Monday, Monday: A Novel (38 page)

But there was nothing like that. He still loved everything about her. He loved the way she looked, the way she stood there, her soft and plain way of speaking her mind. For most of his life now, every painting he had made, in ways he couldn’t even describe, had been for Shelly. As he’d worked, he had wondered what she might think of the finished painting she would likely never see. No matter how he had made peace with Elaine, no matter how much he loved Elaine, Shelly remained a painful sacrifice.

He knew he should stop looking at her if he intended to get through the weekend without falling in love all over again. Forty years, and he had finally managed to tolerate the memories with less discomfort. But now here she was—the mountain behind her, the sunlight filtering down and dancing on her shoulders, the rising wind tugging at her hair, every moment revealing a new Shelly he would have to get over.

Wyatt wasn’t the only person in the gathering whose thoughts were not with the dead tadpole. Everyone at the grave was lost in private thoughts. Shelly’s were a patchwork of worries as she stared down at the splintered roots and considered how everything that had happened in the last twenty hours had made it nearly impossible to reveal the truth to Carlotta. The unexpected arrivals of Madeline and Nicholas, and then Andy, and then the death of the tadpole, and the runaway dog—it had all created so much confusion. If Madeline were to follow through on her plan to take Nicholas to the rodeo tonight, and if Andy were to go along, then there would be a chance to talk to Carlotta. But it was an imperfect chance, and Carlotta deserved a more thoughtful introduction to the truth than one slotted to match the timing of a rodeo. And of course Madeline would need to be told afterward.

Shelly avoided looking at Wyatt, Jack, and Delia—worried to meet their eyes. The unwieldy truth hung between the four of them as they stood over the tiny, ridiculous grave. She looked instead at Madeline, who was obviously chafing at Andy’s voice, and at Carlotta, who appeared especially pensive.

Madeline’s eyes were only on Andy. She resented his stage management of this funeral, and thought how her own father would have taken her off to bury the tadpole in private. Nobody knew the Hebrew words Andy was saying, or cared what they meant. He was indulging Nicholas more than she thought was healthy—trying to excuse himself as a weak husband by being an overly decent father. Nicholas couldn’t be getting much out of this ceremonial mishmash. And he was no longer grief-stricken.

She moved in closer and placed a hand on his shoulder. Small as he was for seven, he seemed to be growing so quickly. She remembered when he was four years old and had pointed to the telephone wires and power lines on their street and asked what they were used for. She had tried to explain electricity and how sound could travel through wires, but had realized from his disappointed expression that this wasn’t the kind of answer he had wanted. “What did you think the wires were for?” she asked him.

“For the birds to sit on,” he told her. How touching and sad it was that he had believed people were good enough to set up all those wires just so the birds could rest.

Across from Madeline, Carlotta was in a somber mood, reflecting on the small grave she had dug not long ago beside the little creek called the Peña Blanca. She looked at sweet little Nicholas, and thought how lucky he was to have a father who would take so much care to bury the tadpole, and how strangely nice it was here under the shade of the tree, with everyone gathered around like family.

46

A FAMILY OUTING

By dinnertime, Madeline was sure something apart from her marriage was wrong in the house. Nothing was going the way it usually did. The dinner was store-bought lasagna Delia had dug from the back of the freezer, and no one bothered to sit at the table, but ate alone as they got hungry, standing up in the kitchen or taking their plates out to the porch.

She sat at the bottom of the stairs to eat her portion, puzzling over the situation. Nicholas stood at the top of the stairs and complained that his boots didn’t fit. Andy appeared beside him in a cowboy hat and a pair of boots he had borrowed from Jack. The hat was too small for his head, and he looked ridiculous, like he was wearing a costume.

They took Madeline’s Suburban to the rodeo. She insisted on driving. She didn’t want to surrender control of anything in her life. She turned the radio off, not wanting to listen to sappy songs.

The highway into town became the main road through it, running alongside the railroad tracks, past the bus station and the post office and the feed store. Just beyond a building supply and the Dairy Queen, Madeline pulled into a gas station and waited while Andy and Nicholas went inside. Andy came out with two bottles of Guinness and opened one by shoving the mouth into the door-lock mechanism.

