“So,” Addie said. “How’s he doing?”
Her father grunted. “You know your grandpa. He ain’t the type to sull. But still.”
“What?”
Logan straightened and tilted forward, searching for words and seeming to find them, finally, somewhere in the fire.
“Remember when you were five or thereabouts and I took you up to McPhee? I was afraid you’d be too squeamish to bait a hook. Shows you what I knew. Then when we did catch ourselves a bass, I set it down there on the rocks and you talked to that fish and petted it like a housecat till the light went out of its eye. Do you remember what you said then?”
Addie shook her head.
“You said maybe that fish had a mommy in the lake and it had died of sadness from being taken away from her. Jesus Christ almighty. I haven’t thought about that for, what? Almost twenty years? But when I seen the old man’s face that morning he come in for his coffee, I knew right away. It was the light. It just seemed to of gone from out of his eyes.”
Logan slid from his chair to squat at the hearth and poke at the fire with an iron. The flames coppered his face, animating it, highlighting its creases and crags. He was lean in the manner of other alcoholics Bradley had known; dissipated men for whom food was merely an afterthought. His profile, though, belonged on a Roman coin.
“As a widower yourself,” Bradley ventured, “I’m sure you could empathize with what he was going through.”
The iron paused. Logan nodded.
“In high school,” Addie said, shifting the conversation to Bradley, “I was the class salutatorian. The only B I ever got was in Calculus my senior year. The Calculus teacher, Mr. Hoover, had a son named Grant who got the only A in the class. He was the valedictorian.”
She set her mug on the table and rearranged her legs.
“I applied to four colleges: Harvard, UCLA, Colorado State, and a local school called Fort Lewis. I was accepted at CSU and Fort Lewis, and I was rejected by Harvard. But for some reason I never heard back from UCLA.”
“Addie,” her father said.
“The registration deadline for CSU was coming up fast and the frustrating thing was, there was no one I could talk to. I mean, nobody here had ever applied to a college, and if I’d asked my guidance counselor Mrs. Melton she’d have recommended I take cosmetology classes at the community college. I think Grant and I were the only two from our class who’d even applied out of state.”
At the sound of Addie’s voice the old Labrador emerged from out of the shadows. It padded over and rested its head on her knee.
“So anyway I moped around for a few weeks pretending everything was fine. But Grandma Vivian, she could see I was troubled about something.”
“Abstracted,” Bradley said, and was rewarded with a smile.
“She asked me what was wrong, and when I told her she said when she was a girl, all the men in the county were off fighting the war in Europe, or in the Pacific, and that she and most of her friends had to quit school to work on the ranches and farms. That’s why she never got past the ninth grade. She and her mother would work until sundown doing chores outside and then they’d work until bedtime doing the baking and canning and whatnot, and then they’d wake up and start all over again. Just the two of them tending a ranch with fifty-some head of cattle, day in and day out, for something like four years straight.”
Addie rescued her mug from the dog’s swinging tail and took another sip.
“And when the men finally came home, those that did, she was already eighteen and wasn’t about to go back to high school. So what she did, she taught herself to type. She practiced for months, and then she drove into town and applied for jobs at maybe a dozen different places, but she was turned down every time. Either because she had no experience or else no diploma. So at this point in the story I’m thinking, okay Addie, your stupid college problem is a big fat nothing so quit whining and get on with it. Which is probably what I needed to hear, but that wasn’t the point she was trying to make.”
She scratched at the old dog’s ear, and its tail accelerated.
“What she finally said was, ‘Addie, don’t you be that worn-out girl with the callused hands who lets some man in a bolo tie decide her future.’ And that was better advice than any parent or teacher or guidance counselor ever gave me.”
Logan, still squatting and smoking, lowered his head. He replaced the poker in its caddy.
“So where did Grant Hoover end up?” Bradley asked, and Addie smiled.
“The Colorado School of Mines. And when he told me I thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t know he wanted to be a mime. Why would anyone want to be a mime?’”
Logan took a final drag off his cigarette and dropped it into the fire. He stood, stiff in his movements, and wiped his palms on his jeans.
“Well,” he said. “Big day tomorrow. The viewing’s at one o’clock, then the procession back here to the graveyard. Then we get ourselves pawed and clucked over by half the women in Montezuma County.” He regarded Addie where she sat. “I believe those horses could use some work in the morning, in case you was of a mind.”
She hesitated before nodding. “I’d like that.”
“All right then. You’ll find your room is right where you left it.”
Logan circled behind the sofa. “As for you,” he said to Bradley’s back, “you’ll find clean sheets on the guest bed. I’ll trust Addie to show you the way.”
* * *
Bradley lay on his back with his fingers laced over his ribs. He heard a toilet flush downstairs, then the faint and skeletal clatter of dog claws on hardwood, then quiet. In the room next door he heard drawers open and close, then the telltale squeaking of bed-springs. Other movements whose import he could only imagine. Did imagine, picturing Addie in her bra and panties, in only her panties, in nothing at all. Bending and straightening, her dark hair brushing the milky white of her shoulders. Her eyes glowing electric blue in the moonlight when she turned her face toward the window.
He waited ten minutes more, then eased to the edge of the bed.
Downstairs he heard nothing. Next door there was only silence.
The door creaked on its hinges. The hallway lay dark and empty before him. Holding his breath to listen, he heard only the quickening pulse of his own guilty heart.
He opened her door slowly. What moonlight there was cast a crooked oblong on the bed, on the wooden floor, on the otherwise dim and empty room.
“Addie?” A whisper. “Hello? Anyone home?”
He stepped inside, leaving the door behind him ajar.
The room was small and tidy and appeared to have been stripped of its personal effects. A bookshelf held a fish tank, cracked and empty. The bed was a queen, still neatly made, and thumbtacked above its iron headboard was a poster advertising some sort of equine dietary supplement. The poster depicted a cowgirl on horseback, her body leaning and her blond curls flying as they twisted, horse and rider together, around a teetering barrel.
Opposite the footboard, two pairs of cowboy boots stood by a scarred wooden dresser. Above the dresser hung a mirror and wedged in the mirror’s oval frame were three curling photographs Bradley bent to study in the meager light from the window.
The first showed Cowgirl Addie sitting horseback in fringed leather chaps and a straw cowboy hat. She appeared to be thirteen or so, with braces on her teeth and hair tumbling halfway to her waist. She beamed into the camera as a sunflower-sized ribbon was affixed to the horse’s bridle by a woman in a bright floral dress.
The next photo was of Graduation Addie, older and more familiar, standing