Jane Smiley - Golden Age

But the fact that Gail Perroni was not dead was the least of surprises at the ranch. The second-greatest was the way Gail threw her arms around Janet when she saw her, and hugged her with considerable strength, and the greatest was Chance, just behind her as she opened the door, also smiling, picking his teeth from their lunch of tamales and spinach salad.

Janet must have looked surprised, because Gail said, “Honey, go ahead and pry.”

They stepped back and welcomed her in.

What was Chance? she thought. Only twenty-nine? But years of sun had polished his skin and the angle of his chin. Maybe it had whitened his teeth, too — his teeth practically gave off light. He looked, how to think of this, at home. They led her into the back sitting room, a room she had never been in. It had a series of three French doors facing northwest over a pasture that had been left fallow. It rolled gently upward, lifting its purple wave of lupine with it.

Janet said, “The lupine are amazing this year.”

Gail said, “They are amazing every year.”

Chance went over and opened one set of the doors, and the fragrance billowed in.

Janet said, “What shall I pry into first?”

Gail said, “After Ray died, I asked Chance to come stay with me and run the ranch for a year while I decide what to do with it.”

“Only I know this?”

“My lawyer knows it. The bank knows it. The hands know it. The cattle know it. They run for cover when they see him coming. Ask something else.”

“Does Loretta know it?”

“Not so far.”

“What if someone were to tell her?”

“Like you?”

Janet nodded.

Chance said, “Please don’t, Aunt Janet.”

There was a long pause, and finally Janet said, “She paid me to come and find out whether you were still alive, Gail.”

Gail said, “No, she can’t have the ranch. Not now, not ever.”

Janet crossed her legs and looked out the French doors. Finally, she said, “She told me that she was against the development.”

“She may have been, but I suspect that she did know that when the fellow paid us for the land we got five hundred thousand, and, we later found out, your brother got a million and a half. That little fact went undisclosed, although Loretta’s signature was on the papers.”

“I have never understood my brother,” said Janet.

“What’s to understand?” said Gail. “He is a psychopath.”

Janet glanced at Chance, who looked interested but unmoved by this assertion. Clearly, it had been asserted before. Janet said, “Look, Gail. She wasn’t putting me on. She sounded worried.”

Gail bumped around on her end of the couch for a moment, then said, “I never liked Frank Langdon. The first time, in that restaurant, I said to Ray that he was the coldest man I had ever met in my life. I told Loretta she was making a mistake marrying the son of such a cold man, because someone like that would have no idea, not only how to love someone, but that love exists in this world. Your mother was strange, too. I liked her, actually, but she was more like a plant than a person.”

Janet opened her mouth, but she was not the one to defend her father, was she?

Gail went on, “And I for one don’t care that your mother has got it together now, and everyone loves her. At the very time when she should have done her job, when those twins were babies, she was missing in action.” Then she said, “But weren’t we all. However, here we have Chance, and for me, that’s the reward.” She reached over and pressed her hand into Chance’s. He gave it a small squeeze. Where was the wife? Janet thought. Where was the baby? She was uncomfortable enough to sit quietly for a moment or two, then lean forward, saying, “I guess my mission is accomplished, then. I won’t say anything, just that you’re fine, and not to worry.”

Gail said, “I trust you.” She held out her hand, and Janet shook it. Chance followed her to, and then out, the door. There was more to say, but she sensed him pulling away, as if fine threads were stretching between them. At the last moment, as he was opening his mouth to wish her goodbye, she said, “Got any new horses to show me?”

“Well, the last horse Grandpa Ray bought was an Appaloosa yearling. Two-year-old now. I’ve been working with her. Haven’t mounted her at all, but she’s pretty sturdy. I guess I’ll be on her by summer.” He headed toward the barn, and Janet followed him.

The filly was in with two other horses, a bay and a gray. They were standing in the far corner of the pen, playing with a plastic bucket. The gray would pick the bucket up and drop it; then the other two would nose it and push it over. When it fell over with a rattle, the Appy and the bay sprang into the air as if surprised, and trotted away, tails in the air. There was whinnying and snorting, and then the three youngsters returned to the bucket and started over. Chance put his fingers to his lips and whistled. All three spun around, and then trotted up. Chance palmed them each a lump of sugar.

