Chapter 17 Still in the dress
The Lariat had eight units and a gravel apron and a woman called Pearl who ran it out of the first one, and on the Wednesday afternoon Maeve had stood in that doorway with a bag against her hip and asked for work, out loud, without one person in the world standing behind her, and had been so frightened of the sentence that she got it out twice.
Pearl had looked at her for a long moment, frankly and all the way down to the boots, the way you look at something that has come in off the highway.
Then she started talking and kept going.
“Eight units turned by two, four dollars a unit, you find one thing in a drain you don’t like the look of and it’s still four dollars — I had a girl last spring wouldn’t touch unit six after a fisherman and I don’t blame her, but I docked her, because it’s the job.
” She was already going in for the cart.
“You’re not from down the valley. No, don’t tell me, I’d only get it wrong out loud to somebody and then I’d have to live with it.
Bring that bag in out of the sun, it’s safe enough, there’s nobody here but me and I’m nosy, not light-fingered. ”
So Thursday started at seven with a mop bucket and a bottle of pink cleaner and the particular smell of a highway motel in September, which is dust cooked on a wall heater over a whole summer and then let go cold.
Maeve worked the row from eight down to one.
She stripped the beds and turned the mattresses and ran the vacuum with the cord over her shoulder and wiped every one of those wall heaters out with the flat of her hand in a rag, and her hands by ten o’clock had gone tight and red across the knuckles in a way they had never gone in three years of being kept nicely.
She looked at them in the mirror of unit four while the water ran.
Soft hands. Marla had held them under the light the first morning at the Ember and said out loud that they had never done a thing.
Two weeks of counter work had taken the wedding manicure off her in pieces and now the cleaner was taking the rest, and Maeve stood in a stranger’s bathroom with a rag in her fist and found she could not make herself sorry about it.
It was the first thing she had ever owned that showed.
The payphone on the block wall took quarters, and cleaning motel units turned out to be a trade that paid in them — under the beds, in the ashtrays, down the side of a chair cushion, coins nobody was ever coming back for.
She had eleven of them in the pocket of the green coat by lunchtime and it took five of them to get a hundred and thirty miles of line to her sister and hear the bright voice again, you’ve got me, leave it, and she hung up before the beep because she had nothing to say into it that would fit.
She spent two more on the Ember, and that call took her four goes at the keypad, because she had missed Wednesday and she was missing today and she was going to miss two more.
“Ember.”
“Marla. It’s Maeve.”
A pause with a fryer in it.
“I’ve missed two,” Maeve said, “and I’ll miss Friday and Saturday. I’m at the Lariat turning units for Pearl. I’m not asking you to hold anything for me. I’d sooner you had it off me than off somebody in this county who enjoys it.”
A long time went by, which is a long way into a quarter.
“Don’t,” Marla said. “Don’t you stand at a pay phone spending money to apologize at me.” Something went into hot fat at the other end of it. “You’re on Sunday at eleven. If you’re not, you’re not.”
And the line went, because Marla had a counter to work and had never in her life said goodbye to anybody.
Dara called her back at ten past four.
Maeve was sitting on the concrete strip outside unit one with her boots off, counting the thirty-two dollars Pearl had lifted out of the cash tin for her, in ones, counted out loud twice with a remark about most of them, and then counting it again, and the phone went in her coat pocket, and the name came up on it, and she looked at that name for three rings like a woman looking at weather.
“Dara.”
“Not yet.” A breath down the line that had been held a long way. “Don’t say anything nice to me yet, I’ll stop.”
“Okay.”
“I got told.” Her sister’s voice went up and came down.
“Deb from the office called me on Sunday because she wanted to be first, you know Deb, and she said it out like it was a treat for me — that Charlene had cut my job herself, on the phone, on the Monday, before eleven in the morning. Before you’d even had a day of it, Maeve.
She did it before you’d had a day.” A sound that was not a laugh.
“I’ve been going around for two and a half weeks telling our mother that my own sister cost me my job.
