Laura's Shadow, page 21
A new thought crept in, unbidden. One that threatened to sour every bite of breakfast. “My car. Did the starter really go out? Or was that a ruse to get me to stay?”
“You think we’d stoop to that?” Eugenie asked, eyes wide and swimming behind the thick lenses of her glasses.
“I think you look like those nuns on The Sound of Music caught with a handful of sparkplugs.”
“We didn’t do anything to your car,” Eugenie said, sounding short of convincing and nowhere near innocent.
“We would never,” Alma chimed in, sounding less of both.
“Well, you know what? I’m going to call him,” Trixie said, rising. “That mechanic. I’m going to call and ask him exactly what’s wrong and see if his story matches up with yours.”
“Fine,” Eugenie said.
“I mean it.”
“Fine,” Alma echoed.
Trixie got up and strode over to the phone where the Yellow Pages waited in a wood-scrolled rack bolted to the wall. “What’s the name of his shop?”
Alma responded by reciting a phone number.
Trixie eyed her suspiciously. “You know the shop’s number?”
“Justus and I are rather involved,” Alma said.
“Of course you are,” Trixie said, and asked her to repeat the number.
The line rang and rang and rang and rang, and as Trixie was about to hang up, a gruff voice spoke. “McCready Mechanics.”
“Hi, this is Trixie Gowan, owner of the ’68 Chevelle that was brought in yesterday? I wanted to check on the status. See what’s wrong and when it will possibly be ready for me to pick up.” She hated the fact that her side of the conversation was a mere series of questions, as if she needed permission to even make the phone call.
“Hold on.”
By hold on, he obviously meant stay on the line while he set the phone down, because all she heard after that was the rumble of men’s voices with the occasional clang of metal. She pressed the phone closer to her ear, as if that would do anything to make the conversation more distinct, listening for the make of her car or her mother’s name. Soon enough, a man was back on the line.
“Sixty-eight Chevelle?”
“Yes,” Trixie said, working authority into her voice.
“We’ll get back to you.” And then the phone went dead.
Trixie stared at the receiver in disbelief. “He hung up on me.”
“Was it Justus?” Alma was leaning on her elbows, cup poised in front of her lips.
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” She hung up the phone, wanting nothing more than to crawl back into bed and start the day over again. “I’m going upstairs to shower.”
She trudged upstairs thinking that if she were back at work, they’d all be gathered for the Monday Morning Meeting. Needing a distraction longer than a shower, she dug through her closet and found her old running shoes. They were crumpled in on each other from years of emptiness but fit around her foot as if she’d worn them yesterday. She shouted to the house at large that she had decided to go for a run but didn’t wait for any acknowledgment of her change of plans. She took a slow jog until she was out of view of the house before stopping to stretch in a way that would make her high school track coach proud. Not until she turned onto the main road did she pick up her pace.
The morning was hot and close, bringing a trickle of sweat down her back and dampening the armpits of her T-shirt within minutes. The dirt in the shoulder that ran alongside the paved road was packed tight, and for long stretches of time the only sound was the rhythmic thump thump of her shoes keeping time with her steady, even breath. Occasionally she’d hear a car’s engine behind her, and she turned her head long enough to gauge its distance before shifting to the right a bit as it blew by, trying not to equate the gust of wind against her with the power the vehicle had to send her into the open field.
GG used to tease her about this, about running. She knew what it meant to have no choice but to take to your feet to go from town to town. When she was Trixie’s age, owning a horse—let alone something for it to draw—was a luxury.
“Imagine,” she’d say, sipping coffee while watching Trixie stuff her gym bag, “running for the sake of running.”
“It keeps us healthy and fit,” Trixie said one time. “What did you do for exercise?”
GG had laughed. “Life was exercise. We never got to stop moving until we died.”
