Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel (10 page)

I had been in love with Lee once, I think, and I suppose that many women in our town and now all around the world could say the same thing. The difference is, I
think
he may have been in love with me too, though time has muddied things so that all I have now are memories from ten years ago or more, before Henry and I were even married, before the kids arrived, when I was younger and the margins of my world seemed more flexible and indistinct. When it seemed that there was a chance I might not live in the same place on earth all the years of my life.

Thinking about him, about Lee, about myself, and that time in my life, when I was younger, I feel a blush blossom up from my chest and across my face. The truth is, I don’t think too much about it, and I try not to think about Lee that way either. But sometimes I do. Everything back then was up in the air and blurry and if you asked me who I was going to marry, I’m sure I would have told you Henry, because I am a practical woman, and because Henry is so
good
. But I think I could have seen then another path, a much different path, in which I was married to Lee, and I still sometimes imagine what that would have felt like: traveling the world and being treated differently than normal people, standing on a red carpet with the cameras aimed at me, rather than standing at a grocery store, looking at a glossy photograph of Lee with another woman on his elbow.

And what bed would we lie in? And would we make babies together? And would he write songs about me? And would women in town treat me differently, whisper behind their cupped hands and smile at me stiffly when I paid for groceries with fifty-dollar bills? Or would everything be the same? Would Lee and I come over to Henry’s house and have dinner with him and his wife, their children buzzing all around us, and would I look at Henry and detect some infinite sadness, an emptiness that was my absence in his life?

The Escalade began rolling forward again and soon we were parked outside the terminal, the air hot and full of exhaust, the faint smell of final cigarettes and the snap of cinnamon gum. Henry collected our luggage from the back and shook hands with Kip. Ronny and Lucy stood on the curb, shifting their weight from leg to leg. They were dressed a little garishly, as if headed to Branson or Gatlinburg, or some other two-bit destination. I gave Kip a hug and he handed me a small package, small enough to fit inside my purse and wrapped in thick, brown paper.

“Would you please give this to Lee?” Kip asked me. His face was serious, etched with an emotion I had never seen before in him and I might have called remorse or resignation. “Tell him we’re happy for him, okay? Tell him congratulations. Will you do that for us please?”

“All right, campers,” Henry said, clapping his hands together, “let’s get moving.”

“New York City,” Ronny said. “New York City.”

*   *   *

Minneapolis is the nearest
big
airport to our town, though as I have said, we are from Wisconsin, and though the two states embrace each other along the Mississippi and the St. Croix, all the way up to Lake Superior and all the way down to Iowa and Illinois, I still
feel
that they are separate, unique places. And flying up and over Minneapolis and its skyscrapers and then over St. Paul’s older, more humble skyline, it felt as if I could draw a very detailed map of the landscape that grew in scope beneath me. The tapestries of fields, the ridgetop and valley bottom forests, the creeks glinting silver and blue, the teardrop ponds, the innumerable lakes, the yellow gravel roads and the blacktop lanes and highways. Then, directly below us, our town.

“Wave to the kids,” I said to Henry.

“You think that’s Little Wing?”

“Sure, look—there’re the railroad tracks, and the mill. The pond, the golf course. No seriously, look—you can tell because of the quarry, look at that water.”

“It’s almost turquoise,” Henry said, and nodded, “like the Caribbean. I still don’t think that’s Little Wing.”

I turned to him. “Why not?”

“That golf course only had nine holes, I think. Ours has got eighteen.”

“What? No, that one had eighteen.” I turned back to the window, but by then we were already over another city, a city that was much bigger than our town. Maybe Eau Claire. “I was sure that was Little Wing.”

“Wake me up when we get over Lake Michigan,” Henry said, closing his eyes.

Suddenly, Ronny was in the aisle.

“Hey Ronny,” I said.

“Yeah, hey—Lucy was wondering if you would trade seats with me so you could go back and talk about something.”

“Ronny,
something
?”

“I dunno, dresses or something. Shoes. She’s worried about her shoes.”

