The Secrets She Keeps (19 page)

“Nash?”

“Holy Christ,” she whispered.

“What’s the matter?”

Was she crying? She was not the crying type. But she wiped her eyes and set the letter in her lap with a shaking hand. The writing on the envelope was spidery. I tried to read it. “Jack?”

Shaye took the pan off the stove, and we looked at each other. I put my arms around Nash. Her shoulders didn’t feel broad at all; it’d been my memory that made them so solid. They were small, and they were trembling.

“Nash,” I said. “Nash, it’s okay.”

Of course, it wasn’t okay. Not much was okay in that room, for any of us. Tex, maybe, and even he had an uncertain future.

Nash’s eyes were sunken and small, and the thin skin of her cheek was wet. “All these years,” she said. “A man like that. I wasn’t sure if he was even alive.”

“Well, see?” I said. “He is.” I didn’t know what I was saying, what news I was helping to deliver. Maybe someone didn’t die after all. Maybe just love had, and now here it was again. I squeezed her hand.

“I’ve missed that charming bastard for sixty years. I thought for sure he was gone for good.”

Summer of ’51
, Shaye mouthed to me, but it wasn’t the time for that now.

“You see?” I said to Nash. “There you go. You never know.”

I rubbed my thumb along the smooth tissue-paper skin of her hand. There was the crackle of the needle between songs.

I was right. You never did know. It was what made the whole damn trip so hard, and so worthwhile.

Nash cracks the ice free from the tray and chases a cube as it skates across the counter. She catches it just before it falls to the floor. She puts it, and a few others, into the copper mugs. In goes a shot of vodka, a few inches of ginger beer, a twist of lime. Nash keeps the vodka to a minimum in Ellen’s drink. Three nights ago, she and Veronica and Ted from Washoe Pines went to the Old Corner bar, and Ellen didn’t just dance with a cowboy, she kissed one. Her lipstick ended up on the side of her cheek, and her hair had gone as wild as if it had survived an act of God and was still too shocked to speak of it. Mother always said that change had its own clock, but Nash feels it might be best to slow Ellen’s down a little. All the late nights and men and alcohol make it seem like change is heating up and rising like boiling water about to spill over on the stove, and although this is how it usually goes, it feels like an imminent disaster now that Nash is in charge.

That morning, Alice phoned to tell her she might be gone another few weeks. A few weeks! There’s been the sudden decision to move Gloria in with a friend, since she won’t leave California. Something else is going on, Nash is sure of it. It’s not just the latest creep, Billy what’s-his-name, leaving Gloria. Not many things would keep Alice from the ranch that long.

“Here you go,” Nash says, and hands around the drinks.

“She’s an ox,” Veronica says, and takes her glass. “Her rear end is bigger than Zorro’s.”

“Oh, you’re cruel,” Ellen says.

“Correct, but cruel,” Hadley says.

“I met her before, you know,” Veronica says. “With Gus. At a fundraiser for the Field Museum. The husband looked long-suffering. Like he’d been left outside on a winter night and never let back in.”

“She has
children
, poor things,” Ellen says.

“Don’t worry, they no doubt have a nanny,” Hadley says.

Ellen sips her mule. “A nanny! I can’t even imagine that.”

The ox is Mrs. Morris Shumley, who Nash picked up at the Reno train station that afternoon. After her six weeks are up and she’s had her day at the Washoe County Courthouse, Mrs. Morris Shumley will have to reacquaint herself with her own first name. But this is how she introduced herself as she shook Nash’s hand with her gloved one as the crowd at the station closed around them. This is how she presented herself to the rest of the girls, too: She politely made their acquaintance and then retreated to her room, as if the introductions were a tawdry piece of business now concluded.

“She wants nothing to do with us harlots,” Lilly Marcel says. Her round stomach has grown so much in one week. She leans back a little when she walks now.

“
I
want nothing to do with you harlots, but I’m stuck with you,” Hadley says.

“A nanny.” Ellen still can’t imagine it.

“I want to see the ox on the back of a horse,” Veronica says, which makes them all laugh. “No wonder Mr. Shumley dumped her like a hot potato. He probably hasn’t had—”

“Don’t even say it, Veronica,” Ellen giggles.

