I didn’t say anything. If Irene hadn’t connected those dots herself, then it wasn’t my place to do it for her, to explain that everybody knows how things happen for a reason, and that we had made a reason and bad, bad, unthinkable things had happened.
“Why can’t we just be friends like we were?”
“Because we’re too old for that stuff,” I told her, tasting the lie on my tongue even as I said it, thick as a wad of cotton candy, but not nearly so easy to make shrink into sugar crystals and disappear.
She wouldn’t let me off that easy. “Too old for it how?”
“Just too old,” I said. “Too old for all of that kind of stuff.”
They started the ride again, and since there was no one in the car below us, we were back on the ground just like that. Everything that had just happened left up on top.
Mr. and Mrs. Klauson found us by the Zipper just after that. They fed us thick-crusted pie and corn on the cob and took Polaroids of us with Smokey the Bear, with balloon hats on. The two of us played along pretty well, I thought.
We kept playing along once school started. We sat together in World History. We went down to the Ben Franklin lunch counter sometimes and ordered chocolate milks and grilled cheeses. But whatever we once were we weren’t anymore. Irene started hanging out with Steph Schlett and Amy Fino. I started hanging out even more with my VCR. I watched from the bleachers as Irene kissed Michael “Bozo” Fitz after a wrestling match. I watched Mariel Hemingway kiss Patrice Donnelly in Personal Best. I watched them do more than kiss. I rewound that scene and watched it again and again until I was afraid the tape might break, and handing a broken tape of that movie to Nate Bovee, trying to explain it while he smiled his smile, would have been unbearable. He’d already given me shit when I’d checked it out.
“You gettin’ this one today, huh?” he’d asked. “You know what goes on in this movie, sweetie?”
“Yeah, she’s a runner, right?” I wasn’t playing dumb, not really. The tape case read: When you run into yourself, you run into feelings you never thought you had. On the back there was a picture of Mariel and Patrice standing close to each other in dim light. The synopsis mentioned more than friendship. I had picked it up mainly because it was a story about runners, and I was planning on going out for track. I guess somewhere there was a part of me that had figured out how to read those codes for gay content, but it wasn’t something I could name.
Nate had held on to that tape for a long time before giving it back, just sorta studying the picture of tussled-up Mariel Hemingway on the cover. “You let me know what you think about this one, huh, kiddo? These gals sure can run together.” He’d done a little hoo-wee whistle after that, licked his lips.
I took that tape back when the store was closed and put it through the drop box. Nate didn’t say anything about it the next time that I rented, so I was hopeful that he’d forgotten about it. I was hopeful, but I wasn’t stupid enough to try renting it again, even though I wanted to. Sometimes I dreamed that scene from the movie but with Irene and me instead. But I couldn’t ever make that dream happen. It just came on its own, the way dreams do.
Grandma and Ruth didn’t involve me much in the way they settled things between them—things like who would be in charge of me and where I would live and how I would be paid for. I could have asked more questions. I could have asked all of them, the big questions, but if I had then I would have just been reminding everyone, including me, that I needed to be taken care of because I was now an orphan, which made me think about why I was now an orphan, and I didn’t need one more reason to think about that. So I went to school and I stayed in my room and I watched everything, everything, without any discretion—Little Shop of Horrors and 9½ Weeks and Teen Wolf and Reform School Girls—usually keeping the volume low, the remote control in my hand just in case I had to hit the Stop button fast, Ruth on the stairs; and I let every decision being made at that kitchen table just settle around me like plastic snow in a snow globe and me frozen in there too, just a part of the scene, trying not to get in the way. And for the most part, that seemed to work.
Grandma officially moved out of her apartment in Billings and into our basement, which my dad had put a bathroom in but never got around to completely finishing. So some of the guys who used to work for him did, fast, within a month or so—they put up drywall and made Grandma a bedroom and a living room, soft blue carpet and a new La-Z-Boy recliner, and it was pretty nice down there.
