“Did he tell you where she went?”
“He didn’t know. Said she just handed him her key and left.
Didn’t take her furniture, TV, anything.
“And that was it. She was gone. Didn’t call me, didn’t call the hospital, didn’t turn in a resignation. She just left. I never heard from her or about her until someone here told me her sister called and said Helen was dead.”
“Had she said anything to make you think she might be leaving?”
“Not a word. But she was real funny about her private life.
Never talked much about anything more than her work.”
“The last few times you saw her, did she act like she was troubled about anything?”
“To the contrary. She was up! Happier, more talkative than she’d ever been. Said leaving the burn unit was the best decision she’d ever made.”
“I didn’t know about that.”
“Well, it was time. The burn unit’s rough, and Helen had been there for almost three years. Then she lost a sixteen-year-old who’d been critical for weeks. And that did it for her. That’s when she asked for the transfer.”
“To what?”
“Pediatrics. She’d only been there three months before she took off. And that’s what’s so weird. She just loved working with the babies.”
*
Caney was making a stab at figuring his income tax, a project that always brought out the worst in him. But today he was saying little, even when his totals didn’t jibe. He didn’t want to add to Molly O’s dark mood, which had not been lifted by her trip to the beauty shop.
She’d been finding small jobs to do while they weren’t busy, jobs that required no thought and no conversation.
When Life walked in, she was filling salt shakers, unmindful of her long-held superstition which required her to toss a few grains over her shoulder each time salt was spilled.
Life had been in the Honk for breakfast and lunch, but they were two hours away from supper, and he never showed up unless it was mealtime.
But his timing was only a little less strange than his appearance.
He’d changed out of his overalls and work boots into clean starched khakis, a white dress shirt and a dark blue sport coat just a tad too tight across his belly. His hair was perfectly parted, slicked with Brylcreem, and he smelled of soap and aftershave, something lemony and sweet.
“Hey, Life,” Caney said. “You preaching or politicking?”
“Neither one.”
“You look nice, Life,” Molly O said, knowing how much a compliment could mean to someone who needed it.
“You’re a little early for supper,” Caney said.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Get you something?”
“No,” Life said, doing his best not to look at Molly O.
Caney had never seen Life so serious and distant, but he pretended not to notice and went back to his paperwork.
Finally, to break the silence, Life said, “Guess I will have some coffee.”
Molly O filled a cup and slid it onto the counter without speaking, but just before she pulled away, Life stretched his hand toward her and brushed his fingers across her wrist.
“You want some pie with that?” she asked, figuring his touch was a signal for food.
“No.”
He added sugar to the cup but never stirred it, never raised it to his lips. Then, after several seconds of intense concentration, he said, “Caney, do you mind if I have some time alone with Molly O?”
Caney tried to cover his surprise while he fumbled to recap his pen. “Why, sure, Life. No problem.”
Molly O looked as puzzled as Caney, who snatched up slips of paper, shoved them beneath the counter and hurried to the kitchen.
He was hardly out of sight before Molly O said, “What’s the matter, Life?” a look of concern on her face.
“Well, I was wondering . . .” He stopped and listened as pounding came from behind the Honk. “What’s that?”
“Bui’s making a pair of pants for the dog.”
“With a hammer?”
“I think they’re some special kind of pants, probably some Vietnamese thing. I don’t know, maybe it’s got something to do with his religion. Now, you said you was wondering.”
“Yeah.”
Life pulled himself up, squared his shoulders and began the speech he’d been rehearsing for a week.
“You’re going through a very bad time right now, Molly O, so this maybe isn’t the best time to ask, but I have to.
“You know times haven’t been the best for me. I mean, I don’t have much farm left . . . and after burying Reba, well, that pretty much wiped out what little I did have put aside. Now understand I’m not complaining. It had to be done.”
“Yes,” Molly O agreed. Burying Reba certainly seemed appro-priate . . . considering she was dead.
“Now I’m telling you all this ’cause I want to be honest about the situation I’m in before I ask if you could see your way clear to . . .”