I nodded, collected my purse, and slid past Henry, who patted me gently on the butt. I was more than a little nervous about my own dress, but I wasn’t sure that Lucy would have been my first choice as fashion consultant. I moved into the aisle and Ronny jammed past me, jarring Henry. He threw himself into my seat, and peered out the window. I heard him ask Henry, “Did we pass Little Wing yet?”

I paused a moment in the aisle to allow a flight attendant to slide past me.

“Beth thought she saw it,” Henry mumbled. “Ronny, get some sleep.”

“Can’t sleep on planes,” Ronny said, “never could.”

“Did you fly a lot when you were doing the rodeo?” Henry asked.

“Never,” Ronny said. “We always drove ourselves. Or went Greyhound.”

Henry looked up at me and shook his head.

Lucy was waving me back, the bangles on her arms sounding like a tambourine. I smiled at her, folded into Ronny’s seat, and then felt a moment of uncertainty, that I had nothing to say to this woman, this
stripper,
whose body my husband had surely seen at Kip’s bachelor party. I placed my hands in my lap and felt uncomfortably proper.

“Leland must be a real nice guy to fly us all out there like this,” she said, turning her body toward me.

I nodded. “Well, you know, he adores Ronny.”

“He’s so famous! I didn’t even know who he was, but then Ronny was showing me all his scrapbooks and I mean, shit—Lee has been in
Rolling Stone
and
Spin
and even
People
.”

I was miffed not to be sitting next to Henry and I admit to being a little pissy with Lucy. “It’s true,” I said, “even
People
.”

“Okay, so, tell me about what you’re wearing,” Lucy said, undeterred.

I had been jogging every day since the afternoon Henry returned from the mailbox with Lee’s invitation. And I had been jogging
hard
. It was spring then, and desperate for the sun, desperate for fresh air, I would get the kids sent off to school, clean up the kitchen, and then hit the back roads jogging as the day warmed, the air still cool and damp.

I wanted my body to be lean for the wedding; I did not want to be standing in some posh New York City hotel lobby looking frumpy and pale, like some backwater wallflower. So mornings when the vernal ditches sluiced noisily with meltwater and over the unplanted fields terrestrial fog hung in the air, like so many surprised ghosts, I went running, the gravel beneath my sneakers soft and a little unsteady. The first morning, the most important thing to me was
not to stop,
so I ran all the way into town. Five miles. By the time I reached Little Wing, my feet were riddled with so many blisters I was forced to call Henry and have him pick me up from the library.

But it became easier after that, more fluid. Leaving Henry to his cows and machines and fields, I would run down the driveway and out onto County Road X, waving at slowly passing pickup trucks and tractors. One day, I decided to run out to Kip and Felicia’s place. It was seven miles, but the morning was young, the temperature perfectly mild, and so I found a sustainable pace and grooved there, aware of my breathing, the bounce of my body.

As I jogged up their driveway, Felicia waved to me from their wall of south-facing floor-to-ceiling windows. I had hoped to surprise her, to discover her not in fact working, but perhaps loafing around the floor plan of their sprawling, immaculate house. Or maybe watching soaps or some inane game shows. If I was real lucky, she might even be sprawled out on their couch, eating a bowl of Fruity Pebbles while she guffawed at the cartoons, colored cereal lodged between her teeth. I had wanted to catch her in disarray, hair piled atop her head as if a squirrel’s nest, in her pajamas and glasses, last night’s facial mask still caked to her cheeks, chin, and forehead. But no—even from their driveway I could see she was put together in slim yoga pants and a sleeveless shirt, her hair looking as if she’d just been to the salon that morning. In one hand she held a coffee mug, and I could see that she was speaking into a cordless telephone with the other. She motioned me inside, as if I had wandered into her office without an appointment. Which was actually exactly what I had done.

Twenty feet from their front door I broke my pace and began stretching my aching legs. I was pleased not to be out of breath, that the running was already changing me. One of the things I liked best about being pregnant was that my body offered me surprises; that I could somehow contain this little secret, and then deliver it out into the world, and endure such pain, my very bones yielding and bending, my body immediately capable of feeding a new person; immediately! I could see then, in those moments after a long run, that exercise could take on that same unexpected hue—that I could surprise myself and run ten miles without much discomfort.

“How about a bottle of cold water,” Felicia said, holding their glass door open. “Come on in here and take those shoes off. Sit down and relax.”

