Aid. He feels now as though his saddle-sore body needs attention, and he rides with the phrase repeating over and over, and after a while it switches to mortal remains, which he doesn’t like the sound of. And then for some reason earthly possessions, which is better because it leads him to think about things other than pain and discomfort. Astrid’s tea service, for example. How it needs polishing. Where the polish is kept. And what Use the silver tea service might mean, and in what context it could be taken as practical advice. In the light of day it seems simple: Be hospitable. Astrid was always hospitable, and she admired people who used her well. Lee always thought that was a funny way to put it: She used me very well.

The going is a little easier on this leg, as George said it would be. The ground is still sandy but the surface has been contained by the roots of grass and pasture sage. There are no more dunes, just sporadic patches like children’s sandboxes that have been allowed to spill over onto backyard lawns. Lee is grateful for George’s old hat, which is keeping his face shaded from the sun. He’s no longer thinking about who might haul him the rest of the way; he knows no one along this stretch. He tries to focus on the ground that he’s covering, where he is in proximity to home. A map begins to develop in his head. He almost wishes he had a piece of paper and a pencil with him so he could record his route. There are photographs of ancient maps in one of Lester’s atlases, and Lee remembers the curious drawings included by the early mapmakers: exotic birds and animals, unusual landmarks, depictions of significant events along the way. Cartography was an art, Lester told him, before it was a science. Lee tries to remember the landmarks he’s encountered so far, mapping them in his head and adding little anthropological details much like the quotations he once kept about the Bedouins in his scrapbook: The dunes provide a handy place for local teenagers to drink their ritual beer away from the watchful eyes of adults. Or, George and Anna Varga are an interesting study of lifelong familial companionship, and Anna’s kitchen is welcome relief for the hot and hungry traveler. He has no idea where the word familial came from.

He crosses a Texas gate into what he assumes is community pasture, and he sees signs of cattle: droppings baked dry in the sun, narrow trails that wind their way toward water. He follows one of these cattle trails, and when it reaches the lip of a coulee, Lee decides to dip down into it and get out of the sun for a while. The horse edges down the south-facing drop, picking his way through patches of cactus. As they descend farther, they encounter low shrubs and scruffy stands of willow and black poplar, the welcome relief of shade.

There’s a creek running through the coulee, not much of one, but when they get to the bottom Lee guides the horse into the shallow water and lets him drink. Lee closes his eyes and listens to the quiet sound of birds and leaves rustling. When he feels the horse shifting beneath him, he opens his eyes and realizes just in time that the horse is about to drop and roll in the water. Lee lifts the reins and gives the horse the heel of his boot, and the horse does a little start as though he’s just realized that Lee is still up there.

Lee decides to give the horse a break by leading him through the coulee for a ways. He slides to the ground and splashes himself with water, and then sets off on foot. He discovers it feels good to walk. The horse follows him willingly, tugging just once in a while as he snatches at a mouthful of grass.

Lee has to keep his eyes on the ground to avoid tripping on roots and deadfall. Even so, he steps on the rotten branch of a black poplar and it snaps, and one end flips up and Lee sees a glint of metal, hardly noticeable except that the sun is shining through the trees right on it. He stops and brushes the dry grass away, and sees that it’s a tarnished and rusted pocket watch. He uses his shirt to wipe the dirt from the watch and tries to open the face, but it’s too rusted. For the second time today he thinks about Lester’s watch, the one he’d broken and thrown away in the sand in order to conceal his crime. As he walks through the deadfall, putting off the return up into the hot sun, he remembers how he’d surprised himself with his ability to lie, straight-faced, when Lester found the watch was missing.

Lee knows the empty velvet box is in Astrid and Lester’s bedroom closet because he’d put it there himself, with the blankets and photo albums and other possessions, after one of the neighbor women found it when she was helping him with Astrid’s clothes. He’d hardly been able to bring himself to touch the box, he’d felt so guilty at seeing it once again. It brought back shame, for the old crime, and for every ungrateful thing he’d ever said or done.

Now, with a different watch in his hand, he thinks again of how it all started with temptation, with his knowing the watch was in Lester’s drawer because Astrid had shown it to him one Saturday when he was eight years old and feeling dejected because Lester had lost patience with him. Lester had been trying to repair a combine and he needed Lee’s small body to reach into a tight space he himself couldn’t get to, which Lee did, but he couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to do after that, couldn’t follow Lester’s instructions, and Lester finally said, “You might as well go to the house.” Go to the house was the ultimate dismissal. It was what Lester said to the dog when he was getting in the way. All the dogs they ever had were trained to go to the house and lie on the step, banished, at Lester’s command.

