The Decoding of Lana Morris (22 page)

Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Arnot stops by to take the Snicks to the library, but Tilly says Lana needs her,
you bet
, so Tilly stays. Lana tries to talk Tilly into taking a nap so Lana can nap herself, and Tilly does lie down on the carpet, but she can’t stop talking and squirming, so they decide finally to take snacks to Tilly’s rock place, a big bunch of boulders under a pine tree at the outskirts of the town cemetery.

Lana stretches out on the big rock in the shade and is nearly drowsing when Tilly says, “Is everything going to be okay?”

Lana blinks open her eyes. “Why do you ask that, Tilly?”

Tilly shakes her head without speaking. On a platter-sized, flat-topped rock, she’s making a loose, rounded pyramid of smaller rocks.

Lana looks at her and says, “If you could have one wish, Tilly, what would it be?”

“For everything to be okay,” Tilly says without even thinking about it.

Beyond the cemetery, along the flat horizon, a dark truck moves east to west, right to left, so far away Lana can’t hear it. It could be anybody’s truck. It could be Whit’s truck. Lana eases her eyes closed. She wants to talk to Whit, she wants to talk to him in the worst way, but she doesn’t want to think about him and what Veronica called his allies. It’s quiet except for the slight rattle of cottonwood leaves in the breeze and the dim click of rocks as Tilly builds her little pyramid, but then that stops, and Lana feels Tilly moving close, and after a moment or two, Tilly touches one of her stubby fingers softly to Lana’s
eyelids and then smooths it slowly over the contours of Lana’s cheeks and forehead, chin, and nose.

“Pretty face,” Tilly says, and Lana clicks open her eyes and looks up at Tilly.

“Yours too. You have a pretty face, too,” she says, and she means it, which is why, she supposes, Tilly seems to believe it.

Whit hasn’t gotten home yet when Lana and Tilly return to the house, but some men are inside hauling a plasma TV upstairs. It looks really heavy. The men stagger, grunt, and stop every few feet, and these are beefy men. Veronica stands above them wearing house slippers and a short robe. “I don’t know how you lift that big old thing,” she says in a cooing voice.

It makes Lana want to puke, but Tilly is fascinated and wanders upstairs. A few minutes later, Veronica drops the cooing and yells, “Come get Tilly, Lana! She’s in the way!”

Lana doesn’t have to get Tilly. Tilly leaves on her own when she hears this.

It’s almost dusk. The sun slants through the window, and when it catches the motes of dust floating in the air, it reminds Lana of the minutes in the garage before she closed her eyes and let Whit kiss her. Those minutes felt like seconds, but today’s minutes feel like hours. Whenever Lana looks at the clock, she wonders if it has stopped and needs a new battery, but it doesn’t. When she goes over and puts her ear close to it, she can hear its dull rhythmic clicking.

She and Tilly play two rounds of Candy Land, then Lana browns meat for spaghetti, and Carlito, Alfred, and Garth return and the beefy TV guys leave and supper’s over and most of the Snicks are watching a show and Lana
and Tilly are standing at the kitchen sink rinsing dishes when Whit’s truck finally turns up the driveway and pulls into the garage. Lana hears him whistling “Some Enchanted Evening” as he crosses the yard.

“Well, there are two fetching individuals,” he says to Lana and Tilly when he comes in, a remark that pleases Tilly more than Lana.

“I just put the spaghetti in the refrigerator,” Lana says.

He slides behind her and, careful that Tilly can’t see, gives the nape of Lana’s neck a quick grazing kiss. When she shrugs him off, he says, “Tilly, did you put Lana in the refrigerator by mistake?”

Tilly laughs at the thought but says she did not, no, sir.

Whit starts eating the spaghetti straight from the pot while leaning against the refrigerator. Lana supposes he’ll finish it all, then put the pot on the counter to be washed. By her.

His little ally.

Who sees with the eyes of a child.

She wipes her hands on a towel and turns around. “How’d the painting go today?” she says.

“Not bad,” he says, chewing. “Better than yesterday anyhow.”

Lana nods. “And yet there’s no paint on you.”

Whit chuckles and keeps eating. “I’m a clean individual. It’s a personal trademark of mine. You know what I always say? Nothing shouts
no prospects
louder than a painted-up painter.”

“But how do you do that? Paint without getting paint on you?”

Whit tips the pot to get the last of the spaghetti. “Well, for starters, I wear coveralls and a separate pair of paint
boots, all of which I can remove at the end of the painting day.”

