John D. MacDonald

The Widow’s Estate

The other guests left at a little after eleven. Laura asked Cal if he would like a nightcap. He asked, tentatively, if there might be any cold beer. On her way to the kitchen she collected some of the dirty ash trays and glasses. When she brought the beer to him, he was bending over the fireplace poking the fragments of birch log into the bed of embers. The autumn wind sighed across the eaves.

Calvin Burch straightened up and put the fire tongs in the rack. “Compulsive fire-prodder,” he said with a slightly apologetic tone as he took the beer from her. He was a tall, thin man who moved abruptly and, quite often, rather awkwardly.

“So put another log on, for talking,” she said. She turned the lights out at the far end of the living room and came back to sit at the end of the couch. The new log burst into flame quickly, the silver bark crack ling. He sat beside her and they looked at the flames.

“Lollie,” he said, “when I got back from Japan, the wire was there and it was three weeks old by then. If only somebody in the home office had had the sense to...”

“It doesn’t matter, really. I had good friends here to help out. And... maybe I wouldn’t have been really aware of whether you were here or not. It racked me up, Cal. Terribly. That whole time is sort of a blur. They had to keep me tranquilized. I resented... the necessity of it. You know? An adult should be able to cope with anything, without crutches. How long does it take to get to be an adult? I’m thirty-two years old, Cal!”

He looked at her, his mood grave. He was aware of the pride in the lift of her chin, a defiance of life in her eyes. He could not tell her that in the flame-light she looked helplessly young.

“Cope? There are some things, Lollie, nobody is strong enough for. Certainly not a sudden, terrible thing like that.”

“You know, Mitch had a complete physical just two months before it happened. They told him he was in perfect shape. And he was so smug about it.” Her laugh was abrupt, without mirth.

“Even though I didn’t get the news until it was three weeks old, Lollie, I would have come east anyway if it hadn’t been for the damned negotiations on the new plant. I told you about it over the phone when I...”

“For goodness sake, Cal, stop feeling guilty! Don’t you think I’m capable of understanding?”

“I know. But it’s six months now. Almost six. The three of us were as close as people can get. You and Mitch were the best friends I’ve ever had.”

“I’m still around, Cal, dear.”

“It’s fantastic the way I keep both feet in my mouth.”

“I’m just teasing, Cal. Anyway, there is something I have learned in these months since Mitch died. People try very hard, but there’s no right way to say anything about a thing like this. And I’ve felt strange all evening, having you arrive the very first time I’ve done any entertaining, seeing me as the merry hostess or something, without a chance to talk to you. Until now.”

“They seem like nice people.”

“They are. But the evening wasn’t a success. I didn’t expect it to be. But I had to start some place, somehow. They all tried to seem as if they were having a good time, bless them. But all the other times they’ve been in this house, Mitch was here. So it made a strain. Next time it will be better.”

“Very tough for you, too.”

She shrugged. “I was on the edge a couple of times. Thelma made it difficult. She’s the big blonde. She’s real sweet and sloppy and emotional, and she genuinely misses Mitch. She hugged me once and just looked at me once, and those were the two times I was on the edge.”

“I wouldn’t have known it.”

“I didn’t want anybody to know it, Cal. Golly! I had enough of the public collapse thing. Tears are for private. I guess I’ve got too much pride to want to be a... pitiful figure. Maybe I am. I don’t want to advertise it any more, at least.”

“If this comment isn’t in bad taste, Lollie, I want to say you’re looking just fine.”

“Leaner. Honed down, sort of, I guess. Two months ago I was way down. Skin and bone. Now I’m in better shape.”

“I’m glad you’re... handling it so well, Lollie. I guess I knew you would.”

“And I? I don’t know. I was getting through one hour at a time. Now I’m getting through one day at a time. Grief is... is such a sneaky thing, Cal. You don’t know what to brace yourself for. I would never have guessed it would be this way. It seems to wait until you’re a little off balance. It doesn’t have to be what’s said. It can be a tone of voice, even. Then it isn’t any dignified business of the eyes misting up. It’s a raw, horrid pain, so you want to double over and hug yourself and howl like a kid.

“Last week I was coming back after driving Kit to her school-play rehearsal, and I saw a car exactly like the first one Mitch and I ever owned. Same color. I had to pull over to the curb and wait there about ten minutes before I could get going again.

“Do you mind if I ramble like this? I have friends, but I haven’t had anybody I could talk to just this way.

“There’s another part of it that’s bad too, and I couldn’t have guessed it. It’s a kind of... phoniness. I don’t know how to say it. You have yourself under a constant observation, and you watch how you are reacting. I find myself dramatizing the lone widow thing, so that when I’m shopping, for example, and I go in a place where they don’t know me, I feel just slightly put out, like some bit-part television-type getting surly because she isn’t recognized. I tell myself how brave I am, and when I handle something well, I feel proud and smug. Then I wonder if I’ve handled it too well, and that makes me doubt my own capacity to really feel and understand what’s happened to me. It’s a continuous self-appraisal that sometimes doesn’t seem... healthy.

“What I’m trying to say, Cal, grief isn’t a constant thing. When I laugh, I hear the sound of it afterward and feel like a dirty traitor. Sometimes, when I cry, I feel like a bad actress. And I know all the time that Mitch would be so terribly concerned about me, and at the same time sort of... amused. You can understand that.”

“Of course.”

“For the sake of the children. That’s a tiresome phrase, but really, it’s so horribly true. They’ve been a life raft for me. Without Kit and David, I would have indulged myself all the way in grief. I’d have sunk right down into the ultimate puddle of tears, gone without a trace.”

“They’re handsome children, Lollie.”

“And you don’t know how I resent them sometimes. Their hearts were utterly broken at first. They adored him. But they adjust so fast! A half-year is a long, long time for a girl seven and a boy nine, I guess, and it’s a good and healthy sign they’re able to adjust so quickly. But I keep wanting them to miss him more than they seem to. I want them to know their new captain wasn’t always the captain. They refer to Mitch as if he were lost in the mists of antiquity, for God’s sake!”

“Which leads to a temptation, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lectures. Deification of the lost father. Demanding their appreciation.”

“I guess I’m doing that. Is it bad?”

“Only because it might substitute myth for what was a very good reality.”

“I wouldn’t want that, Cal. I wouldn’t want that at all.”

