The Virgin of Small Plains

  When the truck backed down the driveway and its headlights disappeared, when her father came trudging back up the stairs, when he had shut his bedroom door and a long time passed after that, Abby gave up waiting for Mitch to return to her bed that night. At least he hadn’t gotten caught, she was pretty sure, or else her father would have thrown open her door to read her the riot act. So that was good. But nothing else was. Not poor Mitch having to run home barefoot in the snow, not Mitch having to take the chance of getting caught by his parents when he sneaked back into his house, and not the two of them being separated on the one night they should have been together most.

  God only knew when she’d get the nerve to try again.

  The tears started to come. Abby cried herself to sleep, feeling sorry for herself.

  “This is just the worst,” she told her wet pillow. It was hard to be sixteen. She just couldn’t imagine how it could be any harder.

  Chapter Five

  When she padded downstairs in the morning, Abby wasn’t surprised to realize that Mitch hadn’t called her yet. Yawning, delighted that school was canceled, she took bread out of the refrigerator and put two slices in the toaster.

  “Mom?” she called out in a sleep-hoarse voice.

  “Doing laundry,” came her mother’s voice, up from the basement.

  Abby was relieved not to hear any condemnation in it, no hint of, “Boy, are you in trouble when I get up there, young lady.” She could hear sounds and low voices from her dad’s medical office, meaning he was working in there this morning. When he didn’t come storming out to confront her, either, she figured they’d gotten away with it.

  Gotten away with nothing, she thought, ruefully.

  Mitch would probably sleep in even later than she had, Abby thought, as she pulled out butter and raspberry jam, and he deserved to. She unscrewed the top on the jar of jam, ran a forefinger around the outer edge of it, and then licked off the tangy, seedy overflow. She hoped he hadn’t gotten caught sneaking home. She didn’t envy anybody who had to convince the judge of a false story. It was his profession to be able to winnow truth/wheat from lies/chaff, and it would be especially easy with Mitch.

  Around the time that her toast was about to pop up and the room was filling with the warm, yeasty aroma of homemade bread, Abby got the delightful idea of getting dressed and stomping into Mitch’s house and waking him up. If Nadine would let her into his bedroom, she could jump on him and surprise him awake. He’d hate it for about two seconds, until he saw who it was who was straddling him and tickling him.

  Abby left the toast where it was in the toaster.

  She ran upstairs, got dressed in warm layers of clothes, then raced back down to find her tallest, warmest boots and to toss on all the other layers of protection that made living in Kansas such a drag in the wintertime. She told herself that if she lived on a Caribbean island, she wouldn’t get any snow days. But maybe she’d get hurricane days—

  Abby felt goofy with the sheer pleasure of being sprung free for a day.

  She flung open the front door.

  God, what a gorgeous day!

  The sun was so bright, reflecting off the snow, that she almost ran back into the house for sunglasses. Squinting hard against the glare at first, she barely noticed the presence of the sheriff’s car in her driveway. But it was just Nathan Shellenberger, Rex’s dad, her own dad’s lifelong friend, no big deal. Abby was accustomed to all of the town’s families running in and out of one another’s homes. She didn’t give it a second thought.

  It wasn’t even all that cold, really. By the time she had high-stepped the length of two front yards, and waved at neighbors who were shoveling, she was so hot she pulled her wool cap off her head and stuck it in her coat pocket.

  Abby shook her hair loose, reveling in the crisp feel of fresh air, clean hair, being sixteen.

  Yeah, she was disappointed they hadn’t been able to go through with what she’d planned the night before, but it wasn’t like it was the only chance they’d ever get. It had just felt that way to her in the middle of the night when any bad news seems worse that it really is. She certainly wasn’t mad at Mitch about it. It wasn’t his fault that her dad got an emergency call last night. Probably some woman delivering a baby and unable to make it through the storm to the hospital in Emporia. Abby hoped everything had turned out all right. Her dad hadn’t been downstairs very long, and he hadn’t called her mother down to help him make a delivery, so maybe the patient didn’t make it in, after all. No, wait, there’d been the headlights and the noise of a truck in the driveway—

  Abby shook off those thoughts, hoping for the best for everybody.

  It scared her and made her giggle, all at the same time, at the thought of Mitch hearing her dad coming, panicking, and sneaking out of the house. He must have frozen!

  Damn, why did the Newquists have to have the world’s longest driveway?

  By the time she had trudged all the way up, she had also peeled off her gloves, and unbuttoned her coat to let the sides flap free. When she reached the big front door, she rang the doorbell. Any other house in town, she could just walk on in, but not here. Nadine had heard too many crime stories from the judge. She believed there was a burglar around every bush and a rapist hiding in every backseat. Abby’s own mother constantly kidded Nadine about it, but that never did any good. Year after year, there was some new security device added to the Newquists’ house—a dead bolt, a chain, one year a security system (in Small Plains!). This past year, they had adopted a dog that barked so much they’d finally had to get rid of it before one of the neighbors got fed up and shot it.