Molly O shook her head.
“Life, I’d help you if I could, I really would. But I’m running pretty short right now myself. My phone bill last month was almost two hundred dollars, but I could let you have—”
“Oh, no! Nothing like that. . . . I didn’t mean . . . No, that’s not what I came to ask. . . .”
The front door opened as Vena stepped inside and forced a smile.
“Hi, Life.” Though the phone call had left her shaken, she was trying not to let it show. “You’re early, aren’t you?”
Life’s shoulders slumped and his chin dipped toward his chest.
“I guess I am,” he said with the realization that his attempted proposal had been thwarted once again.
As Vena started for the kitchen, she almost collided with Bui as he ran through, dashed into the utility room and returned with the dog tucked under his arm.
“I make for Spot some panse,” he said, nearly breathless with excitement.
“Well, let’s go see,” she said, feigning enthusiasm she couldn’t feel just then.
Vena followed Bui through the kitchen, but before she reached the door, he stopped her.
“Not look,” he said.
“What?”
Bui demonstrated by shutting his eyes. Vena followed suit, then let him take her hand and lead her outside.
“Look now!”
Chicken wire stretched around a ten-foot square of winter grass . . . and in the center sat the doghouse.
“A fence!”
“Yes, I make for dog some panse,” he said, then he lifted Spot over the fence and put her inside the yard.
Casting forlorn eyes at Vena, the dog took a few hobbling steps.
“See Spot run,” Bui said clearly.
After she sniffed at a clump of chickweed, Spot squatted and peed.
“See Spot jump,” he said, enunciating every word.
And when the dog limped inside her new home and curled herself at the door, Bui wound up his recitation, his voice confident and strong.
“See Spot run and jump,” he said with the dignity of a learned man.
Then, smiling, he bowed.
Vena, touched by Bui’s kindness, found some relief from the sadness that ached inside her when she hugged him against her and whispered, “Thank you,” as her eyes filled with tears.
M
OLLY O HADN’T MISSED a day of work at the Honk since she’d found her fourteen-year-old daughter naked in the backseat of a car with a drummer in a band called Hard Drivin’.
After running the drummer off with the threat of castration, Molly O had delivered a burning lecture to Brenda who had yawned and padded off to bed where she’d fallen into a deep and untroubled sleep. In the next room, Molly O had wept, pacing the floor and praying for guidance.
She’d only wanted to settle her nerves when, still sleepless at three the next morning, she uncapped her last husband’s last bottle of Jim Beam, just a hot toddy to help her calm down. But she ended up drinking it all, then woke up suffering the agonies of a hangover, the only time in her life she’d ever been drunk.
She’d never even taken off for a vacation, though she’d planned one, a graduation gift for Brenda. They were going to Nashville for a whole week, take in the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry, stay in a motel with a pool and swim every day.
But that all fell through when Brenda dropped out of school again, this time for good, and ran away with a guitar player in a band out of Nashville.
When Molly O found the note Brenda left, she gave some thought to drinking again, but decided against it. Instead, she pulled herself together and went to work, knowing the best place for her to be that day was with Caney.
Even when she was under the weather, Caney couldn’t get her to stay home. She’d worked with bronchitis, a sprained wrist, pleurisy, migraine headaches, and once with ten stitches in her arm, the result of falling off a merry-go-round at the fair.
So on Monday when she wasn’t in by seven, Caney knew something was wrong.
“You okay?” he asked when she answered the phone.
“Oh, I was gonna call you, Caney, but I fell asleep.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’ve caught a darned cold. Cough kept me awake most of the night and I think I’m running a little fever.”
“Well, why don’t I get in touch with Doc Warner, get him to call you in a prescription.”
“No, honey, don’t do that. It’s just a cold, nothing to do but wait it out.”
After Caney hung up, he tried to convince himself she was right.
But a cold had never kept her home before.
He stayed busy for the next couple of hours as Vena turned in a steady stream of orders. They could have used Bui’s help, but he came in later now because of his lessons. When Galilee started teaching him to read, he’d proudly announced that he was a student. But when Caney had asked him questions about his school and his teacher, he’d become as secretive and vague as he was about the place where he lived.