“I was taught my father was ten feet tall. It took me a long time to finally track down the reality. When I finally learned, on my own time, in my own way, that he had been an ordinary mortal, I was able to be more at home in the world. He was... a pretty good man, I guess. I was eleven when he died. It’s easier to live up to a man than a myth.”

She looked at the fire for a little while. “I’ll watch that.”

Cal mimicked: “ ‘Your father would want you to do this. Your father would want you to do that.’ It was powerful medicine, I guess. But when they set standards you can’t meet, you feel as if you’d betrayed the dead. Lollie, one of the things I’ve been wondering about. What’s the financial picture?”

“Not too bad, really.”

“What kind of advice have you been getting?”

“All kinds, believe me!”

“This isn’t the time or the place to go into it. School day tomorrow. But I would like to... advise you, if you think it would do you any good.”

“I’d appreciate it, Cal.”

“When would be a good time?”

“Come over about ten in the morning? Or do you have...?”

“I saw the people I had to see. I’m free for as long as I can be of any help.”

She walked him to the door. “A crummy motel,” she said. “And a perfectly good guest room right here.”

“It’s a very comfortable motel.”

She made a face. “Hah! The fragile reputation of young widows. Or, more accurately, a widow who is not so young.”

“Younger than I am. By a year and a day. Remember the joint birthday parties, Lollie? My birthday would end at midnight and yours would begin.”

“And Mitch was a very fast man with the champagne.”

“Calling himself the natural-born celebrator.”

“Cal, do you ever hear from Barbara?”

“Not from her directly, but I heard about her, almost a year ago. Somebody saw her in Los Angeles. She left the guy she left me for and went back into club work. Doing all right, I guess. It’s what she likes best.”

“Does it still hurt?”

“To use one of her lines, only when I laugh.”

He kissed her good-night, a light fraternal peck on the cheek. She stood hugging herself in the autumn night and then waved to him as he drove off in the rental car. She went back in and sat on the raised hearth with her back to the fire until she was warmed through. She forced herself into briskness and picked up in the living room. She rinsed the buffet dishes and packed them into the dishwasher.

When the house was locked, the lights out, the fire screen closed, Laura Barnes lay in her bed. She could hear the distant drone of the dishwasher in the last of its cycle. She was on her back, her eyes open. Cautiously, carefully, she let herself relax, thinking, Will I cry tonight, or won’t I? It was like a strange sphincter she kept closed against the hollowness of her heart as she walked through her timeless days. Alone, she dared relax it to find if tears had been stored. This night there were none. She turned on her side and burrowed her way into sleep.

When Cal arrived that Thursday morning a little after ten, she was talking to Molly Moyer on the kitchen extension. She interrupted the call to let Cal in and tell him to help himself to coffee. She went back to the phone and finished making the arrangements for the committee meeting with Molly.

She poured herself coffee and took it to the breakfast booth and slid in, facing Cal. He wore a tweed jacket and a soft blue shirt. He had nicked the edge of his jaw while shaving. Casual clothes never seemed quite right on Calvin Burch. He had a long sallow face, straight black hair, deep-set eyes, with a jutting prominence of bone at brow, cheek and jaw. He looked severe, judicious, scholarly and humorless, all his warmth and wit most carefully concealed.

“By two o’clock this morning, when at last the world grew still,” he said, “I think I had it all figured out, just who was occupying the unit next to mine. Two deaf auctioneers, three moose — full grown — one roller-skating team, and four sacks of cats.”

“Good thing they didn’t put you next to somebody real noisy.”

“At six o’clock the maids started. I couldn’t figure out whether they were using megaphones, or a P.A. system.”

“It was very quiet here.”

“Don’t tell me about it. Please.”

“I dozed off after the alarm went off. I lost twenty minutes. I just barely got the kids onto the bus.”

“Good school?”

“Pretty good, I think. David got into their gifted child program this year. He’s insufferable about it. They won’t test Kit until next year. His latest method of infuriating her is to speak to her in French.”

“Will you be able to stay on here?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out, Cal, as the weeks go by. The estate is sort of settled now. Under the terms of his will, I’m the executrix, which I’ve learned is the wrong way to do it. It should be a bank, people who do it all the time and know what to do and how to keep records. Mitch’s personal lawyer was Bill Wandell. He’s been a lot of help, but you certainly have to pay for that help. That Bar Association is quite a union. Standard rates on estates. It comes out to four percent on the net estate.”

“If you think I’m being too nosy, Lollie...”

“Heck, I want to tell you where I stand. Thank heavens he had the mortgage-insurance stuff on this house. It made the house free and clear. It’s too much house for the three of us. Actually, it was too much house for the four of us, but we bought it on the anticipation of Mitch’s future. You know how well he was doing. It wasn’t foolishness when we took on this much house five years ago. It just turned out to be a little foolish.”

“Are you going to keep it?”

“That’s one of the decisions. I’ve told myself it represents a kind of security to David and Kit. It’s their home place, you know. Their yard, their neighborhood friends. I didn’t... want to take too much away all at once. And it’s my home place too, you know. A refuge. I’ve wanted to stay... where the memories are, for a while anyway.”

“I can understand that.”

“But it takes money to run. Bill helped me work it out. Taxes, insurance, heating, utilities, yard-work, the whole out-of-pocket thing comes to a hundred and twenty dollars a month on a year-round basis, without putting in anything for maintenance or depreciation. I don’t understand about depreciation, but Bill keeps mentioning it.”

“So how about your income?”

“I can tell you that the Social Security was a pleasant surprise. When you have little kids, it works out pretty well. Without that I’d really be sunk. But it stops when they get to be a certain age. Or it goes way down, at least. He was in the group insurance plan at the company, so I got ten thousand from that. I had to take it in cash; there weren’t any options. He had a thirty-five thousand-dollar policy on his own. The insurance agent and Bill and I had a conference about that. We decided the best thing to do was take it as a life income, five years certain. And there was another forty-four hundred, the amount Mitch had in the corporation retirement fund. So I did have fourteen thousand and some cash. He had an insurance thing on the time payments on the car, so I got that free and clear too. I kept that one and sold my little one. There weren’t any medical and death expenses. The group insurance plan took... care of it. And he wasn’t sick long enough for it to run over... over the...” She felt her face changing as her voice became uncertain.

