The Decoding of Lana Morris (4 page)

“Welcome to the historic town of Hereford,” Chet says, “a town named in honor of a large and not-smart animal.”

Beyond him, all Lana sees is another deserted podunk town, except this one seems even more deserted and more
podunk than the rest. “Whose mighty idea was this?” she says.

Chet, grinning, says, “Trina’s, mostly. She said she felt the urgent need for a cheeseburger, and hey, if you can’t find a cheeseburger in a town called Hereford …”

Lana looks at the boarded-up movie theater and the silent shops and wonders about that. Two Rivers is small and a bit on the shabby side, but at least you saw people walking in and out of the grocery store.

Chet starts off in the direction of Spink, K.C., and Trina, who are already far down the block, but then he turns and says halfheartedly, “Wanna come?”

He knows she won’t. It’s not that great sitting at a table with people who have a rule against talking to you, for one thing, and for another, all she’s got is small change. (That’s the norm with Lana. Sometimes when K.C. and Trina get tired of calling her Foster, they call her Unfunded Foster.) “Naw, you go ahead,” she says, and Chet slides off to catch up with the others.

Lana notices the LeSabre is the only car parked on the entire street and yells, “Tell K.C. that was staunch luck finding such a fine parking space.”

Staunch
is a word one of her mother’s boyfriends used—Lana didn’t like the boyfriend, but she likes the word. She thinks it’s funny, but almost nobody else does, so it’s a nice surprise when Chet throws a grin back over his shoulder.

As he walks off, Lana realizes the two-dollar bill isn’t behind her left ear and feels a surge of panic until she sees it lying there in the trunk, unrolled and flattened. This isn’t the first time she’s done this in her sleep—unrolled and flattened the bill, then lost track of it in the blankets—and
she often awakens afterward with a vague sense of dreaming of her father. Today she can’t find the little rubber band she uses to bind the rolled bill, but she always keeps a spare in her pocket (they’re orthodontic rubber bands—she pocketed a whole handful in a dentist’s office a few years before and they’ve lasted ever since).

Lana rolls the bill tightly, secures it with a new band, and tucks it behind her ear. Then she looks around. Chet and the others have disappeared from view, and no one else is out and about. Except for heat vapors rising from the blacktop, nothing moves.

Lana crosses to the shady side and walks along with the idea of window-shopping, but there isn’t much to see. There’s a post office, a craft store, a barbershop, a feed store, and a defunct market. One scrawled sign in an insurance office says,
Gone to Town Picnic
, and after that Lana starts noticing yellow flyers announcing the Hereford Roundup and Barbecue, Live Music & Boat Races, Main Bower at Lake McElheny.

Lana turns the corner and heads away from downtown, scuffing her shoes across the fine dirt of an alley where a cat watches her from a trash can lid with such blandness that Lana points a finger and says, “Bang.” The cat pulls its paws under its white fur, unimpressed, and Lana walks on.

At the corner of First Street, an old stone hitching post sticks crookedly out of the grass, and Lana sees that the houses here are old, high-peaked, and handsome, with wide porches and massive doors. It’s the sort of street her mother used to drive them along when she had a car and enough gas, a good street for playing the House Game. In the House Game, you looked over the contenders. You
considered size, color, and features. Then you settled on the one you were going to buy just as soon as it came on the market. Her mother always picked one with a sun-porch full of wicker and potted plants. Lana always picked one that had bicycles, sleds, or baseball equipment strewn on the yard and driveway, as if the sale of the house would include children.

The houses on First Street both cheer and depress Lana. The yards are green, there are flowers here and there, and in one front yard a beach ball floats in a blue wader pool. Beyond the little pool is a porch with enormous wavy glass windows, and sure enough, inside it, among the potted plants, there rests an empty wicker love seat, the sort she knows now her mother was never even close to owning.