Astrid, feeling sorry for him, took him up to the bedroom, opened the top drawer of Lester’s oak dresser, and withdrew the velvet box. Inside was a man’s silver pocket watch on a chain—a fob watch it was called—and Astrid said it came from Norway and had belonged to Lester’s grandfather. “That would be your great-great-uncle,” she explained. An impossible number of years for Lee to comprehend. Astrid told him the watch was an heirloom, and that Lester used to worry about who would get the watch, “but now he doesn’t worry about that anymore,” she told Lee, “because he has you, and someday the watch will be yours.”

Astrid let Lee touch the watch. He asked her if it worked. She said it did, but it was delicate because it was very old, so she didn’t want to risk winding it up. Lester, she said, would be upset if he even knew she was showing Lee the watch. After Lee had a good look at it, Astrid put the watch away and they went back downstairs. “Remember,” Astrid said, “that Lester may seem impatient sometimes, but you’re like a son to him.”

A month or so later, when Astrid was in town and Lester was in the field, Lee took the watch out of Lester’s drawer again. He’d only meant to look at it, but the temptation to see if it worked was too great and, besides, he already thought of the watch as his. He wound it and listened to it tick. Then he wound it some more and it stopped ticking. He tried to unwind it and the winding mechanism came off. Through the bedroom window Lee could see Lester coming into the yard on the tractor, and he panicked. He put the blue velvet box back in the drawer and the watch in his pocket and ran downstairs and outside to get his bike.

He rode along the dirt trail into Hank Trass’s sandy lease northwest of the farm, climbed through the wire fence and up the first sand hill he came to, and pitched the watch as far out into the sand as he could throw it. Then he ran back down the hill, his shoes filling with sand, and he found a stand of poplar trees that had been covered right up to their leafy branches so they looked like trees that had been chopped off and stuck back in the sand, and he stayed there all afternoon. When he got home, Astrid sent him to his room without supper because he’d been gone so long.

The watch wasn’t missed for a year. Then one day Lester took Lee upstairs to show him something and Lee knew it was going to be the watch. When the watch wasn’t in the box, Lester called Astrid and Lee was terrified, sure that Astrid would know. But Astrid looked at Lee, and then she told Lester that she’d sent the watch away to be cleaned and it had gotten lost in the mail. She sent Lee to his own room and then she and Lester had a hushed discussion behind their closed bedroom door. Afterward, Astrid had come to Lee’s room and asked him straight out if he had taken the watch. Lee had shaken his head and the watch was never mentioned again.

All through his school years, whenever Lee went up the road and west onto Hank’s lease, he couldn’t help looking for the watch. He knew the chances of finding it were slim, and he didn’t know what he’d do if he did happen to find it, but he believed it was possible that one day he would be walking and there it would be. The sand was constantly changing, after all, covering and uncovering roots and bones and objects discarded by their owners. But he never found it.

Lee slips the rusty old watch in his pocket, throws the reins over the horse’s neck, and lifts himself into the saddle. He groans out loud—like an old man, he thinks, but who’s to hear?—and once again settles into a position that can’t in any way be called comfortable. Luckily, the expectation for comfort is long gone.

Although the shade of the coulee is preferable to the heat of high ground, Lee knows the creek will wind and cut back endlessly, adding miles to the journey, so he urges the horse toward the north-facing slope. At the top, he sees a pair of antelope stock-still and staring at him. Up ahead, a fence and a waving field of yellow wheat. The crop confuses him for a minute, and then he realizes that he’s ridden far enough south that he’s back into cultivated land. To the west he can see a farmyard. He tries to remember who lives there: It’s the old Stanish place, he thinks, recently bought by a couple from Ireland. There was a story about them in the local paper, how they couldn’t afford to buy land in Ireland so they looked at Canada. They were planning to raise sheep and found the people of Juliet friendly and helpful. Lee looks for signs of sheep but he doesn’t see any. In fact, the place looks deserted and run-down.

He watches as the antelope bound away from him and scramble through the fence, down on their knees and up again so fast, it’s as though they’ve run right through it. He adds the fence and the farmyard to the map in his head and composes a notation: The land to the south is marked by fences, a sure sign that the settlers of the area intended permanence rather than a nomadic lifestyle. Then he gets carried away: A deserted farmyard is a sad reminder of the failed homesteader, who gave it his best effort and then left again with all his earthly possessions, mortally wounded by the loneliness of geographic isolation.

He sees a gate in the wire fence and turns the horse toward it.

Daisy Breaks Something

“When are we going to drop this cake off?” Martin asks. He’s still got it on his lap while Vicki drives her old Cutlass up and down the streets and alleys of town looking for Shiloh, and then she gives up in annoyance.

“That boy,” she says. “He has a thing or two to learn.”

“What?” Daisy asks. “What does he have to learn?”

“Many things, Daisy,” Vicki says. “Too numerous to mention. And you’ll have to learn them, too, unfortunately.”

