Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“It seems a lot to be responsible for,” she agreed. “But my point is, with you treasuring the memory of Darla so, I would think you would find her more present back there.”

Dennis opened his mouth in a wide grimace. “Sorry,” he said. “Darla always told me I eat too fast. Sometimes I can’t catch my breath. I just had lunch.”

“You could visit her grave and such,” Francine went on relentlessly.

“That would be unhealthy, wouldn’t it?” Dennis said. “Besides, Darla never liked St. Louis. She didn’t care for vernacular landscapes. You couldn’t see the stars in St. Louis. Darla liked a pretty night. No one liked a pretty night more than that girl did.”

“She sounds like an exceptional young woman,” Francine said dryly.

“She was beautiful and smart and kind and generous.”

“I don’t see her, Dennis! I can’t picture her at all!”

“And when she looked at you, she did it with her whole heart. You existed when she looked at you. You were…” He appeared to be short of breath again.

“I’m not a particularly nice person, Dennis. I’ve had to admit that to myself, and I’ll admit it to you as well. I might have been nice once but I get by the best I can now. I don’t even know how you’d look at someone, anything, with your whole heart. Why, you’d wear yourself out. You’d become nothing but a cinder. Now, it sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn’t. It’s what I always think when I see cows grazing in the fields or standing in those pleasant little streams that wind through the fields or finding shade beneath the occasional tree, that they have a very nice life until they don’t. An extreme analogy, perhaps — well, yes, forget that analogy, but you have to move on, Dennis.”

“What?” Dennis said.

“Now I want you to read the note I’ve given you. And I really must find Freddie. He and the sheltie have been gone for an unusually long while.”

Francine walked briskly through the patio to the garage. The door was open and Freddie’s large dour Mercedes was gone, leaving only “her” car, an unreliable convertible she professed to adore. She would go to the dog park. She stepped into the convertible, turned on the ignition and studied the gauges. It was very low on fuel.

At the gas station, the attendant inside said, “What would you do if this wasn’t a real twenty-dollar bill, backed by the United States government?”

“What would I do?”

“Yeah!” The girl had unnaturally black hair and a broad unwinning smile.

“Of course it’s real. Do you think I’m trying to pass off a counterfeit?”

“I’m not going to take it,” the girl said. “I’m using my discretion. Nobody uses money anymore.”

“It’s a perfectly good bill,” Francine said. “Don’t you have a pen or a light or something that you pass over these things?”

“I’m using my discretion.”

Francine was about to continue her protests but realized this would only prolong the girl’s happiness. She returned to her car, annoyed but not so shaken that she failed to offer the moribund palm on the pump island her customary sympathy.

There was no dearth of gas stations. She sacrificed the entire twenty to the gluttonous little car. Then, after driving for miles and making several incorrect turns, she arrived at the dubious park. When she and Freddie had first moved to Arizona they took a rafting trip and everyone on it got sick. The guide hadn’t lost enthusiasm for his troubled industry, however. “Nobody likes to get sick from a little bacteria!” he said. “But you’re on the river! Some folks only dream of doing this!” This was another river, though, or had been.

A half dozen dogs rushed up to her. One had a faded pink ribbon attached somehow to the crown of its head, but none of them had collars. She tried to befriend them with what Freddie referred to as her birthday-party voice, though they seemed a wary lot and disinterested in false forms of etiquette. She wondered which one of them had the hallucinations and what he thought was going on around him right then. She waded through the pack and approached a group of people sitting on a cluster of concrete picnic tables.

“Has a man with a sheltie been here today?”

“The sheltie,” a woman said. “Congratulations!”

“I’m sorry?” Francine said.

“No need to be. It was a dignified departure, wasn’t it, Bev?”

“As dignified as they come,” Bev said. “We all almost missed it.”

“I find it so much more convincing to just see how things happen rather than to observe how we, as humans, make them happen,” a man said.

“Yeah, but we still almost missed it,” Bev said, “even you.” She winked at Francine. “He thinks too much,” she confided.

“A swift closure,” another man said. “One of the best we’ve seen.”

Francine began to cry.

“What’s this, what’s this,” someone said fretfully.

Francine returned to the car and drove aimlessly, crying, around the sprawling city. “Poor old dear,” she cried. “Poor old dear.” But I might have misunderstood those people completely, she thought. What had they said, anyway? She stopped crying. When it was almost dark she pulled up to a restaurant where she and Freddie had dined when they did such things. She went into the restroom and washed her face and hands. Then she opened her purse and studied it for a long moment before removing a hairbrush. She pulled the brush through her hair for a while and then replaced it. Slowly she closed the handbag, which as usual made a decisive click.

In the dining room, the maître d’ greeted her. “Ahh,” he said noncommittally. She was seated at a good table. When the waiter appeared she said, “I’m starving. Bring me anything, but I have no money. Tomorrow I can come back with the money.” She was a different person now. She felt like a different person saying this.

The waiter went away. Nothing happened. She watched the waiters and the maître d’ observing her. On the wall beside her was a large framed photograph of a saguaro that had fallen on a Cadillac Brougham in the parking lot and smashed it badly. Save for such references, one hardly knew one was in the desert anymore.

People came into the restaurant and were seated. They made their selections, were served and then left, all in an orderly fashion. A glass of water had been placed before Francine when she first sat down and she had drunk that but the glass had not been refilled.

She left before they flipped the chairs and brought out the vacuum cleaner. When she arrived home the garage door was still open and Freddie’s Mercedes was not there. There would probably be a reminder in their mailbox the following morning that subdivision rules prohibited garage interiors from being unnecessarily exposed. No one likes to look at someone else’s storage, they would be reminded. Francine very much did not want to go into the house and face once more, and alone, the humming refrigerator and the moth floating in the sheltie’s water dish. Given Freddie’s continued absence, she would probably have to call the police. But she did not want to call the police after her experience with the fire department. She considered both of these official agencies and their concept of correctness of little use to her. She eased the car into gear — it sounded as though something was wrong with the transmission again — and drove off once more into the dully glowing web of the city, lowering the roof and then raising it again. Finally she left the roof down, though no stars were visible. The lights of the city seemed to be extinguishing them by the week.

Stopped at a light at a large intersection, she saw the Barbeques Galore store. The vast parking area covered several acres and was dotted with dilapidated campers, for the store was not closed for the evening but had gone out of business, providing welcome habitat for the aimless throngs coursing through the land.