7. Mandy
Mandy
The blister had turned into something else.
The skin at the base of her thumb, where the pitchfork rode, had gone tight and yellow and hard, a small ugly thing she kept pressing with her other thumb to feel it not hurt.
Those first days it had wept through a bandage every night.
Now it was just part of the hand, and she looked at it like it belonged to somebody she was getting to know.
The same hand had set her old phone face-down on a counter in Amarillo a week ago. She had cut the cord on purpose. Standing at Lucky’s rail, she wanted to pick one up again—not to be reached, only to reach one person and set it down.
Lucky butted the empty bottle out of her other hand and went looking for more anyway, all forehead and indignation, his white face streaked dark where he had shoved it into the straw. The single white sock on his off-side hind flashed when he wheeled.
“That’s it. That’s the whole show.” She let him lip at her sleeve, his tongue rough as a cat’s and twice the size. “You would think nobody ever fed you.”
Late sun came down the valley flat and gold.
In the distance, past the corrals, a truck door shut.
Junebug stamped in her stall and blew, and the whole place ticked and settled, the work of the day mostly emptied out of it and the work of the evening not yet started.
Mandy’s thighs still screamed from yesterday’s ride, a deep private ache that ran from her seat bones to the backs of her knees and that she would have died before letting anyone see her favor.
She’d ridden three hours and slept four and she would have done it again tomorrow if he asked. If anyone asked.
“There she is.” Mary Jo came down the aisle with a banker’s box under one arm and her reading glasses shoved up into hair the color of a fox in October. “Feeding the future T-bone.”
“Don’t say that to him. He doesn’t know.”
“He’s a bull calf on a cow-calf outfit, honey, he will figure it out.” But Mary Jo stopped at the rail and let Lucky smell her knuckles. She set the box on a hay bale. “You eat today?”
“I had a thing. At lunch.”
“A thing.”
“A sandwich. Walt made coffee and I had a sandwich.”
“Mm.” Mary Jo dug in her jacket pocket and came out with her phone, turned it over once in her hand, and held it out across the rail. Just held it there, between them, in the gold light. “You got people?”
Mandy looked at it. Black, scuffed, a cracked corner taped over, the most ordinary object in the world.
She’d had nineteen dollars, a stolen car, and a wedding dress balled in a restroom the day she decided the cleanest way to disappear was to throw her own phone away for good.
She hadn’t held one in a week. She’d thought, leaving it, that it was the same as not wanting it.
“I don’t,” she said.
“Everybody’s got somebody.” Mary Jo didn’t move the phone.
“I’m not asking who. I drove out here to do Andy’s books and I am going to sit in that office an hour and yell at his handwriting, and if a person wanted to take a phone down to the far end of the barn where the signal is better and there’s nobody to hear, I’d be the last to know about it.
” She let that sit. “It is a spare I keep for the truck. Leave it on the kitchen table when you’re through and I’ll get it back tomorrow. That’s all.”
Something pulled tight behind her sternum, and she didn’t look straight at it.
In Highland Park, a phone came with strings, a thousand thin ones.
Every call she’d ever made had been logged in somebody’s head as data, leverage, a thing that could be brought up later over a dinner she hadn’t chosen.
Mary Jo offered it with the same plain generosity she might have shown a stranger caught in the rain.
“Thank you,” Mandy said, and it came out rougher than she meant.
“Don’t thank me.” Mary Jo picked up her box and went, boots loud on the concrete, talking to herself about her brother’s threes that looked like eights. “Man builds a thing the size of a county and can’t write a legible numeral.”
The far end of the barn was where they kept the tack that didn’t get used, oiled saddles on a long rack and a wall of bridles gone stiff, and the window there looked out at the meadow climbing up toward the dark line of timber.
She sat on an overturned bucket in the last of the light.
The number came to her without her deciding to remember it.
She dialed. It rang twice into a silence so wide she could hear the timber moving.
A breath. Then, low and fast and careful, a voice that did not say hello. “Who is this?”
