“I’m meeting them. Soon as this is over.”
From the television comes the wheezing, rollicking chords and notes of accordion music.
“That’s about the sound,” Dean says, “I made when I was heaving my guts out.”
“It’s only the one song,” his mother says. “You want me to change the channel?”
Dean pushes himself to his feet. “Leave it. I’m going to lie down awhile.”
As he walks barefoot toward the bedroom, Dean’s mother calls after him, “I’ll clear out soon as this is over.”
“Watch as long as you like.”
The bedroom walls are painted a blue so pale that only in the faint light of late evening or early dawn do they look blue at all. At any other hour, the room passes for white. Edie received permission from the landlord to paint the apartment, and the color of the bedroom was her idea. Into a gallon of white paint she stirred in a little cerulean blue, a drizzle swallowed immediately by the white. But the blue was there.
“Why bother?” Dean had asked her. “It’s not even noticeable. Why not leave it white?” “It’s private,” Edie said. “Only we’ll know. It’s roman-tic.” Dean didn’t understand, but he didn’t dare say so. The walls of every other room in the apartment remained white.
Dean lies down near the edge of the bed. He raises his knees up toward his waist. As his stomach and intestines flutter and pinch, his lips draw into a tight line, and he covers his eyes with his hand.
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
11
But nothing can keep those thoughts from seeping in. He’s never been what you’d call confident or self-assured—just one more way he and Roy are so very different—but lately almost anything at all can set off another wave of uncertainty about his life. This morning he had a bout of vomiting right after Edie left, and he couldn’t be sure what started it, the actual illness or the sound of a car door slamming as his wife climbed into a car with his brother.
From the living room comes the sound of his mother’s laughter.
High-pitched but steady. Then her laughter stops, replaced by the heavy tread of her footsteps. After a moment her laughter starts up again. The antenna must have needed adjustment.
When he wakes up, his mother is standing in the bedroom doorway. “I’m heading out,” she says. “You want me to make you some soup before I go? Chicken noodle?”
Dean glances at the bedside clock. His mother has had time to watch more than a single episode of Lawrence Welk. “No,” he says.
“That’s all right.”
Mrs. Linderman braces herself in the doorframe. “Maybe you should give me a call when they get back.”
“At home or the Silver Dollar?”
“I’m leaving for home soon. If your father and your uncle ain’t ready to go, they can find their own way back.”
“We’ll see,” Dean says. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow for sure.”
“Supper’s around five. Heat or no, I’m roasting a chicken. If you get your appetite back, you’re welcome to partake. The both of you.”
As soon as the door to the apartment clicks shut, Dean gets the yearbook down from the shelf again. He switches on the lamp beside the bed and thumbs through the heavy glossy pages until he arrives at the portraits of the graduating seniors.
He doesn’t linger on the photograph of Dennis Arneson, whose father died in Korea and who still wore a look of betrayal, nor on the practiced smile of Dorothy Bergstrom, nor on Doris Lantz, her pocked, pitted face smoothed over by darkroom magic. He skims quickly past Gail and Dale Peterson, the other set of twins in the class, and past the girl who was traded from boy to boy like a baseball card. Finally Dean’s
12
Larry Watson
eyes come to rest again on Edith Pritchard. She isn’t smiling, but many of the young men and women in these pages aren’t. Eastern Montana doesn’t fill its young with a lot of false promises. Like the faces in many other portraits, Edie’s is angled to the side. But just like her picture as part of the homecoming court, something is different . . . No one else seems as lovely and alive on the page as she does, staring out at the eyes that stare at her. Dean once asked her how the photographer caught that look. She laughed and said, “He told me to act like I knew something no one else knew.” And that was years before cerulean blue.
Roy parks in a driveway of sorts, two dirt tracks worn through sparse grass, and under a lone cottonwood, the only shade on this dusty edge of town.
“You still want to wait in the car?” he asks Edie.
“If it’s all the same to you.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
The front porch of the tumbledown little house is missing boards, and a window screen has torn loose and curled upward. Masking tape covers a crack in a front window. A corner of the house is splintered, as if an animal has gnawed on it.
Roy climbs out of the car and shuts the door quietly. The keys still dangle from the ignition. “Turn the radio on if you like,” he says.
“The battery’s got plenty of juice.”
“You’re sure this is the place?”
Roy waves a hand in the direction of the gravel road running past the house. “You see any other possibilities?”
Yet Roy seems reluctant to walk away from the car. Finally he says, “I’ll check around back first. Maybe I can get a look at the truck before the haggling starts.”
He takes a few steps, then looks back. “Wish me luck.”
“You don’t need it,” says Edie.
That brings his smile back. “We all need it.”
You’d think Roy Linderman had been the track star. Shoulders
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
13
back, a bounce in his long stride—nothing like Dean’s loose-limbed slow, slouching walk.
Edie turns on the radio and adjusts the dial until the static clears and a station comes in. CHAK—Moose Jaw! But in another moment, the song that seems to play once or twice every hour comes on, and Edie switches off the radio. My God, she thinks, even in Canada they can’t get enough of that boy jumping off a bridge. Overhead the cottonwood leaves applaud the silence.
She opens the glove compartment and begins a desultory inspection of its contents. A flashlight. An unopened pack of Camels.
Match books. A comb. Maps of Montana and North Dakota. When she lifts the maps, she jerks her hand back as if she’d been stung.
Under the maps is a gun, a revolver with a wood handle and a blue-black barrel that gleams even in the dark glove box.
Edie has seen guns before. She’s lived in Montana all her life. Not a highway sign or a rural mailbox is without its bullet holes. The gun racks in living rooms and rec rooms. The rifles and shotguns boys brought to school for hunting after the bell rang. The dead deer strapped to car roofs and hanging out the back of truck beds. In high school Edie dated a boy who said he had a pistol under the front seat of his car, though he never showed it to her. Her own father’s rifle and shotgun leaned in a corner of the front closet where everyone hung their coats, and when her father died, her uncle went directly to that closet to claim those guns as his own.
And yet Edie has never touched a gun. She reaches into the glove compartment and takes hold of the revolver’s grip. So many curves in the wood and warm steel . . . the round barrel, the cylinder, the hoop of the trigger guard. The gun fits her hand as if it wants to be held . . . but after only a few seconds, Edie puts the revolver back and covers it again with the maps.