He must see her looking at his hands because he says, “Then I clean up my hands real good.”

“But you don’t smell like turpentine.”

Whit makes a snorting laugh. “Turpentine? Nobody uses turpentine. They don’t even use paint thinner. Everything’s latex now, water-based, cleans up with water.” He winks. “And water, you may have noticed, is odor-free.”

He drops the fork into the pot and, slipping by Lana, goes to the sink and washes the pot himself, which is just one more strange aspect of this conversation. The explanation he’s given her about coveralls and latex paint was convincing, and now he’s washing his own pot and fork, and drying them, too, carefully, with a tea towel until the aluminum shines. As he sets the pot into its proper place in the cupboard, he says, “So how was it today with Ronnie?”

When Lana doesn’t immediately answer, Tilly says, “Her got a big giant TV!”

Whit turns from Tilly to Lana. “Yeah?”

Lana nods, and Whit’s face breaks into a beaming smile.

“I told you that Gooch guy was a genius for gaming those insurance boys,” he says, and before Lana can say anything else or even mention Inspector Stiller’s visit, he hurries upstairs.

Lana hopes Whit will suggest everybody come up to watch a movie on the enormous TV, but he doesn’t. He closes the door to their bedroom and doesn’t come back out for the rest of the night.

T
hat night Lana falls asleep listening to Chet’s podcast—Chet spends a lot of time reminding the Sodbusters about the Oddball Olympics event scheduled the next day on Highway 20. Lana sleeps a deep dreamless sleep, and when she gets downstairs the next morning, Garth is sitting by the front door, Tilly is eating Trix, and Carlito and Alfred are still sleeping. Whit’s already gone. His half-filled coffee cup stands on the kitchen counter, and Lana can see that his truck’s not in the garage. She looks around for a note, but there isn’t one. From upstairs the shrieks and applause of some kind of audience-participation show carry down from Veronica’s plasma TV.

Lana doesn’t know how many more breakfasts there will be together, so she makes pancakes and spreads baked apples over them, a dish that everybody likes and is Garth’s personal favorite. She calls them together at the kitchen table and while she’s pouring milk in glasses, she has an idea. She sits and has everybody be quiet and close their eyes.

“Thank you for this food,” she says, “and thank you for this day, and thank you for the company of Alfred and Garth and Carlito and Tilly.” She stops. She doesn’t know
what to say or do next. She’s had her eyes closed, but now she opens them and looks up. All of the others are just staring at her.

To everybody’s relief, Tilly says, “A-men! Let’s eat!” and they all dig in.

Garth didn’t eat yesterday, but today he eats fast, as if somebody’s going to take it from him. “More?” Lana says when he’s done, and he nods, yes.

After breakfast, Lana cleans up the kitchen, gets Tilly to sweep the porch, and sends Alfred up to make beds in case another inspector comes. “And flush the toilet, okay?” she shouts, just in case. She calls Mrs. Arnot then to make sure she’s coming for the boys
and
Tilly this time.

When Mrs. Arnot says she’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Lana goes upstairs to talk to Veronica, but as she approaches, she falls quiet. The door is cracked open, and she can see Veronica standing in front of the mirror. She isn’t wearing anything flirty, so she isn’t getting ready for Dr. Gooch. She’s just wearing slacks and a cotton top, a good, normal-seeming look for her, the kind of outfit she used to put on just before Whit came home. Veronica stares at the mirror and turns one way, then the other, and starts to cross her arms, but she no longer has two arms to cross. The awkwardness of it, and of her pinned-up sleeve, collapses something in her face, breaks it down, tears everything away, and what’s left, Lana can see, is fear, pure, childlike, naked fear.

Then Veronica’s eyes flick toward Lana, and the coldness snaps back.

“What’re you looking at?” she says.

“Nothing. I just came to …”

“Came to what?”

Lana takes a deep breath. “Came to tell you that breakfast’s done, the house is picked up, Mrs. Arnot’s coming for the Snicks, and I have to run an errand, so you’re in charge.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” Veronica says, but Lana’s already on the stairs and heading down. “Where’re you going?” Veronica calls, but her voice isn’t all anger now—there’s an imploring element, too. “When will you be back?”

For the first time since coming to the Winterses’ house, Lana feels almost sorry for Veronica.

“As soon as I can,” she calls back.

