Diane Davidson - Tough Cookie

I hopped out of the Rover and walked up to Rorry’s red car. The front bumper was crumpled, the right headlight gone. I fingered the cold metal of the impacted area. Rorry claimed somebody had stolen her Subaru, then smashed it up. I believed her. It hardly made sense that a pregnant woman would risk her unborn child to wreck a caterer’s van. I edged back over the thick ice to the Rover, loaded up the casseroles I’d made, then carefully made my way to a rickety wooden staircase that led to an unpainted aluminum door.

There was no doorbell, but the door opened the moment I started to shift the dishes around to find a way to knock.

“Bummer about the car, huh?” Rorry said wistfully. “It’s my fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have left the keys in it.” She wore a navy blue knitted maternity dress with thick cables and an uneven hem. Her skin was the color of mashed potatoes; her light brown eyes looked cloudy; her hair, blond and thin, curled softly around her face. She looked like an unhappy ingenue. If my arms had not been full of covered casseroles, I would have given her a hug. She pulled the door open as wide as it would go.

“Yeah, bummer,” I agreed, with a backward glance at the red Subaru. I decided not to mention what had happened to my van. When possible , I’d learned, do not upset a very pregnant woman .

“It’s the second time I’ve been a crime victim in this park,” Rorry said bitterly.

“The second time?” I prompted as I followed her to the tiny kitchenette.

Rorry opened the freezer section of a small refrigerator. “The first time was after Nate died. When I had to go down to see the coroner, some kid broke in and stole our TV and Nate’s videocamera. The cops caught him with the television, but he denied stealing the camera. The little creep.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I muttered as I tucked the casseroles into the only freezer space free of icy stalactites and stalagmites. Respect for personal property was a very low priority in Killdeer, it seemed. I shook my head, turned, and gave Rorry a long, tight hug. I told her I’d be right back.

“Do you still love coffee?” she asked when I returned with the box of baby blankets.

“More than ever.”

She pressed a button on an ancient drip machine to start a pot brewing. Rorry had always invited me in for a cup of coffee, even when she and Nate had lived in a tiny Aspen Meadow apartment. Back then, he’d had a little business making videos of recitals, high-school graduations, and weddings. Apparently he and Rorry had also badly wanted children, and now … On the counter, a torn herb-tea package and half-full glass mug of green liquid indicated the mother-to-be wasn’t indulging in caffeine these days. Next to them stood one of those porcelain coffee-bean containers and a grinder from an expensive mail-order coffee bean house. Low-income folks, I’d found, always bought a few food luxuries in case someone dropped in.

Rorry waved at her minuscule living area. “Please, sit down. And thanks for the casseroles and baby blankets.”

“No problem. It was fun putting it all together. And it’s nice to know someone can make use of Arch’s things.” I walked into the wood-paneled living area, where the linoleum of the kitchenette gave way to green shag carpet. This space featured a miniature sagging green-and-gold brocade couch, two stained gold chairs, and a fruitwood-veneer coffee table with a small pile of cardboard coasters featuring beer logos. The furnishings were all from that Seventies-era style known as “Mediterranean.” It must have been in that decade, I reflected as I sat on the couch, that this trailer had been built and sold as a furnished home. If Killdeer could spend millions expanding onto adjacent slopes, why couldn’t they subsidize low-income housing for their workers?

“Here you go.” Rorry set a large mug of steaming coffee on one of the cardboard coasters. She winced. “Don’t look at the rug. My boss back at Aspen Meadow Carpets would have had a fit.”

“I won’t tell,” I vowed, “if you promise not to squeal to my food-snob clients that I brought you meatballs.” She laughed and sipped her tea. I drank some of the coffee and pronounced it delicious.

Rorry smoothed the blue dress over her huge belly, then said, “Thank you for being so nice, Goldy. I don’t deserve it, after how bitchy I was to you.” Her light brown eyes held mine. Flecked with gold, puffy from lack of sleep, they were weary and apologetic. And sad.

“Don’t worry about it, I can handle bitchy. Remember when the president of the Episcopal Church Women objected to our class doing Ezekiel-in-the-Valley-of-Dry-Bones in the narthex? Now that was bitchy .”

She smiled thinly and shifted with obvious discomfort in her chair. “We had fun with that class, didn’t we?” When I nodded, she pulled a miniature bottle of lotion from a pocket, squirted some onto her right palm, and rubbed her hands with a nervous wringing motion. “We did Ezekiel after we did Joshua and the walls of Jericho,” she mused. “We were a pretty rambunctious group.” She took a deep breath. “I still stay in touch with St. Luke’s through the prayer chain. That was a great community. In Killdeer, there’s nothing like it. You’ve got the very rich and then you’ve got their servants, who live in trailers at the edge of town. Guess what category I fall into?” She laughed humorlessly.

“If you don’t like it,” I blurted out, “why do you stay?”

“We used to love to ski.” Rorry’s voice was unexpectedly defiant. What had she said at the fund-raiser? She was just puzzled . Her mood swings were bewildering. Or maybe not. After all, she was nine months pregnant and, as far as I could tell, alone. “I suppose you’ve heard the rumors,” she went on bleakly. “That’s one way that Killdeer doesn’t differ from Aspen Meadow. The gossip mill runs around the clock.”

“Nope, haven’t heard any rumors. And I’m a servant, too, you know.”

“But you’re dying of curiosity, and so is everyone at Front Range PBS. They sent you.”

“Nobody sent me, Rorry,” I told her. “I saw you Friday … and suddenly missed our friendship. So I called.”

She stared at the low, stained ceiling and went on as if I had not spoken. “The TV people won’t tell me anything. Oh, sure, they have their annual do in memory of Nate. They’re not raising funds for me , because the FCC says they can only raise money for themselves. For equipment! What a joke!”

“Rorry, I don’t know what—”

She banged her mug down on the battered coffee table and glared at me. “Nate’s the father of this baby I’m carrying.”

“Ah.” Either she’d been artificially inseminated, or she was losing her mind.

She read my expression accurately. “The first time we conceived, we had to freeze his sperm and go through artificial insemination. I was seven months pregnant when I had the miscarriage. Then last year I read an article, about women laying claim to the frozen sperm of their deceased lovers. So I decided to use what I had left of Nate.” When she scowled, her eyes crinkled in anger. “Use it before his girlfriend did, that is—”

I gagged on my coffee and remembered what Arthur had told me about Rorry’s suspicious nature, about her claims Nate was having an affair with Boots Faraday. “You think another woman would actually—”

Rorry held up a hand. “Nate said he and Boots Faraday—the collage artist, do you know her?” When I nodded, she raised a thin blond eyebrow. “Nate said Boots was giving him business advice. Then he went out-of-bounds to film something, and she said he was tracking lynx. Unfortunately, the wildcat population doesn’t buy a lot of videotapes, so I doubt a film of tracks was his so-called moneymaking idea.” She tsk ed and asked, “Do you know anything about tracking wild animals?”