9. Mandy
Mandy
She’d been kept her whole life. Guarded, driven, walked through rooms on an arm that made sure of her, handed from one set of careful hands to the next like a thing that mustn’t be dropped.
So the strangest part of Marlow on a Saturday morning wasn’t the cold or the quiet.
It was that nobody in it was keeping her at all.
No car idled at the curb with its engine running for her.
No hand came to her elbow. She walked the half-mile of the main drag entirely unheld and waited to feel exposed, the way she’d been braced to feel every hour since Amarillo and what came up instead, treacherous and warm, was the opposite of exposed.
She’d learned somewhere along the line that feeling safe and being safe were two different animals, and that the first one was the one that walked you out into the open.
She kept her hands in her pockets and didn’t trust it.
She trusted it anyway. Both at once. That was the trouble with the whole morning.
Marlow had three stoplights and all of them worked.
Every other person nodded to her as she walked, because she was in Stillwater clothes, and Marlow had figured out by now that Stillwater clothes meant she was a known quantity.
The rest could keep to itself. A man going into the hardware store touched his cap at her.
A woman coming out of the bank smiled at her with her eyes only, woman to woman in a place where everybody’s been cold all morning.
Nobody asked her name. Her name was: she’s with Stillwater.
She hadn’t known, until just now, that she’d been hungry for that.
She had two hours and a list. A brown padded envelope to pick up for Mary Jo at the post office.
A paper sack to fill at the hardware store for Lucky.
Andrew had said meet me at the Antler at eleven and given her a folded twenty out of his wallet for lunch, which he hadn’t done before.
She’d taken it without commenting on the change.
He hadn’t commented on her not commenting.
They’d ridden into town in his truck early, heater going hard, a silence between them that was the loudest silence she’d ever sat inside of.
He’d let her out at the corner by the post office. He’d said, eleven. She’d said, eleven. They hadn’t said anything about Tuesday night at the corral gate, because they hadn’t said anything about it since and, apparently, they weren’t going to.
She’d watched his truck pull away down the main drag. She’d stood on the sidewalk in the gray light with her gloved hands in the pockets of Mary Jo’s ex-husband’s canvas coat. She’d thought, well, all right, that’s what we’re doing then. She’d turned and gone in to wait for the post office to open.
Now it was ten-thirty. She’d done her errands.
She’d walked the half-mile twice. She’d stood across the street from the Antler for one whole minute by the bank’s clock just to feel what it was like to stand on a sidewalk with no driver waiting at the curb, no phone in a clutch, no town pretending it didn’t recognize her face from the society pages.
Marlow didn’t know her face. Marlow had decided she was Mary Jo’s new one, the woman in the old brown hat, and that was enough.
She caught her reflection in the bookstore window beside her.
A woman in a brown work hat with a braid down her back, a coat too big in the shoulders, a flannel hanging past her hips, jeans tucked into boots too large.
Her braid had gone from honey to road-honey, finer at the temples than it used to be from being scraped back every dawn.
There was a bruise on the back of her left hand from a stall door and she didn’t remember getting it.
Her father would not have recognized her. He would have walked past this coat, braid, and oversized boots because he had spent thirty years building a daughter nobody overlooked. The thought, instead of frightening her, made her smile.
She crossed the street.
The bell over the Antler’s door was loose enough in its bracket that it had to ring twice on the swing.
A small first ding and a larger second one.
The second was the one that announced you.
The heat hit her face. The smell came at her at the same time: bacon fat going in a pan that hadn’t been emptied since dawn, coffee burned down to the bottom inch, the green smell of pickle relish from a half-eaten plate near the door, fryer oil one day past its change.
The room was loud. It was the noise of a Saturday in October in a town where the gather was finishing and the elk season was on, men in canvas and men in blaze orange and a few women in both, the booths full and the counter full and a line of three at the register.
Nobody looked at her except the woman behind the counter, who looked at her once and said, Mary Jo’s, and tipped her chin to a two-seat booth in the back corner under the window onto the alley.