  “Abby,” Nadine Newquist said, upon opening the door. She looked her usual elegant, unwelcoming self, Abby thought, only more so, if that was possible. How such a cold fish had given birth to a sweetie like Mitch was more than most people had ever been able to fathom. But she’d known the woman forever, eaten grilled cheese sandwiches in her kitchen, drunk lemonade in her yard, and so she made her usual effort to treat Nadine Newquist just like she treated every other adult in town, courteously and cheerfully.

  “Hi, Mrs. Newquist! Can you believe all this snow! Is Mitch awake yet?”

  “Mitch is not here, Abby.”

  “He’s not? He’s up already? Where’d he go?”

  “He drove off this morning with his father.”

  Abby laughed, thinking his mom was joking. But when she didn’t also laugh, Abby said, “They really did? This morning? Where’d they go?”

  Nadine Newquist looked into Abby’s eyes for a long moment, and then she said, “The judge took Mitch out of town, Abby. We’re sending him away. He won’t be graduating with his class. We’re enrolling him somewhere else. He’s not coming back.”

  “What?”

  Abby blinked, not sure she’d heard the words she’d heard. They’d come so fast. There was so much weird impossible information in them. She couldn’t grasp them. They slid out of her brain. Nadine was going to have to start all over and say them all again, slowly. That way, the words would turn out to be something completely different from what Abby was afraid she’d heard, words that nobody could ever possibly have said to her.

  “What?” Abby asked, again.

  Her mouth had gone dry, her heart was pounding.

  “As you know better than I do, Abigail, my son came home very late last night from your house, when he wasn’t supposed to be there. He lied to us. Apparently, it was not the first time. Perhaps lying is perfectly acceptable in your home, Abby, but it is not in ours. I don’t blame Mitch. I blame your influence, and not just about the lying, either. He’s feeling far too much pressure from you. Mitch doesn’t know how to say no to you, Abby. And neither he nor we want him to ruin his future by hooking up with a girl who would get pregnant in order to keep him here with her.”

  “No! I didn’t…I never…”

  Nadine put up a hand, palm out, to stop her.

  “We’re taking him away from you, Abby, and you’re
just going to have to live with the fact that it’s your fault that our son cannot remain in his own home. He agrees with us that it’s the right thing to do. He will have a far brighter future away from you than he would ever have with you. You’re just a small-town girl and he’s meant for bigger things. You need to forget him. You need to get on with your silly little life.”

  Mitch’s mother closed the door in Abby’s face.

  Abby stood there, in shock, for about two seconds. Then she rang the doorbell again. When nobody answered, Abby pounded on the door with her fists until it hurt too much to keep doing it. When that didn’t raise any response, she yelled, “Nadine!” The first name slipped out, a personal, desperate plea. “Please, Mrs. Newquist!”

  There was no response from within the house.

  Abby didn’t know what to do or how to react to the strange, horrible feelings inside her body. She felt as if she were going to explode from panic and grief. She ran around through the snow to the side of the house, trying to see in through the windows, but all the drapes were closed. She ran to the back, even tried the back door, but it was locked tight. For a wild moment, she considered dragging a ladder out of the garage, propping it against the house, and climbing up to Mitch’s second-floor bedroom.

  Not graduating with his class? Not coming back?

  Feeling pressure from her, afraid she’d get pregnant to trap him?

  That was impossible! It was a joke. They were playing a cruel joke on her. They were all inside, behind the curtains, laughing at her. It couldn’t be true! No matter how serious Mitch’s mom had looked, no matter how much her voice had quavered with anger, no matter how deep the contempt in her eyes, it just couldn’t be true.

  Is this really my fault? Abby backed away from the Newquist house.

  For a long time, she stood in the snow, staring at the house that wouldn’t let her in. Was this really happening because of what she had wanted to do last night? Were they trying to keep Mitch and her apart?

  She couldn’t believe Mitch had ever said those things, or felt those ways about her.

  Abby ran to the back door and pounded on it again.

  “Please! Whatever I did, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Please don’t send Mitch away! Please don’t send him—”

  Her voice trailed off, and she finally began to cry.

  When her mother found her there ten minutes later, Margie put her arms around her sobbing daughter.

  “How did you know where to find me?” Abby wept into her shoulder.

  Her mother looked as if she had run all the way through the snow. She had on a jacket, but it wasn’t even zipped, and she wasn’t wearing gloves, hat, or boots. With her feet clad in nothing but loafers and socks, Abby’s mother stood in the deep snow and held her.

  “Nadine called, and told me to come get you.” Margie tightened her grip on her younger child, and whispered back with a tearful vehemence that turned her vow to a hiss, “I’ll kill her for hurting you like this!” She stroked the back of Abby’s head with one hand, and wiped her own tears with her other hand. Pulling back just enough to be able to look into her daughter’s brimming eyes, she said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s go home, sweetheart.”

  Chapter Six

  When Rex staggered down to breakfast that same morning, he found his mother seated at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, instead of cooking breakfast as she usually did. No wonder he’d come down late, he thought; there had been no smell of bacon frying to lure him out of bed. The whole house felt cold and looked dreary, even though the snow had finally stopped and bright sunshine was coming through the windows.

