Chapter 2 Ninety miles and one pass
The frontage road ran west out of Verlon alongside the highway for two miles before it let you back onto it, and the sodium lamps quit a long way short of that, the way everything in Verlon quit, and by the time she got past the last of them the satin was sticking to the backs of her knees.
Seventeen pounds of dress. She had not known the number until the woman in Ellery said it, pleased, like weight was a feature.
Now she knew it in her hips. The skirt dragged a grey stripe of road dust up the front of itself, the bodice held her at the ribs where she could not reach the lacing, and the bra strap on her left shoulder had stopped being an emergency about four hundred yards back and become simply a fact about her.
Her right hand still had the knife in it. She kept noticing it the way you notice you are still holding a receipt.
Cars went by. Not many — a Saturday in August on a road nobody took unless they lived on it — but enough.
A silver Buick slowed and she did not turn her head and it went on.
A kid in a flatbed hollered something out the window that the wind took.
A woman in a Suburban with two car seats in the back looked at her for a long stretch of road, and Maeve watched the brake lights come on, and go off, and the Suburban keep going, and stood there in the weeds feeling her own entire life go by at fifty-five miles an hour and not stop.
Behind her the water tower stood up over the elevator, grey where the paint had gone. She could still see it. That was the trouble with the flat. In Verlon you could walk for an hour and still be standing in the middle of the place you had left.
Go back.
It came up out of her quietly and reasonably, the way it would have come up out of her mother.
It was not a long walk. The hall would be sitting down now.
Everett would be out front in the good grey suit with his hand on the back of his neck.
If she came in the side door in the next ten minutes there was a version of the afternoon where she had been sick in the ladies’ and somebody found her, and Charlene Bidwell laughed about nerves at every table for the next twenty years.
That was all it would ever have been. One bad half hour.
A story at Thanksgiving. Nobody would even have to be told.
She was still walking while she thought it. That was the only mercy in it — her legs had not consulted her.
The phone was in her purse, off and face down.
She had a clear picture of what was in it.
A stack of missed calls by now, maybe more.
Dara first. Then her mother. Then Everett, who would not call more than twice, because he was not a man who called three times; he was a man who put the phone in his pocket and made one call to somebody else instead.
She kept her hand off the purse and walked.
The truck came up behind her about ten past two and she heard it before she saw it — the long descending groan of a loaded diesel coming off the highway onto the frontage.
Then it was alongside and past her and stopping, air brakes going off like somebody dropping a sheet of tin.
Forty feet of flatbed came to a halt with big square bales stacked and strapped three high and hay chaff coming back off the load in the heat shimmer.
OSTROFF was stencilled on the door in paint that had been red once.
The window came down. The man inside was sixty-odd and thick through the neck and sunburnt in the exact shape of a short-sleeved shirt, with white hair cut by somebody at home and a pair of drugstore glasses folded on the dash where they were doing nobody any good.
He looked at her. He looked at the dress, once, top to bottom, the way a man looks at a load to see how it is going to ride.
He did not look at the knife. She was fairly sure he saw it.
“Where you headed?”
And Maeve Purnell stood in the ditch weeds with her mouth open and found that she had nothing.
She waited. That was the honest truth of it.
She stood there and waited the way she had waited in the truck showroom and at the clinic in Ellery and at every dinner table in three years, waited the standard two seconds for somebody to come in over the top of her and finish it — she’s going to her sister’s, she’s had a shock, she’s going home.
The two seconds went by. The diesel knocked over. The man behind the wheel sat there with one wrist over the top of the steering wheel and waited right back.
He was not being kind, and he was not being unkind. He was not being anything. He had asked a question and he was going to sit there burning fuel until the question got answered, because that was how a man found out whether he was pulling over or not.
“I don’t know yet,” Maeve said.
It came out cracked. It was the first true sentence she had said out loud to another human being since about the middle of May.
Ostroff nodded like she had given him a road number.
“I got a drop to make and I ain’t in a hurry,” he said, and reached across and shoved the passenger door, and it came open about eight inches on its own weight. “You can figure it out sitting down.”
Getting into the cab in seventeen pounds of satin took her two tries and most of her dignity.
There was no step worth the name; she got a knee up, got a fist of skirt in each hand, and hauled, and something in the dress gave with a small dry sound and she decided not to care about it.
The seat was hot vinyl with a folded horse blanket over the split.
The floor was a drift of hay chaff, an aluminum thermos, a clipboard, and a litter of cardboard coffee cups.
It smelled like the inside of a barn in July. Alfalfa and diesel and hot plastic and, under all of it, a cigarette somebody had put out in this cab in about 1998.
She got the door shut. She got the skirt in after her, most of it, and she put the knife down on the seat beside her thigh because she had run out of hands, and that was the first time in two miles it had left her fist.
Ostroff picked the glasses up off the dash and put them on his nose and looked at the mirror and pulled out.
He did not ask. That was what she kept waiting for and kept not getting.
Ninety miles, a woman in a wedding dress with the back of it cut open and a cake knife on the seat, and the man drove and let the radio do the talking, and when the radio went to static on the long bend past the beet dump he turned it off and let the engine do the talking instead.
At the stop sign where the frontage road met the highway he put his indicator on and then he took his foot off the clutch and stopped it and looked over at her.
“Which way?”
Maeve looked out through a windshield with a dead grasshopper on it.
East was the flat. East was stubble and beet dumps and every town out on it where Everett’s father did business with the county, and where every second person would know her face by Tuesday.
West was the pass.
She had been up it twice in her life, both times as a passenger, both times as far as the summit pullout and back because Everett liked the view and hated the road past it.
“West,” Maeve said.
