The only other car visible on this stretch of highway is at least a couple miles ahead, and then it vanishes, curving its way into the first of a series of low hills, each stitched to the next with a narrow dark strip of cottonwood or bur oak.
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
7
“Now you,” Roy says, “you probably have to hike your skirt up plenty high to get so much sun.” He leans forward to look at her.
“And maybe undo a button or two.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Of course with those miniskirts you’ve taken to wearing . . .”
“For God’s sake, Roy. Can’t we have a normal conversation?”
Roy smiles the smile of a man confident of its power to heal or beguile. “Why sure, Edie. What did you want to talk about?”
But she says nothing and turns her head away from her brother-in-law. She knows women whose husbands would never let their wives get into a car with Roy Linderman. But not Dean. No, not Dean.
The big ovens in Flieder’s Family Bakery blaze all night long and into the day, turning out racks and trays of cakes, cookies, rolls, and loaves of bread, some of it trucked to stores around town. People might say they love the aroma of Flieder’s baked goods, but they don’t have it in their nostrils every day as Dean and Edie do in their apartment above the bakery.
Dean sits on the sofa in his underwear. A saucepan rests on the coffee table in front of him just in case he pukes. On his lap is the navy blue leatherette-bound Prairie Harvest, the 1961 yearbook of Gladstone High School, and it’s open to the page picturing the homecoming queen and her court: five pretty girls in formal dresses standing in the middle of a football field on a windy day. The girls’ carefully done-up hair-dos blow back from their faces, and the queen, Dorothy Bergstrom, holds up a white-gloved hand to keep her crown in place.
Dean stares at the page as if he’s studying for an exam. Why does Edie look like a woman and the others like schoolgirls? Her body could furnish the explanation, of course, but there has to be something else. Is it in her eyes? Is there some measure of self-knowledge there that the other girls don’t yet possess and perhaps never will?
Or is Dean Linderman searching for something in the photograph that could provide the answer to the question that perpetually troubles him: Was Edie Pritchard a girl who could make a mistake among
8
Larry Watson
her suitors, believing she’d chosen one young man when she meant to choose another? Or is his uncertainty simply the kind that could trouble any twin: Do you mean me or my brother?
Someone knocks at the door, and Dean closes the annual and slides it under one of the pillows on the sofa. By this time his mother is already in the apartment, her blue-and-white floral-print housedress stretching as wide across her as it would billowing on a clothesline.
She’s breathing hard from exertion and has to wait a moment before speaking. “You feeling any better?” she asks.
“You didn’t walk here, did you?”
“Just from down the street. Your father and your uncle are at the Silver Dollar sampling the wares.”
“I’m doing all right.”
The apartment is not spacious, and its windows are high and narrow. The dim light makes the place feel even smaller, with every corner vanishing in shadow. Mrs. Linderman peers carefully at her son before bending down and pressing her palm against his forehead.
“Well, you don’t have a fever. How long since you been on the pot?”
“Three hours at least.”
“You’re probably done then.”
“I don’t think I have anything left in there.”
“You didn’t have much to begin with.” She points to his bare torso.
“I believe I can count your ribs from here.”
“I haven’t had much appetite lately.”
“I should have your problem,” his mother says. “But you be careful. Just last year your father caught something, and he couldn’t stop throwing up. He was down to blood and bile, but he kept heaving.”
Dean says, “This was probably something I ate.”
“You can be sure,” she says and walks to the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator and surveys the interior. She closes the refrigerator and proceeds to open cupboard doors.
“Tonight you can have a couple soda crackers,” she calls out, “and a little 7Up.”
While his mother is conducting her kitchen inventory, Dean slips the annual out from under the pillow and carries it to the bedroom
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
9
and puts it on the closet shelf. He takes a pair of Levi’s out of a laundry basket and pulls them on.
Dean sits back down on the sofa, but his mother keeps circling and sniffing the air as if she’s trying to separate the smell of white bread from wheat wafting up from the bakery below.
“Roy’s paying her for making the trip?” Mrs. Linderman asks.
“That’s what he said. Forty bucks.”
“How about you? Was he going to pay you?”
“I would have done it,” says Dean, “out of the goodness of my heart.”
“Huh.” Mrs. Linderman continues her circuit of the room. “I thought they’d be back by now,” she says. “It generally don’t take your brother long to close a deal.”
“Maybe it took some time to track the owner down.”
Mrs. Linderman walks over to the television set, a Motorola small enough to rest on a TV tray. Although the set is turned off, she adjusts its antenna anyway. “So I take it,” she says, “you ain’t concerned.”
Dean closes his eyes and lets his head loll back on the sofa cushions. “What would I be concerned about, Mom?”
“It’s not for me to say.”
“No, go ahead. What should I be worried about?”
She bends over and looks at the blank television screen, though of course the set gives back no image but hers—cheeks as round and pronounced as plums, heavy jowls, close-set eyes, and all framed by improbably black hair enclosed in tight mesh.
She says, “You can get color in a little portable like this now, you know. I seen the ads. You probably have too.”
Dean opens his eyes. “Stop changing the subject.”
“Roy could get you a good price on one.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
Mrs. Linderman rises back up to her full height. She adjusts her hairnet. “What the hell. If you ain’t worried, you ain’t worried.”
“That’s my wife you’re talking about,” Dean says.
Mrs. Linderman shakes her head and says cheerfully, “It’s not so much your wife as your brother. You know what your uncle says. Ice to Eskimos.” She pauses then adds, “Panties off a nun.”
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Larry Watson
Dean closes his eyes again. “Go ahead,” he says. “You want to watch, watch.”
His mother reaches eagerly for the knob and turns the television set on. “Lawrence Welk,” she says, by way of explanation, and turns the channel selector to 12. She backs toward an easy chair and lowers herself onto its sagging cushion.
“Are Dad and Uncle John coming here?” Dean asks. “Or are you meeting them back at the Silver Dollar?”