“I’ll get me more of your coffee, m’am,” he said easily and stood up and went over to the stove.

She was grateful for his quick tact. She was under control by the time he came back to the booth.

“So, Cal, the total estate came to about eighty-five thousand, which sort of sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. Part of it is the thirty-two-thousand-dollar appraisal on this house. And I know what major things have to come out of the cash. Sixteen hundred for estate taxes. Thirty-four hundred to Bill Wandell’s firm. I paid off the things we owed here and there and put the rest in the savings account. I keep trying not to dip into it. My income is four hundred and eighteen dollars a month now, tax free. It sounds like it ought to be enough. But, gosh, it seems to be an awful close thing.

“Just when I think I know where I am, I get a bill for a couple of hundred dollars for the insurance on the car, or the hospitalization on me and the kids. Or, like last month, seventy-eight dollars to get the oil burner fixed. Forty dollars on Kit’s teeth.

“Mitch was making eighteen thousand. That’s fifteen hundred a month, about eleven hundred after they took out the deductions. And we couldn’t seem to save anything, Cal. We used to talk about it sometimes, and worry about it, and feel like grasshoppers instead of diligent ants. We weren’t ever in a hole, but we were never more than even.

“It’s like the house. We were living up to what we expected the future would be. Mitch had to live pretty well, you know. They sort of expected it of him. Whenever he’d get a raise, we’d think we were going to be able to get ahead of the game. But there was always something coming along to use it up.

“Our friends are the same way, only worse. Some of them are really in the hole. It’s a funny way to live, I guess. And you don’t realize it until... the money stops.

“I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what I’m going to do. I can get along like this by being real careful. But I won’t be able to educate the kids. That would be a shameful thing, Cal. I want to be reliable. I have to make some kind of a move sooner or later. I just don’t know when or how.”

“It isn’t all that urgent, is it?”

“Not really, I guess. But I don’t want to get too used to not facing it. I have to watch myself. I could turn into a slob in the twinkling of an eye.”

“Would this house sell without much trouble?”

“Oh, yes. I could probably get thirty-five. Bill thinks I could. It would solve a lot of problems, I suppose. That money, invested, would give me about a hundred and forty dollars a month. There’d be enough extra so I could take out education policies on the kids.”

“But the problem is, I suppose, where would you go?”

“Don’t you have some nice easy answer? Everybody else does.”

He shook his head slowly. “No easy answers to that one, Lollie. Not when you’ve got your roots in this town, in this section of town. No relatives you can go move in on, yours or Mitch’s. So what do you do? Take an apartment in the city? Try to find one with three bedrooms you’d like and could afford. Buy a nice new little tract house? Where you’d probably be the only woman alone in the whole development? I can’t see that working out too well, one of the best reasons being you’re a very handsome gal.”

“Thank you, sir. I know it’s a trite and tiresome story, but I’ve noted just a little bit of wariness on the part of the married females I’ve known for years. They know I’m not predatory. I guess it’s sort of an instinct. Cal, you’re the first person who’s understood this problem of pulling up stakes. It isn’t as simple as people think. I guess I should have known you’d be able to understand.”

“Most people like neat solutions. There aren’t any, usually.”

“I could see Bill and that insurance agent working out one of those neat solutions. The agent came right out with it. ‘If you marry again,’ he said. He wanted to say when instead of if. He said I could then set aside the life income money for the education of my children. But they wanted it all neatened up.”

“How do you feel about remarriage?”

Laura shrugged. “I think about it sometimes. I guess because I’m supposed to think about it. I’m thirty-two. But it seems the most implausible thing in the world, Cal. I accept the fact it’s within the realm of possibility I might meet a man some day and fall in love with him. But I can’t imagine it. I’m a one-man gal. Mitch was that man. Anybody else is... inconceivable. So, with that ruled out, it brings up another point. I can’t spend my life housekeeping for my kids. With Mitch gone, there’s less point in the home-and-hearth routine. I don’t want to live my life just taking care of them. It would be an unhealthy thing for me and for them. I have to have something to do. But that’s a pretty problem too. Liberal arts at Bennington, and eleven years of marriage. I’m not a career type. I’m a wife type.”

“And committeewoman?”

She scowled at him. “Darn you, Cal, that’s been part of being a wife in this sort of marriage. The executive wife, I suppose. But not, I should hope, pushy about it. There’re things I’ve done that’ve helped Mitch. Fund drives, League of Women Voters, PTA, Art Center. Why shouldn’t I have used surplus energy that way? A lot of it is fun and it helped Mitch, indirectly. A lot of clever men have had a lot of fun writing snide things about suburbia. But while Mitch was living and working, there was good reason for it. Now the basic reason is gone, sure. And it seems empty and more than a little bit silly, but I’ve gradually gotten back into all that stuff and I keep on doing it because the only other choice is to keep hiding in the house while the kids are at school.”

“Or find a job.”

“I knew we’d get around to that. Doing what? Sales lady, hostess in a restaurant, waitress? I don’t want the kids coming home to an empty house. That’s part of my job too. If I hire somebody to look after them, I end up with a net of how much per week? Ten dollars, maybe? What kind of job has the same hours as school?”

“You’ve got time, Lollie. Time to make decisions.”

“Oh, yes indeed,” she said ruefully. “All the time in the world. Funny thing. I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was doing it. So was Mitch. We were going to rassle our way through the adolescent thing and the college thing, and try to make good people out of the kids. Then, way ahead some place, there were the, like they say, sunset years, a comfortable elderly couple. Cal, it’s like buying a ticket all the way through, and then they let you off in some crummy little town where you don’t know anybody and you don’t want to be. And you know, sometimes when I’m tired, I resent my poor darling. He deserted me, and left me all the responsibilities, all the planning and wondering, everything to do alone. That’s a terrible way to feel, isn’t it?”

“Understandable, Lollie.”

She had her elbows on the table, her jaw propped on her fists. She was more striking than pretty, with gold-brown hair, small nose, a faint pattern of freckles, a slight suburban weathering of forehead and the corners of her eyes. Her mouth was level and ripe and controlled, and her eyes were large, gray-green, looking at him with a forlorn derision, a vulnerable knowing of self.