Mandy made her way down the aisle between the booths and the counter, the paper sack against her hip.
She’d been looked at her whole life. She’d been looked at by photographers and waiters and her father’s friends and women her own age cataloging her dress.
She walked the Antler aisle and not a head turned.
The diner ate around her. A man at the counter laughed at something a man two stools over said and didn’t look up from his eggs.
Two women in a booth on her right were arguing in low voices about a hospice schedule.
A boy of maybe ten was building a tower out of jelly packets with the concentration of a surgeon.
She walked through it untouched. She slid into the back booth and put the sack on the bench beside her and laid her hands flat on the table the way Mary Jo had taught her to lay them.
The waitress came over with the pot. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
She poured. Mandy thanked her. The waitress went away.
She drank the first cup at a slow steady pace and thought about almost nothing.
The radiator under the window clanked. The clock above the register was three minutes fast. The cook called an order up in his cook’s bark and somebody at the counter answered him in the same key.
She thought about Lucky and the new nipples in her paper sack and whether they’d fit the bottle without the leak the last ones had.
She thought about Mary Jo across the street at her office and whether Mary Jo would come over for lunch or stay there to make Andrew come to her, which Mary Jo did sometimes when she wanted a thing said in private.
She thought about the corral gate at dusk and Andrew’s hand on the latch and her hand on a buckle and the half step he’d taken. About how she hadn’t moved back. About how she’d lifted her chin. She’d thought about this since the second it happened. She’d thought about it ever since.
She was thinking about it now over a coffee in a booth in a diner that smelled like bacon fat and pickle relish, and it occurred to her that maybe this was just going to be what her interior weather was now.
She was going to carry around the memory of a man taking one half step toward her at dusk for the rest of her natural life, and knowing that didn’t make it stop.
Which is why she was already a little porous when the words came through the back of the booth.
She didn’t catch the start. She caught the middle.
“A fella called me Tuesday.”
“Yeah.”
“Said he was a lawyer.”
“Where out of?”
“Dallas.”
A pause. The clink of a cup setting down. The first voice was older and dry. The second was younger and patient.
“He said he was looking for a girl,” the first voice said.
“What kind of girl?”
The first voice dropped a half tone. “Blonde,” the voice said. “Twenty-seven. Said she might be using another name. Said she might be working out here.”
“How would he know that?”
“He didn’t say. He said the family wanted her home, quiet. Used that word three or four times. Discreet. Discreet. Like saying it enough times made it that way.”
Mandy had stopped breathing without deciding to.
“How much?” the younger voice asked.
The older voice gave a number that had a comma in it.
She didn’t move. She didn’t put the cup down.
She didn’t lift it either. Her hand was around the white porcelain in a grip that had become, in the space of one sentence, the only thing holding her to the booth.
She was aware of every place her skin touched the cup with a precision she hadn’t felt since the last time her body had moved without asking her, at the end of an aisle, the ring barely to the first knuckle and Preston’s hand closing over hers, the instant she’d taken her hand back and left her shoes on the marble before she knew she’d decided a thing.
The diner had gone very loud and very quiet at the same time.
Plates being stacked. A baby crying two booths over.
The cook calling order up in his cook’s bark.
Her own pulse in her ears, perfectly distinct.
“You going to make the call?” the younger voice asked.
“Hadn’t decided,” the older voice said.
The first voice wasn’t one she knew. The second she half-recognized, maybe, from somewhere. She couldn’t place it and didn’t try. She made herself drink her coffee. She made herself swallow. The coffee tasted like nothing at all.
The phrase that floated up in her head wasn’t a phrase she’d ever used.
It came up whole and unbidden, in her father’s voice, which she didn’t appreciate.
Blood money. That was the name for what was being offered to a man in a sheepskin coat in a booth behind her for the news of where a blonde twenty-seven-year-old happened to be working under another name.
Blood money was what you called it when the money had a person under it, and the person was you.