Richard Ford - Women with Men

“In what sense?” I said, and I smiled at her because something in that seemed funny. I could remember her and my father talking in the living room until late, and then everything getting quiet and finally the sound of lamps being clicked off.

“In a distant sense, Mr. Genius,” Doris said, “and in the sense that if he comes back we'd start back right where we left off. Or try to. Though if he's intending to stay gone, I wish we could get divorced so I could begin to pick up the pieces.” She laughed. “That wouldn't take a lifetime.”

“What do you think'll happen?” I asked, referring to my father and mother. I'd never asked anybody but my father about that before, and when I'd asked him the first time, he said my mother was going to come back — this was before we left Great Falls. Though one time in the car, on the ride home from a baseball game, he'd suddenly said, “Love's just what two people decide to do, Larry. It's not a religion.” He must've been thinking about it.

“What do I think's going to happen?” Doris said. She adjusted her glasses upwards on her nose and took a deep breath, as though this was not an easy question. “It depends on timing and the situation of third parties,” she said very seriously. “If your mom, for instance, has a young pretty boyfriend out in Seattle, or if your dad has a girlfriend back there where Jesus left his ankle shoes, then that's a problem. But if they can hold out long enough to get lonely, then they'll probably do fine — though they don't want to hold out too long. This is my opinion, of course, based on nothing.” Doris looked over at me and reached and adjusted the collar of my coat, which was turned up. “How old are you?” she said. “I should probably know that kind of thing.”

“Seventeen,” I said, thinking about my mother's having a pretty boyfriend in Seattle. I'd thought about it some in the months she'd been gone and decided she didn't have one.

“Then you've got your whole life in front of you for worrying,” Doris said. “Don't start now. They ought to teach that in school instead of history. Worry management. Would you, by the way, like to know something about yourself?”

“What?” I said.

She didn't look at me, just kept driving. “You smell like wheat!” Doris said and laughed. “Ever since you got in this car it's smelled like a silo in here. Won't Don let you sleep in the house with him?”

And I was shocked to hear that, because I didn't like living out on the farm or in that house and I knew already I might smell that way, because I could smell it in all the rooms and in my father's clothes. And I felt angry, angry at him, though I didn't want to let Doris know. “They stored grain in our house before we moved in,” I said, and didn't want to say anything else.

“You're a real hick,” she said. “You better check your shoes.” She laughed again.

“We're just out there for this year,” I said. And I felt even angrier about the whole subject. Out the clouded window, the first dark rows of tilled winter wheat began just beyond the road verge and the fence line — snow crusting between the new rows. What I wanted to do, I thought then, was stay in Seattle with my mother and start in at a new school after Christmas even if it meant beginning the year over. I wanted to get out of Montana, where we didn't have a TV and had to haul our water and where the coyotes woke you up howling and my father and I had nobody to talk to but each other. I was missing something, I thought, an important opportunity. And later, when I would try to explain to someone how it was, that I had not been a farm boy but had just led life like that for a while, nobody'd believe me. And after that it would always be impossible to explain how things really were.

“I was depressed, myself, for a long time after Benny left,” Doris said. “Do you know what that means — to be depressed?”

“No,” I said gloomily.

She reached up and put her finger on the hole in the windshield where water had come in and frozen. She looked at the tip of her finger, then looked at me and smiled. “You're way too young for turmoil,” she said, “because I'm too young for it myself.” She licked her finger. “Tell me about your dad. Has he got a girlfriend out there in Siberia? I'll bet he has. Some little diamond in the rough.”

“He does,” I said, and I didn't care if she told my mother. “There's a teacher down the road from us.”

“Well, good for him,” Doris said, though she didn't smile about it. “What's her name?”

“Joyce.”

“That's a cute name. I guess your mother doesn't know about this.”

“I don't know if she does.”

“I'm sure she doesn't, not that it matters,” Doris said. I wondered if my father was down at Joyce Jensen's trailer right then. I remembered the red car sitting in front.

Doris took her bottle of schnapps and handed it and her cup to me. “I'd have another, please.”

I thought maybe she was going to get drunk because I'd told her my dad had a girlfriend. It was nearly dark and snow was building up and it was colder, and even though we were close to Shelby it was still three hours until the train. And I had a fear that we'd miss it, that Doris would get drunk and go to sleep someplace where I couldn't wake her up and I'd end up back at home that night, going in the front door after midnight and finding no one there.

I poured less than I'd poured before. The schnapps was gluey on my fingers and tasted like root beer. I had been in bars with my father and seen that schnapps before, but I hadn't actually seen someone drink it.

“You know,” Doris said, and she sounded indignant about something, “you certainly understand you don't belong to your dad, don't you? Nobody belongs to anybody. Some people think they do, but that's ridiculous.”

“I know that,” I said. “I'll be on my own when the school year's over.”

“You're on your own right now. School doesn't determine that,” Doris said. “And I'm not your mother. You know that, too, don't you? I'm your aunt. A technicality. It doesn't matter to me what you do. You can move right back to Great Falls tomorrow if you want to. You can live with me. That'd be an innovation.” Doris cut her eyes at me, still indignant. I thought she might invite me to have a drink of schnapps, but I didn't want it. I remembered a little tattoo she had on her shoulder, a blue-and-red butterfly I'd seen the summer before, when she was around the house and spending time with my father. “You're like a bird in a glass cage, aren't you?”

“I won't stay there much longer,” I said.

“We'll see about that,” Doris said, staring out into the snowflakes. “Did you buy your mother a nice present?”

“I'm going to,” I said.

“Did your dad give you a lot of money, now that he's collecting a big check?”

“I had some already,” I lied, thinking that nice stores would probably be closed in Shelby. I pictured the main street, where I'd only been once, with my father, when my mother had taken the train back from the Cities, and all I could remember was a row of bar and motel signs with Route 2 running through the town toward Havre. “I worked at the elevator in the harvest,” I said.

“Is Don still off the drink?”

“Yes, he is,” I said.

“And you two get along just great?”

“Yes,” I said, “we do.”

“Well, that's wonderful,” she said. Out in the snow and fog haze I could see faint yellow lights all in a string at the bottom of a hill. It was Shelby. “I used to think your father'd married the wrong sister, since we all met at the same time. You know? I thought he was too good for Jan. But I don't think so now. She and I have gotten a lot closer than we used to be since she's been out in Seattle. We talk on the phone about things.” Doris let her window down and poured out the schnapps she had left. It hit the back window and froze. “She's pretty wonderful, did you know that? Did you know your mother was wonderful?”