And she did it at ten to eleven on a Monday morning and I never typed a line for her family in my life. ”
Maeve sat on the warm concrete with the ones in her hand and did not say a single word, because she had learned exactly one thing in nineteen days and it was that you let a person get to the end of it.
“I’m not —” Dara stopped. “I’m not saying I’m right with you. I’m saying I was wrong about who did it, and I’m not going to be one more person in that family who works out they were wrong and then just goes quiet about it.”
“Seventeen days,” Maeve said.
“I know how many.”
“I counted every one of them.”
“I know you did.” A long pause, and under it a kid’s voice wanting something and being told in a minute. “Where are you? You sound like you’re outdoors.”
“Cutbank. Highway 12, where it comes off the mountain. I’m cleaning motel rooms at four dollars a room and I’m a hundred and thirty miles from you and I’ve got thirty-two dollars in my hand.
” She heard herself say it. She heard that it came out as a fact and not an apology, and something in her chest sat up. “Dara. His wedding’s Saturday.”
“Two o’clock. Three weeks, Maeve. Charlene had the hall deposit moved over by the Tuesday and Janice Roddy’s girl was sat in your chair at their table inside two weeks, and there is not one person in this town who’ll say out loud how fast that was.
Mom’s doing the flowers.” Dara’s voice went careful.
“She’s got my veil in a bag in the hall, Maeve.
The one you wore. She hasn’t put it back in the drawer. ”
“I know what else she’s got.”
Friday was the mill payday, which she had not known and which the diner on Third Street knew the way a church knows Christmas.
Maeve cleaned six units by two and walked down and stood in the back door of the kitchen and asked for the night, cash, and the man said he’d take her from five if she could carry four plates, and she could — the Ember had taught her that and a good deal else.
The mill came in from five-thirty onward with checks cashed at Yoakum’s window and an appetite, and she worked the floor until the fryers went off at eleven.
Sixty dollars, and no share of the jar, because the jar went by seniority and she had two days.
Her feet had stopped being feet somewhere around nine.
The forty-one she had carried over the mountain and Thursday’s thirty-two had gone on a unit of her own and on eating, so what she had in her coat in the morning was Friday’s eighty-four dollars and nothing behind it.
The card was in that coat too, in the flat inside pocket, with her own name typed on it and a man’s money behind it that she had not asked for and had not been told the size of. She found it with two fingers the way you find a sore tooth. Then she left it where it was and counted the cash again.
The ticket office was the counter of the fuel stop and the bus went east down off the mountain at seven twenty in the morning, and it cost her seventy-three dollars, and when the girl had counted the change back Maeve stood in the doorway with the receipt and the dark still on the flat and eleven dollars folded in her fist.
Eleven dollars. Three weeks ago she had been marrying four-fifths of the county’s paving.
She had thought it would frighten her. She stood there and waited to be frightened and it did not come, and what came instead was the thing she had been turning over since a gravel apron on Wednesday morning, which was this: every single person who had handled her had been sure, and the being sure was the whole of it.
Everett was sure. The table in that chapel had been sure.
Hitch had been so sure that he had put her sister’s name in her mouth at seven in the morning and driven forty miles on it.
And they were all going to go on being sure, for ever, in a town that agreed with them, unless somebody stood up in front of the actual people and said the true version out loud where it could be heard.
There was nobody to do that. That was the whole arithmetic. There was not one other person on this earth who could do it, and she had a seven-twenty bus.
It was two buses. The first came down off the pass and onto the flats and put her into Ellery mid-morning, and then it was the best part of two hours on a bench outside the depot waiting on the eastbound, which stopped twice in thirty miles because it stopped everywhere.
Maeve sat over the wheel arch with her bag between her boots and watched the country she came from get flatter and browner and more her own.
The elevator. The water tower going grey.
The line of semis across the frontage with the grass grown up around the tires since before she was born.
She got down on the frontage road at twenty past one in jeans and the green coat and boots that had cleaned out fourteen motel bathrooms, with her hair loose off her shoulders and no ring on her and eleven dollars in her pocket, and walked up the three streets of Verlon to the church hall.