“Water sounds divine,” I said. “Busy morning?”

“Not really. That was just Kip calling. With all the spring rain and melting, they’ve got water in the basement of the mill and he’s spending
more
money, installing sump pumps and a new drainage system.” She shook her head. “I
get
what he’s trying to do. I
get
his vision for the place. But, Beth, I gotta level with you. The place is a goddamn money pit.”

“Maybe it won’t always be,” I offered.

“You’re too kind. Anyway … let’s talk about something else, okay? Please.”

“Well,” I said, all of a sudden uncertain, “I do have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“I need a killer dress.”

“Black or red?”

“Hmm. Maybe black.”

“Come with me,” she said, moving off toward their bedroom. I followed, gingerly at first, and then with unabashed curiosity. I had been in their house before, once. It had been a welcoming party, their first summer in town, and though Kip had guided groups through the house, calling attention to lumber salvaged from long-since-demolished Chicago department stores and industrial fixtures scavenged from defunct Milwaukee breweries, I could not remember entering their bedroom.

It was stark, modern, white. A vase of daffodils stood on each bedside table. The bed was perfectly made, and dozens of throw pillows festooned it near the headboard. The space seemed too big, too empty for my taste, but then I remembered my own bedroom,
our
bedroom back home. The walls practically bowed with family pictures, threadbare chairs in the corners, paperback mysteries stacked three-deep on Henry’s nightstand alongside the old clock radio, romance novels and Kleenex on mine. Clothing everywhere and every surface covered: parental consent forms from school, children’s books, perfume bottles, cologne bottles, shoehorns, and lotions. Not
even
for an instant was I envious of Felicia’s life, which then appeared before me as so fashionably barren. Ours was a
home
. A nest. A place well lived in, and loved. Maybe it’s a good thing, from time to time, to spy on other people’s lives. For me, anyway, it has the effect of making my own life feel like a well-loved thing.

“Here,” Felicia said at last, emerging from a cavernous walk-in closet. “Try this.” She held a dress up against me. I was aware then of my own perspiration, and inched backward. She stepped toward me, following me. “Don’t be silly—come on.”

“Felicia, I can’t.”

“Please. Try it on. Look, if you hate it, I’m just going to take it to Saint Vinnie’s.”

I did as she said. And it was perfect, the dress. We chatted the remaining hours of the morning away, and then, graciously, she offered me a ride home. On the drive, gazing out the window of her Land Rover, I thought about the fact that she and Kip had not been invited to Lee’s wedding, and though it made perfect sense, it also seemed unfair to her, this woman who had done nothing wrong to Lee or Chloe, and who had been nothing but decent to me. Better to me, truth be told, than I had been to her. For all of our Middlewestern
niceness,
I realized that we, that I, could be every bit as cold as our longest season.

Slipping Felicia’s dress on in front of the mirror back home, I stood on my tiptoes, and imagined what shoes I’d wear. The dress was silk, but felt more like a part of my own body—as if some dark paint had been applied to every curve, every muscle, every bone of my being, rendering me no longer nude, no longer a figure even, but an invitation.

*   *   *

“I don’t know how to describe it,” I told Lucy, “it’s almost
too
sexy, without actually being too sexy. It makes me feel younger. I don’t know. That probably doesn’t make any sense.” I felt embarrassed, opening up to her, this almost-stranger, about my body, about what I thought was sexy or not.

Lucy put her hand on my forearm and looked at me meaningfully. “Girl,” she said, “I
hope
to Jesus there’s no such a thing as ‘too sexy,’ ’cause I intend to let it all hang out.”

I smiled. Over her shoulder, I could see Lake Michigan, its millions and millions of scalloped waves shimmering like blue and silver sequins.

*   *   *

LaGuardia was stifling hot, and the cab ride into the city as different from Minneapolis as imaginable—the traffic dense, erratic, competitive. I held Henry’s hand the whole way, and not out of affection. I felt as if I had just boarded a malfunctioning rollercoaster or a rocket. Ronny naturally took shotgun, intrigued by the Sikh driver’s orange turban and walrus beard, and frequently turned to face us through the glass partition, grinning wildly.