Lucinda stared at the envelope in her tremulous hand, still unable to bring herself to open it, afraid the letter inside might not say what she hoped, the ink of its fateful return address smudged by sweat where her fingers and thumbs had worried it. She’d fielded unfavorable replies so often in years past, she wondered why she’d bothered this time.
A voice startled her.
Lucinda looked up from the envelope as Ed Baines speared a hot dog from the steamer with his jackknife blade and plopped the sorry dog on a paper plate beside a jar of opaque vinegar, in which floated pickled eggs that looked like odd organs left to cure in formaldehyde.
“What’s that?” Lucinda said.
“Jonah, I never seen him so riled,” Ed said. He grabbed a hot dog bun and with his stubbed fingers wedged the dog in it, dribbled relish on the dog, and bit down, half the dog gone with a bite.
Lucinda slipped the envelope under the cash register drawer and set to counting grubby ones and fives from the day’s scratch lotto ticket haul, wetted her thumb between each bill and counted aloud. Recounted. She penciled the lottery tabulation in a leather-bound ledger then packed the bills into a vinyl bag, zipped the bag snug, and slid it back under the cash drawer. She did not want to talk about Jonah. She’d not seen him in going on a year when he’d entered the Grain & Feed earlier. He’d looked poorly, though not as poorly as her father, and she felt sick for turning him away.
She slipped out from behind the counter, a clipboard pressed to her hip, and walked down among an aisle of screws and bolts, nuts and washers, slid out each flat metal drawer. She fished her fingers through the metallic machined pieces that kept the world from flying apart, her lips moving with arithmetic precision. The cool, smooth feel of the bolts and washers slipping between her fingers comforted her. With a pencil stub, she calculated the inventory.
“I feel awful about it,” she said, her voice sounding as injured as her heart felt for wounding Jonah, and, let’s be honest, wounding herself in turn. Refusing him credit was not business, it was personal. For Jonah, and for her. It was shameful.
She tried to blame her behavior on the fact that she’d just discovered the envelope in the mail as she’d spied Jonah and his cart of supplies behind a customer on whom Ed waited. She’d been so fixated on the envelope that she’d hardly glanced at Jonah as she’d said, “No credit, Jonah, sorry.” Dismissed him. “It’s me, Jonah,” he’d said, as if his decline in appearance and hygiene left him unrecognizable to her; as if Jonah, dear Mr. B., could ever be unrecognizable to her. “I know. No, Jonah, sorry,” she’d said as she’d started to peel the envelope open with the edge of her thumbnail.
The look in his eye. She’d betrayed him, the one person he trusted, the only person he spoke to beyond perfunctory communication with other store clerks. He’d stood there stiff with humiliation, smoldering with rage, then stalked out of the store. She’d been cruel. She despised business. The necessity of it. It made her behave in ways against her nature, or what she felt was her nature. Which was why she’d been so anxious when she’d seen the envelope in her mail. Perhaps she would get a reprieve from the Grain & Feed for a spell, if she could arrange it, and if the letter inside the envelope proved heartening.
“I can’t just let him keep charging and never paying. Can I?” Lucinda said, cringing at her attempt to justify her actions. She could afford it; it wouldn’t have killed her or her meager bottom line to help Jonah. Of all people. That counted. He counted. Still, there came a point, didn’t there, when business was business and enough was enough? The store was not a gold mine. More a money pit. Changes needed to be made if it were to even survive. Still.
“Can I just let him keep charging?” she repeated.
Ed shrugged.
Lucinda swung the clipboard toward the front corner of the store to the side of where she stood. “I’m gonna bust out that wall,” she said. “Clear out this front area, put in a bay window. Give customers a place to sit with their coffee. Maybe get a rack of bestsellers. Paperbacks. Wi-Fi for the iPad crew. I need cash flow for that,” she said, though the plans might now, perhaps, be rendered moot by the news in the envelope.
“Good luck with Wi-Fi here, Sisyphus.”
