A House by the Side of the Road (10 page)

“There's not a lot of diversity here,” she said.

Christine slid the rubber band off her ponytail and shook her head, her hair falling down around her shoulders. “Tell me about it,” she said. “No. Diversity is not our strong suit. You have to go all the way to New Hope to find that.”

“Maybe I'll import some city kids,” said Meg. “Build a dormitory out in back. Put up a hoop. Is Dan at work?” She upended her glass to slide an ice cube into her mouth and crunched it.

“Aiiii!” said Christine. “Stop! You're giving me the willies. Yes, he's at work. Or so he says.” She gathered a handful of potato peels from the sink and threw them into the plastic bucket she kept for compost. The action was more violent than it needed to be.

“Where else would he be?” Meg didn't want to pry but was curious.

“He wouldn't be anywhere else.” Christine sighed. She stood, gazing down into the sink. “I'm just being silly. He works all the time, when there's work. He's a good, solid, responsible, funny, wonderful man. But, damn! He's been acting so weird. He's gone all the time lately, and when he's home, we never talk. If he is around in the evening, he dozes off on the couch and then stumbles up to bed, and no matter how fast I get up there after him, he's sound asleep.” She paused. “Or pretends to be.”

She dropped a quartered potato into a pot and turned, leaning against the sink and looking at Meg. “You know what I miss? I miss sitting up in bed reading my book while he's reading his. I miss those minutes just before drifting off when I can rub the top of my foot against the bottom of his without worrying that I'll wake him up, because he isn't asleep yet either.”

She looked past Meg to the clock on the wall and then turned and selected another potato. “Why am I telling you this?” she said. “We barely even know each other.”

“Oh, pooh,” said Meg. “We've been friends for, what? Almost a week? People have gotten married after knowing each other less time than that.”

“Stupid people,” said Christine. “But you're right. There are some people you can know for decades and not feel you have a clue about, and then there are others…” She used the peeler efficiently. “Along with a lack of diversity, one problem with the bucolic life is loneliness. After Hannah died and before you moved in, well, there just wasn't a woman around here except me. I don't know how pioneer ladies survived.”

“I know you didn't ask for advice…” said Meg.

“Go right ahead.”

“Follow him. Call up where he's supposed to be working. Go through his wallet. Look at the charge-card bills. Does he have a cell phone? Look at that bill.”

Christine turned and fixed Meg with a disbelieving look. “Are you serious? I love him. I trust him.”

“Yeah, you love him. No, you don't trust him. Not completely, or you wouldn't be worried. Why be worried? It takes too much out of a person to worry. Has he ever, uh, worried you before?”

“Not like this,” said Christine slowly. She picked up her iced tea from the countertop and sat down across the table from Meg. “He's really private. Even after fifteen years, there's a lot about him I don't know, that he seems not to want me to know. He had a rotten childhood. I know that. He barely speaks to his parents. But he won't tell me much about it. And he has a brother I've never even met who, I think, has been in jail.”

“You
think?
”

“Uh-huh. Odd, isn't it? Dan got a letter from him once, years ago. I wouldn't even have known about it, but I found it in a desk drawer at his office in town while I was looking for some deposit slips. I asked him about it. ‘His name is Alan. He lives in Houston. He got in some trouble and I need to send him a thousand dollars,' he said.”

She got up to put the pot on the stove and turned on a burner. “We didn't have a thousand dollars to spare. Had to borrow it. I wouldn't have minded—I mean, I'd find
ten
thousand dollars for my sister if she needed it—but he wouldn't even tell me what the trouble was. We had a major fight. It's the only big fight we ever had. He kept saying, ‘You don't understand,' and I kept saying, ‘That's right, but I'd like to.' I was furious.”

“Old ties,” said Meg. “They can get you.”

“Yeah. Well, it's not his brother I'm concerned about now. It's that secretive side of my otherwise perfect husband. If he's upset about something, I want to know what.”

“Maybe he really is just working too hard.” Meg badly wanted to believe that. She didn't like the tightness she heard in her friend's voice.