Her voice did it better that time. It came out of her chest instead of her throat, and it was so strange and so loud in the cab that she put her hand on the satin over her sternum, as if she had to hold the place it came out of.
“West,” Ostroff agreed, and hauled the wheel over. “Up the pass, then. Coldwater. Ninety miles and a bit of a climb, and my drop’s on the way.”
The terror started about twenty minutes later and it lasted an hour.
It did not feel like fear. That was the part nobody tells you. It felt like arithmetic.
Eleven dollars. That was the first number and it did not get better after it.
A lipstick. A phone she was not going to turn on, on a plan that Everett paid, which meant it was a phone in the same way the Tacoma sitting outside her mother’s house was a truck — hers to use and never hers.
No bank card, because the account had Everett’s name first on it and she had not wanted to make a thing of it.
No job. Not one day of work in three years, and before that the Legion hall kitchen in Verlon at nineteen, and the counter at the feed store, and that was the whole of her working life, seven years back and three years cold.
Soft hands. She turned one over on the satin of her lap and looked at the pale crescents at the cuticles where the manicure had grown out and thought about walking into a kitchen anywhere and holding those hands out to a woman with a clipboard.
No plan. That was not even a number. That was just a hole where the numbers should have gone.
She watched the mile markers come and she did the sum again and it came out the same way every time, and the astonishing thing — the thing she could not get over — was that she had said west anyway and the truck was still going west and nobody had stopped it.
She had done that. There was nobody in this cab to blame it on.
Around three they came through Rennick with its four buildings and its dog, and around half past they pulled into a ranch gate with a cattle guard and a sign that said KELSO & SONS and a loader already coming across the yard.
Ostroff got out. Maeve sat in the cab with the engine off and the heat coming up through the floor, and a man in a torn cap took eight bales off the top of the stack, and she watched all of it through a windshield, and every minute of those twenty minutes was a minute she could have gotten down out of the truck and asked either of those men for a phone.
She did not get down.
Not getting down took more out of her than the knife had.
Ostroff came back with two bottles of water sweating out of the ranch fridge and a sleeve of soda crackers, and put them on the seat between them, and said, “Kelso’s wife,” which was apparently the whole explanation.
Maeve got her purse open and got out one of the eleven dollars.
“I’ve got this.”
He looked at the dollar for a second. Then he took it — took it properly, put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket — and said, “Then that’s yours,” and started the truck.
She sat with the cold bottle in both hands and could not have said why her eyes had gone hot.
It was a dollar. It was a bottle of water she had paid too much for out of money she could not spare, and it was the first thing she had bought with her own money since the spring she turned twenty-three, and nobody had told her she was being silly, and nobody had reached across and paid for her over the top of her head.
The grade started at four.
The flat let go of them all at once — stubble, then a river willow bottom, then the road tipped up and the engine dropped two gears and started to work.
Sagebrush gave over to pine. The air coming in the wing window changed temperature so sharply she felt it on her collarbone, twenty degrees off in ten minutes, and it smelled of hot brake and resin and rock, and the light came down through the timber in bars across the hood.
Ostroff drove it slow with the jake brake growling on the corners.
Twice he pulled onto the wide gravel to let somebody by.
There was a rock face on one side with water coming out of it and running in the gutter, and a drop on the other, and one dead tree standing up silver out of a burn that must have been years ago.
Maeve watched the mirror bring the flat back into view at every switchback, smaller each time — the whole brown floor of it laid out with the river scratched across it, and somewhere down there a grain elevator and a water tower and a hall with a hundred and ten people in it and her mother in the good blue dress.
Two thirty had happened. Three had happened. By now they had stopped saying she was fine.
“You want a town,” Ostroff said, out of a silence about fifteen miles long, “or you want a road?”
“A town,” she said. “Somewhere there’s people.”
“Any thoughts past that?”
“No.”
“Huh,” he said, and that was all, and he did not offer one, and Maeve sat with her hands in her lap and understood that this too was a thing that could happen to a person and had simply never happened to her.
They came over the top a little before five.
There was a summit pullout with three cars in it and a trash barrel.
Then the road went down the far side into a valley she had never looked at, long and green-grey and deeper in shadow than the one behind it.
A mountain stood over it with a rust mark up near the ridgeline, some old plant or works catching the late sun an hour after the bottom had gone grey.
Coldwater sat in the bottom of it. Half a main street with the shutters down, a water tank, a church tower off at the north end where the town gave out into gravel and brush.
Ostroff came down the last of the grade on the brakes, crossed a bridge over nothing much, and pulled the truck over on the wide shoulder at the edge of town where a gravel lot ran back off the road.
It was six o’clock and the sun was still up, but the neon in the window of the low brown building across the lot had come on anyway, buzzing against the dark inside, with one letter of it dead.
br KEN SPOKE.
There were bikes outside it. Nine or ten, nosed in at an angle in a flat worn place in the gravel, chrome going orange in the low light, and beyond them, across the lot, a stone church with the cross gone off the top of it and a pickup parked at the foot of the steps like it lived there.
Ostroff put the truck out of gear.
“Lo’s place,” he said. “She’ll be behind the bar. She won’t ask you anything.” He reached over and shoved the door for her again, eight inches, on its weight. “That’s about as good as anybody does.”
Maeve got her skirts together and her purse and, after a second’s thought, the knife.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You paid,” said Ostroff, and touched his shirt pocket.
She got down into the gravel in a ruined wedding dress with the bodice hanging off one shoulder, ninety miles and one pass from every single person who had ever decided anything about her.
She stood in the diesel smoke and the smell of pine and cold rock.
The truck pulled away. The sound of it went off down the valley and left her with nothing to listen to except the neon.