Obviously Ruth couldn’t still be a stewardess for Winner’s Airlines and live in Miles Shitty, Montana. We did have an airport the size of a double-wide trailer, but it only served private planes and Big Sky Airlines—which people called Big Scare because of its reputation for flights so bumpy they practically guaranteed the need for extra puke bags—and Big Sky flights ran only between Miles City and other Montana towns, anyway: tiny planes with few passengers and no need for a lady in a uniform serving ginger ale and bags of peanuts.
“This is a new phase of my life,” Ruth said all the time in those first months after the accident. “I never planned to be a flight attendant forever. This is a new phase in my life.”
This new phase included doing secretarial work for my dad’s contracting company. My mom used to do most of that kind of bookkeeping stuff at night, for free, after she’d gotten home from her job at the Tongue River Museum; but Greg Comstock, who took over Dad’s business but kept the name, made Ruth an official employee of Solid Post Projects—one with a desk and a name plate and a twice-monthly paycheck.
That fall Ruth had to fly back to Florida to sell her condo, pack her belongings, and wrap things up in general to prepare for this new phase in her life. She had to have some surgery, too.
“Minor,” she’d told us. “Routine business for my NF. They’ve got to scrape me off, clean me up.”
NF stood for Ruth’s neurofibromatosis. She’d had it since birth, when Grandma and Grandpa Wynton noticed this lump, about the size of a peanut, in the middle of her back, along with a flat, tan mark like a puddle of milky coffee (appropriately and officially called a café au lait spot) on her shoulder, another spill on her thigh. The doctors told them not to worry; but as she got older there were more growths, some of them the size of walnuts, of babies’ fists, some of them in places where a pretty girl like Ruth didn’t want them growing, not during bikini season, not during prom. So they’d had her diagnosed, had the benign tumors removed, save the one on her back, which never changed much. It had done a little growing, then stopped, but the surgeons feared its close proximity to her spinal cord, so they left that one be.
I thought it was weird that she, shiny, perfect, glowy Ruth, was so glib about having a bunch of tumors hacked off her nerves (this batch was on her right thigh, apparently, and also one behind her knee); but she’d had it done enough now that it was just what she did, I guess, every half decade or so: one more piece of the beauty routine with a little more effort involved. With the surgery and everything else, she was gone for over a month, and Grandma and I had the house to ourselves again. It was nice. The big thing that happened while Ruth was away was that my mom’s friend Margot Keenan paid us a visit. Actually, she paid me a visit. Margot Keenan was tall and long limbed and was a semipro tennis player for a while after college before going to work for some big-deal sportswear manufacturer. I remember that the few times she came to visit when my parents were alive, she gave me tennis lessons, letting me use her fancy racket, and once, in the summer, she came to Scanlan to swim with me, and she always brought great presents from Spain, from China, from wherever. My parents stocked gin and tonic for her visits, bought limes just so they could make her drink the way she liked it. She had been friends with my mom since grade school. And more important than that, they had Quake Lake in common. It was Margot’s family who had convinced my grandparents to drive up to Virginia City the day of the earthquake while they stayed behind, and so it was her family who’d lost a son, Margot’s brother.
She was now living in Germany and hadn’t even heard about my parents’ accident until a month after the fact, and then she’d sent a huge bouquet to me. Not to all of us: to me. That thing was gigantic, with flowers that I didn’t even know the names of, and in the card she promised that she’d come to visit as soon as she was back in the States. Some weeks later she’d called while I was at school and talked with Grandma and told her when she’d be arriving and that she’d like to take me to dinner, and Grandma said yes for me, which was what I’d have said anyway.