“Tess.”
The sound that came out of Tessa Gordon was not a word.
It was a punched-out, half-strangled thing, and underneath it, Mandy heard a car door and the click of a lock and the muffle of somebody cupping a hand around a phone.
“Oh my God. Oh my God, don’t, hold on, hold on, I’m in the parking garage at NorthPark, give me one second, I have to…
” and a rustle, and then closer, fierce, dropped to almost nothing.
“Are you okay? Do not tell me where you are. Are you okay? Are you safe? Are you hurt? Are you in a basement somewhere, chained? I swear to God, Amanda.”
“I’m fine. Tess. I’m fine. I’m better than fine.”
“You left your phone in a gas station.” Tessa’s voice cracked straight down the middle. “I had to find that out from Marisol who heard it from the trooper. Do you understand, I have spent a week picturing you in a ditch?”
She had, in fact, been in a ditch. Mandy decided this was not the moment. “I’m not in a ditch.”
“You sound…” Tessa stopped and Mandy heard her swallow. “You sound weird. You sound far away.”
“I’m a long way away.”
“No, that’s not…” Tessa’s breath caught, froze, and came back steadier, and for a second Mandy was back with her bestie who could cry for exactly four seconds and then go to work.
“You sound like before,” Tessa said. “You sound like you, like the version of you that used to climb out the window at the lake house. I haven’t heard that voice since we were sixteen. Where the hell are you that you sound sixteen?”
The girl who climbed out windows had not disappeared. She had been waiting under everything Dallas required of her.
“I’m working,” Mandy said.
A pause. “You’re what?”
“I have a job, Tess. I have calluses. I have a calf.” She looked at the blister-that-wasn’t.
“His name is Lucky. He’s mine. I pulled him out of a cow at three in the morning.
Well, I held the towels, a man pulled him, but I had the towels and I had the bottle and he lived, and he’s mine, and I muck four stalls before the sun comes up and I can saddle a horse and I rode three hours yesterday and I can barely sit down and it’s the best I’ve felt in my entire life. ”
“Amanda Leigh Miller,” Tessa said slowly, “did you join a cult?”
“I didn’t join a cult.”
“Because that’s what people in cults say. They say they’ve never been happier and they have a calf.”
“It’s not a cult, it’s a ranch.”
“A ranch.” The word came out of Tessa like a foreign object. “You. You who once complained about a five-hundred-dollar facial because the room smelled like, your words, the inside of a candle. You’re shoveling. You said shoveling.”
“Mucking.”
“What is the difference?”
“There’s no real difference. I just like saying it now.
” Mandy laughed, sitting on a bucket in a barn with manure on her boots and a stranger’s flannel hanging off her shoulders.
Tessa laughed too, wet-eyed and disbelieving, and for a little while the parking garage in Dallas and the barn in Colorado felt like the same room.
Then Tessa got quiet, and Mandy felt it change before she said anything, felt the temperature drop through twelve hundred miles of nothing.
“Okay. Okay, listen to me.” Tessa’s voice went fast and low.
“I am so glad to hear from you that I just did a dumb thing, which is talk to you for two whole minutes on this phone. So now I’m going to be quick, and then I’m going to give you a different number, and you are never going to call this one again. Don’t talk yet. Let me get it out.”
Mandy gripped the phone, the taped corner sharp under her thumb, and said nothing.
“About three days after you left, my phone started doing a thing where it was warm in my bag when I hadn’t touched it.
And my dad got a call from your dad. And then a man called my office about an unrelated matter that turned out to be very related, gave me a company name, and asked me, very politely, whether I’d heard from you.
Very politely, Mandy. The kind of polite that has a lawyer standing behind it.
” A breath. “So a few days ago I went to the Walgreens on Mockingbird and I bought a prepaid with cash, in a hat, like a person in a bad movie, because I figured sooner or later you’d surface and I was not going to be the reason anybody found you.
