Part 39 (1/2)

”Ways you haven't even dreamed of yet. But the way you've found is a good one. You've banked your fires with ice water, and it shows. You go into court with that look of disdain, that suffering-martyr pose, that air of having been deeply offended and betrayed, you'll be saying, there's her neck, slash away at it.”

She stared at him speechlessly; he stood up and walked out of the room without looking at her again.

It started to snow that evening by seven. Nell and the children were having a living room picnic. She had spread a blanket in front of the fire; they roasted hot dogs and had potato salad, and later roasted marshmallows. Then they stood on the front porch and watched immense, lazy snowflakes drift to earth.

”I hope it snows this deep,” Carol said, holding her hand at waist level.

”Where's our sled?”

”In the garage. We'll find it tomorrow if there's snow on the ground,” Nell said.

”Maybe it'll be deep enough to ski,” Travis said.

”I.

better see if the skis need wax or anything.”

When they were all chilled, they went back inside and roasted a few more marshmallows and talked about snow.

Doc Burchard stood on his deck with the snowflakes falling around him, wis.h.i.+ng, exactly as Carol and Travis were wis.h.i.+ng, that it would get deeper and deeper until the world was buried under a mountain of snow. He went back inside where Lonnie was making their dinner. She had to run, she said; it might start getting slippery soon.

He told her to go ahead; he would finish and clean up later.

Doc and Jessie ate without a word. He had not spoken to her all week, they were both well aware. When they were done, as she was preparing to wheel herself out of the dining room, she said, ”Lonnie says that Clive wants to marry Nell right away, adopt the children and all. Isn't that nice?”

He looked at her with hatred.

”How long have you known?” he asked. His voice sounded harsh and strange to his ears.

”From the beginning, probably. I didn't make a note of the date.”

”And never said a word, never let on. You treated her like a friend all that time.”

”Oh, well, you know it didn't make a bit of difference.

Not a bit. Not until she was a widow, anyway. Many widows would like to marry doctors.

Haven't you found that to be true, dear?”

”Aren't you afraid to let me prescribe your medicine?”

he whispered.

”Aren't you afraid I might let you slip in, the bathtub, or accidentally knock your chair off the deck, down into the river?” She laughed and pressed the b.u.t.ton on the arm of her chair. The mechanism hummed, and the chair turned smartly and headed for the door.

”You'd better call Lonnie back,” he said in that strange new voice.

”I'm taking a few things and going to town. I won't be back for several days, not until the snow is over, at the very least.”

She turned to regard him from the doorway.

”You're such a fool. Little boy running away from Mama, and so very angry. You're a complete fool.” She sped down the hallway toward her room. The humming of her wheelchair was the only sound in the house.

Not town, he thought then. Not town. To Nell's house, but not this early. The children would still be up. Methodically he began to clear the table. Later, later. He looked down at his hands; the plates he carried were rattling because his hands were shaking so hard.

Lonnie Rowan was rocking, watching television, and dreaming. Her house was not as clean and neat as any of the others that she took care of, Jessie's, or dive's, or Frank's, but no one ever saw it but her, and it didn't matter.

Her rocking chair had been her father's, and during his lifetime she had not dared move it even an inch from its place near the wood-burning stove. He liked things where he put them, liked to reach out his hand and take what he knew was there without having to look first. Now she s.h.i.+fted the furniture frequently and never put a book or magazine down in the same place twice. Sometimes, before she sat in the rocker, she would make a shooing motion with her hand, as if to make him get out. All the furniture was his and her mother's; she had never bought a stick of furniture in her life, never needed more than the house provided. But things were changing, she knew; things changed.

All those years he had said, ”Now, Lonnie, don't you worry your head about the future. My little girl's going to be all right. You can trust the old man to see to that.”

Then he was gone and the bills were her bills, and the future was here. She rocked and hummed under her breath, her face turned toward the television, an old black-and-white one that he had bought back in the sixties. But she was not seeing what was on the screen. She was examining a different future. In this one, she lived in the little house on Nell's place, and Nell and Clive and the kids lived in the big house, the way it was supposed to be. Her lips tightened, then relaxed again. They would go back to wherever they had come from, and Nell would be in the big house where she belonged. Nell and Clive, with no black people for miles around, the way it was supposed to be.

She, Lonnie, would do for them, cook for them, keep the house clean, do a little gardening.. .. She had watched how the kids were around their grandparents, full of laughs and jokes and hugs and kisses. That's how they would be with her, she had decided. She was a virgin; when she was still young enough to marry and have a family there had been her Ma to take care of, and later her Pa, and the years sped by. And the years sped by.

There was no one for her, nowhere to go, no one to turn to. If she ever was going to have a family, she had come to realize, she had to make it happen.

She had watched Clive turn into a b.u.mbling, tongue-tied boy as soon as Nell was free, and she understood that he would marry her; he would make that happen somehow.

And she would go with them, to the little house. She had watched him fussing with a bunch of flowers, a gift for Nell, and she had said scornfully, ”Oh, she'll say they're nice enough, and they are. But you take her this plate of gingerbread for the kids, and see how she acts.”

After that he had carried her cookies, her cakes, her pies to Nell and the children; their love gifts, he had said, and blushed.

She jerked awake and sat straighter, tried to get back into the fantasy, but it seemed to swim out of reach now.

Why would they welcome her? She heard the mocking question in her father's voice; it was how he always had mocked her when he drank too much.

Nell wouldn't welcome her, she admitted finally. Nell thought she was too gossipy, and Nell had got pretty mad when Lonnie voiced what everyone was saying over renting out her house to those kinds of people. Not Nell, she said to herself, but Clive. He liked her; he listened to her gossip and even asked questions. He knew that if she said it, it was so; she repeated things but she didn't make them up, and he respected that. But why would he welcome her into the little house? She rocked slowly, thinking hard.

Grat.i.tude, she decided, and the idea made her palms ooze sweat.

It meant that she had to tell on Jessie, and that meant that Jessie would cut her off without a backward glance, without a thought. She knew that b.i.t.c.h, and that's how it would be. Jessie and Doc were her main source of income.

If she lost them, she would starve.

”Will you stop carping about money?” her father had yelled.

”I told you, my girl won't end up in the poorhouse.

I'm taking care of it!”

She rocked harder and harder. No poorhouse, not these days. Just out on the streets, sleeping under bridges, eating out of garbage cans. She began to cry softly out of frustration and fear, out of indecision. If Jessie and Doc split, she thought, they would move back to town, Jessie back to her sister, or her brother, somewhere away from here, and she would be out of that job anyway. But they probably wouldn't split up. They had had this kind of long silence before and patched things up again.

Her tears stopped and she got to her feet. A cup of cocoa, a bath, maybe something would come to mind about what to do, how to make certain Clive would want to hire her and let her live in the little house when he and Nell got married.

At ten the wind started to blow. Funneled through the river canyon, it whistled and howled and screamed, let up, and started again at a higher pitch. The television news featured the weathermen who grinned and acknowledged that they had been wrong again. The Pacific storm had been forecast to come inland up in Was.h.i.+ngton state, but here it was coming in hard and strong. Rain in the valley, heavy at times. Snow in the mountains, a foot in the pa.s.ses overnight, blizzard conditions, a real Pacific storm front, the first of the season.. ..