She pulled up on a Friday evening in a dust-skinned blue rental car from the Billings airport. I watched out the window as she walked up the front steps. She seemed even taller than I remembered, and she was now wearing her shiny black hair short and asymmetrical, with one side tucked behind her ear. Grandma opened the door, but I was right there too, and even though I didn’t really know Margot well, when she leaned down a bit to hug me, I didn’t freeze my shoulders the way I had been doing for months when on the receiving end of such hugs. I hugged her back, and I think it surprised us both. Her perfume, if that’s what it was, smelled like grapefruit and peppermint, fresh and clean.
We all had Cokes in the living room while Margot talked a little about Berlin, about the various business things she was doing while back in the U.S. Then she looked at this nice silver watch she had on, a big watch with a blue face, like a man’s watch, maybe, and she said that we should get a move on if we were to make our reservation at the Cattleman’s. That was kind of funny, because even though it was Miles City’s nicest steakhouse, tucked between the bars, a place with lots of dark wood paneling and stuffed and mounted animals, it still wasn’t a reservations kind of restaurant. But apparently she had made them just the same.
I could tell Margot was nervous when she opened my car door for me and then told me to pick any radio station I wanted for the sixty seconds it would take us to get down Main Street; and when I didn’t make a move for the dial, she did it for me, cycling through the three stations that came in, making a face, and then just turning the radio off entirely. But I was nervous too, and that made me feel like we were on a date, which we sort of were, I guess. The couple of worn-in ranchers who were ponied up to the Cattleman’s bar gave Margot, in her black pants and black boots and her non–Miles City haircut, the once-over as we passed them for our table; but things seemed decidedly calmer once our drinks arrived: the requisite gin and tonic, and for me, a Shirley Temple, double the cherries, light on the ice.
“Well, I’ll go ahead and say that this is strange, isn’t it? Awkward is probably the best word.” Margot took a long swallow from her drink, letting the ice cubes collide with the lime wedge. “But I am very glad we’re doing it.”
I liked how she said we, and made this dinner something the both of us were doing and not something she had done wholly for me. It made me feel like an adult.
“Me too,” I said, drinking from my mocktail, hoping that I looked as sophisticated doing it as Margot looked to me.
She smiled, and I’m sure that I blushed in response.
“I brought pictures,” she said, digging in this nice brown leather bag she had, more like a satchel than a purse. “I don’t know how many of these you’ve seen before, but I want you to have whichever you’d like.” She handed me an envelope.
I wiped my hands on my napkin before removing the photos. I wanted her to notice how seriously I was taking all of this. I hadn’t seen most of the shots before. The first dozen or so were from my parents’ wedding. Aunt Ruth might have been the maid of honor, but Margot was a bridesmaid. I thought she looked pretty but uncomfortable in her gown and long gloves, much how I imagined I might have looked in the same getup.
“Oh, your mother and that peach monstrosity,” she said, reaching across the table and bending the picture in my hand toward her so that she could shake her head at it. “I had every intention of changing into blue jeans before the reception, but she bribed me with champagne.”
“Looks like it worked,” I said, coming across a picture of her drinking straight from a champagne bottle, my grandpa Wynton in the corner of the frame, laughing a big laugh. I showed it to her and she nodded.
“You didn’t get a chance to know your mom’s parents, did you?”
“Except for Grandma Post, none of my grandparents ever even met me,” I said.
“You would have liked your grandpa Wynton. And he would have liked you. He was very much a rapscallion.”
I liked that Margot had decided, reflecting on the small collection of times she had “known” me, that I would have been appealing to my grandfather. My mother had told me that before too, but it was different coming from Margot.
“Do you know what a rapscallion is?” she asked, waving at the waitress to bring her another drink.
“Yeah,” I said. “A trickster.”
“Very nice,” she said, chuckling. “I like that—a trickster.”
The pictures at the back of the stack were older, from my mom’s high school days and before: a picnic, a football game, a Christmas pageant, Margot towering over the girls in each shot, and as she and my mother grew younger, photo by photo, Margot towering over many of the boys as well.
“You were always really tall,” I said, and then was embarrassed about having said it.