“Will I be bad like Shiloh?” Daisy asks.

“Shiloh isn’t bad,” Vicki says. “All teenagers have things to figure out and it makes them moody. And don’t ask me what moody means. Ask your father.”

Daisy turns her attention to another topic: They could stop at Fields, she suggests, and look at toys and maybe Shiloh will see the car parked out front. Vicki agrees to this plan before she takes time to think about it, and once the kids have their hearts set on it, she can’t back out even though she knows the afternoon is passing. She angle-parks on Main Street in front of Fields, and the kids throw open the car doors before she’s barely stopped and they’re into the store and heading straight for the toy section before Vicki can give them the usual warning about don’t break anything because she can’t afford to pay for it right now. To give some purpose to this stop, Vicki checks housewares for blanchers. The clerk—obviously displeased because the kids appear to be treating the store like a day-care center—suggests that Vicki try Robinson’s. So Vicki gets the kids to put all the toys back and they cross the street. At Robinson’s, the kids do the same thing they did at Fields. Daisy even asks the clerk for a piece of paper and a pencil so she can write down all the choices for Christmas. The clerk—a teenage girl Vicki doesn’t know—tells Daisy it’s too early for a Christmas list, Santa hibernates in the summer, doesn’t she know that?—but she ends up giving Daisy a pen and a discarded till receipt.

The bell on the glass door of the shop rings and Vicki sees Marian Shoenfeld from the drive-in enter the store. She watches as Marian walks with purpose toward the clothing section and stops in Women’s Wear. Now Marian is a woman who would have her beans in the freezer the day they were picked, thinks Vicki. She probably has her whole house in order, top to bottom—or more correctly, Willard’s house, she supposes. She sees Marian take a mint-green outfit off the rack and hold it up to herself in front of a mirror. It looks like a pantsuit of some kind, slacks and a vest. Curious that Marian is buying a new outfit. Maybe she’s going to a special event, a wedding or a graduation. She doesn’t think Marian is the kind of person who would buy new clothes without a reason.

Marian takes the green suit into a change room and Vicki goes back to looking for a blancher. Her eye travels along the row of cake pans and muffin tins, fridge-to-microwave containers, no-stick frying pans, stovetop kettles and cookware sets, colanders and sieves, and, finally, canning supplies, and she concludes that Robinson’s does not have blanchers. She won’t bother asking the clerk; she can tell by looking at the girl that she wouldn’t know a blancher if it jumped up and bit her.

She turns back to the toy section, where another young clerk is in the aisle with the kids, giving them instructions as though she’s their teacher and they’re on a field trip.

“Put one toy back before you look at another,” she instructs. “You wouldn’t leave things lying all over at home, so you don’t do that here, either. And I hope at least one of you is planning to buy something.”

Normally this would make Vicki mad, but right now she doesn’t have time to be snippy with the girl. She tells the kids to put the toys back where they found them, which they do without arguing.

“Okay,” she says. “One more place to look and then we have to head home.” She herds them out the door and then down the block for one last stop at Jackson’s Hardware. She decides that if Shiloh hasn’t found them by the time they’re done, she’ll drive home without him and let Blaine deal with him later. It wouldn’t hurt Shiloh to stew for a while, anyway, although she doesn’t imagine being left behind will teach him much. It will just give him another reason to be irritated with her. Well, at least she can use his disappearance as an excuse for her extended stay in town.

As they enter the hardware store, old George Varga from up north is just leaving, positioning what looks like a new hat on his head. He holds the door for Vicki and the kids, and as soon as they’re inside the kids head for the back. There aren’t any small toys here, but there are plenty of tricycles, bicycles, and other riding toys, and a bright red plastic wagon that the twins have their eyes on. The store is air-conditioned, and Vicki feels the relief from the heat outside. Mrs. Jackson, a middle-aged woman (who dresses very well for a day of standing behind the till in a hardware store, Vicki thinks) is admiring her newly manicured fingernails. Vicki guesses that she’s had them done at the new place in Swift Current, called Pretty Pinkies. The young girls get wild patterns and rhinestones, but Mrs. Jackson’s nails are just plain red.

She asks Mrs. Jackson if she has blanchers in stock.

Vicki sees Mrs. Jackson’s eyes leave her new nails and dart around the store trying to fix on the kids. Why does this happen everywhere they go? Vicki wonders. Her kids are not bad. They don’t steal. There are a lot of them, but what’s wrong with that? She and Blaine are keeping the numbers up in the Juliet School. The twins will be a bonus in the fall, a double addition to the kindergarten class. She and Blaine should be thanked for having so many kids.

“I’m sorry, Vicki,” she says, “they’re all gone. I didn’t bring many in from the warehouse this year because of nobody having any garden. My own garden went to the grasshoppers. They just devoured it. I’m especially sorry not to have any green beans.”