Ed, Mr. Hyperbole. It was only Wi-Fi; how hard could it be to get up here in the shadow of Gore Mountain? “People like that,” she said. “Just to sit. Drink coffee. Read. Let the sun on their face through the bay window. Offer up maple syrup and aged cheddar.” She liked it, when she had time. It had been ages since she’d just sat and read for pure pleasure. Her only reading of late was for her archaeology classes at Lyndon State, classes in which she’d felt as conspicuous among the nineteen-year-old students as a plastic fork in an Ice Age excavation site. Much as she enjoyed the class’s introductory texts, she already knew most of the history, techniques, and biographies on the syllabus and probably could have taught the class herself based on her private studies over the years; she’d certainly offer a wider breadth of texts than the classes offered, which consisted of texts written about men by men with names such as Arthur and Rudolph and Oscar. Famous male archaeologists, no doubt, men she respected, even revered, and whose work and contributions to the field were legend and undeniable. Still, she’d hoped in a college-level class to read more than brief mention of pioneer Kathleen Kenyon, and of Mary Leakey—the first person to discover the hominid Proconsul skull of an ape ancestral to humans, and the Zinjanthropus boisei skull—who was relegated to a few brief paragraphs and referred to as the wife of Louis Leakey. Why was no man ever referred to as the husband of . . . ? Lucinda wondered.
Still, Lucinda felt fortunate. If she were not obligated to read for her classes, she’d not be reading at all. Her time for herself had dwindled these past months in proportion to her father’s deteriorating health, her need to be there for him. The time she gave him strained her time elsewhere, here, and at home with Dale. She wondered how she would be able to leave her father if the letter said what she hoped it said. She wondered what Dale would have to say about the letter too. She’d kept him in the dark about applying. For good reason it had seemed.
“Coming to that, is it?” Ed said, startling her. “Maple syrup and cheddar cheese.”
He swung his hand toward the far wall and said, “Bring in some biscotti and croissants and whatnot while you’re at it. Hazelnut coffee. The fancy stuff. Might’s well go whole hog. Just don’t get rid of these good dogs.” He popped the rest of the hot dog in his mouth and burped, thumbed a dollop of relish from the corner of his mouth, prepared a second hot dog. “Jonah sure was hot.”
Lucinda wished Ed would let it go about Jonah.
“Why he needs supplies for a new shed way up in there is beyond me,” Lucinda said. “He’s too unwell to be up there alone. He should just move down to town. Where it’s safe. That’s what I say.”
“Jonah doesn’t care what you say. What anyone says,” Ed said. “I were him I would never step foot in this town. Would have set off for Alaska years ago. Now there’s a state for such a man. And it’s not a shed he wants to build. It’s a smokehouse.”
“Shed. Smokehouse,” Lucinda said. “He’s got his old house right in town. Rough as it is. He could squat there as easily as in the Gore, no one would say a word.” All these years later, and Lucinda refused to look at, did not dare to look at, Jonah’s old house, whenever she drove by it; yet, here she was expecting Jonah to live there.
“I doubt he wants to step foot in that place ever again. Which is why he hasn’t,” Ed said.
A customer ambled over from the aisle of awls and mauls. Malcolm LeFranc. A steer of a man. Mustachioed Frenchman. A tree cutter among generations of tree cutters. On the counter, he set a Timber Hookaroon, then brought out a wad of cash with fingers greased black.
“If you’re talking about Jonah,” he said, “he’s got more to worry about than credit. I told him just earlier when I was up near his cabin that we’re going to be logging up there in the Gore. Come spring. It’s foregone. Right up to his old shack. And right on through it. That’s private forest. He’s squatting. Has been all along. It didn’t matter any when we didn’t want the trees for money. It matters now that we do. And I can tell you, Jonah, he’s got his back reared and teeth bared. He won’t go easy. That man is going to go the hard way.”
Ed rang up LeFranc and counted his change.
“It’s the act of building not what’s built,” Baines said. “That’s why Jonah wanted supplies.”
LeFranc rolled his eyes and exited the store.
“Makes an old man feel vital,” Ed carried on. “Jonah’s got nothing of import to do with his days.” Import? Who did anything of real import with their days, and where did Ed get such words? Lucinda wondered if Ed, single and forty, sat around at night trying to figure out where he could shoehorn his dictionary words into everyday conversation, or if the words just flew into his brain and out his mouth all on their own, in the moment. Tracking inventory and stocking shelves, busting out walls to make a coffee nook, where was the import in that? It all seemed a distraction from a life of import or at least the life she’d once imagined for herself, so many years ago.
