The Secrets She Keeps (15 page)

“I didn’t even want to get
near
a bathing suit with Stuart,” Lilly says.

“Really?” Hadley lights a cigarette.

“He gets furious when other men look, even when most are only staring at the water, trying to decide whether or not to get in.”

“For all of that attention, you’re meaningless.”

“Veronica!” Ellen says.

“I’m not being cruel! I’m only saying, she might as well be an expensive vase on his shelf.”

“It’s true,” Lilly Marcel says. “Since a vase is expected to be pretty and empty, waiting for someone’s flowers to fill it.” She holds out her palm and Nash drops the ring into it. Lilly Marcel puts it on her own bare finger. She holds out her hand to admire it.

“Get that hideous thing off,” Veronica says.

—

Cook—Irma, who’s been with them for years—leaves for the night, and Helena Orlando, who cleans, is long gone. The girls are still waiting for Jack to drive them into Carson City. Nash checks the barn to see what’s taking so long, and Danny tells her he just went back to his place to wash up.

Nash returns with the report. “We’re not getting any younger!” Veronica says. “You drive us, Nash. Jack can catch up. Join us! We’ll slip you a drink.”

“Twenty-one,” she reminds Veronica. “They’re more strict here than anywhere.”

“Leave it to me. I promise.”

“I can’t go like this.” She’s still in her ranch wear.

“Run and change. You’ll be faster than he is.”

Her mother wouldn’t like this, her taking the ladies out to dance and gamble. Not one bit. Until Nash is of age, that’s Jack’s job, but Ellen has had her pocketbook tucked under her arm for nearly an hour, and Veronica’s tapping her foot, her hands on her hips.

“Come on! This one will need to go to bed and get some rest before long.” Veronica hooks her thumb at Lilly, with her round belly in that red and black dress.

Well, her mother did leave her in charge, and Nash isn’t expecting her to even call to check up. First and foremost, it’s Nash’s job to make sure the women are happy and having a good time. If worse comes to worst, she can wait in the car, which would be better than being stuck at home. Nash dashes upstairs to change. She’s excited. She once snuck into a bar in Reno with two of her girlfriends from school, and they sipped one drink and confessed their crushes and had the night of their lives. Nash writes a note to Jack and leaves it on the piano.

She is not used to driving in the dark, but her nerves settle after the ranch retreats into the distance. She knows that road, and the chatter of the women makes the night feel full of promise.

“Turn on the radio,” Lilly says.

Hadley is in front next to Nash, and she swivels the dial. She’s wearing stylish short gloves with a pearl button at the wrist. They can only get one station out here in the desert, and Tex Williams is fast-strumming his guitar, telling them to smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette. Ellen leans her head out the window and lets the wind rush against her face.

“Roll that up, you’re messing my hair!” Veronica says.

“Oh, boo,” Ellen says, but does as she’s told. She looks happy. Nash spent the day with her and Cliff, their oldest ranch hand, trying to get Ellen up on Jemima, the sweetest little Arabian you’d ever see. Lilly rested by the pool in her shorts and sleeveless top, as the other ladies trekked down the Del Mar Trail and up into High Canyon.

Nash has only seen Broderick’s Bar and Casino from the open doorway before. It was one of the places they always took the ladies, there and the Old Corner next door, when they wanted someplace a little quieter. This night, the strip out front is crammed with Plymouths and Chevrolets and DeSotos, all polished up, hoods gleaming with pride under the streetlights. Nash finds a spot by Hudson’s Garage and they pile out. The place is packed, and the loud sounds of shouting and high spirits and slot machines spill from it. Nash is nervous, but Veronica takes her arm and says, “Relax. I have this handled.”

They find a table. Veronica leaves her fur wrap hanging over a chair as if it’s an animal that’s just been shot. It’s a high-class animal, though, black and silky; mink, Nash guesses—like a skunk without the bristle. Veronica tells the bartender that her daughter would like a mule. The owner, Ella Broderick, stocky and stern-looking, knows full well who Nash is, but she only shakes her head with a little smile at the corner of her mouth. Everyone has seen how tough Alice can be. Ella’s either trying to slip Nash a bit of kindness or she’s taken this chance to stick Alice a little behind her back.