“You know you’re not supposed to drink in a moving vehicle,” Madeline told him.

“The rodeo’s just down the road.”

“I don’t want to drive if you’re drinking in the car.”

“I’ll drive.”

“Not while you’re drinking.”

“Okay, I’ll just hold it then.”

“It’s an open-container law.”

He looked at her.

“Complain to the Department of Public Safety,” she told him.

He pressed the cap onto the bottle. “Bottle’s no longer open.” He was irritated now. She could tell he’d had enough of her anger. She’d about had enough of it, too, but wasn’t ready to let it go.

Nicholas came out of the store with bags of Cheetos and Corn Nuts and got in the car. The parking lot was busy with people heading to the rodeo, a line of vehicles at the pump. Waiting to pull out, Madeline was stuck behind two pickups. Nicholas said, “Mom? There’s something the matter.” She turned and saw he was on his knees, peering over the backseat. He had pulled the sheet off the painting.

“Put the sheet back on, honey,” she told him.

“But, Mom? Is that Nana’s…”

“Cover it up, honey.”

“Does she have clothes on?”

“Yes, she has clothes on. Put the sheet back.”

“What’s he talking about?” Andy asked.

“The painting.”

“You’ve left it in the car the whole time? The heat’s going to ruin it.”

“The water ruined it.”

“Why’s he asking if she has clothes on?”

Nicholas said, “Because she doesn’t have any on.”

Madeline spoke under her breath to Andy, “Just let it drop. Some of the paint has chipped.” But he had already swung the door open and joined Nicholas in the back. “Holy moly,” he said, looking over the seat at the painting in the very back.

“Goddamn it, Andy,” Madeline said. “Cover it back up.”

“Mom! You’re cussing!”

Andy slid back into the front beside her. “Wow. What do you think is the deal?”

“Hell if I know!”

“You’re cussing again, Mom!” Nicholas said.

Andy looked at her from under the too-small cowboy hat. “It’s okay. So your mom posed nude. It was the sixties.”

“We don’t know if she posed nude!”

“‘Signs point to yes,’” he quoted the 8 Ball.

“Would you shut up? God. Why won’t these people pull out?”

“Because there’s a lot of traffic,” Andy said, and added, “I think it’s sort of cool if she posed nude.”

“Can we not talk about this, please? With Nicholas?”

“I already saw it, Mom,” Nicholas said.

“When did you notice it?” Andy asked her.

“Last night. After I got here.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She glared at him.

Nicholas said, “Are we ever going to get out of this gas station?”

When they finally pulled out, Andy changed the subject by telling Nicholas about the rodeo. “These aren’t rodeo people,” he said over the seat. “These are cowboys who work on real ranches. When they ride the bucking broncos, they’ll be using real saddles, not specialty saddles, and the money from the rodeo will help out cowboys who have been hurt, or whose kids are sick or want to go to college.”

What a phony he was, Madeline thought. He knew nothing about rodeos. He had learned all this from a website an hour ago.

Passing the saddle shop at the edge of town, they drove bumper to bumper in a line of trailers and pickups, the lights of the rodeo forming a dusty halo in the darkening sky before them and obliterating the stars. Teenage boys roughhoused in the bed of the truck in front of them, scuffling over a T-shirt. A sign at the rodeo exit announced no alcohol would be permitted, but Madeline decided she would drink a beer after she parked.

Andy was telling Nicholas about calf roping. She pictured him lecturing to perfectly functional corporate employees on how to relate in the workplace. It was hard to believe, looking at him in that hat squeezed on his head, that people took him seriously about anything.

At the clogged entrance to the parking lot the woman selling tickets had a bouffant of bleached hair. “Adults are eight dollars,” she said. “Kids are free. Park where you want.” She flagged them through when Madeline paid. Madeline circled slowly among buses and campers, dodging pedestrians and a man with gray pigtails on horseback. Finally she parked near the livestock pens. A train rattled along the nearby tracks, close enough to shake the Suburban and drown out the sound of Nicholas crunching on Corn Nuts. When it had passed, a steady, nervous lowing of cattle settled over the silence.

“I want to sit here and drink a beer,” Madeline said. “You all go in.”

