Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“Oh, I know him. He should have come and said hello.”

Rosie held her hand out to Stan. “You can come inside if you want.”

“Is it okay, Johnny?

“Sure, not too long, though.”

Stan and Rosie went into the house and Millicent gestured for me to sit on the chair next to her.

She picked a small glass ball from her lap. Its surface had been cut with triangular facets and as it rested on the flat of her palm small rainbows quivered against the dry skin of her wrist and across the woollen shawl that covered her knees. She moved her hand a little and smiled as the rainbows danced.

“Look at that. You’d never think there was all that color just waiting inside light, would you? And all you have to do is look at it a certain way. Beautiful, don’t you think? My Rosie mentioned your brother. She likes dancing with him. Is he a little slow?”

“He had an accident when he was young, but he isn’t slow.”

“A little… different? Rosie is a little different too. Only it wasn’t any accident that did it to her. Life just knocked her around until she couldn’t see any joy in it anymore. She’s lived with me since she was nine. She supports herself now cleaning people’s houses.”

“What happened to her parents?”

“Her mother was a heroin addict. In the evenings, after she’d had her fix, she liked to sit on the windowsill to catch the breeze. They lived in an apartment building and one night she just fell out. Rosie saw it happen. Her father wasn’t the sort of man who could see through to the other side of things so he started drinking and about six months later got in his car and never came back.”

She set her crystals and her shawl on a small table beside her chair and stood up.

“Some folks might have reservations about someone like Stan and someone like Rosie starting up a friendship. They might say it’s bound to end unhappily. But you get to my age and it seems like happiness is only ever temporary anyhow. So if they can pretend for a little while that they aren’t so different from everyone else, I’m just going to be happy for them.”

She went into the house and a couple of minutes later Stan and Rosie came out.

“Rosie put the stereo on and we practiced a dance.”

Stan looked flushed and excited. Rosie leaned against the railing that ran along the outside of the stoop and stared out at the meadow. She sighed and her eyelids drooped a little.

“Can you hear the wind in the trees? I can hear it. Sometimes I wish it would blow through my head like that, then all my thoughts would be untangled. Like ribbons.”

Stan looked uncertain. “I gotta go now, Rosie.”

She turned from the view and kissed him on the cheek and wandered back into the house. Stan called goodbye as the screen door bounced against its frame.

We climbed down off the stoop and started back toward the car. Stan was quiet and I wondered if the whole thing had been too much for him.

“Everything go okay? You still like her?”

“You bet. I hope she doesn’t think I’m a dumb-o.”

“Didn’t look that way when she said goodbye.”

“Yeah, I know! And in the house, when we were dancing, she kissed me on the lips. It made my head spin round.”

My father dropped us back at the house and went into town to finish off his working day. Stan and I took the pickup over to the garden center to check out the warehouse we’d just leased. Bill Prentice wasn’t there when we arrived, but the manager, Rachel, had a set of keys for us and a business card for a plant wholesaler in Sacramento.

The warehouse stood to the side of the garden center at the end of a short white-gravel driveway. It was made of pressed steel and had a row of corrugated fiberglass skylights down each side of its roof. From its front entrance the view was as beautiful as that from the garden center-a sweep of meadow, a line of trees, the river on the other side of the road, and then forested hills marching back into the distance.

Stan and I unlocked the sliding door that formed part of the front wall and went inside. The layout was simple-a single open space with a small office built into the back left corner. The concrete floor was dusty and the air in the place was hot and stale. The fiberglass panels let in a diffuse light that made the place feel vaguely churchlike.

“Wow, Johnny, this is it! This is the beginning of everything. I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it, man. The papers are signed, no one can take it away from us, not even Bill if he changes his mind.”

“I’m going to be something , Johnny, something!”

We poked around for a bit, talking through what the best way to arrange the place would be, how we were going to kick off the business.

“I got a great idea for that, Johnny. What we’ll do is get a whole lot of leaflets and put them in all the stores’ letter boxes and all the rich people’s houses. Advertising is essential. We better call those plant people too. And we have to tell Dad.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He’s going to feel a lot better about me now.”

I wasn’t sure that my father would see things in exactly the same light Stan did. I could already hear how it would waste Stan’s hard-earned money, how it was irresponsible of me to enable this fantasy, how it was a lousy idea…

“Listen, Stan, let me tell him, okay? I want to make sure he doesn’t get the wrong idea about what we’re doing.”

Stan shrugged.

“Okay, Johnny, if you want.”

We locked up the warehouse and headed back to the pickup. On the way we dropped into the garden center so Stan could grab a Coke. While we were there Rachel asked us if we could take a couple of flowering plants around to Bill’s house. He was working from his office in the town hall and wouldn’t be coming into the garden center. He wanted them delivered to his wife that day.

Bill and Patricia Prentice lived a half mile north of the garden center on a plot that was almost the size of a playing field. The house was a large white single-story Californian with green shutters and a brick driveway that made an S from the road up to the front door. Patricia’s olive Mercedes was parked carelessly under a tree in front of the house.

There was no answer when I rang the bell beside the front door. From inside the house I could hear the babble of a talk radio show. I rang a couple more times, but no one answered.

“Maybe we should just leave the plants out front.”

“But she’s got to be here, Johnny. Her car’s here. She just can’t hear us because of the radio. I don’t want Bill to get mad because we didn’t do what he said.”

I tried the door. It was unlocked and swung open to show a foyer tiled in white stone. We could have left then, it would have been easy enough to do. We were only dropping off a couple of plants, after all. But there was a feeling about the house that didn’t seem right to me. A car out front, a radio on, someone who should have been home…

Stan and I stepped through the doorway. After the heat outside the house felt cool. From the foyer I could see into a sunroom on my right and, directly ahead, a large living room. It was from there that the radio noise was coming. The blinds in both rooms were down and the light in the house was muted and didn’t fully dilute the shadows that pooled in corners and under furniture. Air-conditioning whispered through vents near the ceiling. There was no one in either of the rooms.

Stan shouted nervously, “Mrs. Prentice, it’s Stan! We’ve got some plants!”

When no one answered we put the plants beside the door and with Stan glancing about apprehensively and holding onto my sleeve we went through the living room and turned right into a long hall that followed the rear wall of the house. On our left, as we walked along it, there were windows that must have looked out onto a back garden, but these were shuttered and I could see only thin strips of sunshine around the inside of the frames. On our right there were three doors. Two of them were closed, but the last was open and it was through this that we found Patricia Prentice in what was obviously the master bedroom of the house.