“Roulette!” Hadley wiggles her eyebrows up and down. She has to yell to be heard. There’s a wheel up by the bar. Two well-dressed men in white hats and a woman in a green dress sit around it, chips piled in front of them, and the wheel spins red-black, red-black. They’re probably guests from the Flying W. The woman in the green dress whoops, and one of the men kisses her cheek. “I love a chance to give away my hard-earned bucks, as you all know.” Hadley has hinted more than once that Joseph Bernal has cost her plenty.

“There’s a free seat next to that lawyer,” Veronica shouts.

“How do you know he’s a lawyer?” Lilly asks.

“The shoes. Wingtips.”

“Where’s the music?” Ellen asks. She snaps her fingers.

“One dance with a cowboy, and now look,” Veronica says. They’ve heard about Ellen’s dance a hundred times by now. It may end up being the high point of Ellen’s life. Her mother never let her go out after ten o’clock, and then her husband never let her go out at all. After her time on the ranch, she will likely marry a successful traveling salesman and have two more children. Nash hopes for this for her.

The brown liquid shoots down Nash’s throat and leaves scorched earth. Nash imagines the bare black spikes of incinerated trees after a fire in the valley. How the women drink these things, she’ll never know. Lilly gets up to use the bathroom again. It’s astonishing how frequently expectant women go. Lilly makes her way through the crowded bar. She looks beautiful in her red and black dress with the high Chinese collar, and Nash worries that, with all the people here, someone will knock into Lilly or harm Beanie. Ella Broderick is watching her, too. Either this is a businesswoman’s protective gaze or Ella knows who Lilly is. Word has likely gotten around. After that mobster was gunned down in Las Vegas, there’s no telling what might happen on your own doorstep.

The thought makes Nash edgy. Wasn’t alcohol supposed to relax you? But with Lilly lost in the herd, she doesn’t feel relaxed. She remembers the man with the camera, and she sees another man in a dark suit sitting alone at a table. He’s not wearing a hat, and his black hair is slicked back over his head. He wears flashy two-tone Oxfords. He holds his glass in his fingertips, swirls his ice. Nash follows his eyes to a glint of red satin. Who wouldn’t look at Lilly Marcel, even in her condition? Still, Nash sees the man with the camera everywhere—in the black coat by the cigarette machine, playing twenty-one next to a blonde, sitting at the bar by a gray-haired man with a lumpy nose that Nash is sure she recognizes, maybe from Nevada Savings and Trust.

And then, thank goodness, there’s Jack. His saunter says he owns the place, and every other place, too. His confidence makes Nash feel so good, she practically sighs. Once, he plucked up a desert tarantula with his own bare hands, to stop it from heading toward Mrs. Fitz Greens; Nash should tell the ladies about that. They would love it. Heads turn, because here he comes, with Danny and Ted, too, a rodeo rider and dude wrangler at Washoe Pines. It’s Jack’s smile that makes people look—a smile that says he’s open to a little trouble.

Three cowboys. The ladies make room, and there is squealing as Ted lands on Veronica’s lap. The excitement at their table kicks up; it’s both animated and expectant, like the rodeo crowd just as the ticket booth opens. Jack sets an arm around Nash’s shoulders and gives them a shake.

“What are you doing here?” he whispers. She doesn’t answer. She only smiles as if she is capable of mischief, too. She’s not, really. She wishes she were. His breath in her ear gives her chills.

“What took you boys so long?” Veronica asks. She holds a cigarette between her fingers, and Ted, a tall man with eyes as black as Zorro’s, strikes a match and lights it.

“Had to wrap Starlight’s leg. She was hobbling, after you ladies wore her out.”

“Did you hear?” Hadley says. “They made us cross the river. We rode straight through!”

“Did I tell you you’d be fine?” Danny says. Danny is small but tough. His size doesn’t impair his success with the ladies. Collette Brown-Hastings wrote him letters for months after she left the ranch. She wanted him to join her in Palm Springs. You could never imagine Danny keeping company with men who played golf. The idea was hilarious. Danny needed a dentist, too, but Collette Brown-Hastings apparently didn’t notice. “You barely got wet.”

“I got wet!” Veronica says. “I was soaked!” She wasn’t soaked. Maybe the hems of her trousers were damp when they got back. The river barely has any water in it this time of year.

“Did Miss Ellen make it into the saddle?” Jack teases. Nash wishes he would take her hand under the table, but he doesn’t. There was that one time he took her hand, out by the cabins, on a night when he’d had a little too much to drink. He almost kissed her, too, and Nash hasn’t forgotten that. She thinks about it so often, the memory is nearly as worn down as those rosary beads Rosemary McNalley left on her bedside table the day she left Tamarosa.

