The Longest Night (18 page)

The morning passed slowly. Nat got the girls dressed, and they played several rounds of Candy Land. The sole thing Candy Land had to recommend it was that each round moved mercifully fast, so after half an hour Nat felt rather accomplished. It was midmorning by the time she heard an unfamiliar truck's rattle in the street, and a minute later there was a knock at the door.

When she opened it, Esrom was standing there, holding his hat and keeping to the back edge of the step. “Hello again, ma'am.”

“Hello!” she said.

“I remember you!” Sam squealed, appearing from behind Nat.

Nat restrained her gently. “Thank you so much for coming.”

“It was no trouble,” Esrom said, “but I'm sorry to see what happened to your car there.”

“It's terrible, isn't it?”

“It's pretty bad. You're lucky you all weren't hurt.”

“We were out in the middle of the
night,
” Sam said.

Esrom looked at Nat.

“Well,” Nat said, “ ‘middle of the night' is a bit of an exaggeration.”

“No!” Sam's voice was squeaky, her eyebrows energetic. “It really was in the middle of the night. Mama pulled me out of my bed and everyfing.”

Esrom laughed. “Well, all right,” he said.

Nat felt her face flush. “We went for a drive,” she said. “Just for some fresh air. It was late, yes. That's why I had to drive all the way home on that tire.”

“You should keep a spare, ma'am. If you don't mind my saying.”

“The spare is
on
the car. We had to use it when we were driving out here from Virginia. We never replaced it.”

“Well, if it's in use,” he said kindly, “it's not the spare anymore.”

Nat nodded. She wanted to tell him that she understood, that she was not typically a stupid person, but she was too sheepish to say anything.

“I saw some fluid under the car,” he said, “when I peeked under it. Think it might be transmission fluid. Did you hit something while you were out there?”

“I did. I hit a rock.”

“Okay.” He frowned, as if genuinely aggrieved on her behalf. “Well, I don't like the look of the fluid. It's all burnt. Let's hope that's the start of a puddle and not the tail end of all the fluid you had.”

Nat didn't know what to say to this mostly incomprehensible possibility.

Sam, wriggling a little closer to Esrom, could contain herself no longer. “Do you remember me from the milkshake place?”

“ 'Course I do,” Esrom said. “It's Sam, right?”

“Yes! That's right!”

Nat was touched that he remembered Sam's name. “And Liddie,” she added, tapping her younger girl's head.

“Well, I couldn't forget Liddie.” Esrom shook her small hand.

“How are your friends?” Nat asked. “How's business at the auto shop?”

“Oh, fine, thanks. Growing bit by bit.” He gestured toward the car. “I'm going to need to get under the hood to see what all has gone wrong. Can I borrow your keys—see if I can start it?”

“Certainly,” Nat said, and ducked back into the house, then brought them to him.

“All right. I'll let you know when I'm done.”

Nat thanked him and ushered the girls back inside. Sam and Liddie perched in the window. They hooked their fingers over the windowsill, staring as if Esrom were the first man they had seen in years. The oscillating fan flapped the lace edge on their socks, lifting and dropping their skirts as it aimed. Nat puttered into the kitchen, sprinkled a fine rust of paprika over the deviled eggs, and sliced up the coffee cake. Then, inspired, she brought out canned peaches, which she nestled into little iceberg lettuce beds so they wouldn't dribble onto the cake, and went outside to invite Esrom in.

Her heart dipped when she saw the Fireflite hooked up to his truck in a sad diagonal. “Oh, no,” she said, startling him out of his cowboy reverie.

He turned and took a few steps toward her. “Yeah, it doesn't look good. It won't even start up. I suspect that rock you hit made a hole in your transmission pan, and that the fluid leaked out while you were driving so far on that tire. You might've burnt up your transmission.”

“Is that a big fix?”

“Yeah, it's big, I'm afraid.”

“
Darn
it.” Nat felt the hot rise of anxiety, how disappointed Paul would be over the waste of money, her poor judgment, the whole thing. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. After a moment she could feel the cowboy's eyes on her so she straightened up, smiled, and said, “Would you like to come in? We have lunch on the table.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you, but I should be getting back to the shop.”