Vicki considers telling her she knows where she can get some, but says instead, “I just happened to be in town today, you know, and thought I would pick up a blancher.”

Mrs. Jackson says she can have one in for her by tomorrow afternoon, and Vicki is about to say that will be too late—even now she’s going to need ten stoves and forty blanchers to get the beans done before Blaine gets home—when a loud crash comes from the back of the store and a child starts to howl at full volume.

“Mom,” Martin shouts. “Daisy’s broken something.”

Vicki assumes that means a limb. Mrs. Jackson assumes it means a piece of merchandise. They’re both right. Daisy had been climbing up and down the cans in a pyramid-shaped display of barn paint. She fell from the fourth row and landed on her wrist. The cans luckily fell the other way, but one of the lids came off and paint is now spilling out in a widening pool of deep red. The paint has already run under a refrigerator and an apartment-sized clothes dryer by the time the two women get to the back of the store. Vicki’s first thought is that the paint is the same color as Mrs. Jackson’s new fingernails, even as Daisy is screaming loudly enough for the whole town to hear. Vicki tries to examine Daisy’s arm, but Daisy won’t let her touch it. Mrs. Jackson grabs a package of paper towels off the shelf and tries, unsuccessfully, to stop the paint spill from spreading. The other four kids stand in a row and watch, their eyes wide.

“You’re in trouble now, Daisy,” says Martin. “The lady has paint on her trousers.”

Vicki wonders where Martin got the word trousers; what a funny word for a child to use. She glances at Mrs. Jackson and, yes, she has paint on the hem of her beige pants, and on her shoes as well. It’s a disaster. She feels so bad, but she doesn’t know what to do, and she doesn’t know whether Daisy is really hurt or just crying because she’s afraid she’ll catch heck for spilling the paint. There are no bones sticking out, but still, something could be broken in there. She decides she’d better get Daisy to the health center and have her arm checked by the doctor. Mrs. Jackson thinks so, too. Vicki doesn’t have a clue what to do about the paint.

“What a mess” is all she can think of to say.

Mrs. Jackson is thinking the same thing, but she hustles the family to the front of the store, saying, “Never mind that. Just get her to the center. Poor little thing. I hope the doctor is in.” There’s only one doctor, and he covers the health centers in three communities. Vicki says that she’ll come back to clean up the paint, and Mrs. Jackson thinks what a circus that would be, Vicki and her kids cleaning up all that enamel paint.

“Don’t give it another thought,” Mrs. Jackson says. She’s hoping the appliances aren’t damaged. If they are, she certainly can’t ask Vicki and Blaine to contribute to their repair; from what she’s heard, it’s a wonder Vicki can afford to buy a blancher. Anyway, how can she be angry when the little girl is crying so hard she can’t catch her breath? How can one little girl make so much noise? It’s causing her ears to ring. If all the Dolson kids screamed at once, the whole town would go deaf.

“Drive carefully,” Mrs. Jackson says as Vicki hurries the kids to the car.

“If you happen to see Shiloh,” Vicki calls to her, “tell him to wait here on Main Street. I’ll come back for him.”

Mrs. Jackson has no idea who Shiloh is. Another of the many children, she supposes. She can still hear Daisy screaming as Vicki turns off Main Street at the corner. Mrs. Jackson thanks her lucky stars that she and Mr. Jackson weren’t blessed with children. She just could not have stood it.

“Daisy,” Vicki says as they turn the corner and head toward the center, “I know you’re hurt, but you’re going to cause me to get in an accident.”

“I’m the one who was in an accident,” Daisy manages to say between wails. “It was an accident, I promise.” Then crying again.

“I know it was an accident,” Vicki says. Then, before she can stop herself, “Everything that happens to us is a bloody accident.”

“You said ‘bloody,’” says one of the twins. He has to shout to be heard over Daisy’s crying. “I’m telling Dad.”

“Nobody tell Dad anything,” Vicki says. “Leave that to me, if you don’t mind.” She doesn’t know what she’ll tell him about today. One thing is for sure: He’ll be furious.

“What’s bloody?” Lucille asks, her tiny voice a squeal as she tries to raise it above the racket. “Is Daisy’s arm bloody?”

“All of you,” Vicki says, raising her own voice. “Shut up. Shut the bloody hell up right now.”

The silence in the car is instant. Even Daisy stops. Vicki never yells. The children look at her in shock.

There are at least ten seconds of blissful quiet before Daisy starts up again. With renewed vigor.

Temptation

When Blaine’s crew shuts down for the day, Blaine sits in his truck, parked in the ditch, and watches the rest of the men get into their vehicles and leave the construction site. He can see that Justine is doing the same thing he is, sitting in her car, waiting. When they’re the only two left, he watches as she tries to start her car, to no avail. He navigates his truck up out of the ditch and pulls alongside Justine, the vehicles facing and the driver windows side by side.

