Brown-Eyed Girl (3 page)

Chapter 3
Good Coffee

It took Sally's brain three tries to figure out waking up. Impressions shifted, shuffled around seeking some kind of jigsaw fit, and finally came to the astounding resting place of Meg Dunwoodie's cool and peaceful bedroom, Laramie, Wyoming.

The last thing she remembered seeing was the taillights of Dickie Langham's Albany County patrol car, shrinking off down Eleventh Street. She had a vague memory of dragging herself up the stairs. The housekeeper had turned on a lamp on a bedside table in the master bedroom. Sally walked toward the light, kicking off her Birkenstocks in the hallway, yanking her shirt over her head as she crossed the bedroom threshold, throwing the shirt into a corner. She sat down on the bed, hauled off her jeans and underpants in one move, unhooked her bra and tossed it on the floor. She turned down the covers, switched off the light, and slipped under a sea green satin coverlet between cool, fine, clean sheets. She was asleep in seconds, stone dreamless for hours.

Pearly pink light filtered in the windows on three sides of the spacious bedroom. She was pleasantly warm, her face cool in the chilly mountain morning air. She stretched, rubbing her body against the soft sheets, and realized how much room there was in the carved mahogany queen-size bed. Why would an angry spinster poet need a queen-size bed?

She pushed disorder into sequence, willed thoughts in line. She had learned to be good at thinking a thought from one end to the other. She had woken up in this bed because her new day job put her here, in Laramie: scene of some of her most unforgiveable crimes. She had come back in order to be paid excellent money to read and write and talk and think. To do exactly what she was good at, and happy doing. Dickie and Delice had welcomed her gladly, but she didn't deserve gladness, welcome, gratitude, or, for that matter, forgiveness. She was a professional. She couldn't expect love, but she could demand respect.

And the fact that Hawk Green might be five walking minutes from where she lay was of no significance what-soever.

Sally swung her legs out from under the covers. She wiggled her toes, stretched her back, and decided she'd better start out her new life in Wyoming by going for a morning run. She was far from used to the altitude, and figured she'd spend more time walking and gasping than running, but at forty-five, she meant, when possible, to follow the path of wisdom, health, and responsibility, even if it was Laramie out there. She laughed. It occurred to her that all twenty thousand roads had been paved with such intentions.

Still, a run couldn't hurt. She brushed her teeth in Meg Dunwoodie's gleaming bathroom, a palace of vintage mirrors, crystal cabinet knobs, and tiny sea-green tiles. Washed her face, put on her running tights and bra, and a holy relic T-shirt from the Sleeping Lady Cafe in Fairfax, California. Pulled on her socks and shoes and clipped on her Walkman, flipped on the tape, and stepped out into the crisp morning.

Her legs felt surprisingly good after four days in the car, and the first song on the cassette, taped off a broad-cast of the hallowed KFAT radio in Gilroy, California, was the Grateful Dead's cheerfully fatalistic “Box of Rain.” The tape was a wildly eclectic mishmash of stuff— from the Dead to Wanda Jackson, Leadbelly and Steve Earl and Spike Jones (way too much Spike Jones) and her own Van Morrison anthem, the one about the brown-eyed girl. Half an hour of unpredictable and uneven music later, she was rounding the Washington Park bandshell for the third time at her usual snail-paced jog, feeling a little light-headed but strong enough to damn well keep on running, soundtracking with Simon and Garfunkel (God, they sang good together).

She started back toward Meg's house, meandering through neighborhoods to look at everybody's flowers. Marigolds and zinnias, purple asters and shasta daisies, petunias and cosmos delighted her from front yard plots, windowboxes, hanging planters on front porches. So many people in the old neighborhoods south of the university gardened madly in the brief summer, with something of the same spirit Sally had heard in “Box of Rain.” She knew that in dozens of backyards, somebody was tasting a gold morning and thinking about harvesting lettuce and string beans and way too many zucchinis. The first frost could come any time after Labor Day, maybe even before.