So this morning, with almost more business than the two of them could handle, Vena and Caney didn’t slow down until nearly ten.
As soon as he grabbed a cup of coffee, Caney started to call Molly O back, but hung up halfway through dialing for fear he might wake her again.
“Look, Caney,” Vena said, “if you’re worried, why don’t I go over there and check on her. I can borrow Bui’s car, take her some soup, a carton of juice.”
“Yeah.” Caney nodded. “She says it’s a cold, but I don’t know.
The way she’s been dragging around.”
“Oh, she’ll probably feel better when she hears from her daughter.”
“That damned Brenda!” Caney shook a cigarette from his pack.
“Her and her goddamned country musicians. Dewey wouldn’t have stood for it.”
“Is Dewey her daddy?”
“Was. Got killed in a car wreck when Brenda wasn’t much more than a baby. Hell of a good guy, the only one of Molly O’s husbands that was worth a damn.”
“How many husbands has she had?”
“Four. Three of them while she was a teenager.”
“Jesus!”
“Married the first time when she was sixteen, some asshole who beat hell out of her for a couple of years.
“She caught the next one fooling around with her older sister . . . and the third time, turned out the creep was already married to a gal out in New Mexico.
“After that, she had the good sense to stay single till she was almost thirty, when she met Dewey O’Keefe. He came in here with a drilling crew, bunch of hard-drinking boys, stirring up trouble in one town, then another.
“But Dewey wasn’t like that . . . and he wasn’t a kid. I guess he was ten, twelve years older than Molly O. She said they met at a dance hall one night, got married a week later. When the drilling crew moved on, he stayed.
“They settled down, bought a house next door to my aunt.
Wanted a family in the worst way, but Molly O couldn’t seem to carry a baby more’n three or four months. She’d had two miscarriages by the time I went to live with my Aunt Effie.
“I was almost five then, so Molly O and Dewey took up with me, figured they weren’t going to have any kids, so they played mom and dad with me.
“They put up a swing in their backyard, got me a big plastic swimming pool. Took me to movies and carnivals, the zoo in Tulsa.”
“Did they spoil you, Caney?”
“Hell, yes. Even got me a pony. Dewey rode some rodeo when he was young, started teaching me calf roping when I was seven or eight.
“Then my aunt died when I was in the ninth grade, so I moved in with Molly O and Dewey. By that time, their house felt just as much home as my aunt’s did.
“The next year, Molly O got pregnant with Brenda.”
“And all of a sudden, you weren’t their kid anymore,” Vena said.
“That’s what I figured, but it wasn’t like that. They treated me just the same as they always had. Made me feel like her big brother.
When I went off to Vietnam, Molly O wrote me all the time, sent me pictures of Brenda, called her my baby sister.
“When I came back, Molly O and Dewey were waiting for me at the VA hospital in Kansas City. They stayed in a motel for almost a week, came to be with me every day.
“A month later, Dewey got killed.”
Caney turned his face away while he pretended to look for matches.
“Molly O had to sell the house and moved into a trailer ’cause the only job she could find was part-time at the IGA.
“So when I wrote her about opening the Honk, she jumped right in it. Took over everything needed to be done to get it open . . . well, all except that damned sign. I have to take the blame for that.”
Caney shook his head and grinned.
“I managed to screw that up all by myself.”
*
Vena waited for almost a minute after she knocked, shifting the box she carried from one arm to the other. Finally, she tried the door, found it unlocked and eased inside.
Molly O had fallen asleep on the couch, knitting needles resting loosely in her hands. Her head was tilted at an awkward angle and her glasses had slipped down the bridge of her nose.
“Hello,” Vena said softly.
When Molly O stirred, one of the knitting needles fell into her lap.
“I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“Oh, Vena,” Molly O said, straightening her glasses. “No, you didn’t. I heard your voice in my dream, but I couldn’t see you because the boat was so crowded.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Pretty good.”