"I'm in my forties."
"I'm sixty," he said. "I'll be sixty-one next March. Now, how old are you?"
"Fifty."
"A little fuzzy on the math, aren't you? Fifty isn't exactly ‘in the forties,' is it?"
"Fifty."
That's better. All right, so in the seventies you were barely alive. Remember Nixon's energy crisis?"
"Read about it. My father said there was some fifty-five mile an hour speed limit nobody obeyed."
"It was Nixon's energy crisis. And it was a national speed limit. Come on, Cal, what did you do, vote for the guy?"
"I wasn't old enough to even..."
"But you would have, right? Bet you were a Young Republican in elementary school."
"In Massachusetts? Not likely."
In truth all I remember from my teens was finagling ways to drink beer and trying to figure out what was going on under Claudia Jennings' halter top in Truck Stop Women. Those kinds of activities left little time to fritter away on politics. Later, when I did register, I voted Democratic like my parents. I seldom won, but it gave me the opportunity to bitch and moan in four-year increments, and that's almost as good as winning.
"Nixon," he said. "Alternate days to buy gas. Lowered thermostats in the winter."
"And no Christmas lights. My father told me that. But Nixon was long gone by '80."
He showed me the picture again, pointed to a man in a knit cap.
"The guy with the dog. Bobby Laughton. He owned this place. Laid back, easy going, but let some Washington crook tell him what to do and he'd just go off. Atheist—wouldn't put a light on a pine tree if you paid him—until Nixon told him he couldn't. Then the trees went up—Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day. No matter how brown it got, he'd leave it in the window for spite. You can't see it but he had a lighted manger too. It was his homage to the memory of Nixon. Try the wine."
He left, then came back with a filled plate, gave me a paper napkin and some utensils that looked clean enough, then walked away again. "Bon appétit."
Oddly enough, with him out of the room I felt disoriented. As much as he wanted me to think of the place as a restaurant, it just wasn't one. And when he left I felt as though I had been invited somewhere for dinner, then abandoned by the host.
I could hear him moving things around in the kitchen.
"Walter, why don't you join me."
"Already ate," he yelled
"Have some wine then."
"Already drank. I try to have one glass a day; much more than that and I'm pretty useless."
"And you have a lot to do tonight? Setting up for a bar mitzvah? Senior prom?"
There was a brief silence while he mulled the possibilities, then came back to the table.
"All right, Cal. I will have another half glass of this MER-lut."
He poured some into a large coffee mug. Natalie would have railed at him for drinking wine out of something ceramic: I felt a growing admiration for the guy.
"So whatever happened to this Laughton guy?" I said.
"Oh," Walter said, "he passed a few years back."
"He was quite a bit older than you, seems like," I said, "at least in the picture."
"I guess," he said. "Never thought about it much."
He held up the mug and I thought we were toasting the memory of his old friend, but instead he just shook his head. "I'm going to have to buy a few more wine glasses," he said. "Must have broken a few over the years. Of course, the mug holds more."
"And it tastes just as good," I said, a little slap at Natalie wherever she was and an agreement that we were finished talking about Bobby Laughton.
I started in on the eggs.
Chapter 4
There was still the question of finding a place to stay, and Walter—though he had agreed to dine with me—spent most of his time shuffling back and forth to the kitchen. Maintaining a dialogue was difficult, and to make matters worse, the wind would occasionally rise and rattle a window or two, diverting the conversation again.
"Dry as cinder all month," he said, "Season's changing I guess. Hope you brought warmer clothes."
"I'm traveling light. Figured to buy what I needed."
"Uh huh. Well, that's a plan I guess."
Another gust drew our attention.
"Wish I hadn't hung that sign," he said. "Probably find it in Wyoming tomorrow. Where are you staying?"
"I was going to ask about that. The motel," I said, with extravagant confidence, hoping to deflect another sympathetic response like Brenda's. I must have been successful: Walter merely nodded. And he kept nodding—one of those that's what you think nods.
"It seemed dark over there before," I said, more to fill in his silence than to convey any information.
"Usually is. Mrs. O'Leary doesn't waste a lot of lights. More of a candle person."
"Is she related to the Chicago Mrs. O'Leary? The one with the lantern and the cow? I think she was a candle person too until she burned down the city."
"First off it was a lantern, and second it never happened. More important, if you'd like a room there, you probably don't want to remind her of that connection," he said. "It's been played."
"But the candles…"
"Played."
"Does she have a first name?"
"Mrs."
"No, seriously…"
"Mrs. O'Leary. She likes it that way."
"How well do you know her?"
"Pretty well."
"And what do you call her?"
"I call her Mrs. O'Leary, same as everybody else."
"Is there a Mr. O'Leary?"
"Was once; ain't no more."
"Dead?"
"Not as far as I know, but I'm not nosy."
"Divorced?"
"You a renter or a biographer?"
The smile that accompanied that jab didn't entirely mask a bit of pique. I backed off.
"She sounds pretty independent," I said.
"We're all pretty independent. Look at you, traipsing through a strange town, totally unprepared for the elements and without a place to stay. Isn't that independence?"
"I was headed for California."
"So you avoided the cliché—good for you. Brenda warned you I'll bet. Mrs. O'Leary is pretty particular about who she rents to."
"So it's more of a rooming house?"
"No, it's a motel. She just chooses her guests, same way I could have refused you service when you came in here tonight. I'm a small business owner, so is she."
"But there are laws," I said, "discrimination laws."
He examined me with a clinical gaze. "And what minority do you represent, wet tourists without shoes?"
"Maybe, yes, in a strange town without a place to stay."
Walter rubbed his chin. "I'm not sure if that's a registered minority. A lawyer could probably give you more information, but you couldn't find one of those until tomorrow, and