She passed Delice's house, near Fourteenth and Kearny, a brown brick with four gables and tidy dark red trim. Dickie, Delice, and Dwayne had been raised there. When Doreen Langham followed her husband to the grave, she willed it to her daughter, and Delice had lived there ever since. A handsome, lanky teenager and a slightly younger boy stood in front of a basketball hoop in the driveway, shooting free throws. She recognized them from the family Christmas card pictures Mary had sent every year, even when Dickie was on the run. Josh, the older one, was Dickie and Mary's boy. The younger had to be Josh's cousin, Delice's son from her short, spotty marriage to Walker Davis: Jerry Jeff Walker Davis. He was the image of his feckless long-gone father, but looked as if he might have more of a clue. She waved at the boys, then realized that they could have no idea who she was. Still, this was Laramie, not LA. They waved back, smiling uncertainly but smiling anyhow.

It still cracked her up that Delice had made good on their pledge to each other, that they would name their firstborn children after their favorite singers. Jerry Jeff had been Delice's first and last, all that remained of a marriage Delice had described as an extended, sometimes pleasurable, often ludicrous mishap with mixed consequences. Sally remembered long, expensive phone calls from Laramie to California and back. Walker, who had lost what there was of his mind over Delice, had finally left his wife and moved into the house on Kearny. Jesus, he was handsome, a great big gray-eyed ranch boy with steerroper's shoulders and a bull-rider's ass, but Sally had never regarded him as that big a prize. All summer long, he rodeoed around trying to shatter his pelvis in quest of a big belt buckle. How intelligent was that? He had reached the peak of his career potential driving a truck for the state highway department.

Sally knew the story. One winter morning when Jerry Jeff was five, Delice got a postcard from Houston, Texas, with a picture of the Baytown Ship Channel on the front (“Eighth Wonder of the World”). Walker was in Houston for the rodeo. On the back was a message in his tiny, childish handwriting, explaining that he'd fallen in love with a barrel racer from Belle Fourche, South Dakota. Wyoming was too cold. They were heading off to Florida to live in a trailer and work cattle for some sawgrass ranch operation: Did she know that Florida was the biggest beefraising state in the US? He hoped he could eventually get on with a road crew there. He wouldn't ask for half of Delice's property if she wouldn't contest the divorce. In all those years he'd been married to her on the road amid the stock pens, this was the longest postcard he'd ever sent.

That night, Delice put on her felt-lined Sorel boots and her down-filled jacket and walked into the clear, frozen world. It was twenty below. The door handle on her truck was so brittle it broke off when she pulled it. She left Jerry Jeff with Mary, went into the men's bathroom at the Wrangler. She bought a pack of condoms from the dispensing machine, stopped to warm up with a cup of coffee and a shot of peppermint schnapps. Then she went out and got shit-faced at the Cowboy Bar, danced with a trucker to “Faded Love,” and had a cramped, half-clad, freezing but relatively satisfying revenge fuck in the sleeping cab of his idling rig. She'd gone home, dialed California, and poured the whole story out to Sally before passing out and leaving her phone off the hook. The telephone bill was even worse than the hangover.

All this flashed through Sally's mind as she made the turn onto Eleventh Street and slowed to a walk coming up on the Dunwoodie place. The front yard was a testament to Meg's green thumb, rampant with every kind of flower. A big cottonwood tree presided over a small, lush grass lawn.

Sally hadn't bothered to lock the door. Undoubtedly that was stupid, given what Dickie had told her about attempted break-ins, but she'd never locked a door living in Laramie, and she really didn't want to start now. It was one of the things that was supposed to make it worth coming back. She reflected on her own attempt to keep the pledge with Delice. Since she'd never had kids, she'd been forced to settle for naming a dog George Jones. When she first moved to LA, she rationalized getting a puppy, not because she was suffering from loneliness so severe it verged on disabling, but because she lived alone and getting a dog was a security thing. Jones was a typical black lab, dumb and rambunctious but sweet and loyal, and about as much use against home-invading strangers as a Welcome Wagon full of Jaycees. He'd been hit by a car on Hilgard Avenue. Sally hadn't had so much as a tropical fish since.

Thirsty. Water. She threw open the screen, powered down the hall and into the kitchen, and ran straight into the formidable person of Maude Stark.

Margaret Dunwoodie had been tall, almost six feet. Even in advancing age she had been big enough to command notice, and respect. Maybe she had required a housekeeper who could look her in the eye. If so, Maude Stark filled the bill. She towered over Sally, who claimed to be five-foot-six (claimed), staring down at her mildly through eyes so pale they were almost transparent. Her steely hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She was a fit sixty-something woman wearing faded Levi's, worn Nikes, and a red T-shirt with a picture of Susan B. Anthony on it and the slogan failure is impossible.