“At school they called me MoM for years and years—it stood for Miles of Margot,” she said, looking not at me but at a table of diners who had started their cross-restaurant trek to the salad bar.
“That’s sort of clever,” I said.
She smiled. “I think so too. Well, now I do. Not so much then.”
The waitress came back to take our order and bring Margot her second drink. We hadn’t even looked in the maroon menu folders with their gold tassels, but I knew that I wanted chicken-fried steak and hash browns, and Margot apparently knew that she wanted prime rib, because that’s what she ordered, with a baked potato, as well as another Shirley Temple for me. She ordered it without even asking me if I wanted it. It was nice.
I pulled three photos from the stack—one of my mom and dad dancing at their wedding, one of my mom on the shoulders of some unknown boy with a chipped front tooth, and one of Mom and Margot, maybe nine or ten, in shorts and T-shirts, arms around each other’s waists, handkerchiefs on their heads—that one reminded me of a picture I had of Irene and me. I held up my choices in front of her and shrugged my shoulders.
“So you’ve made your selections, then.” She nodded at the pictures in my hand. “The one with both of us was taken at a Campfire Girls jamboree. I was looking for something the other day and came across my old handbook. I’ll try to remember to send it to you; you’ll get a kick out of it.”
“Okay,” I said.
Then we looked at each other, or the table, or the salt and pepper shakers, for what seemed like a very long time. I concentrated on tying one of my cherry stems into a knot with my tongue.
Margot must have noticed my mouth working, because she said, “My brother, David, used to do that too. He could do two knots on a single stem, which he told us meant that he was a very fine kisser.”
I blushed, as usual. “How old was he?” I asked, without finishing the question with when he died, but Margot understood me all the same.
“He had just turned fourteen the weekend before the earthquake,” she said, stirring her drink. “I don’t think he had actually kissed very many girls before he died. Maybe none except for your mother.”
“Your brother kissed my mom?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “In the pantry of the First Presbyterian Church.”
“So much for romance,” I said.
Margot laughed. “It was very innocent,” she said. She picked up the salt shaker and tapped its glass base against the tablecloth a few times. “I haven’t been back to the Rock Creek area since it happened, but I’m going straight there after I leave Miles City tomorrow. I feel like I need to.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
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“I wanted to go back anyway; I’ve been wanting to for several years,” she said.
“I don’t ever want to go there.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” Margot reached her hand across the table like she was maybe going to take my hand, or just touch it, but I moved it fast to my lap.
She smiled a tight smile at me and said, “I’m going to level with you here, Cameron, because you seem adult enough to handle it. Grief is not my strong suit, but I did want to see you and tell you that if you need anything from me, you can always ask and I’ll do my best.” She seemed like she was done, but then she added, “I loved your mom since I met her.”
Margot wasn’t crying and I couldn’t read on her face the potential for it, but I knew that if I looked at her long enough, I could definitely get all weepy, and maybe even eventually tell her about me and Irene and what we had done, what I had wanted to do and still did want to do. And I knew, somehow, that she would make me feel better about it. I could just tell that Margot would assure me that what I had done hadn’t caused the accident, and that while I wouldn’t believe anybody else telling me that exact same thing, I might actually believe her. But I didn’t want to believe her right then, so I didn’t keep looking at her face but instead drained the rest of my Shirley Temple, which took several swallows; but I finished every last sweet pink-red carbonated drop until the ice clacked against my teeth.
Then I said, “Thanks, Margot. I’m really glad you came.”
“Me too,” she said, and then she put her napkin back on the table and said, “I’m ready for that salad bar. How about you?”
I nodded, and then she asked me if I knew the German word for bathroom and I said no and she said das Bad, and it seemed funny so we both smiled, and then she stood and told me that she was just going to pop into das Bad for a minute before we ate. And while she did that, I took her photos back out of the envelope and found that wedding shot of her drinking straight from the champagne bottle and I slipped it up under my shirt and just inside the waistband of my pants, its surface cool and tacky against my stomach.