She frowned and said, “What happens, I guess, you begin to question too many things. There isn’t as much point in things. This kind of life... it was working. But now, the things I do, it’s kind of empty, an empty way of life. I know if you peel any human activity right down to any ultimate meaning, it’s hard to find much sense in it. But these days there seems to be a lot less sense than usual. He should have left me millions. I could devote myself to good works and feel noble as anything. Cal, dear, I don’t want to inflict any kind of... spiritual torment on you, but what kind of response should I have to a world which could take Mitch away from us?”

“Looking for reasons won’t get you anywhere.”

“I know that. Everybody dies. I tell myself I made the good years good, but I could have made them better, maybe, if I’d known. In a way, I’m glad we lost that baby that time. I was such an utter trusting idiot up until then. The world just couldn’t do such a nasty sneaky thing to Laura Barnes. It wasn’t fair. But I got over it and it gave me some armor, I guess. It left me a little better prepared to... to handle this. I was like a puppy, prancing and smirking up to a big dog, whining with pleasure, and getting one hell of a painful bite. So maybe I grew up from that point, knowing I could be bitten again.”

He sipped his coffee. He said, “I’m the man who came to help. What can I do?”

She smiled in a bitter way. “There have been other guys very eager to help, and they came around with a detailed plan.”

“Really?”

“I’ll give you a sample. Johnny Dorran. Pretty good friend, I thought. He had a peachy, dandy little unlisted growth stock. I should cash the insurance and sock the money into it right away. It was a special favor on account of the favors Mitch had done him. It was a steal at three dollars a share. Western Devices, Inc. Pick up ten thousand shares. Nobody knew it yet, but Westinghouse was dickering to buy it in order to pick up the patent rights. In six months and a day I could sell out again, and I had his personal word it would sell at least twelve. So, after capital gains taxes, I’d walk away with a hundred thousand dollars. He had me all steamed up, Cal. It seemed like the answer to everything. I had to keep it a dark secret but, thank God, Bill Wandell wormed it out of me. Seems Johnny Dorran was in that little company up to his eyeballs, and my thirty thousand would have been bailing him out of a very serious hole. Bill investigated. He had a little talk with Johnny. One friend gone. Bill told me last month, just as a matter of personal interest, that Western Devices is selling for a dollar and a quarter a share. Nice?”

“The world is full of wolves, Lollie.”

“And they look just like people. When I think how close I came to doing such a fool thing, I feel sick. But there’ve been a couple of other things I can feel even sicker about.”

“The same kind of thing?”

“No. Johnny takes the prize for that. A different thing entirely. Dear, sweet Ralph Becklund. More a friend of Mitch’s than mine. But he helped a lot and he was very sweet. Sometimes the dam breaks and you have to run blindly into somebody’s arms, just to be held for a minute, blubbering like a child. Mitch gave me a lot of physical affection, Cal. I like being held. About two weeks after the funeral, Ralph brought some papers out to be signed. Something set me off. I can’t remember what it was now. Some little thing. He was nearby and I trusted him, and I flung myself against his manly chest. And in a little while I suddenly realized the son of a gun was trying to turn it into a big opportunity. He was all hands. As soon as I was certain, I wrenched myself free and I swung and I hit him right on the nose. With my fist. He stood there, dazed and bleeding, and I went into the worst case of hysterics I’ve ever had. You know, he worked with Mitch for... at least six years. What kind of friendship is that? What did he take me for?”

“For vulnerable.”

“Never that vulnerable, Cal. Never. But to get back to advice. You know me, I guess, as well as anybody. I want to ask you an impossible thing, dear. You know the situation. You know the kids. You met my best friends last night. Tell me what my direction should be? Tell me what to do with my life.”

“That would be presumptuous and...”

“I need the objective viewpoint.”

“Maybe I’m too close to it. I miss Mitch too, Lollie. I’ll miss him the rest of my life. How many close, close friends can one man have in a lifetime? Two? Three? I loved that guy too.”

She felt it beginning to happen. She got up and managed a smile and said, “Sit tight. Back in a minute.”

She shut herself in the bathroom and muffled the hard familiar explosions of sobbing in a woolly bath towel. She accepted it with a dreary practicality, a spasm she could not help, like the morning sickness when she had carried Kit.

When it had dwindled, she washed her face, bathed her eyes in cold water, replaced her lipstick and went back to the kitchen.

“Don’t get feeling too responsible, Cal. I’m not saying I’d plan my life around what you think it should be. Maybe I’m only checking my own ideas.”

“I’d want to think about it.”

“Of course.”

“One thing comes to mind. And I don’t know if I can say it properly. Mitch was doing well in a very tough competitive industry. And you were part of it. Success isn’t just what goes on down in that office building. Part of the fight went on here too. Suburbia is just as rough a battlefield. You win the social and the political skirmishes here. And renew the guy for the next day’s wars. This is probably a stupid analogy, Lollie, but considering you as the drummer boy, how much sense does it make to have you keep right on marching toward the enemy after the troops have been shot down?”

“The analogy isn’t stupid.”

“It turns into a lot of motions without meaning, doesn’t it?”

“But when they’re the only motions you know...”

“Down in town the brass used to say Mitchell Barnes is a smart, aggressive guy. And he has a lovely wife, nice kids, an attractive home. They entertain well. They take an interest in their community. They have a wonderful stability. Now, regardless of the gags about the executive wife, that made Mitch potentially more valuable to the firm than if he were... a Cal Burch in a bachelor apartment in the city.”

“We joked about it, about being a team. We knew there was a phoniness about it, but we went along with it because that’s the way the world is.”

“Of course.”

“So that becomes the basic question, doesn’t it? Why should I live the same kind of life? Because, damn it, it’s what I know!”

“But you’re looking for purpose, aren’t you? Some purpose above and beyond the kind of negative purpose of not upsetting the life you and your kids are used to?”

She scowled at him. “But even that negative purpose is gone, Cal. Even if I stay here, it won’t be the life we were used to. It’ll be something else no matter what I do. And it can turn me into somebody else. Somebody I don’t want to be. I can feel that happening. The wives close ranks, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, not my good friends. The rest of them. Lollie Barnes is a widow now. Predatory, dangerous.”

“Come, now!”

She laughed. “Golly, you can look very fierce and indignant, Cal. I don’t blame them, really. Some of them have good cause to be nervous. Not on my account. Just because they’ve let themselves go dumpy and dreary. I think it’s a primitive thing, really, worrying about the unattached female in the tribal village. But if you go on for a long time with wives clutching their husbands and steering them away, it can have its effect on your own personality, you know. A lady could eventually start walking as if she were just about to start twisting. I could buy eyelashes out to here and develop a significant chuckle.”