“Problem with the car?” Blaine asks.

“It always does this,” she says.

“Want me to have a look?”

“That’s okay. It’ll start eventually. You have to ask just right.”

“Must be a woman, then,” Blaine says.

“Ha ha,” Justine says.

There’s an awkward silence, and then Blaine says, “Hop in if you don’t feel like waiting around. I’ll give you a lift into town. If you’re sure you don’t want me to have a look.”

Justine rolls up the windows in her car before getting out and into Blaine’s truck.

“It’ll still be here tomorrow,” she says. “You can look then. Or maybe someone will steal it, which would actually be great.”

Blaine backs off the approach, puts the truck in gear, and guns it. They fishtail along the unfinished stretch of highway.

“Yahoo, cowboy,” says Justine, laughing.

Blaine tries to think what he can talk to her about, now that they’re alone together. He wonders if there’s any chance she engineered this ride to town with him, and the possibility makes him nervous and eager at the same time. Maybe too eager. He stands a chance of making a fool of himself.

“So, how’s the job?” he asks.

“Kind of boring,” she says. “But a job’s a job.”

“The guys treat you all right? Some of them are a little rough.”

“They’re all talk,” she says. “Anyway, I’m just the flag girl. Not much of a threat. Might be different if I was the foreman. That might not go over.”

Blaine laughs. “You’re right about that. I’d have a little trouble with you as the foreman myself.”

“Well, I’d do a better job than the alcoholic hobbit,” she says. “He’s so pathetic.” Her tone is completely dismissive. “Anyway, someday I could be the foreman of a crew like this. Then they’d have to watch their own asses instead of mine.”

Such confidence, Blaine thinks. Only the young. They reach the end of the construction and Blaine angles the truck around the barricade and onto the pavement.

“Do you want to grab a cold beer somewhere?” Justine asks, as though they were old friends.

Well, they are, sort of, he supposes. Still, he doesn’t know what the suggestion means. She might be playing with him. He decides to ignore the question.

“So, you’re a university student,” he says. “How’d you end up in Juliet?”

“I applied on that government Web site for summer jobs and this is what I got. I don’t mind. I’m staying with a pretty nice family. Room and board.”

Blaine asks her what she’s studying and she tells him engineering.

“No kidding,” he says.

“There are girls in engineering these days, you know,” she says. “I heard they have a quota, but I’m not sure if that’s true.”

“Hey,” Blaine says. “You’re in Juliet. It’s going to take us a while to catch up, guys like me, anyway.” He adds, “Old guys like me,” with emphasis on the word old.

He half waits for her to tell him he’s not old, but then is glad when she doesn’t.

She says something else, though, that makes him doubt his own hearing. She says, “We should just keep on driving. Or maybe head south. We could go across the border into Montana for a beer.”

“Why would we want to do that?” Blaine asks. Carefully. Something is coming back to him here, some knowledge of a game he hasn’t played since he started dating Vicki. There’s a skill to checking out a situation like this without committing yourself.

“No reason,” says Justine. “Just for something to do. Something crazy.”

Blaine looks at Justine and thinks how young and pretty she is. She’s wearing lightweight coveralls with her white T-shirt underneath, stretched tight across her small breasts. The T-shirt is so white, it’s practically luminescent even though it’s dusty from her day on the highway. Is she young enough to be his daughter? He calculates. Yes, she’s that young. Or he’s that old, depending which way you look at it. If she’s genuinely asking him to take off down the road with her—and she appears to be—he’s in the middle of a serious wet dream. Either that or a beer commercial.

“I’m a married man, Justine,” he says.

“I know that,” she says. “I asked around. Kids, too. Anyway, I’ve seen your wife and kids in town. You’re lucky.”

Blaine snorts; he can’t help it. “If you think I’m lucky, you’ve got a shingle flapping on the roof. If I were lucky I’d have a million dollars instead of a pile of debt.”

“Oh,” Justine says. “I see. Well, I’m pretty lucky. You can hang around with me for a while and see if it rubs off.”

When they get to Juliet, Blaine turns onto the access road into town.

“Where do you want dropped off?” he asks.

“So we’re not going to Montana, I guess,” Justine says. “Too bad. You can drop me at the post office, then. I’ll pop in and get my mail. That will have to be fun enough for today. Maybe I’ll have a letter from my boyfriend.”

“You have a boyfriend?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she says, and then, “No, of course not.”

Blaine doesn’t know what of course not means, why she said that. He angle-parks in front of the post office and turns off the ignition. Justine makes no move to get out. It’s like they’re teenagers parked out in the country on a side road, only they’re in the middle of downtown Juliet. Blaine gets self-conscious, sitting on Main Street in full view of the world with Justine sitting next to him. If she stays in the truck, it’s more than just a ride. To anyone walking by, there’s something going on.

