11. Mandy
Mandy
At some point, her hands had stopped splitting.
Mandy couldn’t have told you which morning it happened.
Only that she’d shut her fist around the frozen steel of a stall latch one dawn and it hadn’t cost her anything, and she’d stood there in the half-dark holding a thing that didn’t hurt, more frightened by that than she’d been by any of the pain that came before it.
Stillwater had put a working woman’s hands on the ends of her arms. And tonight Mary Jo was going to do Mandy’s makeup, pin up her hair, pour her into a late friend’s green silk, and send her into the exact kind of room she’d wrecked a car and crossed two state lines to climb out of.
Andrew had stood at Lucky’s rail and said Caroline’s name. He had given Mandy only the edges: a marriage, a bad ending, and the reason he kept parts of his life separate. She had thanked him and left the rest alone.
Since then, neither of them had mentioned the diner or the mountain. He still left coffee by the stove. She still took the wrong mug. The silence had changed.
Mary Jo’s living room took afternoon sun through two south-facing windows.
It fell across a deep red and ochre rug, a leather chair worn almost to black, and a Pendleton folded with exact care over the couch.
The glass-front cabinet held turquoise, horse books, and a black-and-white photograph Mandy did not cross the room to inspect.
Bronze chrysanthemums opened in a cut-crystal vase.
The house smelled of paste wax, cedar, and the hot iron Mary Jo had going in the next room.
The dress.
It hung from the top of a closet door at the end of the hall, and from where Mandy stood, she could only see the bottom three feet of it.
Deep green silk falling straight to the floor, the color of a Colorado lake in deep summer at the part where the bottom drops out.
She didn’t walk down the hall to look at the rest of it.
She’d been refusing to look at the rest of it since they came through the front door an hour ago.
“You’re hovering,” Mary Jo called from a room with a hot iron in it. “I can hear you hovering. Come in here and stop it.”
“I’m looking at your house.”
“Look at it sitting down.”
Mandy followed the voice into the kitchen. Cream curtains covered the lower half of the window, tiny running horses embroidered along the hem. The horses were not perfectly even. Mandy liked them immediately.
A bouquet of yellow asters and white snapdragons sat in a milk-glass jug at the center of a round oak table that had been waxed enough times to forget its own grain.
Two glass bottles of Coca-Cola stood beside the jug with the caps already off, two paper straws standing in them. The straws were striped red and white.
“Sit,” Mary Jo said. She came out of the laundry nook in a denim apron with embroidery on it that was probably also her own work, glasses up on top of her head, the iron in her hand.
She looked Mandy up and down once and let out a small huff that might have been satisfaction at how very ranch Mandy looked at one o’clock in the afternoon.
Brown work hat in her hand. Carhartt over a flannel that wasn’t hers.
Boots that weren’t hers either. “You’re filthy. ”
“I worked through breakfast.”
“I can smell it.”
“I cleaned the boots on your porch.”
“Honey, the boots are the least of it.” Mary Jo set the iron upright on a trivet and sat across from her and pushed one of the Cokes a quarter inch closer with one finger.
“Drink that. We’ve got about three hours before that man comes to collect you, and you’ve got to be soaked and dressed and braced for the worst night of your life, in that order. So drink.”
Mandy drank. The Coke was so cold it hurt the top of her mouth. Real sugar. She’d forgotten sugar tasted like anything. She put the bottle down carefully and looked at Mary Jo over the rim.
“What did you mean, the worst night of my life?”
“I meant it as a joke.”
“Then say it like a joke.”
Mary Jo grinned. It was a quick fox-grin she didn’t give to many people.
“Smart girl. All right. It’s not the worst night of your life.
It’s the most expensive room you’ve been in a month, and you’ve been in some expensive rooms. You’re going to be on the arm of a man whose face doesn’t move in expensive rooms, and you’re going to be looked at, and I can’t for the life of me decide whether to warn you about that or not. ”
“You’ve decided to warn me.”
“I’ve decided to drink my Coke and think about it.”
Mandy didn’t say anything for a second. Mary Jo had been doing this all month, the small accurate sentences with the doors built into them, and Mandy hadn’t yet decided whether Mary Jo was going to walk through any of those doors or just stand in the frame and let Mandy decide.
She’d been raised by women who walked through every door without knocking.