“Cut it out, Lollie.”

“Anyhow, you put your finger on the problem, Cal: Something positive to do with my life.”

“So all I have to do is come up with a good answer?”

“Won’t you?”

“Any minute now,” he said, and grinned. His grin was a rare thing. It broke all the somber planes of his face. It had always made her feel good to see Cal Burch grin.

He went into the city for an early afternoon appointment concerning the acquisition of a large tract in Georgia for one of the subsidiary companies. On the way in, the city looked better than usual to him. He seemed to feel a pleasant nostalgia he could not quite identify. Later in the day, as he came out of the office building on Lexington Avenue, he realized that the two long talks with Lollie had sent a part of him back into the past, way back before he had met Barbara and made a bad marriage, soon ended. Mitch and Lollie had the apartment on Gay Street, and sometimes the three of them talked all night. And running through the traditional cynicism of all such talk had been the clean, clear thread of hope and confidence. The world was a shabby, sleepy old beast and they were the ones to saddle it and ride it into the golden era.

At four-thirty he phoned Lollie from the city and said the conference was going into a second session in the evening, so he couldn’t make it for dinner, but could she please save as much of Saturday for him as she could manage. She sounded so remote and dispirited over the phone it made him feel both depressed and restless.

Suddenly he had an idea, a small plan of action which he knew would be grimly pleasurable. He phoned the offices where Mitch had worked. He got through to Ralph Becklund, the man who had made the pass at Lollie. In the process of reaching him, he learned that Becklund was number-two man in the accounting division. He identified himself as a friend of Mitch Barnes. Becklund agreed to meet him in the men’s bar of the Commodore at five-fifteen.

Cal arrived early. He had a specific mental image of what Becklund would be like, one of those meaty, breezy, conspiratorial types, the sort of man most likely to fall for the scheme Cal had in mind. It was essentially simple. He would establish his identity with his very impressive business card. Becklund would know the big, solid reputation of the firm Cal worked for. And Becklund could be made to fall for the big lie — that Mitch, before he died, had recommended Becklund as a man who would fit into a new management team Cal was assembling. He would make Becklund’s mouth water. He would paint the glorious future, say the definite offer would be made as soon as a discreet investigation was completed, and in the moment of parting, casually mention that he was going to tell Laura Barnes about it, because she would be so pleased to know Becklund was getting his big break because of Mitch’s recommendation.

And, of course, Becklund would never hear another word. And he would guess why. And he would have a bitter remorse to last him all his life. “If I had only known.” These are the sorriest words in the language.

Becklund arrived on time. “Mr. Burch? I’m Ralph Becklund.” He did not fit Cal’s imagined picture. He was of medium height, solidly built, with russet-brown hair. He seemed a quiet and decent man, waiting — with sufficient dignity — to find out what Cal wanted. Cal had learned to trust his own instincts about people first, and look at the test results second.

They stood at the bar. Cal bought Becklund a drink. Feeling his way, he made a general comment about how long he had known Mitch Barnes, and waited to see if Becklund would say the usual, sentimental, meaningless things.

But Ralph Becklund shook his head slowly. “I’d never have guessed how much I’d miss that guy, Mr. Burch. The whole flavor of our shop seems a little different now. He was a darned good man. He never kept his guard up... the way the rest of us do.”

“He got a lot of fun out of life, I guess.”

Ralph Becklund looked at Cal with a strangely intent expression. “You’ve known both of them a long time? Laura too?”

“A long time.”

“Then maybe you can do something I haven’t had the guts to do. Sometimes... a man can do something he can’t explain. And I never think of Mitch without remembering it. I... always feel ashamed when I do. Maybe it would help if you’d tell her I still feel sick about what happened.”

“I know what happened,” Cal said.

Becklund looked at him and his smile was wary and sour. “That’s why you wanted to talk to me, Mr. Burch?”

“I’ll tell you it isn’t going the way I thought it would. I was going to set you up, then yank the rug out.”

“I don’t need that. The thing was, it looked so bad. It looked planned. There were things to sign, the retirement account papers. I went out when the kids were in school. I’m not the playboy type, Mr. Burch. I’ve got four kids of my own. Mitch had been dead about two weeks. I was trying to make things as easy as I could, but something set her off after she’d signed the papers. She had to have a shoulder to cry on. There I was, holding her. She’s a very attractive woman. That’s no excuse, of course. So I made the pass, almost in an absent-minded way. It was sort of... the product of feeling helpless and awkward. And she very properly yanked herself loose and busted me one in the nose. She has every right to hate me... but I just wish she could understand. I’ve wanted to call her, but after a stinking incident like that, I’ve been scared she’d misunderstand the phone call even. Twice I’ve dreamed I was explaining the whole thing to Mitch. And he understood it, whatever that means from a Freudian standpoint.”

“Aren’t you sore that’s why I looked you up?”

“Even if I collected another nosebleed, what right would I have to be sore? His best friend, weren’t you? What if something happened to me, and some son of a gun pulled the same thing on Mid? I’ve got no rights to stand on, Mr. Burch. All I can do is tell you I’m not some kind of an animal and hope you believe me.”

“I do believe you, Ralph.”

“It’s a relief to explain it to somebody. How is Laura these days?”

“Trying to put the pieces back together. It’s a long process.”

“I wish her well.” Suddenly Becklund smiled broadly, and Cal found himself liking the man. “I was braced for a horsewhip session. Stay away from the woman, sirrah! No warning needed.”

“She wouldn’t misinterpret an apology.”

“A little belated, wouldn’t it be?”

“Not too late, Ralph.”

Friday was a fine day, without wind, with a small perceptible heat in the pale gold of the sunshine, and a smell of the promise of autumn in the air. He took Lollie out to lunch.

At lunch she looked at him with affection and wry understanding.

“The fixer,” she said. “Improving the look of the world for me. Yes, dear Cal. Ralph Becklund phoned me a little after six last night. Seems you bought him a drink. You are a busybody, you know.”

“I had a little free time. I was sort of curious.”

