John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

His paddle; right. After all, he’d come here looking to buy. Kath was watching Leo bid, his withered fingers ropy on the handle, when Dory angled towards her again.

“You know,” Dory said, “Ossaba can get me into art school in New York.”

The girl cleared out the night’s commotion. She was a portrait and the rest was wall.

“He’ll co-sign the papers for financial aid,” she said. “He’s already put down a deposit on a dorm room.”

“He told you this?” Kath asked.

“In his latest letter, he told me.” Thorns at her shoulders, studs across her chest. “I can move in the first of the year.”

“Well — well, Dory — he’d have all the money.”

“I’d have my own room, Kath. My own room, my own door.”

“But it would still be his turf. His world, Dory. And you didn’t even want the man’s picture around.”

“Oh, the picture. I mean, totally amateur work.”

Leo was motioning for his receipt. Somebody made a crack, Why don’t they just keep a runner at your table? Kath’s own two pink forms however seemed suddenly flimsy, way too few. “Dory,” she asked, “don’t you understand?” But she was head-down, talking to her receipts; in this noise she might as well have been speaking another language.

“The picture’s a separate question,” Dory said.

At the Clinic, Kath recalled, the girl’s story wasn’t so special. An affair during the first year of a residency was a natural hazard. Ossaba’s real problem had been that he lacked the necessary powerful insider to quiet the gossip. The man was black and Muslim, after all. But other doctors had seduced the occasional coed. In most cases the marriage survived, the rupture bridged with jewelry and trips abroad. Most households had the strength for only so much dislocation. Kath herself, just tonight, had lost a good half the wallop she’d come in with. It cost her to avoid Dory’s stare, she felt it in the neck, and she couldn’t believe the effort it took to finger together her receipts and weight them in place with the miniature. On an evening like this — cold and late in the year — that doll’s robe itself mocked her, more substantial than her whole rattling getup. At least the little gilded coverall didn’t pretend to be anything other than a toy, an Emperor’s new clothes.

“I can be out of here the first of the year,” Dory said.

What was the next item? A work in bright fiber, a picket fence and a peacock beyond…but what difference did it make? She’d given nothing here more than a Maybe anyway. Kath slung her paddle up in front of her face.

Afterwards, Leo offered to drive Dory home. Just as well; Kath couldn’t even see the girl. Once the last item was in the books (the only piece left not taken was the ominous view of Peoria Road), ten or a dozen in the audience closed around Kath, picking at their sweat-stuck clothes. The husband of the miniaturist settled behind her, his hands on her shoulders, his fingers greasy with chicken. Volunteers brought the credit-card machine to the table, and she punctuated her conversation with the clack of each imprint.

“What happened?” Kath asked, grinning. “At the bank they’re going to think a bomb hit.”

At last Leo eased through the knot around her chair, quieting the crowd. His smile had paled again.

“The gal would like to go,” he said.

Kath couldn’t see her. She tried to catch a glimpse through the pack of aging bodies, and found herself thinking: I had a family, I had a man who loved me — and now the girl wants to go? The girl too? Kath’s contact lenses couldn’t hold a focus. They needed a soak.

“These lenses,” Kath said, “are going to get a soak.”

And then, finding the old man’s face: “My hero.”

Her looks wouldn’t hold up much longer either. Just getting the receipts in her purse left her blinking, and it felt like her mascara had loosened. Her long coat, whew.

Outside in the parking lot, the black and white leaden with rain, Kath almost walked right into the Glyndes.

Not that they noticed. In the farthest corner of the lot, half hidden behind a Volvo station wagon, the Glyndes were scuffling. Actually scuffling; Kath couldn’t help but stare. The couple staggered back and forth, their arms locked upright above them. Somehow, together, they’d hefted overhead the portrait of Dory’s surgeon. It was like a workout station at the Fitness Center, the extended straining arms, the ungainly square weight. Mrs. Glynde’s open overcoat had been forced back under her armpits, revealing a Gothic label stitched in golden thread. Now a word that might have been please came through the drizzle, now a grunted obscenity. What was going on? Who was trying to hit who? Kath couldn’t even see which of them had hold of the portrait. The art work jigged above the struggling husband and wife, neon exploding off its glass cover. And those colors sweeping that foreigner’s face — could this be a trick of the glare? For a moment those colors looked to Kath like Dory, Dory the way she’d been tonight. Kath saw Dory’s glimmering tornado, her up-a-tree staring and electric ruby skirt; she saw Dory’s bruised pearl, scrap blues, profound whites: the whole wizard’s wardrobe of the disappearing girl.

In the end she moved on without interfering, without lifting a finger. She kept to the hotel, the shadow. There the lights off the youngster’s painting couldn’t reach her.

A SATURDAY MORNING when he came in, that alone made the guy look promising. Plus the day was so sunny for October that the taverns must have been slow all over the valley. Nellie saw no wedding ring. No signs of a real bender in progress either, bloody eyes or black veins. She shot Fitzie a look. Later on she more or less apologized: “I know you’d never mess with my game, Fitz.” But the other waitress had to remember — for weeks now Nellie had been worrying about how she was going to make ends meet till New Year’s.

He said he’d seen the satellite dish from the highway and he’d wanted to watch the Series. “It’s always something like that,” she told Fitzie later on. “Something a little herky-jerky-crazy that gets it started.” She gave away the secret deliberately, needing some support herself by then.

But when he first came in, all the standard openers seemed to be working. They seemed to be clicking . Nellie pooh-poohed the dish, cheap and black; the guy came right back with, yeah, looks like an umbrella got caught in a hailstorm. You didn’t usually get that kind of speed around the Drop By Cafe. She hung in — yeah, she said, and it’s about that flimsy — but when Nellie discovered he was rooting for the East Coast team she wasn’t surprised. She went for something fancier, she adjusted the dish so they could watch the World Series in Japanese. He loved it. He said he wanted to leave here knowing the Japanese for “foul ball.” Plenty of time, she said, on a Saturday morning.

“He told me he only got divorced this past summer,” she told Fitzie later. “So I think that would have kept it from getting complicated, between us. Also they never had kids. So I figured with my Wade, the disability, that gave me some leverage.”

Though of course when she told the story she came out tougher than she’d actually felt. Nellie Nails: she didn’t want anything to throw off the situation established between her and Fitzie. At the time, though, she’d found the man a rare one. When he shot her back a dime on the second draft, she’d noticed that even Ernie’s hands were the kind you thought of when you thought of New York. Interesting quick small hands. His lips were better still, when he grinned it was like he’d lost fifteen years. And he had his cagey side. She never picked up where he worked, though the hours made it sound like something over at Oregon State. In fact she found herself getting defensive. Never mind how slow the place looked now, she lied; most weeks she made as much as most of the girls over at the university.