Mary Jo’s restraint felt like a thing she was being given on purpose.
“I worked in finance,” Mandy said. It was the smallest possible true thing. “I’m fine in expensive rooms.”
“Mm.” Mary Jo took a long pull on her Coke and set it down. “I figured.”
Mary Jo did not ask what kind of finance or where. She set her Coke down, stood, and clapped once.
“All right. The dress is pressed. The shoes are in a box under it. The bathroom’s yours, towels on the hook, robe behind the door, you can wear it out here while we do your hair.
I put a glass of something else in the fridge for the hair part because trust me, you’ll want it. Don’t drown. I’m putting on a record.”
The bathroom was small and very pink. Old tile, a pedestal sink, and a clawfoot tub occupied most of it. Rose petals and lavender sat in a stoneware bowl on the back of the toilet. A used bar of soap rested in a porcelain dish.
Mandy looked at herself in the mirror over the sink, something she hadn’t done since the morning she left. Not a glance in a passing window, or a catch of herself in the side of the truck. Properly, standing in front of glass long enough for the glass to send back the whole face.
Her face had thinned. The cheekbones had come forward.
Her jaw had a clean line beneath it. No polish remained except the fading rose at the edge of two clipped nails.
Her hair lay in a working braid she had done herself every morning for a month.
She did not look bad. She looked unmaintained.
Harlan had spent money and staff hours ensuring his daughter never appeared that way.
Mandy studied the woman in the glass. She looked alive.
Then she undressed.
The water reddened her skin. Mary Jo’s old cast-iron tub held heat, and Mandy let her shoulders sink by degrees.
Every sore place announced itself: a fading bruise on her shin, the hard callus at her thumb, the tight place low in her back.
At the ranch, showers lasted five minutes because work waited.
Here, she stayed until the water cooled.
The robe behind the door was a heavy cream chenille with a sash and small pink piping along the lapels.
It smelled like the same cedar as the potpourri.
She put it on and tied it twice and went out with a towel turbaned around her head, barefoot on a hall runner that had absorbed thirty years of people walking on it.
Mary Jo had put a record on. Patsy Cline, low. The light in the kitchen had moved an inch, and the bouquet on the table had gone a little more bronze in it, and a wine glass had appeared by the second Coke bottle.
“Sit,” Mary Jo said. She had a curling iron heating on a folded towel on the counter and a tackle box on a kitchen chair that turned out to contain makeup.
Lipsticks standing in a row. Brushes in slots.
Eye pencils sharpened to working points.
The kind of organization a person developed over many years of doing her own face well enough that nobody asked who had done it. “Wine first.”
“It’s two-thirty in the afternoon.”
“It is. Drink.”
The chardonnay was very cold. Mandy hadn’t had wine since Dallas. The first sip put a warm hand on the back of her neck, and she set the glass down with both hands, careful and small. Mary Jo pretended not to notice and took the towel off Mandy’s hair.
“All right.” Mary Jo combed it out one-handed, fingers careful, the comb in the other hand starting at the ends and working up, the trick Mandy’s grandmother had once taught a maid.
“You’ve got good hair. I knew you had good hair.
I told Andy two weeks ago you had good hair under whatever you were doing to it. ”
“You didn’t tell him that.”
“I absolutely told him that.”
“What did he say?”
Mary Jo paused over a snarl, worked at it patiently, didn’t look at Mandy’s face in the mirror because Mary Jo knew better. “He said hm. That’s the Andrew Stevens version of a long thoughtful answer, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I’d noticed.”
Mandy held the wineglass in both hands and watched Mary Jo behind her.
This was what having a sister might have felt like.
Not the cousins her mother moved through her life during holidays and fittings.
A real woman in a warm kitchen, doing her hair before an event and knowing when not to look directly at her.
She put her face down for a second over the wine and got it back up before Mary Jo would have to comment.
“You’re fine,” Mary Jo said anyway, very quiet, and kept going.
After the hair was up and pinned to a thing Mary Jo called low but Mandy would have called engineered, Mary Jo did her face.
She worked light, which Mandy hadn’t expected.
The lipstick was a brown red that read like Mandy’s own mouth in better lighting.
The eyes were almost nothing. A pencil along the upper lash line.
A breath of bronze in the corner, mascara.