Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“Is your grandmother in on this?”

“Gran thinks I have talent and should use it while I can. Bogey is thirteen, we’ve trained him perfectly, he’s peaking, and so am I.” He sounded very reasonable. He patted the horse and said, “Reining horses take a long time to grow up. Grandpop told me that when he gave him to me, when I was in first grade.”

Janet said, “Don’t you graduate this year? Just graduate, then do it.”

“Nope.”

Janet climbed onto the lowest railing of the fence and leaned over it, grabbing Bogey’s rein. She said, “Chance. It’s four months. Graduate.”

“Mom already sent my college applications in. Georgetown, St. Louis U., Fordham. Not Notre Dame, because it’s not Jesuit.”

“What does your dad say?”

“Do you mean Michael or Father?”

Janet barked a laugh, but Chance wasn’t joking. She said, “Michael, I guess.”

“He says, fuck you.”

To whom? thought Janet. But she said, “Okay, even so, I think we can work this out. Just come with me—”

Bogey started backing up, fast, tucking his chin, flopping his ears, right out of her grasp. Then he spun, and a moment later, Chance and Bogey were galloping across the arena, then through the open gate at the far end. Janet stood up, shadowed her eyes, saw them disappear around the barn, and then reappear moments later, galloping up a trail that crossed a hillside behind the house. They were going fast.

Janet drove to the house. Loretta’s mom was standing in the doorway, a little hunched, perhaps waiting for her. She said, “He’s a very stubborn boy,” as she stepped back to let Janet in. It was now twelve-forty-five.

Janet said, “I wonder where in the world he gets that.”

“I say nothing,” said Gail Perroni. Janet had liked her every time they met — three or four times now.

Of course there was food. Gail led her into the kitchen, where two places were set. She said, “I thought you might be hungry. Pop is out with Teo — that’s the foreman — checking the fence line at the far end of the ranch; heavens, that’s miles and hours away. And a good thing. I’m going to have to break him in easy to having Chance here.”

Janet said, “I thought he was crazy about Chance.”

“Oh, he is, but he’s going to be just like Lori about this. I’ve spent her whole life trying not to be outnumbered by the two of them.”

She ladled out what looked like tortilla soup, then offered Janet crisp tortilla strips, slices of avocado, and chopped tomatoes for garnish. She said, “I’m having iced tea, but we have some Cokes somewhere.”

“Iced tea is fine,” said Janet as she pulled out her chair. The soup looked so good that the trip became worth it.

Gail looked at her bowl with pleasure, then began eating. She seemed very relaxed. Once Janet had eaten some, and taken a few sips of her tea, Gail said, “I guess you’ll have to leave by two, in case you hit traffic.”

Janet said, “I guess Chance won’t be going with me.”

“Oh, I doubt he’ll be back by then. Bogey can be out all day. He’s as fit as they come.”

They continued to eat.

Gail touched her napkin to her lips — very gently, since she was wearing lipstick, a fuchsia-orange, and plenty of rouge, too. Janet said, “Loretta is very upset.”

“She’ll be fine. A fait accompli is about the only thing that has ever worked with that girl.”

To the best of Janet’s knowledge, Loretta was not yet forty-five. Gail looked older than her own mom, but that could be years of sun. Gail tipped her soup bowl and spooned out the last bite, then helped herself to another slice of avocado. Then she sighed, and smiled. She said, “Well, I feel a lot better now. So — I knew this was coming.”

“Did he say something over Christmas?”

“I knew this was coming sixteen years ago, when Dalla — Remember her? She was the nanny? — she would say to me, ‘Ma’am, do you think that boy can hear? I call him and I call him, and he just walks away.’ So we did a test. He was stacking blocks, and we sneaked up behind him — you know, to clap or something? Well, he heard us coming, no problem. Nope, he hears you fine, but only when you are saying what he’s interested in. It isn’t going to do him one bit of harm to take time off from that prison in Portola Valley. I don’t know why she sent him out here. I told her not to, but she would do it her way. If he goes out on the circuit for a year, he’ll learn that that’s a hard life. A friend of ours had a boy who was determined to be a rodeo clown. He did that for exactly a year and screamed to come home, and Jane, that was his mom, she said, ‘Nope, you do it till you’ve learned all about it.’ It’s dangerous. He lasted a good four years.” She stood up and picked up her bowl, then Janet’s. “Now he’s a vet. Even vet school is a breeze compared to being a rodeo clown.”

“Who tells Loretta?”

“Don’t you have caller ID?”

“On my phone?”

Gail nodded. “Then you don’t need to answer, do you?”

“Will she ever speak to me again?”

“Oh, she’ll come back from the Caribbean, and then she’ll come out here fit to be tied, and then that boy’ll show her what he can do on that horse, and it’s a sight, I’m telling you. And he’ll kiss her and hug her and pooch out his lips and say, ‘C’mom, Ma, please?’ And she’ll stomp around the house for an hour and maybe go call that priest, whatever his name is, but she’ll come around.”

Janet said, “Is she going to be mad at you?”

Gail looked relaxed in a cat-that-ate-the-canary sort of way. “I’m used to that, believe me.”

Then Janet said, “Can I call you when I need parenting advice?”

Now Gail squeezed her across the shoulders. Then she nodded and said, “Almost two now. Takes twenty minutes just to get out to the road.”

As she got into her car, Janet decided that this was, indeed, a Perroni matter, not a Langdon matter. Of course, a part of her thought Loretta was getting what she deserved, but another part of her applied this lesson to Jonah — when and if Jonah were to put his foot down, would Janet then be getting what was coming to her for encouraging, or not discouraging, Chance? Janet had never told any of her Palo Alto friends about her period with the Peoples Temple; they thought she and Jared were fresh out of the East, Minnesota, Iowa, vaguely New Jersey. Nor did she often go into the city, as different as it was now from the chaos it had been in those days. No one she knew now could imagine what San Francisco was like in the 1970s, and she didn’t know anyone now that she had been close to in the Temple. She hadn’t heard from Marla, who was teaching theater at Wellesley and doing occasional plays in Boston and the Berkshires, in seven years. She doubted she would recognize anyone else besides Lucas — ah, Lucas (was he the love of her life?) — who was putting on weight and had safely moved on from youthful good-looking nice young African American man roles to more substantive and weathered father roles, mostly on the TV, though she had seen him twice in movies. And that was a good thing.

When she arrived at the school twelve minutes past her usual time, Jonah wasn’t the last child waiting — only the second to last. She apologized to the teacher. Jonah was sitting quietly on the wall that ran along the drive, kicking his heels against the bricks. When he saw her, he sighed and jumped to the ground. He dragged his backpack to the car, picking it up only when the teacher said, “Come on, Jonah, you can carry that.”

Janet opened his door, and Jonah got into his car seat. He was small, and she still had nightmares about him slithering under the belts of his very expensive Britax and rolling up like a millipede beneath the passenger’s seat. He was, she had to admit, much like Emily had been at his age, reserved and suspicious. She suspected that those who discussed this behind her back agreed that he got it from her.