“To tell you the truth,” Roy says, “he reminded me a little of Dad.
For about a month after he sold the ranch, he looked like death itself.
Drinking more than ever. Staring off at nothing. Then Mom sort of gave him a kick in the ass. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she told him. Get with it. This is your life now.”
“Easy advice,” Edie says. “If you can follow it.”
“Usually isn’t much choice in the matter, is there?”
“I suppose not.”
The waitress, a shy young woman with stooped shoulders, appears and takes their orders. A T-bone and hash browns for Roy, chopped sirloin and a baked potato for Edie. Roy holds his highball glass aloft and rattles the ice. “And could I get another one of these?” He points to Edie’s half-full glass of beer. “How about you, Edie? Another Budweiser?”
“I’m okay.”
As the waitress walks away, Roy says, “That’s something you wouldn’t have seen not too many years ago.”
“What’s that?”
“A place like this hiring an Indian gal.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Roy leans closer and when he speaks, even in his lowered voice, his breath causes the flame of the candle on their table to flicker. “They
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had a big scandal up here a while back,” he says. “A doctor or politician or somebody was raping Indian women. He’d been at it for years.”
“My God. They finally caught him?”
“Killed himself before it could come to a trial.”
“My God.” An air-conditioning vent is nearby, and Edie is sitting right in the path of its cool breeze. She rubs her hands on her bare shoulders.
“I have a jacket out in the trunk,” says Roy.
“I’m all right.”
“And then a few years ago, the local sheriff was shot and killed.
I’m telling you, Edie, it’s the Wild West up here.”
The waitress returns with Roy’s Jim Beam highball and places it on the starched white tablecloth. “Your salads will be right out,” she says.
“No hurry,” Roy replies.
Roy sits back in his chair, and for a long wordless moment, he gazes at Edie. From another corner of the restaurant comes a man’s booming laugh. Knives and forks scrape and clink against dinner plates. The smell of whiskey, of cigar smoke, of charred meat drifting through the shadows. Saturday night in Bentrock.
“Anybody sees us here together,” Roy says, “they’d assume we’re a couple.”
“But we’re not.”
“We could have been, Edie. If you’d have let things go on a little further. We both wanted something more to happen, didn’t we? And after, then it would have been you and me for sure. I’m right about that, aren’t I?”
“Stop, Roy. Please. Just stop.”
The waitress brings their salads, and it looks as though a single head of lettuce has been sliced in half for each bowl. She places a carousel of salad dressings on the table.
Neither Edie nor Roy lifts a fork. Edie again rubs her shoulders for warmth, and Roy lights a cigarette.
“I can go get that jacket for you,” he offers again.
“I’ll be all right.” Edie looks around the Spur. The dining room is filling up. Maybe they could have been a couple. After all, it hadn’t
The Lives of Edie Pritchard
19
been Dean—her boyfriend—who showed up on the doorstep on that winter morning when she was home from high school—home alone, and in her pajamas. And she’d been angry with Dean, giving her strep.
Roy didn’t care that she was sick and looked it. And she was curious about Roy. She’d heard what other girls had said about him . . . and he was Dean’s twin. What must that be like? But they’d stopped. She’d stopped. She was curious about Roy, but she loved Dean.
There isn’t a table in the Spur now that doesn’t have at least one man and one woman seated at it. At one a man covers a woman’s hand with his own. At another a man strikes a match to light a woman’s cigarette. Yes, perhaps she and Roy could have been a couple, but that’s not the same as should have been.
“You want to trade seats?” Roy asks.
She shakes her head no.
Roy takes another long drink from his Jim Beam and water. “Look, Edie. I’m sorry if what I said in the car earlier offended you. But, damn, since when can’t you tell a good-looking woman she looks good?”
“My grandmother said if you say ‘I’m sorry, but . . . ,’ you aren’t really sorry.”
“Was that your grandmother Fitzgerald or Pritchard?”
“Grandma Fitz.”
“Wise woman.”
“Was she? In the last year of her life, she told me if she’d been smart, she’d have moved to Sacramento when her son and his wife invited her to come live with them. Instead she said, ‘I have to stay in Montana, but for the life of me I can’t think what for.’”
“I remember she used to roll her own smokes.”
Edie laughs. “Even when her hands got bad, she could still roll her own.”
“Would you like to live in Sacramento?”
“Dean and I used to talk about moving. But we’re okay where we are. For now.”
Roy leans forward again. This time he pushes the candle to the side as if he might need to climb across the table. “Here’s what I’d like to do. Take off with nothing but the clothes on my back, a few
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dollars in my pocket, and the car I’m driving. I’d leave Gladstone and go to, say, Great Falls. There I’d swap the car for another. Then I’d go to maybe Pocatello. Or Denver, even. Make another deal. See if I could add to my bankroll. Make enough to stay in the Brown Palace.
You ever been there? Incredible hotel. Just beautiful. But that would be part of the plan—stay in a fancy hotel in every town. And then finally end up in California, driving a convertible alongside the ocean and with more money than I left with. I was reading this article the other day, about San Francisco and all the kids going there—
hippies I guess they are—just to hang out. What do you think? You’d fit right in with your sandals. Maybe I’d grow a beard. Wear some of those love beads. Can you feature that?”
Edie’s large green eyes gleam with something other than candle-light. “I’ve always wanted to go to New York,” she says. “Just to be there . . .”
“We could do that,” Roy says eagerly. “We wouldn’t have to go west. East would work too. No reason why not—”
“We?”
“What do you say? We have two vehicles to get started. I’ve got a little money. We could buy you some clothes in . . . I don’t know.
Fargo, maybe? Minneapolis?”
Her face darkens as she sits back out of the reach of the candle-light. “We? ”
“We’ll leave here and head out on Highway Two. Straight across North Dakota. I know that road. We can make good time—”
“Stop it.” Edie covers her ears with her hands. “Stop it-stop it- stop it!”
“All right. All right,” Roy says. “Just having a little fun. You know me.” He takes a swallow of his whiskey. “I never know when to quit.