That’s the phone you use from here on. This one, the one we’re on right this second, I think this one’s being tracked somehow. ”
The cold came up through the bucket and into her. “They’re listening to your phone.”
“I think they might be.” Tessa’s voice softened, hearing the fear come up in her.
“I’m not telling you to scare you. I’m telling you so you understand.
This isn’t your dad being sad his little girl ran off.
I mean it’s that too, but that’s the part you can see.
Underneath it’s a project, Mandy. There are people on it. It has a budget.”
Mandy looked at Mary Jo’s scuffed phone. She had called the only number she knew. Somewhere, a machine might have written it down.
“Give me the number,” she said.
Tessa gave her the new number. Mandy took it on the first pass and checked the second. She had memorized a hundred seating charts and donors’ names. This number was hers.
“Say it back,” Tessa said.
She said it back.
“That one only. Never this one again.”
“Tell me the rest,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Tell me the rest, Tess.”
Tessa told her plainly. Four hundred people had watched Harlan Miller stand and announce that his daughter was under strain, unwell, and resting somewhere private.
The wedding was postponed. The family requested discretion.
By the time the guests left, Amanda Miller had not fled a marriage she did not want. She had broken under pressure.
“He’s managing it,” Mandy said.
“He’s managing it like it’s a quarter that came in soft.” Tessa’s voice was very even. “Like you’re a bad number he’s going to talk the analysts down off of. And the thing is—”
She stopped, started again. “The whole town thinks you had a breakdown, Mandy. Not that you woke up. They think you broke. And your dad would rather they think that. He’d rather you be crazy than be right. Because if you’re crazy, he can fix it. He knows how to fix that.”
Outside the window, the timber had gone black. Mandy thought of the ivory slip in the spare room and her father standing before four hundred people, turning the first public choice of her life into proof that she could not choose.
“And Preston?” she said. She made herself say it.
The quality of Tessa’s silence changed.
“Tess. And Preston?”
“Preston is not acting like a man who got left at the altar,” Tessa said carefully.
“That’s the part I needed to tell you. If he were heartbroken, I wouldn’t have bought a phone in a hat.
Heartbroken men get drunk and post things and call you at two a.m., and you block them, and it’s sad, and it’s over.
” Tessa paused. “He’s not doing any of that.
He’s telling people you two are working through a difficult time.
Present tense. He came to the Hendersons’ on Saturday and he was, Mandy, he was fine.
He was charming. He talked about the foundation.
He said the wedding was postponed, postponed, like a flight, and somebody asked if everything was all right.
He smiled and said these things happen and you don’t throw away something this valuable over a rough patch. ”
“Valuable,” Mandy said.
“He didn’t say her. He said something.”
The word sat in the cold barn. Mandy remembered Preston’s fingers around her arm, a grip that looked tender from across a room and closed like a gate up close.
“I have to go in a minute,” Mandy said. “It’s not even my phone.”
“Okay. Okay.” Tessa’s voice came back fast and bright and false-cheerful, the armor going up, and then it dropped again, all the way, down to the place where the two of them actually lived.
“I just need you to hear one thing before you go and I need you to actually hear it, not do the thing you do where you go warm and pretty and stop listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your dad will come around eventually because he’s a banker and you’re a depreciated asset and at some point the math on chasing you stops working.” Tessa took a breath that Mandy heard travel the whole twelve hundred miles. “But Preston isn’t a banker. He’s not going to just let you go, Mandy.”
Up at the house a light came on in the kitchen window, yellow against the blue dark, and a man’s shape moved across it once and was gone.
The pipes somewhere under the barn knocked as the cold worked into them.
Lucky had lain down in his straw at the far end, a black shape with a pale face, and his breathing was the loudest thing for a hundred yards.
“I hear you,” Mandy said.
“You better. I love you. Don’t be in a ditch.”
“I love you. I’m not in a ditch.”
The screen went dark.
Mandy headed toward the house.
The kitchen window stayed yellow ahead of her.