Trixie thought about that conversation as she ran, just one of the scenarios that flitted through her mind, like scenes from previous episodes of her life. GG telling stories about footraces and baseball games she watched in her youth in De Smet and later when they moved to Silver Meadow, the town that folded in on itself as farms conglomerated and families moved away. There were no photos, but Trixie pictured the competitions in sepia-toned images—farmers in pants and shirts and suspenders, running in their heavy leather boots; groups of young men in old-timey baseball uniforms, wrinkled cotton, each face festooned with a moustache.
She always loved it when GG slipped away into the past, forgetting the harshness of her growing up and the mysterious bitterness that gripped her most of the time. She appreciated the fact that GG didn’t exaggerate in her stories. She had been every bit as hungry, as cold, as frightened as she claimed to be, so when she allowed an occasional happy memory to slip in, Trixie wanted to share that too.
She’d asked once, “Didn’t you ever participate, GG? Surely they let the girls run too.”
“No,” GG said, looking young and shy. “I was a watcher. Sometimes I took a book and got a glass of lemonade and enjoyed watching the others have their fun. Got teased about that, of course. Cap said, ‘How are you going to watch the game with your nose buried in a book?’”
The bit of conversation rang as clearly as if GG were running beside her. Or speaking from the trees. Or chatting in the back seat of the car that honked, startling Trixie to a stumbling halt. She bent, putting her hands on her knees, and breathed heavily.
Cap.
Cap Garland.
If Trixie hadn’t spent the previous day reading Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, the name buried in the recovered memory might never have drifted up to the surface. But she had. Cap Garland’s place in the novel now ran alongside GG’s reflections as closely as the two lines of paint running down the middle of the road. Cap Garland in a horse-drawn cutter, zipping down Joliet Street on a Sunday afternoon. Cap Garland among the gatherings of young people at socials and singings. Cap Garland daring Almanzo Wilder to take that treacherous ride in the dangerous cold to fetch his love home for the weekend.
Cap Garland had never been more than a tertiary character in an all-but-forgotten book. And yet this was the book that turned GG into a grieving shell the night Trixie was born. He was a vibrant point of color in a book where GG was nothing more than a single, unflattering sketch.
Last night her grandmother recalled GG boldly speaking of her friendship (if not friendship, then certainly connection) with Laura Ingalls Wilder, something she touted until the publication of Wilder’s final novel. Something she’d been proud to share as an invisible accomplishment until the smallness of it, the perhaps falseness of it, came out in black and white. Young Mariah Patterson disappeared from the story, even though she’d taken up her life in De Smet during those years when Laura was finishing school and living the life of Little Bachelorette on the Prairie.
They were close to the same age, lived in the same town, yet GG had spent her youth watching. Not invited, not included. Perhaps seeing it played out in the pages had been a painful reminder of what she’d missed. No frivolous courtship. GG married a man she didn’t love because … she was twenty-six, and time for a family was running out. Maybe her life would have been different if she’d been a part of the clique—Laura and Almanzo, Mary and Nellie and Cap. The names, fresh from reading, listed themselves as Trixie’s feet resumed their pace.
Laura, Almanzo, Mary and Nellie and Cap.
Laura, Almanzo, Mary and Nellie and Cap.
She glanced up at the cirrus clouds and thought of her great-grandmother’s hair, how it fell around her face in wispy tendrils. She saw her standing in her bedroom doorway, mismatched and malbuttoned, saying she had somewhere to go. Someone she had to see.
Laura, Almanzo, Mary and Nellie and Cap.
And Cap.
GG wasn’t bitter because she hadn’t been invited to sleigh rides with the cool kids in town. She’d been living with a decades-old broken heart, and that heart had been broken by Cap Garland. Image after image dropped into her brain like slides on a carousel, those rare, unguarded moments when GG told her few happy stories—so few, in fact, that they were told over and over in rotation. Trixie could hear the text and the delivery; she could picture the dreamy expression on GG’s face as it aged over time. A baseball game, and Cap looking dashing at third. A dinner, and Cap sopping gravy with his bread. A three-legged race at a Harvest Festival, and Cap dragging his partner across the line. Cap riding out in a blizzard to bring wheat to the town. Dancing with Cap at her brother’s wedding.
