Monday, Monday: A Novel (35 page)

“I’ll drive to the highway in case he runs in that direction!” Andy shouted. He got in his car and backed it up in a spray of gravel and sped off, calling for Ranger out of the open window.

“Mom, I’m barefoot! I have to get my shoes!” Madeline yelled.

Shelly started quickly around to the back of the house. “Ranger!” she called. “Ranger!” Her slippers picked up dirt through the open toes as she struck out toward the barn. From around the front of the house, Carlotta was calling musically, liltingly, “Ranger? I’ve got your ball! Come get your ball!” And from a window upstairs, Jack called down, “Shelly? What’s going on?”

“Andy came and brought Ranger and he’s run off.”

“I’ll be right down.”

Everything was unsettled under the strange reptilian eye of the mountain with its tail stretched on the horizon, but something in the shimmer of moonlight over the open spaces, and the sounds of purring night birds in the brush, and the thought of Ranger leaping erratically through the tall grasses, ecstatic with his freedom, filled Shelly with a sudden excitement, as if trailing along in the dog’s wake she was infected with his delirium.

His bark perforated the darkness to the left of the road. He had found an armadillo or some other varmint, and she heard a running skirmish as he attacked it. She yelled for him but didn’t want to venture out into the cactus to find him. The tussle ceased in a moment, and Ranger continued barking from a stationary position when the animal must have retreated into a hole. Finally the dog came bouncing out of the grass and charged across the road in front of her.

“He’s over here!” Shelly called. He vanished again, then skittered onto the road and raced directly at her. She stooped to grab him as he veered and passed her. “He’s coming your way!” she shouted toward the house, turning to follow him.

Madeline and Carlotta came running. “Come get your ball, Ranger; I have your ball!” Carlotta called.

“He’s coming your way, Jack!” Madeline yelled.

“He passed me!” Jack’s voice came back. “He’s going toward the barn now!”

Shelly turned, retracing her steps toward the barn, listening for the dog and scanning the silhouettes of rocks and vegetation, the stalks of century plants swaying stiffly in the breeze. At the barn she paused and listened, leaning for a moment against the fence of the empty paddock where she used to lead Carlotta around on Freckles. It was peaceful here, and the night smelled good. She wished she could stay longer.

Madeline’s voice drifted to her. “Mom? We got him!”

She whispered a word of gratitude, relieved for the dog and for Nicholas, who loved him. Leaving the quiet refuge of the empty paddock, she was walking back toward the house when she realized that the voices of Jack and Madeline and Carlotta, coming from the front of the house, were suddenly cordial. A fourth voice wove in and out of the conversation. Andy’s? No. She paused.

It was Wyatt’s voice.

She stood very still and listened, unable to make out the words. The tenor of his voice, the way it rose and fell, the warm, low, laughter, played tricks on her heart, as if the last forty years had never happened.

And yet they had happened, and they had brought her here—to this place in back of Jack and Delia’s house, where she stood in unflattering jeans and an old white T-shirt. Her slippers were dusty. Her toes were gritty. Her hair was still wet from the shower. And Wyatt was just around the corner.

But what did it matter? He was married, and her heart belonged to Dan.

Jack came walking around from the front. “Shelly,” he whispered.

“Yes. I know.”

“He caught the dog near the cabin.”

She smoothed her hair back. “How do I look?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Nervous.”

“Stay with me,” she said.

They walked around to the front. Wyatt was talking to Madeline in the driveway. He held the panting dog under one arm, his other arm around Carlotta. Even from yards away Shelly could see he looked better than she had hoped. He wore jeans and a nice jacket. The years fell away like confetti.

She forced herself to smile.

Why hadn’t he lost any hair? Nothing about his appearance was drastically different, except that he looked more authoritative. The last time she had seen him he was twenty-five years old, and now he was in his sixties. Even holding the silly dog, he looked good.

40

THE BLUE BLOUSE

Watching Shelly walk toward him, Wyatt felt like a rush of amphetamines was hitting his system. She was gloriously authentic, her face older and softer, her hair no longer the color of bronze, but tinged with a pliant, silvery gray. She said something banal that washed over him—a greeting of some kind—and hugged him lightly, then patted the dog and mentioned her grandson—that he would be so grateful the dog had been found. “He loves the dog,” she said.