Lana crosses the street to get away from the house and finds herself in front of a green-roofed Victorian with two, maybe three floors, the topmost roof crowned with iron filigree and lightning rods. The porch is open to the weather, not glassed in, and it has two wooden rocking chairs on it, turned slightly so that if two ghosts were sitting there, they could speak. Lana puts her hand on the little curlicue iron gate that’s attached to a curlicue iron fence. Somebody has the right to open it, walk up the sandstone steps, and plop down in the rocking chair, then open the carved wooden door to what is probably a carved wooden staircase. Somebody does that every day, she thinks, and probably never considers that it’s anything special.

A dog’s bark carries from down the street, and a squirrel whisks here and there on the front lawn. Worked into the iron swirls on the gate is the capital letter
H
.

Lana lets go of the gate, then walks on past a white cottage, a blue two-story, a yellow house that is plainly the one with the fun mom (sports gear everywhere), and a plain white corner house, from which she can see downtown again. The emerald green LeSabre’s still parked alone on the street, but Chet and the others are nowhere in sight. Lana puts her hands in her pockets and is walking back to Main Street, wondering what to do next, when she sees something reflected in the window of the insurance office, a movement in the shop across the street, and she turns for a better look.

It’s an upstairs shop, and hanging from the roof eave above its door is a wooden sign that says M
ISS
H
EKKITY’S
O
DDMENTS &
A
NTIQUES
. Below that, in crackled gilt lettering, it says,

And here’s something. There, in the window where Lana thought she’d seen a moving shadow, an
OPEN
sign has appeared.

“H
ello?” Lana says once she’s climbed the outside stairs and stepped into the shop, but no one answers. Sun shines through the windows, but the lights in the shop are off. Much of the shop is dim, and the corners are dark. “Hello?”

Nothing.

“Miss Hekkity? Anybody?” For no good reason, she imagines Miss Hekkity as someone young and pretty, like her kindergarten teacher, Miss Marsh.

No reply.

Lana fingers her two-dollar bill and stands adjusting to the dimness. In the center of the store, the glass cases are full of family artifacts—engraved sports trophies, felt pennants, awards for school achievements. Around the edges of the shop, antique furnishings have been arranged in a semblance of tiny, packed rooms. In the nearest one, a blue-and-white-painted doll crib holds a stained Raggedy Ann beside a miniature aqua high chair, a rocking horse, and a display of hand-smocked dresses. Beside that, a crazy quilt covers a red wooden spool bed just big enough for Lana to lie down on, an idea that Lana has to resist, it seems so welcoming.

Lana goes idly from one tiny roomlike space to the next, picking things up, putting them down. What always makes Lana wonder are the things people are willing to leave behind. There are awards and ribbons and old books with personal notes written inside (on the title page of one, someone had written,
See p. 131 for hiccup cure,
and another book was inscribed,
To Jamesy, Papa’s Little Lump of Love
). Lana wonders what happened to the girl named Betty Jean Coker who took home the second-place award from her sixth-grade spelling bee or to the person whose rabbit won a blue ribbon at the 1954 Dawes County Fair. Lana is holding a soft green felt pennant bought by somebody to commemorate a trip to Banff National Park when suddenly a voice close behind her says, “Find what you’re looking for?”

Lana turns, and a single overhead lamp suddenly illuminates the woman who, by means of a string pull, has just turned it on. She isn’t young and tall, like Miss Marsh in kindergarten. She is small, thin, and old, her face wrinkled like tissue paper that’s been folded and unfolded many times. Her white hair is cut short to frame her face, like it might have been cut when she was five, ten, twenty, and forty. She wears plain girlish clothes: a gray cardigan with enormous buttons, a white blouse with a round collar, and navy blue pants. But her shoes are a surprise, red leather, definitely stylish, the kind of shoes Lana hasn’t seen on the feet of many small-town shopkeepers. And behind her glasses, her eyes are keen and kindly and a beautiful luminous blue.

The woman had been knitting—she holds four short wooden needles linked by red yarn—but now she waits patiently for Lana’s reply.

“I like everything,” Lana says. “I’m just looking, though.”

The woman, resuming her knitting, seems slightly amused. “That’s what they all say.”

For some reason this annoys Lana. “Well, the reason I say it is I’m fresh out of loot.”