“You don't have time for lunch?” She felt even more foolish, now, for going to the trouble to make the eggs and coffee cake; she was transparent in her pathetic desire for any kind of a friend. The day in the diner came snapping back to her: the waitress's harsh eyes, her sense of being left out. One embarrassment always called up another in quick succession. Her eyes stung with tears and she hoped he didn't notice, but his sudden change of heart and soothing, solicitous tone, as if she were an unhappy horse who might kick him, made her suspect that he did.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Of course I have time for lunch. That's real nice of you.” His eyes held crinkles at the edges from time spent in the sun, and his smile was warm, although his teeth had obviously never been worked on, crossing one another here and there like a fence that needed mending.

When he pried off his boots in the entryway, stepped inside, and saw the table laden with food and three kinds of silverware (dear God, she'd put out cloth napkins, what had she been thinking?), his eyes widened. Nat felt exposed by her ridiculous effort: the gently crumbling coffee cake, fussy perfection of deviled eggs lined up like oysters on the half shell, satiny peaches that glistened in their own syrup.

“We have food,” Sam was singing, “we have special food today-ay.”

“Holy smokes,” Esrom said, “this is like Easter.”

“Oh, no,” Nat said, “we eat this way all the time.”

“No, we don't,” Sam muttered.

Nat and the girls sat in a semicircle, all tilted slightly toward Esrom while he ate. He reddened and squirmed under their attention, but enjoyed his food with such gusto that soon Nat felt more at ease.

Sam prattled endlessly, sputtering deviled egg in Esrom's direction as she regaled him with the bright wanderings of her consciousness (“I once ate a coffee cake with a
real
coffee bean on top, but the bean was like a dis-gus-ting rock”; “I can play Go Fish and I always win”; “I seed a vulture eating a dead turtle on the side of the road and Daddy said, ‘That's ashes to ashes, dust to dust' ”). Liddie nodded vigorously at Sam's statements so they could be partially claimed as her own. Liddie's little voice was still soft and slurred, so most of what she said was hard to understand. It was Sam who could always translate—“She says she has a doll that sleeps, and when you give it milk it pees”—and they could see from the satisfaction on Liddie's face that this was correct. Liddie hated to be misunderstood; it was one of the few things that enraged her.

They dug into the coffee cake, and Nat poured milk around the table.

“Ah, cold milk,” Esrom said. “I don't get that every day. At my place we usually drink warm milk.”

For some reason this nearly embarrassed Nat, and Sam blurted, “Why?”

“We got cows.”

“Do you eat 'em?” Sam asked. “Do you make 'em into boots?”

Esrom laughed. “That's right, the boots,” he said. “No, we don't eat our cows. Else where would we get our milk from? Our neighbors, Lind is their name, we trade them for beef once a year.”

“Oh,” said Sam. “Then you're not a real cowboy.”

“Sam,” Nat said, disapprovingly.

Esrom waved his hand to show her he didn't mind. “By your high standards, maybe I'm not. But I do ride a horse most every day. Does that count?”

“Yeah,” said Sam, generously. She thought for a moment. “Why are all your neighbors named Lind?”

Esrom helped himself to another square of cake. “I like you,” he said. “Say,” he added, “I found something this morning you girls might like.” He reached into his front shirt pocket and produced a strip of shed snake skin, half a foot long. It was transparent, thinner than tissue, and lined with pale marks that made it look somehow ancient and valuable, like a scroll. The girls leaned closer.

“It's a snake skin,” he told them. “I found it this morning. It's only part of it.”

“Where's the other part?” Sam asked.

“I don't know. Maybe blew away.”

“Is it a rattler? Did it die when it lost its skin?”

“Well, I can't say for sure if it's a rattler,” Esrom said, “ 'cause this is only the head end. If you find the tail of a rattler, you can see the little bumps where the skin shed right over the rattle. See here?” He pointed carefully. “The skin peeled over its eyeballs. And no, shedding its skin doesn't kill it. Snakes just do that from time to time.”