“It came running up to me at the cabin when I drove in,” Wyatt told her, confused by Madeline’s presence here. Carlotta had introduced him to Madeline, so now he knew who she was. But what was she doing in Alpine in the middle of this delicate situation with Carlotta? He took a closer look at her, curious if there was any resemblance to Shelly, or even to Carlotta. He didn’t see any. She was petite, with pale skin and dark hair and remarkably long eyelashes.

She took the dog from him. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” she said.

Carlotta looked from Wyatt to Shelly. “I guess it’s been nearly forty years since the two of you have seen each other.”

He tried not to stare at Shelly. He was vaguely aware that Madeline was telling him she had seen pictures of his family in the house over the years and had looked at some of his paintings online. She told him he would meet her son in the morning. “His name is Nicholas,” she said. While she was talking, a car approached, and she spoke to the driver through the window. “Wyatt Calvert caught him,” she said.

The driver put the car in park and got out with the motor running. He was clean-cut and nice-looking. “
The
Wyatt Calvert?” He shook Wyatt’s hand. “I’ve been hearing about you ever since I met Madeline. I didn’t know you were coming. I’m Madeline’s husband, Andy. God, I’m glad you rescued the dog. It was my fault he ran off. What good luck that you’re here.”

Jack mentioned how late it was and remarked that it was an hour later for Wyatt. Shelly said very little. Wyatt tried to catch a better glimpse of her eyes. All these decades he had thought about her, and seeing her under the light in this dusty drive was confounding.

After everyone told Wyatt good night and went into the house, he walked back down to the cabin and carried his bag in from the rental car. Sinking into the chair, he pulled off one of his loafers and sat for a while, trying to reconcile this new image of Shelly with the girl he had known. His knees were stiff and his back hurt from the flight. So many years hunched over his work had been hard on his back and his eyes.

But the sight of Shelly had set his adrenaline running.

He sat for a long while, watching a moth flutter and bump against the lamp. Usually here in Alpine he felt landlocked by the endless terrain, but tonight he welcomed being isolated from his life and his family.

Sitting and holding his shoe, thinking about his affair with Shelly, he hardly knew how to judge the man he had been back then, or the man he was now, with so many burdensome secrets. He had been twenty-three at the beginning of the affair, twenty-five at the end. He would like to think he couldn’t be tempted to have an affair again, but the knowledge that he was capable of so much lying had humbled him.

Finally he got up and shoved the window open, admitting a small breeze. The screen captured the interior light in the crosshatch of gray wire and muddied his view. Clumps of vegetation in the gloom outside looked like loitering, misshapen humans. He opened the cabinet over the microwave in search of snacks of any kind, but it was empty. The bed had only one pillow, so he opened the closet to look for another, but the shelf over the hanging rod was bare. He was starting to close the door when he noticed the painting.

It was shoved in sideways, settled flat to the wall. He pulled it out and looked at it. “There you are,” he whispered. In this odd way, she had come to visit him. He felt a sudden sexual urge at seeing her quiet smile and the way the ribbon spilled over her pale shoulder. He stared into her eyes. He had come to Alpine expecting to see her as a woman nearly sixty years old, and found himself confronting the face of the girl she had been so long ago.

He noted the frame had come loose at one corner. Studying the face, he saw how little justice he had done to it. He had failed to capture the subtleties in the expression and neglected her sense of buried energy, applying his paint too thickly on the initial layers—too heavy-handed with highlights—and making the surface pasty and dull compared to what he could paint now. And then he had added the final burden of clothing. The piece was hackneyed and prosaic. He examined the features, lingering in her abstract presence as he had not been able to linger in her presence in the driveway. Searching along the sweep of the satin ribbon and the soft strands of hair, then over an area that he slowly came to realize had been damaged by water, his gaze came to rest at last on the small, taut, pinkish nipple revealed by the flaking chips of the blue blouse.