The woman’s expression doesn’t change at all. It’s as if she hears, but doesn’t hear. Lana sees that what’s emerging from the knitting needles is a mitten, a really big mitten. Gigantic, even. The woman shifts the stitches along one needle with her index finger and seems to count. A silence develops, and Lana notices a neatly printed poem taped to the back of the cash register:

Not that this matters to Lana. She wouldn’t be buying anything unless the label said
FREE
.

Lana says, “How come nobody’s home in this town?”

The woman barely looks up from her knitting. “Town picnic.”

“And everybody goes?”

“Just about. There’s a cranky old misanthrope named Friedrich who doesn’t. He keeps his café open every day of the year.”

“Every day?”

“Every day.” The knitting needles keep moving,
click click click
. “There are a few of us who live alone and are
grateful for a place to go on Thanksgiving or New Year’s. He does German dishes.” The woman smiles to herself. “I’m one of a small group of Americans who actually associates Thanksgiving with potato pancakes and wurst.”

Lana picks up a tea towel that has a cluster of cherries and the word
Tuesday
stitched into it with cheerful red embroidery floss. “How come you don’t go to the town picnic?” she says, and then without thinking it through, she adds, “Are you cranky, too?”

The woman laughs a surprising laugh. It’s quick, bright,
young
-sounding. “Not
too
cranky, I hope.”

But the woman doesn’t answer the question, so Lana says, “I guess you don’t like the picnic, then?”

“I used to go,” the woman says, and her expression seems to dry up and hollow out and her voice, too. “I just didn’t feel like it this year.” She glances down at the jumbo mitten she’s knitting and seems to be deciding whether to go on explaining or not.

She goes on.

“Last year,” she says in the same dry, hollow voice, “I was taking care of someone who was fond of the picnic. My nephew, actually. He looked forward to it every summer, especially the boat races. He liked to cheer them on. He’d pick his favorite on the basis of color. If there was a red one, he’d always root for that. Then a little committee came to ask me if I could keep him home. They said some mothers had complained that he was dangerous, that he scared their children. They said they hoped I would understand and wouldn’t be offended.”

Lana’s guessing the nephew is a Snick or has AIDS, one or the other. “What happened?” she asks.

“Well, I
didn’t
understand, and I
was
offended. I had to
lie to my nephew and say it was canceled. But he saw the boats on people’s trailers, headed out of town. He saw the flyers. He may have been different, but he wasn’t an idiot.”

So he’s a Snick, or at least was
, Lana thinks. “What do you mean,
wasn’t
?”

The woman hitches her chin a half inch. “He died a few months ago of heart failure. In March. He was fifty-two.” She looks off toward the line of windows facing the street. “His father died about six years ago, and then his mother passed, and no one else in the family wanted him.” Something touches the woman’s face, Lana can see it, some soft touch of a hand no longer there. “His name was Quinn,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” Lana says. She could say more, but something keeps her from telling the woman about Tilly and the rest. Maybe it’s because she knows in her bones there’s a difference. She doesn’t mind the Snicks, sometimes she even halfway likes them, but she can tell that this woman’s feelings for her nephew went way beyond liking and Lana isn’t sure her feelings for the Snicks go beyond liking, or ever will. So Lana just says she’s sorry and waits.

“Well,” the woman says, picking up her yarn to wrap and knit again, her voice again composed. “What would you be looking for if you weren’t … fresh out of
loot
?”

“Sometimes I like old photograph albums,” Lana says, and the woman nods and says, “Well, look around to your heart’s content. Sometimes people find what they’re looking for.”

Lana wanders down the aisle, staring into the little rooms with all the wares on display—shaving brushes, class rings, hat pins, thimbles, commencement programs, perfume bottles, ribbons for prize Herefords. The rooms
are so full of abandoned things that Lana feels a strange kind of longing to move into them. There is everything a person would need to live here: beds, quilts, lamps, pots, dishes, even clothes, all of them smaller than modern things and more fragile, as if the people who owned them were a different people altogether, smaller, simpler, more careful with their things. Until of course they outlived them, and others found them useless and sold them or gave them away or just left them where they lay when they closed the door for the last time.