Someone wins at the slot machines and there is a cheer. Nash sees Lilly exit the restroom. The man in the far booth keeps his eyes on her back as she moves across the bar. She slips onto the padded bench next to Jack. He orders her a martini, and Nash notices that he doesn’t need to ask the way she likes it.

“I most certainly did! Tell them, Nash,” Ellen says.

“Several circles around the ring, and Jemima barely minded the screaming.”

Ellen sighs. “I screamed, I admit it. If I never have to get on one of those animals again, it would be fine by me.”

“Aw, come on. You just need a little practice,” Jack says.

Ted’s arm is on the back of the padded bench where Veronica sits, and his thumb grazes the bare skin of her neck. Lilly Marcel’s hand briefly touches Jack’s as they rest on the table; fingers touch fingers as glasses are passed. Hadley is on her third whiskey. She takes it with her as she finally heads off to lose a large stack of chips at the roulette wheel. Danny brings more drinks. Jack tells that story about the bull. The energy in the bar seems to grow and grow; it’s outsize now, a bloodthirsty organism, like in
The Thing from Another World
. Ted pulls Veronica close and whispers something to her. The room seems to shift and sway with noise and bodies and skin. It is hard to know what is what and who is with whom and where each voice is coming from.

A few hours later they all rise to leave, laughing and knocking into one another as they go. Outside, Jack leans against his truck and lights up a cigarette. His cowboy hat is on the hood, and as he exhales, he tilts his head to the night sky.

Veronica says she’s driving, since Nash isn’t walking straight. Nash’s mother will kill her if she ever finds out, but who cares. Veronica drives too fast, and Nash has her nose out the window because she doesn’t feel well. Her clothes smell like cigarettes.

“If Eddie could see me now!” Ellen says. She won some money at craps and is riding high on her victory. “We’re better off without him! The children don’t need a father like that.”

“I told Stuart the baby was someone else’s,” Lilly says from the backseat.

Even through her nausea, Nash is shocked by the words. Veronica snaps off the radio. Merle Travis abruptly stops singing after
I ain’t coming back
.

“What?”

“So he’d let me go. So he wouldn’t have anything more to do with us.”

Ellen chatters on about Scotty and the birthday gift Eddie never gave him, but Veronica catches Hadley’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Nash feels abruptly sober. She thinks about the man with the camera and the one in that back booth, who paid his tab just as they were leaving. She watches the beam of the headlights behind them in the side mirror. She thinks about Jack, smoking that cigarette. How he’d better be careful, because jealousy can be lethal. She’s mad at him, the way he acted all night, how he pretended to read Lilly Marcel’s palm, tracing lines with his fingertip. Still, nothing bad had better happen to him. Jack belongs to them, not to Lilly. He thinks he knows so much, but he’s an innocent next to Stuart Marcel.

“Shit!” Veronica screeches, and swerves the car.

Lilly lets out a little scream.

“Dear God, Veronica!” Ellen has her hand to her chest.

It was just a stupid rabbit. Nash wouldn’t have overreacted if she were driving. Jesus! Sometimes, truly, the ladies could get on your nerves, and on one another’s, too.

“If I remember, you don’t even know how to drive, so shut your trap,” Veronica says.

“Be nice, and keep your eyes on the road,” Hadley says, and tosses a bottle cap she must have found deep in the backseat of the Styleline Deluxe. It pings against Veronica’s chignon, which doesn’t feel a thing.

It comes to Nash then. It’s eluded her all night. The gray-haired man with the lumpy nose. He doesn’t work at the bank. He’s a judge at the Washoe County Courthouse. He’s the Honorable Judge Riley, whom Nash stood in front of with the adulterous Mrs. Fletcher.

That night, no one was what or who they seemed. Veronica wasn’t, as Ted slipped his tongue into her mouth, and Hadley wasn’t, when she opened her pocketbook and handed out more bills to lose, and Lilly wasn’t, in her sweet, jeweled hair clip, letting her hand rest, palm up, in Jack’s, and that man at the back table wasn’t, either. He’d gotten in a different car from the one that has been following them ever since they left Broderick’s.

Veronica hits every rut in the road to Tamarosa. Yet they are home safe, Nash thinks.
Home. Safe
. This is what home should be above all else, though Nash knows how often
home
is the secret setting for the darkest troubles.