“I’m glad you did, Cal. It takes a little nastiness out of the past. I think I understand it a little better — at least as much as he does. Maybe he was, even in some misguided way, trying to improve my morale or something, showing me I was an entrancing type. And I guess he’s punished himself way out of proportion to that one crummy little scene. And a man with a nosebleed is bereft of all dignity. The good thing to know is, Cal, there wasn’t any planning involved. I told myself he had it all planned. Which is nonsense, of course. I should have remembered that Mitch and I always thought of him as a pretty decent guy. He’s still a pretty decent guy. So thank you — for him and for me.”

“I had a shifty way to clobber him, but after I talked to him, I knew there was no point in it.”

She frowned. “I share some of the blame for Ralph’s miscue, hurling myself into his arms like that. And at least his reaction was terribly direct. Not like some of the other things that happen.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t look so fierce, Cal dear. Just little hints from the slob types who think all widows are vulnerable and think they are irresistible. You are supposed to know the script and react co-operatively to the first slimy hint. When you don’t, the hint gets a little broader. When it gets broad enough, then I smack ’em down. Not like I did Ralphie. With a very few carefully selected words.” She sighed. “Women are supposed to like compliments. I could do without that kind, Cal. I wish I could look dark and sallow and sad and unapproachable. But I’m an almost-blonde, with freckles, so when I’m not actually crying I look so damnably merry. This face wasn’t built for grief. What am I supposed to do? Wear a sign?” Suddenly, in the midst of her rueful smile, her eyes began to fill.

He called for the bill and got her out of the village restaurant quickly. By the time they were in his car, she was all right once more. He drove over to the parkway and turned north. He took a side road and stopped when they came to a public picnic area beside a brook. They sat on a picnic table in the sunlight, their feet on the bench. She could see, in the deep shadow on the far side of the brook, a cluster of bright fallen leaves.

“Calendars are so darn merciless,” she said. “Do you mind my going on like this?”

“Talk about everything, Lollie.”

“We knew him best. Better than any other two people. Calendars are hell. I got through our anniversary somehow. There’s three more to claw my way by. His birthday, the day we met, the day he died. And if you ever hear me say ‘passed away,’ please wash my mouth out with soap. Died is a clean word. Birth, love, death. They’re the absolutes, the big clean words worth using. Once I get through the first time around, the second should be easier. Right now I can’t believe it will be. But why should I try to sound like an authority? You had some bad dates to get through, after Barbara.”

“But it wasn’t the same. It was such a smaller thing, Lollie. By the time she left, there wasn’t much to leave behind.”

“But you loved her.”

He shrugged. “The first year was rough. Then it got easier.”

“How about now?”

The suddenness of his grin charmed her. “She’s stashed with the flawed heroines of my childhood. Guinevere, Juliet, Becky Thatcher. Time has changed her into a fiction. It would scald her to know that, I imagine. She’d hate to think I was cured.”

“But it did take time. That’s the dreary part of it. Time is what your life is made of. So suddenly it becomes something you endure, and hope it goes by quickly. A horrible waste. Speaking of time, Cal dear, when do you have to leave?”

“Sunday. But I have to be back in New York in a couple of months. I’ll see you then.”

“They keep you so busy. You must be doing well.”

“Better than I ever thought I would, really. But don’t let them know that. I do wish I had more chance to use the engineering. But my best talent seems to be dickering. Vermont blood, I guess. We had to go international on the production end, or lose our world markets by being priced out. So I’m the one who gets us set up in foreign parts. Lots of dickering.”

“Do you like it?”

He looked faintly troubled. “They pay me well. They let me do things my way for the most part. I head up a wonderful team. Bright, loyal guys. And a lot of it is like a big poker game. Intrigue, bluff, espionage, bribes, barter — sensing the political climate and the commercial temperature. I’ve gotten pretty shifty.”

“Then what’s wrong with it?”

“You have a good ear, Lollie. I thought I was sounding a hundred-and-ten-per-cent enthusiastic.”

“That was the trouble.”

He looked startled, then laughed. “You win. Remember the times we talked all night?”

“Of course.”

“Definitions of honor. Moral paradoxes. Maybe I just have a hangover from all that talk. You see, I’ve learned how to manipulate human beings. I’ve learned to be good at it.”

“Is that so dreadful?”

“Only when I find myself enjoying it.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a cause for a certain amount of alarm.”

“No it isn’t, dear Cal. Because you are aware of it. That’s what makes the difference. And probably makes you better at what you do. I’m a human being. Manipulate my future. That’s a request.”

“I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

“And?”

“I know exactly what you should do, at least in the immediate future.”

“What?”

“Get a sitter for tomorrow evening, and I’ll buy you a dinner in town. After that, I have no ideas.”

“That’s what I call a real short-term manipulation, friend. But I’ll take it. Practically a genu-wine date, huh?”

“Practically.”

By five-o’clock on Saturday, the hour when Cal had said he would come by for her, Laura Barnes had tried on three different outfits and had settled for the fourth, but did not feel secure about it. She was aware, more through instinct than reason, of the emotional basis of her indecision. An evening in the city had been the traditional festivity with Mitch. And so there was nothing she could wear which did not have the aura of memory. Mitch had always had such specific opinions about what he liked her to wear that, over the years, her wardrobe had become an expression of his amiable prejudices, along with her perfumes, her costume jewelry, the styling of her shoes. To that extent she was still his creature, and the thought of indulging in this rite of festival with someone else made her feel like an imposter.

She made final inspection in her full-length mirror, tilted her head and looked with an almost hostile objectivity at the image of the urban woman, perfumed, orderly, speculative, in the severity of last year’s spring outfit, unaltered but not too obviously large for the woman now twelve pounds lighter, the small defiant hat, lizard shoes, the ranch-mink cape over the arm, tailored purse in the gloved hand.

Who am I, she thought, and wished she had not accepted. All she could do now was trust Cal to sense the fragility of this venture, to use all the empathy at his command to make it an endurable evening. Nothing could make it a joy.

“Lots of luck,” she whispered to the mirror image, and turned on her heel and went to the front door to let the sitter in. Before giving the sitter instructions, she called Kit and David in from the back yard so there would be no arguments about food or bedtime or television.

“You look like a lady, Motherrr,” Kit said with shining eyes, with seven-year-old feminine enthusiasm.

“Thank you, dear.” She turned to David. “Do I pass inspection?”

