“Water! That’s what I thought you said! I didn’t ask for a bath, cowboy, I asked for a drink! Though God knows I could use both! Give me a hand with this duffel, would you? It weighs more than I do!”
“Oh,” Emily scraped, when she caught up to me and got a load of Nina. “If that’s what a stem-winder is, I want to be one, too.”
Chapter Three
By the time Nina and Emily exited the Mixmaster, heads together, they were giggling like schoolgirls. “Oh, no,” Emily said. “I really couldn’t. Not in a million years.”
“Of course you could,” Nina said, tucking Emily’s hand into the crook of her elbow as they started for the house. “You drove here by yourself, all the way from San Francisco, didn’t you? You’re very brave, I think.”
“More like very desperate,” Emily said.
“There’s nothing like a nip of desperation to make a person brave,” Nina said. “Alcohol also helps.”
“Oh, I don’t drink.”
Nina patted Emily’s hand. “You don’t drink yet.”
Margaret emerged on the ranch house porch. Nina let go of her new friend to run up the steps and throw herself into Margaret’s arms as if she were a soldier just home from the wars.
Yes, the ranch house had a porch. Oh, I see, you don’t have a photograph of it and you were picturing something low-slung and adobe. No, no, the main house at the Flying Leap was a gabled clapboard Victorian with gingerbread trim and a porch that wrapped around three sides. The dream house of some miner born poor back East who’d suddenly found himself flush with cash. A six-bedroom, high-desert white elephant, picturesque but not the best match for Reno’s extremes of climate. You saw a lot of this sort of thing around Nevada back then, the residue of the newly and briefly rich, rambling mansions dropped into a landscape that looked like the surface of the moon. It was a good fit for our transient customers, though, who cared about picturesque and weren’t around long enough to be ground down by the impracticalities of the place. Max and Margaret had oil heat installed for winter and ceiling fans for summer. They lived in a first-floor bedroom behind the kitchen and so didn’t suffer so much from the fluctuations in temperature. Sam and I slept in a detached two-room bunkhouse by the barn the set designer had built for us out of gray-weathered wood he’d scavenged from some collapsing miners’ shacks over in Spanish Springs.
Nina had asked to be put up in Scorpion, the little bedroom tucked under the attic eaves. That room was tiny, hot in summer and drafty in winter; the stairs to it were many; and it was quite a hike from the bathroom facilities on the second floor. But it was a single, the only one inside the ranch house, and it had the best views of the distant mountains, the Sierra Nevada range. The room stood empty much of the year, called into service only when the Flying Leap was overfull or a beloved repeat customer asked to have it. Margaret believed privacy was the last thing our ladies needed, you see. Too easy when sleeping solo to spiral into a funk when the lights went out and the bad thoughts crowded in. “It’s like stabling a goat with a thoroughbred to keep the horse from kicking its stall to pieces,” Margaret explained.
“How do you tell the thoroughbred from the goat?” I asked.
“Easy,” she said. “Everybody’s both.”
Nina’s choice of bedroom meant I had to lug her enormous duffel up three flights of stairs. That bag was impressively heavy. When I’d first hefted it at the airport I’d exclaimed, “What do you have in here? Bricks?”
“The canned remains of every man who’s ever underestimated me,” she’d said, and winked. “So watch yourself, Handsome.” As I manhandled that duffel up those flights of stairs, I decided the shifting lumps inside it must in fact be books. In the 1930s, calling novels the canned remains of men really wasn’t far off base as metaphors went.
By the time I was back downstairs, Emily had vanished. Nina and Margaret were still entangled in their reunion, so I lingered, taking my time about hanging Nina’s jacket up in the closet under the stairs. In the daylight hours the back of the hallway was dim enough to make it hard to notice anybody standing there, and the acoustics were excellent if you left the closet door open and stood in front of it. My mother, God rest her soul, always said you never really knew another person until you’d walked a mile in their shoes or overheard a fair amount of their conversations without them knowing. So in the interest of providing better client service, I chose to listen in.
“You know, you don’t have to keep getting married just to visit me,” Margaret said.
“That’s not the only reason,” Nina replied. “I want to see Sam, too. That other cowboy said he’d gone to Reno for the afternoon.”
“Yes. He should be back soon.”
“Reno, ugh. Sodom for amateurs. Gomorrah for photographers.” From the shadows I watched Nina standing in the bright frame of the doorway, loosening the knot in her necktie and slipping it over her head, exposing the strand of gumball-sized pearls she wore underneath. Her pearls were like Doorknockers’ emeralds. Even when wearing nothing else, a pricey piece of jewelry kept those rich girls from feeling absolutely naked when they absolutely were. But I’m getting ahead of my story.
“Listen, Margaret, I know I asked for Scorpion, but I’ve decided I want Coyote, same as last time.”
“Coyote is a double.”
“Yes. I remember that.”
“And I remember you saying hell would have to freeze over before you would agree to have a roommate again.”
Nina teased apart the necktie’s noose and studiously wrapped its length around her wrist. Then she tucked her chin and shot a glance at Margaret from under her lashes. “When I said that, I hadn’t met Emily. She’s not one of those old bags you always stuck me with. They kept giving me tips on marriage. I know how to get married. I’ve done it three times already.”
“Those old bags?” Margaret asked. “Look who you’re talking to, Nina. I’m as old as any of them were.”
“You? You’re ageless, Margaret. Also more of a valise.”
Margaret snorted, but didn’t budge.
“Emily said her roommate left this morning,” Nina said. “The next one won’t be here until next week. She’s afraid she’ll cry all night if she’s not sharing a room with somebody. Please? Think of all the fun Emily and I could have together.”
Margaret’s face softened. “All right,” she said, “as long as Emily agrees.”
“I know she will,” Nina said. “It was her idea.”
That would have been news to Emily since, of course, it wasn’t.
By the end of the week Nina and Emily had become inseparable. Bent over a jigsaw puzzle in the library for hours, whispering. Sprawled on the porch roof underneath their bedroom window early in the morning before it was hot or along toward evening after the day cooled down, reading books from Nina’s duffel of canned remains. Carrying between them from barn to house a pail of milk I’d relieved our cow Katie of, like Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting playing milkmaid, sloshing out so much in transit that half the milk was gone by the time they handed Margaret the bucket.