Driving home, she passed Dan's dark blue truck as he came around the curve. He smiled and raised a hand. She waved back.

“Talk to your wife,” she said grimly. She wished he could have heard her.

*   *   *

Sara's voice mail promised a return call, and it came as Meg was finishing dinner.

“If you'd stay home once in a while, you wouldn't have to pay for as many long-distance calls,” said Meg.

Sara, her closest friend in Chicago, was full of questions.

“The house? I love it,” said Meg in response. Her phone made the clicking noise that meant she had another call, which she ignored. “It's kind of a wreck, but I love it. It's got slanty cellar doors, can you believe it? And rosebushes. And a honeysuckle. And a huge pantry. And an attic with room to store things.” The signal came again. “And everything smells good.”

“Don't you want to get that call?” asked Sara.

“No,” said Meg. “I've been waiting too long to talk to you.”

“I won't go anywhere,” said Sara. “It's probably the MacArthur Genius-Grant people.”

“Gosh, you're right. I keep forgetting they're due to call. Hang on.” She pressed the switch hook, but no one replied to her hello. She retrieved Sara.

“They gave up,” she said. “I'll just have to keep struggling. But, like I said, this ain't a bad place to struggle.”

“We've been hoping you'd hate it and come home again. Everybody misses you, and we're pining.”

“I doubt that
every
body's pining,” said Meg dryly.

“Everybody who deserves you is pining.”

“So come see me. I have a nice new friend named Christine you'd really like, and the town is cute and clean, and the cafe has homemade pie, and I miss you too.”

They chatted for a few minutes until Sara's date arrived. She promised to call back soon, and Meg was smiling as she eased into a bathtub full of hot water. She leaned back and sighed contentedly and then felt her heart leap in her chest when the dog began barking furiously right outside the window.

Her sudden fright, and embarrassment at the intensity of it, made her angry. “Be
quiet!
” she yelled. What was the dog's problem? She wasn't the type to burst into excited yaps when she detected an interesting scent. Unlike Harding, when she gave chase, she did so silently.

Whatever had occasioned this uproar was undoubtedly harmless, but the heat and depth of the water had lost their ability to soothe, and Meg scrubbed hastily, eager to finish and dress and feel less vulnerable.

She was seated in front of the computer, halfway through a vocabulary exercise, when she remembered the call-waiting tone. Her fingers stopped moving across the keyboard. She sat back and took a deep breath. No, that was ridiculous. The caller had been Christine, or Mike, or perhaps Jack calling to cancel breakfast, and whoever it was would call back.

But by the time she went to bed, no one had called back.

*   *   *

The alarm woke her at six forty-five. She felt groggy and confused. With birds singing cheerfully outside, she lay still, trying to remember why she'd set the alarm. She'd started to slide back into slumber when she remembered and sat up, smiling happily.

Pulling on a chenille robe, she went into the bathroom to stand in front of the mirror. Her dark eyes looked puffy and surely, she thought, her hair could have more
shape.
Start some coffee, first. Coffee would make everything else that needed doing seem possible.

An hour later she was reasonably pleased. Clean, faded blue jeans and a rough, white, pullover shirt were the correct degree of presentable, she thought. Icy water had taken away the puffiness around her eyes, and shampoo and the blow-dryer had worked their magic. Her glossy dark hair curved away from her face. Daily labor on the fence had given her a faint sunburn that showed on her cheeks, her forearms, and under the V-neck of her shirt.

The dog barked in the front yard and, a moment later, a horn honked twice. Meg went out onto the porch. Jack's red pickup sat in the driveway, the window on the passenger's side rolled down.

“You want to save me from this ravening beast?” he asked, leaning toward the window from the driver's seat. “I thought I'd ignore her and just stride on up to the door with my normal, testosterone-charged
savoir faire,
but she's having none of it. ‘Nice doggie, nice doggie' didn't impress her.”

“Good grief,” said Meg. “I guess you're the first visitor besides Christine since Canine Contentious decided she lives here. She keeps her distance from Christine, but she's never challenged her. I'm sorry!”