Hadley claps her hands over her eyes. “I’m seeing it now. The way he
shudders
for all the wrong reasons.”

“Stop!” Ellen says. She is bent over, laughing. She holds her hand up in the air.

Veronica shakes out a cigarette. “She seems to have forgotten that she’ll be a divorcée now, too.”

“It’s an awful word, isn’t it?” Ellen says. “
Divorcée
.”

“I think it sounds rather glamorous,” Veronica says.

“There was a divorcée who lived down our street,” Ellen says. “The first one I ever saw. She had beautiful clothes. I watched her house, imagining that strange men would be picking her up in various cars or that her children would set off bombs in the yard, but nothing interesting happened. Her grass turned brown, is all. And then she moved away.”

“You must find a way to keep the grass green.” Hadley shakes her finger at Ellen. She means it.

“I might have to get a job at a department store,” Ellen says. “That divorcée, she sold perfume at the Emporium. I don’t know the first thing about selling perfume at the Emporium.”

Cook baked a ham for dinner, and there are steaming beans and scalloped potatoes and buttery rolls and peas. As they move to the big table for dinner, there is the swish of chiffon against stockings. Veronica’s dress is gold with silver embroidery, and Ellen is in a green formal with netting to fill out the skirt, with a black taffeta jacket over the top. Hadley wears red, with a cut of gown that shows off her bare neck, and Lilly is in pink satin, with a pink wrap off her shoulders. Their hair is perfectly coiffed after a visit to the hairdresser in the city earlier that day; the smell of Lustre-Creme and the bitter-metal odor from Hadley’s permanent wave are masked with L’Origan. The meal is hurried, then cut short entirely when Jack and Danny arrive. They are taking the ladies to Cal Neva Resort in Tahoe, where Johnny Y. Michaels will be performing.

“Don’t look so down, Peanut,” Jack says. He’s wearing his nicest shirt, with the pearl snaps, and he’s doused himself with aftershave. “Three more short years, you’re free to go anywhere.”

They take off. She is left behind with that ham and Boo and Mrs. Morris Shumley, who will likely stay in her room reading novels, same as Nash. The similarity of their evening is humiliating.

Nash helps clean up the dishes, and then Irma unfastens her apron with a sigh and leaves for the night. One time, Nash and Gloria rode in the backseat when Alice picked up the ladies at Cal Neva after Cat Callahan performed. Nash was just a child then. She remembers the tall, flashing lights of the
CAL NEVA
sign outside the lodge, the crowd spilling out the doors. There was the energy of a party and the smell of alcohol and cigarettes as the women piled into the car. There was high-pitched hilarity, a sense of carelessness and freedom, and it all felt dangerous to her young self, up way too late.

In her room, Nash picks up Boo for a dance. “You look lovely in fur,” she says to him, but he’s unimpressed. She sets him down, and he eyes her warily from the floor. Nash has Johnny Y. Michaels’s record. He is singing into a microphone on the front, his eyes sleepy-looking, his dark hair as shiny as the satin lapels of his jacket. Nash imagines Jack dancing with Lilly Marcel, holding her carefully, the bump of Beanie against him. She imagines Lilly Marcel’s neck smelling of Jack’s aftershave. There is something lewd about his interest in a girl, a woman, who is in the family way, isn’t there? He shouldn’t see her as her own, separate self; her body isn’t just hers. Nash flings the record and it hits the leg of her desk. She doesn’t even like Johnny Y. Michaels all that much.

All of this—the long-ago car ride, the album, Jack’s aftershave—circles together and forms a cyclone of feeling even Nash can’t understand. It is jealousy, yes, and longing, yes, but for whom and what exactly she can’t tell. For all of it, likely. For all of life that’s just waiting for her as she stays on that ranch, serving drinks and listening to stories of other people’s lives and loves. This is her destiny, and she knows it, and it’s pulling her under already. Gloria would have taken the situation with Jack into her own hands, at the least. No. She wouldn’t have bothered with a man like Jack at all. She
fled.