He shrugged, unsmiling. “Sure,” he said, and turned away. When he was solemn and troubled he seemed more like a miniature adult, a heart-twisting version of Mitch. As Kit chattered at the sitter, Laura followed David into the living room.

“Is anything wrong, dear?”

“Heck, no.”

“Look at me, David. Please stop wandering away. If something is wrong, please tell me.”

He turned and glowered at her. “Have a nifty time.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re having a real good time ever since Cal got here.”

She understood. She grabbed him and hugged him. “Darling, Cal is one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was your father’s best friend. And he’s going back to California tomorrow. He thinks it will be good for me to go out. I think so too, dear. But I don’t want to. It’s like when a pilot has an accident, they say he should fly again.”

“Are you going to marry that Cal?”

“David!”

“Well, are you?”

“What makes you think I’m going to marry anyone?”

“Joey said you would.”

“Joey is an authority?”

“His mother got married three times already.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and made him look directly at her. “David. I love you very much. I trust you. And you are supposed to trust me. Before anything happens in this family, before any big decisions of any kind are made, you and I are going to talk it all over. Okay?”

He struggled, without much success, to remain remote and gloomy. But his eyes changed and the shape of his mouth changed. “Kit too?”

“Kit too, dear.”

He looked slightly disappointed. “I guess that’s fair.” He turned and looked out the side window toward the driveway. “There’s Cal.”

During the drive into the city she heard herself chattering and tried to stop. It was compulsive noise-making, a trait she deplored in others. But if she stopped, she was afraid of what the unemployed mind would do. It seemed akin to stage fright.

It was not until the evening was within one drink of being over that she was able to escape her own masquerade of forced gaiety. They were in a quiet lounge, a banquette in a paneled corner, shadowy, far from the casual piano.

She took a deep shuddering breath and felt that she was looking at his wise and gentle eyes for the first time in the entire evening. “I’ve been a horror,” she said.

“Not so.”

“A bad return on your investment, Cal dear. Investment of the wisdom of the heart, I guess. Thank you for turning it into a city I’ve never seen before. Places I’ve never been. Thanks for not asking me what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. Thanks for taking charge.”

“A date with a lady, Lollie. Not a sentimental journey.”

“Date with a tiresome lady. Yattatta-yack. I’m hoarse from all the girlish giggling. I’m exhausted from having a fun time. But a good evening to remember. Please believe that, Cal.”

“I want to.”

“You have a thoughtful look.”

“With a tinge of guilt.”

“What about?”

“It wouldn’t be easy to say. I guess I always suspect my own motives. I can try to applaud myself for making this evening as easy for you as I possibly could. Then I get into the idea of what I’m trying to prove. So now I have the compulsion, masochistic no doubt, to put a vagueness into words and clobber the whole evening, maybe to punish myself.”

“You lost me.”

“That makes two of us. I’ve been trying to prove, perhaps, I can make whole areas of existence... easier for you. We’re both survivors. With a solid base of affection. Living half-lives. I’m thinking of the constructive suggestion any outside busybody would make.”

He saw her eyes narrow and her face grow still. “Don’t, Cal. Please.”

He tried to smile. “A yen to neaten up the world. Manipulate. Make the maximum use of human talents. But in name only. A place shared.”

Her voice was husky and her eyes were cold. “A neat little sacrificial gesture for a dead friend.”

“No, I just...”

“What in hell do you think I am? Part of your problem? A factor in some lousy equation?”

“Lollie...”

“I’m not something to be arranged. I’m not up for barter. And I’m not one of your obligations! I’d like you to take me home.”

A leaden silence lasted until they were opposite the George Washington Bridge. Suddenly they both spoke at once.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Let me go first. I didn’t like it, Cal. I didn’t like it at all, but I didn’t have to take it that badly. Because the motives were good. One should always remember the motives. I apologize.”

“I guess you remember what Mitch used to tell me back in the days of my delayed adolescence. He always said I had a positive genius for cramming my foot into my mouth. I haven’t gotten over it. Or over the yen to make tender, noble, sacrificial gestures. It was a vulgar suggestion, Lollie. Vulgar, meaning without taste. When you do remember this evening, please have some amnesia about the tail end of it.”

“You too,” she said. “I didn’t come out so darn well either. And you know, I gave you an opening, asking you what I should do with my life.”

“I’ve got some alternate advice, if you think I’ve got any credibility left.”

“Now don’t get too humble.”

“Never fear. Anyway, make a small plan instead of trying to make great big ones. Come June, close the house, load the car, show your kids the country and see some of it yourself. Just wander. Hit the parks, the far places, the towns you’ve never heard of. Be gypsies for the summer.”

“We talked about taking that kind of a trip someday.”

“So take it.”

“It... sort of scares me.”

“If it does, then maybe it’s something you should do. And if you find no place which looks better to you, then you’ve found out that this is your home, and this is where you should stay.”

“Like proving it for good.”

“Yes.”

She did not mention it again until he was saying good-by to her, and the sitter was in his car, waiting to be driven home.

“It’s been good having you here, Cal.”

“I’ll be in touch. Lollie, I’m proud of you. Of the way you’re handling it.”

“Is there another way?”

“A lot of other ways, but not for you, thank God.”

“Cal, this was a good evening, really.”

“I’m glad if it was.”

“And I think I’ll take that trip with the kids. Thanks for everything.” She kissed him quickly on the corner of the mouth and went hastily into the house. When he backed out of the drive, he saw her in the living-room window, standing and looking out. She waved and he touched the horn ring lightly.

The next day, heading west on the jet, he found it difficult to concentrate on his work. He put it aside and looked down at the hazy checkerboard patterns of the farm states. The aircraft seemed to hang motionless above the slow turning of the earth. He realized he had learned, at last, that Mitch Barnes was dead. And the world was that much emptier. Objective knowledge had not been enough. The heart resisted logic. He achieved a final knowledge only by seeing the places where Mitch should have been, and found him gone. By seeing the empty arms of Mitch’s widow, and her evasive eyes.

He felt his face grow warm when he thought of his grotesque suggestion, and was glad he had been as carefully indirect as he had been able to be. Lollie was not a contrived person. Her heart, her instincts were warm and genuine. Any pattern which ignored the demands of the heart was unthinkable to her, and justly so. The true heart is a gambler, and resents being asked to play for matchsticks.