“We’ll wait for you,” Andy told her. He got out of the car with Nicholas, and they stood together peering through the rungs of a metal fence at a skittish horse pacing around in a cramped pen. Madeline sat in the car drinking, smelling damp manure and dusty hay through the open windows. She could hear the shouting of the announcer from inside the covered arena, “Get on up behind him, boys! Stick to him! Stick to him!”

Andy walked over and spoke to her. “Why don’t you just talk to your mom and be honest. Tell her the portrait got wet and some of the paint is cracking and you’re wondering—”

“Please don’t tell me what to say to my mom.”

He returned to the fence and scooped a handful of hay from the ground and offered it to the horse. Beside him, Nicholas squinted from blowing dust and the lights of vehicles circling the parking lot.

“Why are you feeding that horse?” Madeline shouted through the window. Andy turned and stared at her blankly. “It’s not your horse,” she told him, and he dropped the hay on the ground.

She was starting to feel like a bully.

What if it wasn’t his fault that he was inclined to be unfaithful? He was possibly like the species of voles she had read about in a magazine. They were different from prairie voles. Male prairie voles were monogamous, and these others were not. Prairie voles had hormones that addicted them to their mates.

But marriage was not an addiction. Marriage was a commitment.

Still, whatever Andy had done was over. He wasn’t doing it now. Now he was only offering hay to the horse again.

“It’s not your horse!” she shouted.

“Okay,
okay
.”

Could he not even keep any boundaries with a
horse
? She yanked the rubber band out of her ponytail and twisted it back in.

Andy and Nicholas stroked the horse’s nose through the rungs of the fence.

The metallic voice continued to rumble from the arena: “You are on the money, boys! Goodness gracious! That’s a fifty-three point twenty-two! You are
on
it!”

A thin boy in a ball cap with riding gear draped over his shoulder jogged past Madeline’s window. His hurry, and the jangling gear, and the ball cap, the reins flapping shattered her thoughts with a sudden memory of the boy at Devil’s Sinkhole running toward the car. The memory flew at her, spinning her into a panic, as if she were once again heading down the white caliche road toward the nightmare at the sinkhole. She was wrestling with her dread when Andy came to the window.

“Are you ready to go in?” he asked.

“I need a minute more. Go on and take Nicholas.”

“Honey? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t want to ever confide in Andy again. “Go on in.”

She watched the two of them disappear among the vehicles. A dry wind gusted through the Suburban, carrying cattle sounds and the whinny of horses. Madeline rolled the window up, finished the rest of the beer, got the other beer from the back, and drank it, too. Mildly intoxicated, she found her way through slatted shadows of livestock pens, past an on-call ambulance parked near the rear of the bucking chutes, and into the arena.

The lights and chaotic atmosphere helped to dispel her dark thoughts, and she began to think about Emmett Johnson and wonder if she would see him. The announcer’s voice thundered down from the booth, “And now for the Escamilla brothers—world-famous
charros
here from Mexico to amaze us with their rope tricks!”

She spotted Andy and Nicholas buying burritos at a booth and climbed into the stands with them as they ate. Mariachi music played over the speakers while the
charros
, in sombreros and studded leggings, performed horseback stunts and lariat feats. A cowgirl riding an Appaloosa galloped across from the pens, the horse’s hooves churning up dirt and the girl’s braid flapping against her back.

Scanning the arena, Madeline finally saw Emmett standing near a banner for McCoy’s Building Supply. He wore jeans and the same work boots he had worn earlier, but now with a western shirt and a cowboy hat. She waved at him, and moments later he appeared next to her and squatted down on a step, a boy just older than Nicholas standing behind him.

Emmett introduced the boy as his son, Clay, and Madeline introduced Andy.

“Thank you so much for the help with Ranger,” Andy told Emmett, standing to shake his hand. “You really saved the day.”

“Not any problem at all. How’s he doing?”

“Fine, I think. Thanks to you. I’m just glad you were able to get there.”

Clay bounced in his boots, his hands in his back pockets, his hat brim resting on his ears. He had the same solid build as his father.

In the arena, two mounted cowboys in matching plaid shirts were trying to rope a steer with a number placarded on its back. “Hang it on him!” a woman sitting behind Madeline shouted. “Come on, Skinny! Stay with him. Get in closer! Hang it on him!”