Stringing the tales together like this, Trixie realized she’d heard more about Cap Garland than her great-grandfather. She listened to her feet trying to remember his name.
Melvin? Marvin? Merrill …
Merrill. Merrill Gowan.
And his son, Mark Gowan, who married Eugenie Post, who became Eugenie Gowan.
And their daughter, Alma Gowan.
Mother of Trixie Gowan.
Four generations, not a Garland in the bunch.
Trixie came to the county road sign that marked her turnaround to head back home. She resisted the urge to stop, fearing she’d never get the momentum back again to carry her all the way, but then she had a new motivation to be the wind at her back.
Questions.
If young Mariah loved Cap Garland, then why had she married Merrill Gowan? Did Cap love someone else? Did he marry someone else? Why wasn’t his fate part of the common lore?
Why? Because Laura married Almanzo, and Cap dropped out of the story. At least in the Wilder books. Not in Mariah’s memory.
Trixie’s T-shirt hung heavy on her shoulders, drenched with sweat, as was the waistband of her jogging shorts. With no cars in sight, she lifted the hem of her shirt and wiped her face. She lifted the sodden braid off the back of her neck and created a breeze with her movement. Morning runs were meant for mornings, and figuring it was by now after eleven, well, morning was long gone. The sun beat down with the full force of noon, holding the air captive and still in its heat. Trixie’s stomach and throat reminded her that she’d consumed bacon and pancakes and coffee—but not a drop of water. Sweat poured down her face, but her lips were dry and she worried that, motivation or not, she might be too soggy to keep up this pace for the rest of the run home.
Three cars passed her in quick succession, the first one startling her with a series of three quick honks, the second sending such a blast of black smoke from its muffler that she had to close her eyes and head deeper onto the shoulder so she wouldn’t stagger into traffic. The third was coming upon her as her vision cleared, and she wasn’t quite sure if she should trust her eyes. Midnight-blue. Mustang. Convertible. And a familiar set of wide shoulders behind the wheel. The driver glanced over his shoulder, put on the blinker, and the quiet of the morning filled with the crunch of tires on tiny pebbles.
She ran, not slowing her steps until she could make out the song coming from the radio—”Layla.” Then she walked, finally stopping to lean her elbows on top of the passenger door.
“Hey, Prairie Girl,” Ron said, as if running into each other on the side of the road leading into her family’s property nearly two hundred miles away from Minneapolis was the most normal thing ever. His hair—that mass of wild brown curls—looked remarkably undisturbed by the journey, its tangle resistant to movement. He turned in his seat, one elbow up on the seat back, the other draped casually over the wheel. “Didn’t know you were a jogger.”
“Runner, actually.” The distinction mattered. “High school track, and then whenever I get the chance.” Obviously not often enough. “Wait—what are you doing here?”
“For one thing, if you’re heading home, I’m really, really happy to know I’m not lost. Are you?”
“Am I lost?”
“Are you heading home? Because otherwise, I’m going in the totally wrong direction.”
“Yes, I’m heading home.”
“Great. Then get in, I’ll drive you. Or does that defeat the purpose of running? And then someday maybe you can explain the actual purpose of running.”
Resigned that there would be no answers here on the side of the road, Trixie opened the door and got in, mindful of her sweaty body against the car’s leather seat. “Layla” still poured from the speakers as Ron brought the car back onto the road, the song easing into its coda. She raised herself up, her body and soul revived by the rush of air, knowing it would last a few minutes until she would instruct him to turn it off. Beside her, Ron was humming with the instrumentation, solidly on key, and the question of why he was here battled for supremacy with the question of why wouldn’t he be. The momentum of the car brought out the sweetness in the air, turning the wheat fields into a blurred blanket of gold.