Sally had once owned the same T-shirt, along with a purple one with the slogan sisterhood is powerful. There had been moments among feminists, over the years, when she had thought they could use T-shirts that said sisterhood is impossible. Still, you kept on.

“You must be Sally,” Maude said in a voice that was amazingly soft and friendly. “I saw you take off running just as I pulled up.” Sally now recalled the new silver Chevy Suburban parked out at the end of Meg's front walk. “I took the liberty of making some of the coffee you brought—how about a cup? There's cream and sugar if you want it.”

Sally looked skeptical. She had never in her life had a good cup of coffee in Wyoming; that was why she'd brought beans from Peet's and her own grinder. Even Dean Edna McCaffrey, the goddess of gourmet cooking, had had a Mr. Coffee that she filled with Folger's. The best thing about that Mr. Coffee was how it moaned when you turned it on, like somebody having the best sex they'd ever had in their life, right there in Edna's kitchen. But even though Sally had become finicky about coffee to the point that it was embarrassing, she didn't want to get off on the wrong foot with Maude.

“Great!” Sally said, smiling with what she hoped looked like gratitude. “Thanks.” She poured in half-and-half (that might help) from a little china pitcher.

It was good. Damned good. Maude made good coffee. A sign from heaven.

“Meg got to where she couldn't live without Peet's coffee. A friend in the Bay Area used to send her five pounds at a time,” Maude explained, blowing Sally's mind. A tea kettle whistled on the stove. Maude moved to pour boiling water over a Celestial Seasonings tea bag. “I myself gave up caffeine ten years ago—you know it's been linked to breast cancer.” She
tsk
ed slightly. A sign from hell. “But I'm not one to tell people what they should or shouldn't do,” she finished implausibly, taking tinfoil off a pan of fresh blueberry muffins. She dumped the muffins into a towel-lined basket, passed it and a china plate to Sally, and gestured at a pot of Tiptree's Summer Fruit preserves. If this was purgatory, make the most of it.

“Meg's lawyer, Ezra Sonnenschein, told me you live out in West Laramie,” Sally said, biting into a still-warm muffin.

“Actually, it's a little west of West Laramie, out by Wood's Landing, off the grid,” Maude told her proudly. “Solar panels, wind generator, and a greenhouse for heat exchange and, of course, for getting garden stuff going. Meg always got her seedlings from me,” she explained, consuming two muffins in four bites without dropping a crumb. “I write a Sunday gardening column for the
Boomerang
and do a little consulting for the Albany County Agricultural Extension Service. I'll give you a tour of the back garden in a little while,” she said, digging into another muffin, polishing it off, and wiping her hands daintily on a linen napkin. “I assume you'll be composting.”

Sally was speechless. She broke her muffin in half and put some jam on it.

Maude saw that she'd need to jump-start the conversation. “So when do your things arrive?”

Relief: frittery life details. “They left LA last Monday, but since this is only a partial load they're making a couple of stops on the way. The moving company said they'd be here Tuesday,” Sally told her, taking another swallow of wonderful coffee. “I don't have much. Some basic kitchen stuff. My furniture was sh—uh, secondhand junk, so I got rid of it all. It's mostly books. Aside from that, it's my other guitar, records and tapes, sh—uh, stuff like that.” Sally really had to work on not cussing.

“I'll plan to be here to help you, if you want,” Maude offered. “I've cleared out some bookshelves.”

“That sounds fine,” Sally said, smiling, “and I'd be glad to have you help me move things around up here, so I don't fu—er, mess the place up.”

“You won't. You may have been liable to do that a few years ago,” Maude told her wryly, letting on that she knew more about Sally than she was saying, for the moment. “But you're a big girl now, in spite of that nasty mouth on you.” She stood up. “I hope everything here is to your liking. Since the estate is paying me, I've tried to keep the house in the kind of shape Meg expected.” She gave Sally a long, inspecting look. “I don't need the money, as you probably know.”

Sally knew; Sonnenschein had told her that Margaret had left Maude a two-million-dollar trust fund and a sizeable annual sum. Maude was a hell of a lot richer than Sally was.