Lana has braided her hair and threads the braid now through a green DeKalb cap with a flying corncob on the front, one of Whit’s vast collection of caps. There is a bicycle in the garage, an old Schwinn with ten gears, of which, it turns out, only four actually work, but those are enough. Lana pedals six or seven blocks and then turns east onto Highway 20, toward the rest stop where Chet has scheduled his Oddball Olympics event, tractor-styling or something like that.

It’s only a little after nine, the heat is already searing, and the highway, which seems flat in a car, turns out to have a surprising number of gradual climbs. There aren’t many cars, but there’s no shoulder on the highway, and when a car does overtake her, it screams by. The big rigs are worse—each one creates a whooshing wake of air that nearly knocks her over. It’s far to the rest stop, very far, so far that she’s begun to think she’s missed it or gone the wrong way, when finally she crests a rolling ridge and sees it: a cottonwood tree and, beneath it, a small set of wooden bleachers.

On the approaching downhill, Lana straightens her
back and, coasting, lets the cooling wind flow into her shirt and over her face. The brakes squeal as she eases to a stop near the bleachers.

No one else is here.

In the dirt she can see some footprints and some deep scrapes from the bleachers being pulled into the shade of the cottonwood. She wonders if she has the wrong day.

“Hello?” she says. “Chet?”

The only sounds are the clicks of cicadas, the stir of cottonwood leaves, and the faint drone of a distant tractor. It smells good, though—beyond the tall, dry weeds, the dirt at the fringes of the near field has been freshly turned.

“Hello?” Lana yells again.

Nothing.

Lana’s instinct is to leave, just write a little note and leave, but it occurs to her that if Tilly were with her, Tilly would want to stay and collect leaves and rocks and, if it was her lucky day, feathers and bones. Lana wishes she’d brought water and maybe a snack. That would be the other thing Tilly would’ve wanted—a little picnic. Lana rests the bicycle against the tree and climbs toward the top of the bleachers. She leans back and stretches her legs over the next seat. She stares off, trying to imagine what kind of event Chet might’ve imagined taking place here. She can’t, though. But it begins to seem interesting to her that someone has put bleachers in a place like this, where there is nothing for a spectator to look at.

Except there is, in a way. There is the half-cultivated field and beyond that a long stretch of green pasture with three massive buttes rising up behind. There are the dense, gray-tinged shapes of clustered clouds with a fancy
name Lana doesn’t know. And there is the chorus of cicadas and the hum of the electrical line and the rumble of a passing tractor trailer on the highway. It all creates the same sense of wonder she used to feel during field trips to museums when she would look into those dioramas, except now she feels like she’s inside it. It has a calming effect on her—it causes a pleasant loosening of her perspective. It’s as if her whole being has been decongested. She likes simply sitting here breathing in, breathing out.

Lana cradles the back of her head into her knitted hands. She closes her eyes. She wishes Tilly were here, and Whit, and her father as he looked in photographs and dreams, and maybe her mother on one of her good days. She wishes Garth and Carlito and Alfred were here. She expels a deep breath, and another, and has just dipped into the first hallucinations of sleep when she hears the sound of dry breaking weeds. For a moment the sound is part of her dream, and then it is not. She wills her eyes closed for a long moment, squinching them into a wishing mode, then she blinks them open.

It’s Chet, standing at the base of the bleachers.

She’d hoped, fantastically, that it was Whit walking toward the bleachers, but when it’s Chet instead, she’s surprised to find she’s not particularly disappointed.

“Hi,” she says.

He’s carrying a blue backpack, and his smile is sheepish. “You came,” he says.

Lana grins and looks around at the empty bleachers. “Not a big crowd by most standards.”

Chet says, “What it lacks in size, it makes up in quality.”

“Well, well,” Lana says. “Big Chief Chetteroid gives the Neighbor Girl a little compliment.”

Chet shrugs, and she says, “So do you think people got the day confused?”

“No, I think the problem is nobody listens to K-SOD, not that they should, really.” He smiles. “I think it speaks well of the K-SOD audience that it doesn’t actually listen to me.”

Lana says, “You’re kind of funny.”

“Is that kind of good?”

“Yeah,” Lana says, grinning, “it kind of is.”

Chet opens his backpack and starts pulling out food. Within a minute Lana’s washing down a bologna sandwich with lukewarm Mr. Pibb. When she’s done, she says, “That was the best bad sandwich and warm drink I’ve ever had.”