Mrs. Morris Shumley begins to snore. Nash hears her clear down the hall. She sounds like an ox, all right, held down by its throat. Nash is too restless to listen to that for hours on end. She might just go into Mrs. Shumley’s room and hold a pillow over her face. She heads downstairs, where Boo watches her without moving from his favorite spot by the fireplace. Like a lot of people she knows, he can say a lot without saying anything.

Nash gets the keys to the Styleline Deluxe, which hang on a hook in the kitchen. She has the urge to do something large and reckless, and the urge rises up and whips around, a bull in the ring, the one in charge, the one that will fling any rider to the ground. She feels as mad and mean as that, too. Peanut, hell. She gets in the car, starts it up. She hits the accelerator hard, and the tires spin and whirl in the gravel, and then she is down that road and into the nearest town of Edwards, if you can call it a town. There’s a store and a post office and a gas station. There’s the Monte Cristo Motel, and the Ponderosa Café, and that’s it.

The flare of fury burns out. It’s only sad out here. The lights are on in Copper’s. Nash parks in the empty strip in front. Boxes of cereal and detergent look oddly sunny against the dismal linoleum floor. When she goes in, the bell rings loud. Rusty Harlow is reading a magazine and puts it down. Nash doesn’t like the way he looks at her. She buys a roll of Life Savers and a Pepsi-Cola, and this is the extent of the mark she makes on the world tonight.

Rusty clears his throat. He says, “Have a good night, little Miss McBride.” His voice says that he’s smoked too many cigarettes, and his eyes are smarmy with alcohol. Nash gets the creeps and gets out of there. The feeling of something lurking follows her back to the ranch. Boo stands and stretches when he sees her, sniffs the hand where she has the candy. He decides it’s not worth the effort and lies back down, sighing through his nose.

Nash eats the Life Savers in order of preference, leaving the cherry for last. She tries to read. She folds the pillow over her head, as the ox is still dying a slow death in the other room.

She must have fallen asleep, because she awakens when an arc of light fills her room. There’s the sound of doors slamming and then laughter, and, inside the house, the toilet flushes. It’s very late. People seem to be settling in. Faucets squeak on and off, doors are gently closed, and the house is eventually quiet.

This miserable night appears to be finally over when she hears something else. Voices. The sound of water. Bodies through ripples.

Nash climbs out of bed. She keeps her light off, tries to peer out through the crack between her curtains. The pool is too far from here to see very clearly.

She is acting crazy but can’t seem to help what she does next. She gets out of bed, and, still wearing her nightgown, she takes each stair quietly. She turns the handle of the front door without making a sound.

The grass is dewy underfoot. Past the grass, there are rocks and scratchy shrubs and the privacy of the big old trunk of the desert willow. She still can’t see, and so she darts to the eucalyptus near the pool, a running apparition in her white nightgown. The tree, with its shaggy, wild bark, is wide enough to hide behind.

It’s just as she thought—the lilt of his voice is so familiar to her. She sees Lilly’s pale shoulders in the moonlight, and Jack’s broad ones. Lilly’s arms are out of the water, keeping her balance, and Jack pushes off and swims, popping his head up right in front of her. Lilly holds her hand to her mouth so as not to laugh out loud. He dives again, reappears at the other end. He stretches his arms out like hers and walks toward her. Their arms meet. Their hands entwine. They kiss, and then he takes her whole body in his arms. Her round belly is otherworldly as it rises from the water, and he carries her in a small circle before setting her down again.

They swim and kiss. Nash can’t hear what they are saying; she can only hear the tempo of their words, and the tempo is slow and as soft as the gray-green eucalyptus leaves that veil Nash’s shoulders. Once again, she thinks she hears the sound of thunder, far off, because she doesn’t know what the horses sound like when they’re that close. She should warn Jack and Lilly. Storms could move fast across that sky. A guest at the Pines was in their pool when lightning struck, killing him instantly.

She hears this clearly: “Be careful,” Jack says. His desire to shelter—it stabs her heart and takes it down, like the vulnerable creature of the pack that it is. Lilly Marcel rises from the water, walks up those steps in the shallow end. Her body is maybe the most beautiful and strange thing Nash has ever seen. She carries a planet, her own weighty earth, which she supports with one arm underneath, the other on the handrail.