41

PROMISES, PROMISES

In boxer shorts, Andy paced the room, asking for forgiveness and promising never to be unfaithful again. He offered to return to Austin and see a therapist and suggested his encounter in the hotel room was actually a step in the right direction because he had not made love with the woman. Madeline stared at him, wondering how he could think this partial resistance would be of any comfort. It was the wanting, the
almost
, that hurt her.

“That’s great, Andy,” she said. “And since you’re being honest, I should probably tell you that our neighbor Bob came over when he caught his son smoking weed, and I let him kiss me because I felt so bad for him. Nothing else happened.”

Andy’s face dropped. “You really let him kiss you?”

“Of course not.”

“Did he try?”

“No, Andy.”

“Thank God. You scared me. Look, I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“Then put your fucking pants on; you look ridiculous.”

“No, really, I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“I’m asking you not to feel tempted by women.”

He would be a liar if he agreed to this, and one of the problems with Andy was that he was never a liar.

Madeline hugged her knees. “I don’t want this marriage anymore.”

“You mean—” He stopped at the foot of the bed.

“Yes, I might mean that.”

But she didn’t. She couldn’t.

“Because of
this
? Because of
her
?”

He was disarmingly good at regret.

“How could you do this to Nicholas?” she demanded.

“I don’t
know
. I don’t
know
.”

Turning the light out and pulling the covers up, she ceased responding to him. Long after he had stopped talking and thrown himself onto the sofa and fallen asleep with an arm flopped over the edge, Madeline lay awake in the dark, alert to his breathing. She ached at the thought of his body next to another woman’s. The thought of this seductive woman made her think of her mother’s portrait, and she tried to imagine her mother posing naked. The idea bothered her more than it should. How strange that the portrait had hung in her own stairwell like a sensual alter ego of her mother, watching her go up and down the stairs all day. She wondered what other things she might not know about her mother. Andy’s behavior hurt her more, but it confused her less.

She would need to get the portrait out of the cabin. Wyatt Calvert probably wouldn’t notice it or mention it, but she should get it back in her car. She couldn’t take it to the frame shop by Carlotta’s store now that the scarred breast was showing. Instead, she would have to haul it back to Austin, its journey here as futile as hers and ending where it had started.

42

THE MAGIC 8 BALL

Wyatt awoke to bright sunlight through the screened windows at six-thirty in the morning. He showered and dressed and walked to the house, and in the kitchen found a small boy who looked about six or seven years old: Madeline’s son, he supposed. The boy sat at the kitchen table, wearing only pajama bottoms and slurping cornflakes out of a spoon. He made low humming noises and swung his legs energetically as he ate. The dog from last night’s escapade sat expectantly at his feet, but jumped up and greeted Wyatt by pawing at his knees. Wyatt scratched his ears, and the dog resumed his vigil beside the table.

“He wants my cornflakes,” the boy said with his mouth full, holding the spoon awkwardly.

“You must be Nicholas.”

He nodded. His hair hung shaggily around his face, and his chest heaved with tuneless humming. A Magic 8 Ball perched on the table beside the bowl.

“Is Jack around?” Wyatt asked.

“He went to buy coffee,” the boy said.

“Do you know where?”

Nicholas shrugged, staring into his cornflakes and focusing on the spoon as he plunged it into the overfilled bowl.

“How long ago did he leave?”

“When I was pouring my cereal.”

Wyatt examined the coffeemaker and found it filled with water but without coffee in the filter. Jack hadn’t gone for a cup of coffee; he had gone for a bag.

“My daddy got here last night,” Nicholas said.

“Yes, I met him last night.”

“I have a tadpole upstairs. Do you want to go see him?”

“I do. But I’d like to see him later. Right now, I’m looking for Jack. Is everyone else still sleeping?”

“Yesterday he fell on the stairs, and Ranger tried to get him.”

“I’m glad he escaped.”

“Mom saved him.”

“Your mom is a hero, then.”

Nicholas seemed to contemplate this idea. “She’s still asleep,” he said. “She’s in the bed. There wasn’t room in the bed for Daddy. He’s on the couch.”