Justine says, “It’s just that you’re the only one out there who seems to have a soul. The others are all about, well, you know, watching my ass.”

All Blaine can think of to say is “You’d better get out. People talk.” He doesn’t mean to sound rude but it does sound that way, at least to him.

Justine opens the door to get out and she’s half in and half out of his truck, looking at him with her big dark eyes, and she says, “You were serious, I guess, about being married.” There’s a moment, then, when he knows that he is capable of making a bad decision, comes so close. He wants to slide across the bench seat and grab her, pull her to him and take a break from his life of attachment and worry and, yes, if he could forget all that he might feel good again. Never mind that he’s too old for her. Never mind that her interest in him makes no sense. What she’s offering, from his perspective anyway, is escape—if only momentary—and he would so badly like to accept.

But he doesn’t. He’s lost almost everything, but he still has a family and he knows for certain that Vicki would never, ever betray him with another man. “Forget about married men, girl. You can do way better than the likes of me.”

“That’s honorable,” she says. “But I’m not sure about that. Anyway, see you tomorrow. Same as always.”

Blaine watches as she goes into the post office and then comes out again flipping through several envelopes. He wonders who they could be from. Not her girlfriends, in this age of e-mail and text messaging. She crosses the street and takes the first right onto a block of new houses, split-levels with double garages and landscaping. He doesn’t want to know where she lives, but he can still see her and so he watches as she turns up the walk of the second house from the corner.

She was just playing with me, he thinks. Now that she’s gone, it’s as clear as day.

Blaine steps out of the truck and goes into the post office to pick up his own mail. He gets out his key, opens the stainless steel mailbox, and finds it empty. Just then Mrs. Bulin walks by and sees the open box.

“Hi there, Blaine,” her voice says from behind the wall of boxes. “Vicki was already in for your mail. Do you think we’ll get rain anytime soon?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Blaine says under his breath. “When was Vicki in?” he asks Mrs. Bulin.

“Quite a while ago,” Mrs. Bulin says. “Early afternoon, I think. Did you hear they had rain north of the river? Andy Patterson went to a sale at Elrose on Wednesday and he said they had three-tenths up there. He said it’s too late for the crops, but a good rain might help the pastures. I didn’t think Andy looked too well. He probably shouldn’t be running around the country to sales.”

Jesus Murphy, that woman never shuts up, he thinks. He slams the mailbox shut and goes back to his truck, fuming. Not about Mrs. Bulin’s chatter, but about her eyewitness report that Vicki was on the move. As usual.

Penance

In the late-afternoon heat of the Juliet School staff room, Norval waits—along with the principal and the director of education, who are both dressed in golf attire—for their job applicant to show up for her interview. “She probably got lost,” Norval offers by way of explanation. He once again peruses her letter of application, thankful that her qualifications trump Mrs. Baxter’s. He can’t understand why the other two on the hiring committee are so unconcerned about Mrs. Baxter’s campaign to weasel her way into this job, despite the fact that she has never been to anything remotely like a teachers college and would surely force the girls of Juliet into a time warp marked by crocheted toilet-roll covers and family values rhetoric as outdated as Elvis Presley.

He checks his watch. Their candidate is now twenty minutes late. Half an hour passes, the director and the principal obviously impatient for their golf game, forty minutes, and finally they are forced to give up. There is no discussion about Mrs. Baxter. They all know the consequence of this no-show. The director gets his car keys out of his pocket and says to the principal, “Tee time, then,” and to Norval, “One of these days you’re going to join us and discover the pleasures of golf.”

Once they’re gone, he tosses the candidate’s resumé in the bin for shredding and considers resigning from the school board.

The staff room phone rings. Norval hopes against hope that it’s the late job applicant calling with a good excuse, but it’s Lila.

“Good,” she says, “I’m glad I caught you. Your cell phone is turned off, you know.”

Norval feigns surprise at that.

Lila wants to know if he’s done what he said he would do, which is go to the church and talk to the caretaker about the renovations. “You promised,” she adds.

Norval doesn’t remember promising exactly. What he would really like to do is go to the hardware store and buy a lawn mower and forget about Lila’s plans. He says, “You’re talking as though these renovations of yours are a done deal.”

“They’re not a done deal, Norval. That’s why I want you to speak with Joe. Everybody knows he runs the maintenance committee. That church is a disgrace. We can’t have the wedding there with things the way they are. Surely you agree with me.”

Norval stops himself from saying that weddings take place in the church pretty regularly with things the way they are.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says.

“I know you,” Lila says. “You won’t want to be too pushy, but you can’t expect a caretaker to have any sense when it comes to decorating.”

