Percival Everett - Half an Inch of Water - Stories

“What was that?”

“You’re the boy who fell off the goat,” she said.

Pat was back with the blanket. “What in the world is she talking about? Is she delirious?”

The medic laughed. “No, I rode in the goat race when I was a kid and I had a pretty good wreck. Broke my clavicle.”

“You didn’t have a beard then,” Norma said, smiled.

“No ma’am, I didn’t. I was eight.” He stood and began to put away his sphygmomanometer. “She’s all right. Pretty cold out there, Mrs. Snow? How’d you lose your coat?”

“Can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s out there somewhere.”

“Remember why you took it off?”

Norma shook her head.

“Well, the thing now is to keep covered up and stay warm. Keep drinking hot liquids.”

“I’ll see to it,” Pat said. “I’ll get a hot water bottle for her feet.”

“That’s good.”

Dan came into the house with some wood and went about making a fire in the stove insert. “We’ll get it toasty in here,” he said.

The medic put his hand on Norma’s shoulder. “I’ll swing by tomorrow morning and check on you.”

“Thank you,” Norma said.

“I’ll stay with her,” Pat said.

“No, you won’t,” Norma said.

“Norma.”

“You heard me. I’m nobody’s baby and I live alone and that’s how I will live tonight.”

“It might be advisable to have someone stay with you, ma’am,” the medic said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

“No.”

“Ma’am? You might be a little disoriented.”

“Do I seem disoriented now?”

“Braden, he can stay,” Dan said.

“Hell no,” Norma said. “Thank you all for everything, but I’m warming up now and I feel just fine. You’re Dan. You’re Pat. You’re the goat boy and that wall of beef out there is Braden. It’s Thursday and it’s snowing and I got lost. And though that might be stupid, it’s not a crime.”

“All right, Norma,” Dan said, putting his hand on Pat’s back and starting her toward the door. “Keep the phone beside you in case you need to call. You’ll do that for us?”

“Okay.”

“And I’m going to call and check on you,” Pat said. “So, answer.”

Norma nodded.

They left and Braden came into the house.

“I brushed out Zed and put him away,” he said. “I made sure he got him some extra grain.”

“You put his blanket on him?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“The blue one?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Thank you, Braden. Thanks a lot. You can go on home now. Sorry I took up your day.”

“I told my wife. I told her I’m staying here tonight.”

“No, you go on home. I’m fine. The doc said I’m okay. Now go.”

“At least let me make you some food,” he said.

Norma looked at his face. It was a kind face. She nodded. “Scramble me a couple of eggs, that’ll be great.”

Braden smiled. “Bacon?”

“Sounds great.”

While Braden banged around in the kitchen, Norma stared at the fire behind the screen. She had fooled all of them. She was as disoriented as she had ever been in her life. She was swimming.

“I’m going to make you some biscuits, too,” Braden called. “Would you like that?”

“That would be nice.”

She could not remember the place she had visited well enough to describe it to herself. She only knew that she had been there. She remembered the dog. She remembered the warmth. She wished Zed could talk, could tell her something about where they’d been. She knew one thing. She would not saddle up in the morning and ride back to that place. She would not follow those tracks. She would not ride again.

Norma Snow felt warm inside. She watched the fire, the flames hovering over the alder log. She listened to the popping and the hissing. She imagined the snow falling on the cattle. She let the blankets slide down from her lap. She was warmer still. The fire grew cold.

Benjamin Taylor’s fourteen-year-old daughter was basically insane. This was what Benjamin thought as he studied the clock in the kitchen. It was nearly four thirty in the morning. On a normal night, he would have been asleep, cracking an eye at his bedside clock and enjoying the idea of another half hour of sleep. Emma had gone out, she said, with her friends Cathy and Tanya, to a movie in town, driven by Cathy’s mother, she said, but Benjamin hadn’t been there when she’d been picked up. He’d had a strange feeling about it when she’d called him on his cell phone. He’d been down at the stables finishing up the last of the chores. He’d asked what she was going to do about dinner and she’d said not to worry. She was fourteen and, lately, was fond of telling him not to worry. Benjamin’s wife had left long ago. It had taken him six years to realize that he had been no good for her, in fact, bad for her; six years to understand that she had abandoned them as an act of survival, but still he was angry she’d gone. Now he sat and waited for his daughter. The cell phone she’d talked him into buying her went directly to her voicemail. He hated her outgoing message. She sounded like a kid trying to sound like an adult.

Three days ago at the grocery market, she had refused to get into the truck and ride home with him.

“Come on, Emma, I don’t have time for this foolishness.”

“I’ll find my own way.”

He was sitting behind the wheel, his door propped open with his foot, and she was standing at the open passenger window.

“What kind of way?” It wasn’t really a question, but he felt he’d stepped badly nonetheless, entering a negotiation with a child.

“A way.”

“Get in the truck.”

“No.”

A woman stared at them as she walked from her SUV to the grocery market door. He made brief eye contact and the woman shook her head. He didn’t know whether she was disapproving of his parenting or offering commiseration for having to deal with a recalcitrant teenager. Either way, he didn’t care. “Emma,” he said, feeling helpless saying it.

Emma gave him and the empty passenger seat a long look and in that moment he realized that he had little leverage. His stern issuance of her name was a bluff. Just what could he do if she walked away? But she didn’t walk away. For whatever reason, Benjamin wasn’t questioning, Emma climbed into the truck. They headed back out to the ranch together. There he would prepare dinner. That night there would be pork chops and rice and broccoli, and she would retire to her room and sit on her phone. But before that there was the ride home.

“Are you mad at me?” Benjamin asked.

“You always ask me that,” Emma said.

“I guess I do. Are you?”

“What do I always tell you?” She looked out the window at the Tasty Freeze, where she and every other teenager in Lander went at night and on weekends. It seemed like a throwback, but yet it wasn’t.

“What do I always say?” she asked.

“You know, I miss your mother, too,” he said, the words feeling stupid. He was already cringing at her response.

“Have you been watching talk shows again?” She laughed. “You don’t miss her. She’s not dead. She left us. And I can’t believe you sucked me into this dumb-ass conversation.”

Benjamin kept his eyes on the road. They rolled past the Target store on the edge of town and started up the hill before the descent into the valley.

A vehicle’s wheels stirred the gravel of the yard. By the time Benjamin was outside, the car was just bouncing taillights and Emma was ten steps from the door. He studied the back of the car.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Friends.”

“I won’t ask you if you know what time it is.”