I will not lie to you. There were times when I liked being around people who still had so much money that a half-spilled bucket of milk was nothing to cry about. Such carelessness almost made me feel like I had money, too. I’d only ever been small-town rich, of course, but small-town rich makes you the equal of a Vanderbilt as long as you stick close to home. If nothing else, working at the ranch gave me some perspective. A few years of fetching and carrying there taught me I wasn’t near as fancy as my mother had led me to believe.
I was shelling peas on the porch late one afternoon when I heard footsteps on its roof, followed by Nina’s voice. “The way they fixed the crossbars on the posts to hold up the roses makes it easy. Just don’t look down.” The climbing rose that perfumed the entryway started to rustle and shake as first Nina’s riding boots, then her britches and gun belt, and finally Nina herself appeared. Once she made it to the ground she stepped back and looked up expectantly.
“Shouldn’t you take your gun belt off before you do that?” I asked.
She didn’t seem as surprised to see me on the porch as she was surprised to be questioned about anything she did. “The bullets are in my pocket, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “The gun is just for show. To scare off wolves.”
“How do you scare wolves if the gun isn’t loaded?” I asked.
“Two-legged wolves are pretty easy to scare.”
The rosebush started shaking again and Emily’s voice tumbled down. “Ow,” she said. “It’s thorny.”
“Don’t grab the branches. Hold the trellis.”
“I’ll fall.”
“You won’t.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Teaching Emily how to leave a house by the bedroom window.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s never done it.” It was clear from Nina’s tone of voice that she considered my query idiotic.
The next day I was in the kitchen, wearing one of Margaret’s aprons while I dried cutlery on a towel, when Emily and Nina drifted through. They had the pinked skin and wet hair of children just out of the bath and were so sunk in conversation that neither seemed to notice me.
As they disappeared out the back door Margaret came into the kitchen carrying a basket of laundry she’d harvested from the clothesline. She put her basket on the counter and stood at the kitchen window, watching Nina and Emily climb into the hammock strung between shade trees at the side of the house. Margaret shook her head and tsked. “I like to think people come to us because they haven’t given up on finding their other half,” she said. “But that one says she’s not marrying again. Not ever.”
“Who? Emily?” I asked.
“Emily? No. The Emilys of this earth are always married.”
“Nina?”
Margaret tapped her nose and winked at me. “You could get work as a detective,” she said, then sighed. “That poor kid can’t catch a break.” She took a stack of folded kitchen towels from the basket, opened a drawer, and tucked in all but one. “You know, Ward, if I’ve learned anything in the last few years it’s that marriage depends on luck as much as anything. First of all you have to be in the right place at the right time to meet the person you’re meant for. What are the chances of that happening for anybody the first time? But everybody—almost everybody—goes in with such high hopes, sold on the best selves the person they’re marrying has shown them up until then. Some hit the jackpot, but others are just letting themselves in for a world of hurt. In my mother’s day the only way out of a bad match was feet first. Poor Mama.” She handed the towel she’d saved back to me. “I think the saddest thing of all is when two people who honestly believe they’re in love marry and then find out they can’t live with each other.”
“Don’t most people who marry believe they’re in love?” I asked.
She took my chin between her thumb and forefinger. She had a special fondness for the cleft in it. God’s thumbprint, she called it. “When you were fresh out of the oven up in heaven,” she’d explained to me once, fitting her thumb into that declivity, “He took hold of your chin and turned your face side to side like this.” She demonstrated. “Then He said, ‘This one’s perfect. Send him down the chute.’ Off you went, born to your mother. Because you hadn’t cooled off yet when He touched you, His thumb left its imprint there. It proves you’re special. That’s what the nuns used to tell us in Catholic school, anyway. That, and how you’ll fry in hell if you get divorced. So take that for what it’s worth.”
That day in the kitchen she repeated my question before she let my chin go. “Don’t most people who marry believe they’re in love? Oh, Ward. Sometimes I forget how young you are.”
I seem to remember Max was supposed to pick up the woman meant to be Emily’s new roommate at the train the following week when he drove a carload of glum-faced guests, Nina and Emily among them, into town to meet with their lawyers. That intended roommate never showed. Every now and then that happened. The threat of the packed suitcase by the front door would make an errant husband mend his ways. Particularly, as Margaret was fond of remarking, if the wife was the one with all the cash. Sometimes I wonder if everything might have worked out differently if Emily had ended up with that other roommate, some nice middle-aged lady who didn’t lie awake at night trying to think of fresh new ways to shake up the world.
That morning I was in Dumpling’s stall, going over his withers with a currycomb, when Nina came looking for me. Good old Dumpling. He was a short-legged, potbellied gelding with a wide, serrated blaze jagging down his forehead and white stockings on all four legs that rose above his knees, markings that hinted at some piebald mustang forebear. Dumpling may not have had a fancy pedigree or, heck, any pedigree at all, but he was a true gentleman, the most tractable and empathetic animal I’ve ever known. When I first came to the Flying Leap he went by Lightning, the name he’d been given as a colt based on that blaze or his speed or possibly both. By the time I joined the staff, though, that old boy could have been outrun by a turtle. However, he was a perfect love and we developed such a bond that I’d taken to calling him “Dumpling,” same as my mother had called me when I was a chubby-cheeked little boy. Soon I had everybody on the ranch calling him that.
While I was grooming my old friend that morning he took to swiveling his ears the way a dog lifts his head and sniffs when he realizes company’s coming. I straightened up and there was Nina on Dumpling’s other side, a folded note in one hand and Emily’s automobile keys in the other. She had on a ladylike dove-gray dress, her pearls of course, no gun belt. I’ll say this for Nina: she cleaned up good. She had her hair up in a French twist and looked as innocent as a Sunday school teacher back home in Tennessee, if that Sunday school teacher had more money than God to spend on clothes. You know who she reminds me of, come to think of it? That actress who became Princess of Monaco. Grace Kelly. Grace Kelly, if she’d been stretched on a rack until she was almost as tall as Gary Cooper, who her character is married to in High Noon. There’s another reason to watch that movie. You could probably rent it on videocassette, if you have a player. Anyway. Nina’s ensemble was just the right amount of prim for visiting a divorce lawyer in Reno. Which is what I thought she was doing, so I was surprised to see her standing there with Emily’s keys.