To get Lila off the phone, he promises to give Joe all of her suggestions.

“Don’t call them suggestions,” Lila says. “Insist. Speak with authority.” Then she runs through her list of what needs renovating before the church is good enough for the wedding that she has in mind, even though she’d already written it all down for him: new carpet in the foyer (or ceramic tile might be nice), new light fixtures in the basement reception hall, the pews need refinishing, and of course everything needs paint. Be specific about the colors, she tells Norval. Those are the main things. The kitchen could certainly use new china, she says, but they can rent something decent for the reception if that’s not possible. Norval knows that the maintenance committee is concerned with the moldings on the four stained-glass windows in the church, which have been leaking in heavy rain. Perhaps, he says, their priorities are already set, what with the state of the windows. He doesn’t say that the chance of any renovation happening before October is next to none.

“Well, that’s fine,” Lila says, “but cosmetic upgrades are what will bring people into the church. It makes sense from a business perspective. Use that argument.”

Once Lila is finally through (though not before reminding him to turn his cell phone on, what good is it otherwise?), Norval calls the caretaker to see if he will be around. He doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to embarrass himself, but he suspects he will be more embarrassed if he doesn’t talk to the caretaker and Lila does.

No one answers. Joe’s awkward voice message tells him that he is in the church somewhere, or perhaps in the yard, or perhaps out on an errand, but he is in and please leave a message. Norval waits for the beep and then tells Joe he will be by at five to talk about the wedding plans, knowing that Joe’s hours at the church commonly run into early evening. He doesn’t mention Lila’s renovations.

Norval decides to turn Joe’s temporary absence into his opportunity to stop and buy his new lawn mower. The heat of the day isn’t waning at all and as he walks the few blocks to the hardware store, he recalls how good the pool water felt earlier, which causes him to recall that he left his wet bathing suit sitting in his office. He decides to leave it there rather than go back to the bank for it.

As he opens the door to the hardware store, Vicki Dolson and her pile of kids come screaming out, almost knocking him over. One of the kids is literally screaming, and Vicki is trying to comfort her as she ushers the kids to the car. It’s the second time today he’s seen Vicki Dolson, and he feels the worry and responsibility once again. He watches as she gets the kids into the car and the doors closed, the little girl screeching like she’s being murdered, Vicki’s life the very picture of chaos. She backs the car out too quickly and almost slams into the side of a half-ton coming down the street.

Norval notices Mrs. Jackson watching through the hardware store window. He steps inside and Mrs. Jackson says, “Oh dear,” and he soon sees that oh dear is in reference to the barn paint that has spread like a spill from a wound all over the floor at the back of the store. Right in the spot where his new electric lawn mower is located. Its wheels, along with the wheels of a gas mower and an old-fashioned manual push mower, are now sitting in paint. Mrs. Jackson looks as if she has no idea what to do.

“I just don’t know where to start,” she says.

Norval doesn’t want to help Mrs. Jackson clean up the paint, doesn’t want to at all, but he offers just the same. She thanks him, but says Mr. Jackson will be by soon, he’ll know what to do.

“Still,” Norval says, “I think we’d better wipe up the worst of it before it starts to dry. Then you’ll have a real mess on your hands.”

Mrs. Jackson stands staring at the spill. Norval can see that she already has paint on her shoes and her pant legs.

“You might want to get your clothes cleaned up,” he says. “Before it’s too late.”

“I imagine it’s already too late,” Mrs. Jackson says. She hands Norval the opened package of paper towels, and retrieves a pack of heavy-duty garbage bags from the store shelves. He gives the pool a swipe with a wad of paper towels, trying not to step in it. The paper towels push the paint around without actually absorbing much. When Norval lifts the wad of paper towel off the floor, red paint drips onto the toe of his loafer and he has to get a clean sheet to wipe it off. Again Mrs. Jackson suggests leaving the cleanup for her husband, but Norval insists, perhaps beyond reason. Mrs. Jackson wonders aloud if it would help to sprinkle wood shavings over the paint and Norval agrees that this might be worth a try.

While she moves out of the way whatever merchandise she can manage—the lawn mowers, some garden tools, the other cans of paint that fell, thankfully, without the lids popping off—Norval walks down the block to the lumberyard and buys a bag of shavings, which he carries back to the store on his shoulder, sweating profusely into his shirt and jacket. Mrs. Jackson finds him a pair of rubber boots—again, new merchandise off the shelf—because it is apparent that it will be impossible to do this job without stepping in paint. Norval takes off his sports jacket, puts on the boots and stuffs his pant legs inside, and then he wades right into the mess and struggles to drag the refrigerator and spin dryer aside. Of course they drag paint with them, but at least the extent of what they’re dealing with is now revealed. Between the two of them, they get shavings sprinkled all over the spill and they do, indeed, absorb at least some of the paint. Norval shovels up the now red shavings and dumps them in garbage bags, and then he attacks the floor with paper towels. When they have the worst of the disaster taken care of, Norval steps out of the boots and back into his leather shoes and carries the bags out back, leaving them against the brick wall of the building. The same stray dog that he’d seen earlier is now sniffing at trash cans in this alley, and he stares at Norval just as he did before.