  He dragged himself up out of his own misery enough to say, “You okay, Mom?” When she looked up, he saw that she wasn’t. “You look awful!”

  “I feel even worse than I look, and please don’t comment on that.”

  “Where’s Pat?”

  “Asleep.”

  “You want me to fix you something?”

  She shook her head, but winced as if it hurt. “Your dad needs to see you in the barn.”

  “When?”

  “He said, as soon as you got up.”

  “Have you talked to Doc Reynolds?” he asked her.

  She looked startled at his question, but then seemed to realize that what he had meant was simply, “Did you call your doctor?”

  “I’m afraid he’ll send me to Emporia, Rex. To the hospital. I think I have pneumonia.”

  “Mom! If you don’t call him, I will.”

  “I’ll do it. Go to the barn.” But before he could leave the house, she stopped him. “Rex? You asked if I’m okay, but I didn’t ask if—”

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  He wasn’t anywhere near fine, “fine” was a distant country he was sure he’d never see again, but he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to think about it, either, although he couldn’t stop. He was surprised he had slept at all, and he felt as if he hadn’t. His hand was definitely broken, no doubt about it. It was swollen to twice the size of his other hand, fluorescently discolored, and it hurt like holy hell. It was an indication of how rotten his mother felt, Rex knew, that she hadn’t even asked about it. He was careful to keep it hidden behind him, so she wouldn’t be reminded of it, and feel she needed to do something about it. And anyway, his hand was nothing. It didn’t hurt at all, compared to the way his heart felt. It, too, felt swollen, bruised, broken.

  The snow had stopped falling, leaving more than two feet of white covering everything. That was two feet that would be multiplied by the many square feet that Rex figured he was going to have to plow and shovel before the morning got much further along. How he was going to manage to do that with a broken fist was just something else he wanted to avoid thinking about. Everything felt like an insurmountable task. He was so exhausted that he felt like there ought to be a warning label attached to his body: Do not allow to operate large machinery. His brain was foggy with stress and lack of sleep, and he felt as forgetful as if he had never done chores before, never fed horses or mucked out a stall. He felt as if somebody was going to have to take him by the hand—the one that didn’t hurt—and lead him from one place to another on this day of no school. How was he going to know where to go next, with no bells to ring in the hallways every forty minutes?

  Clumsily, with his good hand, he slid open one side of the barn door, stepped into the warm, fragrant space, and then closed the door behind him.

  “Dad?”

  His father was in a stall where they had placed one of the cows with her newborn, and he was feeding the calf a supplemental bottle. When Nathan glanced up, and bestowed a tight, tired smile on his son, the unexpected warmth of it nearly undid Rex. Tears sprang to his eyes, and his throat filled. He had a suddenly overwhelming desire to confide his feelings to his dad, just as he had to his mom the night before, but long habit stilled his tongue.

  “Won’t she take the teat?” Rex said, and then cleared his throat.

  “Yeah, she will. I’m just making sure she gets through the first twenty-four hours.” His father pulled a long rubber nipple out of the baby’s mouth, and the calf tried to follow it. Foamy white formula dripped from her pink tongue, and more formula from the big plastic bottle dripped onto the hay at his father’s feet. Behind the calf, the young mother seemed to take it all in bovine stride.

  “Sit down, Rex,” his father said, pointing to a hay bale across the way.

  When Nathan finished with the calf, he went over to the big metal sink they had in the barn, washed out the nipple and bottle, and set them on a counter to dry. Then he sat down near Rex on a second bale of hay, letting out a deep sigh as he settled his weight. Rex rested his wounded hand so that his father couldn’t see it. His mother would be worried, but his father would be pissed at the stupid way he’d broken it.

  Rex sucked air when his hand touched straw.

  “What’s the matter?” his father asked instantly.

  The question made Rex wonder
if his mother had talked to his father at all.

  “Nothing.” To take his mind off that pain he touched another one—his sore tongue. “Sorry I didn’t get up in time to feed the calves.”

  His father waved it off. “I never got to sleep. Thought I might as well work.”

  “Where did you take…her?”

  “To Quentin’s office. Nothing else I could do.” He paused a moment, seeming to gather his thoughts. “Son, do you trust me?”

  “What?”

  “I said, do you trust me?” It came out gruff, impatient, but Rex put that down to the fact that his father looked embarrassed to be saying the words.

  “Sure,” he said quickly, wanting to get the excruciating moment over with, so he could escape to something easier than talking to his father. Like shoveling acres of driveway with a broken hand. “You’re my dad. Of course I trust you.”

  “Yes, but have I earned your trust over the course of your life?”

  Rex thought this was becoming a very strange conversation. “Yes, sir.”

  “What if I told you to do something you thought was wrong?”

  “You wouldn’t do that—”

  “What if I did? Would you do it, just because I asked you to?”

  Rex was just about to complain, “What are you talking about?” when his father quickly added, “Would you trust me to have everybody’s best interests at heart? Would you believe I might be able to see the larger picture?”

  Rex thought the original question was now sufficiently loaded to bring down a bear. What did his dad think he was going to say, anyway? That his own son didn’t trust him? What the hell was this all about?