She wasn't sure how to handle the situation. She didn't yet have a secure enough relationship with the dog to train her. She wasn't sure if the pecking order had been clearly established. Still, the dog had submitted to being petted and, gradually, had come to request it. She stayed in Meg's general vicinity whenever she was outdoors and had spent one whole evening in the house, listening with a polite pretense of interest while Meg read aloud the worksheets she thought particularly witty.

“Just a minute,” said Meg. “Stay there.”

She went into the bedroom and took the sash out of her bathrobe, then went down the porch steps to the flagstone walk that led to the driveway and approached the truck. The dog was standing stiff-legged in the open gate, her tail raised and bristled, her nose wrinkled. She was emitting a low growl. Meg squatted and looked her blandly in the face.

“Enough!” she said, firmly but with no anger. The dog's eyes moved from the truck to Meg. She closed her mouth and stopped growling.

“Good girl,” said Meg, reaching out a hand and putting it on the dog's head. She looped the sash around her neck, tied it, and stood up. “Heel,” she said, tugging lightly at the sash.

The dog, moving reluctantly, walked with Meg onto the grass.

“Go on in,” said Meg, and Jack swung down from the truck, lifted out a brown paper bag, and disappeared into the house. The dog watched him intently, growling softly, and, when Meg untied the sash, ran up onto the porch to scratch at the door.

“I feel like an idiot,” said Meg, having left the dog, discontented, outside and joined Jack in the kitchen. “It never even occurred to me that she'd hold her ground. She tends to avoid people, unless, like Mike, they grab at her.”

“Sounds like Mike,” he replied. “Grabby.”

Meg looked at him. He waved a hand. “Tell you later, when I know you better. Listen, no dog worth its salt lets a stranger walk right into a yard. You should be proud of her, not embarrassed. What's her name?”

“It keeps changing,” she said. “Today ‘Scrappy' seems good. You like dogs?”

He nodded. “All except the tiny little yippy ones. Even them, I don't mind; I just don't think they're dogs, really. That one, however, is a
dog,
regardless of the peccaries among her ancestors.”

Meg laughed. “I'll admit, she leaves something to be desired in the beauty department. And, come to think of it, the fragrance department … But she's making progress in the ‘Don't come near me or I'll chew on your face' department.”

“I hope she continues that progress,” said Jack. “I will woo her assiduously, but there have been times when my charm has taken years to work.”

“But eventually it does, right?”

He winked at her. “You bet.” He started taking things out of the paper bag—a large covered bowl of strawberries, a plate of ham sliced paper-thin, and a box that, when opened, revealed huge golden muffins.

“Yum!” said Meg. “Blueberry muffins! Where did those come from?”

“Long and arduous toil,” he replied. “First I milked the cow, churned some butter, gathered eggs—”

“Did you, at least, really make them?”

“No. They're from the bakery. But they're still warm, so pour some coffee, ma'am, and let's eat.”

It would be hard, thought Meg—looking at him as he leaned back, coffee cup in hand, long legs stretched out under the table—to imagine a more pleasant way to start the day. He was wearing a blue work shirt with buttons in the shape of rabbits. In the pocket was an envelope.

“I like your shirt,” said Meg. “I didn't know they made work shirts with bunnies on them.”

“The market for this style is small,” he said. “Apparently, many men think buttons in whimsical shapes give the wrong impression about their masculinity. I've just written to my niece, suggesting she set a new fashion trend in the third grade by spending her allowance in the notions section of the dime store and following my example.” He patted his pocket.

“You write letters?” asked Meg. “I don't know anyone besides my parents who still writes letters. Don't you have a phone?”

“Don't you know what phone calls cost?” He smiled at her. “It's amazing to me that people blow money that way. My niece and nephew don't think a thing about it. My phone'll ring and it's Jeffrey, long-distance, with his latest uproarious joke. I love it, of course, but it doesn't make any sense to me. I thought schools still taught kids how to write.”

“Not really,” said Meg.

When he arose to carry his plate to the sink, she held up a hand.