It wasn’t until the Mustang was maneuvering the twists to her family’s property that Trixie asked again, “Why are you here? Is everything okay?”
“That depends on your definition of okay, I suppose.”
“You must have skipped out on Monday Morning Meeting to get here.”
“Literally any person there is more than capable. Even Patrick, and he’s seventeen years old. Is that the house?”
He had his eyes trained on the structure, heedless of the flanking trees or hard-packed drive below. Even in profile, the admiration on his face was clear, and she felt a flush of pride.
“That’s it. Now, if you want to see inside, you have to tell me—what’s up? Why are you here?”
Ron put the car in park and turned to her. “Got a message on your answering machine this morning as I was leaving your house. The Guy expressing some concern that they haven’t heard back from you.”
“Oh. What did you say?”
“Nothing. I let the machine get it. But then I got to the office, and there was another message from this fellow saying he has business in St. Paul, so he’s wanting to come by and meet with you.”
“They’re coming to me?”
“They are.” There was a certain beaming to the way he looked at her, making her suddenly self-conscious of her hair—tendrils plastered to her cheeks, the braid all but forgotten—and a shirt too soaked to show the stains of perspiration. She could picture the red blotches on her face, and she could only imagine her smell. And yet she found herself beaming too for a second, before the nerves hit.
“That’s not the way things like this generally work, is it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been the object of a syndication’s desire. But you are.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. So go get yourself cleaned up. I’m taking you home.”
He opened his door, and in the time it took for him to come around and open hers, she took a sweeping glance of the house and gained a new image of home. It wasn’t this place where all her memories lived, stacked upon each other like every dish in the kitchen. Her home was a cozy bachelorette pad, carved out of a rambling house, with a dismissive cat and a waiting workplace. The sound of the word in Ron Tumble’s voice gave him a place in it—not the little apartment, of course, but the life she lived there. Her hours, her mornings and nights. How else to explain her happiness but lack of surprise at seeing him on the side of the road out of the blue? Even in this fraction of a moment when he crossed from one side of the car to the next, she felt a tiny shot of reunion when her door swung open and she stepped into his space.
“Thank you,” she said, pressing herself against the warmth of the car as he leaned in to close the door. “But there’s one thing we have to do before heading back.”
“Oh yeah?” His smile was boyish, expectant.
“Yeah. We’re going to take my great-grandmother out on a date.”
CHAPTER 14
MARIAH
The details were whispered in the corners of the little church in Willow Lake. They passed along the wind-whipped talk as a train of mourners and family and farmers made their way to the cemetery. And the details were horrific.
“Heard the explosion from five miles out.”
“One leg clean off. And his face. The burns. Pray his mother didn’t have to see that.”
“Pray his mother didn’t see any of it, the poor woman.”
Oscar’s mother walked near the front of the procession, her steps mostly strong and resolute, though her daughter Florence’s husband kept close for the occasional falter. This was the daughter who left home shortly before Charles and I came to live in the Garland boardinghouse, so I’d only met her on occasional visits. There was a little girl too, Oscar’s niece, born to his older sister, Vena, who wove her way up and down the procession like a thin black ribbon, solemnly announcing to anyone who would listen, “My uncle Oscar got blown up.”
The girl—Madge, I’d heard her called—said this to me as we gathered in the street to begin our procession. I could see Oscar in her face—all of the Garland siblings were attractive, though I’d never thought his sisters to be as pretty as he was handsome. She had flaxen blond hair, left loose save for a braid secured at her crown. The tips of her ears were pink in the cold, her lips red and chapped. I thought about the baby nestled inside of me and wondered if it would favor its father as successfully.
“You shouldn’t say such things,” I told her in what I hoped sounded both authoritative and kind.
“It’s true, though.”
“It is. But saying something sad, even if it’s true, makes everyone else feel sadder.”