Even Nat found herself leaning closer, and then remembered that she was an adult and set about gathering the empty plates.

“Have
you
ever seen a rattler?” Sam asked Esrom.

“Oh, sure. They're all around.”

“You ever kill one?”

“Well, I have,” said Esrom, “if I find them too close to the house, or in the barn. Otherwise I leave 'em alone.”

“Good grief, Sam,” Nat sighed. “Girls, wash your hands. They're sticky.”

“Here,” said Esrom, “you girls can keep the snake skin.”

Sam and Liddie gasped and hopped up and down, then instantly began fighting over it. Nat told them it would stay on the windowsill until they could control themselves. Esrom stretched out his legs and took the cup of steaming coffee Nat offered him, while the girls washed their hands at record speed and ran back, dripping water all the way. From the window Nat could see her neighbor Chrissie walking her little white dog down the street, stopping to gape at Nat's dangling car. Chrissie peered into Esrom's truck as she passed and then, not seeing anyone inside, looked around the street and up at Nat in the window. Nat felt a twinge of uneasiness and turned her back. She didn't want to rush Esrom away.

Not that she could have, anyhow. “We have a lot of toys we can show you,” Sam was saying, and she and Liddie got to work. They galloped from their bedroom into the living room over and over, showing Esrom their plastic toy telephone, a Dennis the Menace doll, a Betsy Wetsy with missing eyelashes and fluttering, clouded eyes.

“Sorry about them,” Nat said. “We don't have company over much.”

“They're great,” said Esrom. “I never been so finely treated while collecting someone's car.”

“Are you getting work in town these days, like you wanted?”

“Oh, yeah.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin, nodding. He seemed a little surprised that Nat had remembered so much about him. “Lots of auto work.”

“I was surprised that anyone answered last night, when I called.”

“I was the only one left, catching up. I like fiddling with the old cars.” He looked almost sheepish and changed the subject. “Say, I never asked, where'd
you
grow up?”

“California. San Diego.”

“Whoa,” he said. “That must have been nice.”

“It was. Growing up on the beach and all.”

He laughed out loud, as if the very idea of doing such a thing were preposterous. “Sometimes the lava flats remind me of an ocean,” he said. “Is that stupid? Would somebody only say that if they'd never seen the ocean?”

“It's not stupid,” Nat said. “It reminds me of the ocean, too. That's why I was going for night drives. I just like being out there. It's another world. You get to escape yourself.” She blushed and swiped crumbs into her palm.

“So what'd your husband say?” Esrom asked. “When he saw that busted tire? He must've been surprised.”

Sam was trotting toward him with a wooden camera and she cried, “Oh, our daddy's not here at all! He's in Antarctica for a year!”

“Oh,” Esrom said.

“Not quite,” Nat said. She turned on her serious voice: “Sam, do you remember what we talked about?” She meant the conversation where she'd asked her children not to advertise that the head of their household was thousands of miles away. “My husband's deployed to a base in Greenland,” she explained.

“When's he due back?” Esrom asked, and Nat felt a tiny trigger of alarm. He raised his hand. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be personal.”

“No, it's fine. He's due back in December. I'm hoping this baby can hold out for his return, but that doesn't seem likely.”

Esrom glanced around, as if “this baby” might be hiding beneath the table or asleep somewhere nearby. Then he met her eyes and laughed with the realization: “You're having a baby?”

It seemed so obvious to her, but here was another person who hadn't noticed. “Yes,” she said, “in early December.”

“How about that,” said Esrom. “Well, congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

He smiled for a moment as if thinking of something, and then jerked himself into motion. He stood and rubbed his palms on the front of his jeans. “I should be getting back to the shop now,” he said. “But I can't thank you enough for lunch. I'll be braggin' to the guys all afternoon about it.”

Nat wished she had enough food left over to wrap up for them, to make it seem less like all her ministrations were directed at Esrom. “It was no trouble.”

“I'll call you when I know more about your car.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“In the meantime, how do you plan to get around?”