The Appaloosa was not like any Appy Janet had seen before — rangy, with a chestnut coat that was overlaid by what looked like a blanket of snow, across the haunches, mainly, but with a splash up the neck, and then around the nostrils. She was a striking animal. Chance said, “Last thing Grandpa Ray needed was another horse. He paid twenty-five grand for her. Grandma said she was beside herself. I guess they were barely speaking even by the time he passed away.”

Janet reached out cautiously to pet the horse, but the horse was friendly. She sniffed Janet’s hand and presented her forehead to be tickled. Janet said, “Chance, I don’t know that your grandmother should be so, I don’t know, blunt with you.”

“She doesn’t tell me I have to agree with her. She’s willing to live with an Obama supporter.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“You don’t have to know what you think about everything in order to get the work done. That’s what I think about most.”

“You don’t mind being stuck out here?”

“I don’t mind. Given what I like to do, I’m going to be stuck out somewhere. I like here better than Montana or New Mexico.”

“What do you do for fun?”

“We have Internet.”

“I still think you’re too young for this.” Then she said, “What about Hanny? Was that her name? You dated her.” Janet could not remember if Chance had known anything about the pregnancy or the abortion.

“She’s in Phoenix. She’s married. She hasn’t come around since I’ve been back. How do you know Hanny?”

So that was the answer.

“She came to look at colleges and stayed with us.”

“That was nice of you.”

“I liked her.”

“I liked her, too. She was a little ambitious for me at that point.” He laughed, then waved off the two-year-olds, who wandered back to the bucket but seemed to find it boring. Janet watched them for a moment, then turned to Chance and grabbed his arm. She said, “Chancie, I don’t have the feeling that you comprehend what is going on here, what has gone on. Your grandmother loves you, but she’s also using you to get back at your mother. Your father is in deep shit. He ruined me! He ruined my life!” Even as she said this, though, she thought that she was not quite speaking the truth — in spite of constant ripples of worry, she didn’t mind scraping an existence together in Half Moon Bay. The truth was too complex to speak, which was probably why she didn’t talk much anymore. She said, “Anyway, what he did isn’t about me. It’s about something bigger….Oh, I don’t know. Are you still married?”

“Sort of.”

That was all he said. In the end, Janet could only shake her head. As she drove home, she thought, a year and a half, and we’re all still dazed. We can make the first connection, but not the second one — take the first step, but go no further. And despite all her deep and ancient resentments, she would have defended her own father. Her muscles had twitched when Gail attacked him, even though Gail’s observation was right on. “Cold” was the perfect word for him. Here he was, dead for fifteen years, buried, his assets dissipated, his “work,” whatever that had been, finished, forgotten. There was a way he’d had of walking through a room…and then a scene flashed into her mind, long forgotten and now utterly present: Some summer house somewhere, a little ramshackle, she and her mom coming in the door from shopping, exhilarated by the damp weather and happy with something they’d bought. The twins were sitting apart, each on a sofa pillow, their hands in their laps, not looking at one another. As her mom exclaims, “Hello! We’re back!” her father’s beautiful head turns. He looks over his shoulder at them, and there it is, revulsion — not dislike or hatred, nothing so conscious — rather, an involuntary shudder, and Janet knows in her deepest being that they should not have come back, they should have stayed away, left for good. She also knows that her mother hasn’t noticed, bustling with the packages. She sees her father’s face mask over with some sort of fake normality, 1950s male patience. She goes up to him and reaches for his hand, but he avoids touching her, takes one of the boxes from her mother, and the two of them walk away into the kitchen. There is a moment of silence; then Michael reaches out and knocks Richie over. The ensuing brouhaha covers the moment, the look. The oddest thing in the picture in Janet’s mind is how young her father is — almost a boy, really. If she had been the age she was now, or even his own age at the time, she would not have taken it personally.