“You’d follow a man straight off a cliff if that’s where he led you.”
Her mother never had any use for the men Nadine brought around. There was always something wrong with them: too short, bad skin. They drank too early in the afternoon, or they went out too late at night. She’d heard stories about them from ladies at work, or their tattoos looked suggestive and aggressive. It got to where Nadine gave up on introductions, just walked right past her mother wherever she might be, busying herself with the kinds of nonsense Nadine swore she would never do. Stitching things that should have been thrown out long before, polishing silverware that nobody ever used. Scrubbing vegetables that were perfectly fine as they were. And as right as her mother was about those men, Nadine would never give her credit, not in a million years. And besides, Nadine always managed to stop just shy of the cliff.
With Jimmy, she had known what the trip was about. She had helped with the weighing and double bagging, packing it tight into the sports bags—basketball teams, all of them. He hadn’t appreciated her, though, and while she could forgive an oversight here and there, she found that she had her limits. Even her mother would attest to that.
“You’ve always been a hothead, Nadine,” she said, as her daughter threw the last of her clothes into the plastic garbage bag. That time it was Armand waiting at the curb in his little German coupe. “God forbid someone should give you the smallest bit of criticism.”
Nadine stomped through the house to be heard and slammed the door behind her so hard that old Mrs. Hulburt stood up from her garden bed, craned around her holly bush to try and see what in the world had just happened.
Now, Nadine looked up from her spot on the sofa, from the open magazine on her lap, at the sound of steps coming up onto the porch. It was well past dark, the single gas lamp barely illuminating her reading much less the room itself. She had left the front door open, the screen the only thing keeping the outside where it should be. The figure, dark and lanky, stopped at the threshold.
“Nadine.” It was, of course, him. His hand pressed against the screen, moving itself like a disembodied object up one side and down again.
“Otis.”
He stepped back from the screen and ran a fingernail over the mesh. “Is Lester around?”
She turned the magazine onto its face, as if she should somehow hide what she’d been reading from him, this man she could not see. “He’s sleeping,” she said. She stood up and stretched, uncurling her arms from her sides like a mantis. “I was just about to—”
“I wanted to thank you, Nadine,” he said. “For letting us hole up here. I’d bet a hundred dollars if you had your way we’d be at ten different places before we’d be here.”
He leaned against the jamb, the profile of his face against the screen now. “You got a Coke or something?” he asked. “I could sure as hell use a Coke.”
Nadine took a step closer to him. With his face pressed like that into the screen, he looked like one of those bank robbers who had forced a pantyhose over his face, his features flattened and childlike. He pleaded with her, with that marble eye of his.
She went into the kitchen, to the ice box where the soda sat stacked near the back, where Lester kept them. She wasn’t going to wake him to ask.
“It’s warm,” she said, passing it through the door. “I can’t start up the generator till tomorrow.”
He thanked her, and took the can with a trembling hand, his fingers brushing lightly against hers, and her stomach did a little turn. He popped the top and took a healthy swig and then she said, “Otis. How do you and Lester know each other?” She stayed close to the door, her face pressed to the screen now.
Otis suppressed a belch, turned his head to the side and blew it out. “He didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head.
“We shared time in Montana State.”
Nadine caught herself. “Prison?”
“It wasn’t college,” he said. “He never told me what he did to land inside there, if that’s your next question.”
Nadine looked over her shoulder at the bedroom door again. As if she could see in there, at Lester sound asleep in that bed, sucking air through the pillow.
“I guess you didn’t know.” He laughed softly. “It was a long time ago. I was practically a kid, running with the devil, you could say. Stole the wrong car and got myself sent up for three years.”
“Some people might say that any car stolen is the wrong car.”
Otis laughed again. “Where were you when I was eighteen?” He ran a finger over the edge of the screen. “Lester, he sort of—” he paused then, giving a kind of humming sound, like trying to find the beginning of some forgotten song. “He sort of took me under his wing, I guess you could say.”
Nadine said, “Lester, the caretaker.”
He stepped close to the screen then, and Nadine could see him clearly for the first time. He was shirtless, his body haggard and pasty, his hair in all sorts like a toddler just hauled out of bed. His mouth drew down hard, lines etched from his nose practically to his chin.
“Lester takes care of things, all right,” he said. “When he wants, and how he wants.”
There was a rattling sound behind her, and the bedroom door swung open. Lester stood there with his hand on the doorknob, his naked torso leaning out through the opening, all hair and tattoos and scowls.
“What are you up to?” he said.
“Me?” Nadine smoothed her hands over her jeans, as if she had been doing something with them.
“Yeah you,” he said. “Who else is there?”
She looked back to the front door, through the screen to the empty porch and the quiet night. To the soft sound of bare feet padding quietly in the distance, over sod and dirt, like a runner’s heartbeat.