Her girlhood dream to escape Ivers and pursue archaeology or paleontology had disappeared with Sally and— Hell. She couldn’t even claim her dream had vanished with Sally. Who could say if she and Sally would have even remained friends. Many girlfriends in grade school became strangers, if not nemeses, by junior high. Lucinda’s dreams may well have gone by the wayside even if nothing had ever happened to Sally and the two girls had remained friends. One thing was certain: the natural course of their lives had been stolen from Sally and Lucinda. The disappearance had rendered it impossible for Lucinda to live the life she’d been meant to live. For years, Lucinda had clung to her friend’s memory, heard her friend’s voice and laughter, spoken to her, not just in her head, but aloud. She’d shared her secrets with Sally as if Sally were still here, because it felt as if she were still here.
Yet, on her darkest days, as Lucinda entered the hormonal perdition of adolescence, Lucinda had resented Sally, who was always spoken of in a reverent tone, as if she’d never disobeyed her parents to explore the Big Woods, urged Lucinda to join her, or promised Lucinda to keep secrets, lies. In her most immature hours, Lucinda had wished she, Lucinda, had been the one who had disappeared, thinking: Sally’s probably enjoying her perfect self wherever she is.
In her early twenties Lucinda had wondered if she’d used Sally’s disappearance, and hope for her return, as an excuse not to leave town. She’d felt as stuck as George Bailey in her favorite old movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Except Lucinda had no guardian angel and no inclination to jump off a bridge. And, really, she was not stuck at all.
She’d visited New York City in eighth grade for a 4-H trip to see dinosaur skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History and found, instead of a land of tall glinting buildings of silvery promise, one of gray, drab streets, narrow and sunless, the air stinking of sewage and sweat, a humid mealy air that stuck in her windpipe as flocks of people shouldered past with manic hurriedness. It was a city where all things were possible, including men who lay on steam grates, faces sooted with cab exhaust as they mumbled to the people who stepped over them.
The trip had caused her to appreciate home, faces she knew. Faces that knew her. As she’d taken on more responsibility at the Grain & Feed, she’d told herself there was worth in helping those she knew with what they needed to get their jobs done and that if she left, she’d miss it here. True. What was also true was that she’d not dared pursue a dream Sally could not live. She’d told herself exploring for Algonquin and Revolutionary War artifacts in the nearby fields and riverbeds was enough to sate her, rationalized that if she’d not pursued her dream when younger perhaps there’d been a reason for her staying not yet made clear. A purpose. Import.
This reasoning comforted her.
Until a few years ago.
She’d been on one of her Sunday hikes, bushwhacking on the other side of Strange Mountain in search of stone cellars rumored to be of Celtic origin, when she’d seen it: white against the dark earth. She’d gone to her knees and picked at the soil around it, brushed it away to reveal bone. Cupped like a bowl. The crown of a cranium. A child’s skull. A slender shaft of bone too. Straight as an iron rod. Yet delicate. Frail. She’d been certain of what she’d found. Sally.
She’d returned with her father, who’d called the state police to meet at the site.
The bones proved human. A child’s. A male child’s. At least two hundred years old. Likely Native American. Abenaki. Quite a find, though not the find she’d believed it to be. In that moment of discovery, however, Lucinda had regretted each ill thought she’d ever had toward Sally, and wished it had been Sally’s remains. At least then, the days of not knowing would be over.
“Old women can garden,” Baines prattled now. “Cluck their tongues at one another. A man needs to keep doing in his old age, build, like Jonah does, to feel worth a damn.”
“You men, horseshit. And you’ll never see me garden or cluck.”
With a new hot dog dressed with red relish, Baines bit down as he ambled toward the door and tipped his half dog at Lucinda as though making a point, though he had no point to make, just relish dribbling down his wrist.
He opened the door.
The cowbell clanked overhead.
“You think I was too harsh on him?” Lucinda said, the answer clear as spring water.
“He was riled.”
“You don’t think he’d do something?” Lucinda said, fearing for Jonah what she’d always feared, that he’d end things one day. Just give in. For years she’d worried that Sally and Mrs. B., their remains, would be found. And with that discovery, Jonah would have no reason then to continue a life without . . . import.
“Jonah wouldn’t do anything to you. You’re a daughter to him, a—”
“I don’t mean he’d do something to me, but to himself or to, I don’t know. Someone. He was so angry. If he ever went and did something . . . because of me—”
“If Jonah does something, that’s on him. That’s a fact.”
“I could have continued his credit. That’s a fact.”
“World’s just full of useless facts,” Baines said as he exited the store.
Lucinda opened the cash register drawer. She took out the envelope and tucked it into her jeans pocket, wedged it next to the fragment of soapstone whose edges had been worn down by her worrying fingers over the past twenty-five years.