Mrs. Jackson keeps saying she can’t thank Norval enough and insists that she and Mr. Jackson can take it from here, and so Norval finally does what he came to do, which is maneuver his shiny new lawn mower up the aisle toward the front of the store. He notices that it’s leaving red tire tracks, so he flips it upside down and gives the tires a rub with more paper towels. Mrs. Jackson, who follows Norval up the aisle wiping paint marks from the floor, tries to convince him to leave the lawn mower until she can get it properly cleaned, but Norval doesn’t want to wait. He tells Mrs. Jackson that the paint on the tires won’t make a bit of difference to how the mower cuts the grass, so she gives him a whopping discount and thanks him again for helping with the paint.

“That Vicki Dolson is a nice enough girl,” Mrs. Jackson says, “and she’s got her hands full, that’s for sure. She offered to help clean up, but of course she won’t be back. How can she afford to buy anything . . . well, I’m sure you know all about that.”

Once again Norval feels the weight of what he knows, and Mrs. Jackson must recognize the look on his face because she says, touching his arm, “Such a difficult job you have, Norval.” He simply nods and leaves the store, wheeling the lawn mower in front of him, with his jacket draped over the handles. He has red paint on his hands, and when he looks down he sees a spot on his pant leg, another on the sleeve of his shirt. Red for guilt, he thinks; how damned obvious. He wonders if, now that his clothes are probably ruined anyway, he should go back to the store and have Mrs. Jackson daub sample spots of all Lila’s preferred colors for the renovations on him. Come to think of it, the red color he’s already wearing would probably fit with Lila’s idea of a more modern look for the church. He recalls seeing cranberry on the list, along with taupe and olive green.

Norval pushes the lawn mower along the sidewalk, over cracks and gouges and through unmarked intersections, until he comes to the neat-looking United church, with its beige lap siding and its caragana hedge on three sides. An arch-shaped sign on the lawn names the church as St. Andrews, and informs of Sunday service at eleven o’clock with the Reverend Mary Marshall at the pulpit. Juliet shares the reverend with three other communities and gets her only once a month. The other Sundays, a lay minister takes the service. Sometimes, the lay minister is Norval.

Norval looks up at the roof of the church and sees that the shingles on the south side are curling up. The paint is peeling on the south side, too, and Norval has the reluctant thought that perhaps Lila is right, the church is in need of a touch-up, although not because of Rachelle’s wedding. He wheels the lawn mower around to the side of the building and parks it by the door that leads to the basement reception hall and Joe’s office. Norval tries the door and it’s open. Joe must be here, then. Norval wonders briefly about the wisdom of leaving the new lawn mower outside unattended, but it’s hidden from the street by the caragana hedge.

From the side door landing, Norval has the choice of going downstairs into the hall, or up four steps to the chapel door. This is the minister’s entrance, and leads to the pulpit and the choir loft, if you can call the ten or so banquet chairs lined up behind the pulpit a choir loft. Because the basement is dark, Norval chooses to go up the steps, but when he enters the chapel, Joe isn’t there, either. He decides to wait. He sits in the front row of pews and sees that the list of hymns from last Sunday is still on the board, among them one of his favorites, “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.” He tries to imagine himself sitting here, in this very spot, having just watched his daughter tie herself to matrimony with Kyle Hoffert. Will he be able to act happy and blessed, for Rachelle’s and Lila’s sakes?

He looks at the stained-glass windows, two on either side of the church. Although the windows are not at all fancy and are just patterned with simple geometric shapes, mostly green and yellow, they are pretty, especially on the west side with the late-afternoon sun shining through them. He thinks that maybe this is the first time he’s ever sat in the chapel by himself. He’s practiced his sermon here a few times, but with Lila watching and writing her comments on a pad of paper. Notes, she called them, which she’d learned how to give in her time at theater school.

Norval checks his watch again. He really should call Lila and let her know he’s waiting for Joe. She’ll have dinner ready. He takes his phone out of his pocket, turns it on, and dials his home number. When Lila says hello, he surprises himself by not saying anything. “Hello?” Lila says again, and again he doesn’t answer. He’s not sure why. Perhaps he doesn’t want to hear the sound of his voice echoing banalities in the empty little church. He does know that he feels quite a sense of satisfaction as he turns his phone off and puts it back in his pocket. And for the next while he loses track of time and sits by himself in the quiet with the sun coming through the west windows, spraying oddly colored light around the room.