He would write to her, often. And see her again in May. And undo any small damage he might have done. He had not wished to add himself to a short ignoble list — Johnny Dorran, Ralph Becklund, Calvin Burch.

But at least his approach had been sanctimonious, if that was a virtue. He’d offered the name without the game. And the alternate suggestion had been sound.

He was unable to come east in May. He phoned her and explained why. She sounded better to him. Cheery and casual. She said they were going to try the gypsy trip and the kids were all steamed up about it. Together they’d marked up a bushel of maps. They would be on no time schedule, but when they got to the coast, if they got to the coast, she would phone him.

But when she did phone him, in late August, the call came from Las Cruces, New Mexico. She sounded enthusiastic and alarmed. “You sort of got me into this, Cal, so if it sounds as if I’m yelling for help... well, I am.”

“I’ll call you back and tell you how soon I can get there, Lollie.”

She explained, without telling him very much, that she wasn’t exactly in trouble. She needed advice.

He rearranged his appointment schedule, made airline arrangements and called her back and told her to meet him at the airport at El Paso at eleven the next morning, a Tuesday.

It was a blistering morning in El Paso. She had sounded so uncertain over the phone, he was totally unprepared for the exuberance and vitality of the woman who met him. She’d brought the children with her. All three of them were so deeply tanned their white teeth were startling and their eyes looked pale. Their hair, Laura’s particularly, had been sun-scorched to a lighter hue. During the forty-mile trip north to Las Cruces, all three of them chanted the wonders of the Southwest, the people, the climate, the way the mountains look, mesquite, sage, early morning horseback rides. Laura looked very slim and fit.

They had lunch near Las Cruces, then dropped the children off at the house of some of their new friends, and went back to the Sageland Motel. It looked clean, bare and comfortable, had an efficiency kitchen and was thoroughly air-conditioned.

She smiled at him and said, “You seem a little disconcerted or something, Cal.”

“You don’t look and act enough like a damsel in distress, maybe.”

“I don’t want the distress. That’s where you come in. I’ve been burning bridges, Cal dear. I sold the house two weeks ago. Now I want to do something. It seems so plausible it... it scares me. I keep remembering that son of a gun, Johnny Dorran. Maybe he did me a favor, teaching me not to trust anybody. I don’t know. Anyway, I trust you, and you have a talent for dickering. You told me so.”

She wanted to buy a business. It was a short distance west of town on Routes 70 and 80. It was listed for sale with a local realtor. He drove out with her and looked at it. There were three hundred feet on the highway, and it was seven hundred feet deep. There was an adobe main house, with a gift shop attached, and two rental cottages. It was owned and operated by an elderly couple named Persons.

Mr. Persons came out to give them cordial greeting. He was a hunched, leathery old man with a wide tombstone smile, and he insisted on being called Dave. “So you’re the fella Miss Laura here was telling Ma and me about. Now you both come on in the front room and set. This here is a house that’ll never need air-conditioning, no sirree. Cool and dry in the summer, warm and dry in the wintertime, not that we get much winter, Mr. Burch. Feel how cool it is in here. Ma is taken poorly and she’s lying down in the back room and I know she’ll be sorry not to be up and around to say hello.

“Like I’ve been telling Miss Laura, Ma and me, we come from Kansas twenty-three years ago last month, and we built this little business up from scratch. Not that it’s any gold mine or anything like that, but we do rent the cottages regular, and on the gift items we got a good steady trade of folks stopping off the highway. The taxes are small, and the upkeep isn’t much, so you don’t actual have to take in too much to keep yourself going. Like I’ve been telling Miss Laura, we got a Mexican couple lives back there in a shack beyond our line, Gutierrez their name is, Joe and Ampara, and Joe he keeps the grounds up on account of my back troubling me, and Ampara she does maid work here in the big house and in the cottages for them that wants it, and they both work cheap.

“Reason we got to sell out, Mr. Burch, we’re plain getting too old to be alone and we got a daughter in San Diego has room for us and wants us and been after us two or three years to sell out. We both taken such a fancy to Miss Laura here. I’m telling you the truth, Mr. Burch, we’re giving her a better price on it than we figured on giving anybody, but it’s nice for us to know it will be in the hands of such a fine girl with her two dandy kids.

“She told me you’d probably be wanting to look at the books, seeing as how she can’t make head or tail out of them. I guess maybe nobody could. We just write stuff down in this kind of dime-store notebook I got here, the money that comes in on the righthand sheet and the money we pay out on the lefthand sheet. Trouble is, we put everything we pay out all together, whether it’s food for us or gas for my old car, so you’d have to kind of sort out the business things. Here’s the notebooks for the last three years, and you’re welcome to take them right on along with you and look them over and keep them long as you want.

“We want Miss Laura to be happy and satisfied. One thing we did do, when we decided on selling. We took an inventory of all the gift stuff and put it in this book here with the price we paid for it. And we put the house furnishings we’ll be leaving behind, because our daughter has a whole house full of furniture, and we won’t take along any more than I can get in the car and in the little cargo trailer I haul. Right here is the biggest amount of money in the gifts, this line of handmade Indian jewelry. Like I said, you take the records right along and you can study them up, Mr. Burch, but I’m telling you, we’re not about to come down any more on the price we set special for Miss Laura.

“My back is troubling me today, so you knowing where everything is, why don’t you take Mr. Burch around and show him the place, Miss Laura?”

An hour later, when they drove away, Laura was full of enthusiastic explanations. “I don’t know if you could see how charming that house could be, Cal, it’s so cluttered with junk. And so is the gift shop and so are the cottages. There’ll be a million things to get rid of, and I’ll have to work like a dog, but golly, I could make it all so attractive!”

“Taxes,” he said. “Zoning, water supply, sills, beams and roofs.”

“I’m going to think of some wonderful new name for it and design my own highway signs, and do something exciting in planting areas with those big bristly cactus.”

“Mark-up, credit rating, fire protection,” he said.

“There’s room for more cottages. Did you notice? And that gift shop. Isn’t it frightful? I’m going to dispose of all those tricks and jokes and pottery burros and concrete jackrabbits and put in some of the really fine local things you can get. Hand-woven fabrics, native pottery, handmade furniture.”

“Will this stretch of highway be bypassed? Will it be widened? What’s going to be built near you? Is the town expanding this way?”

She turned abruptly and stared at him. “Cal, you can certainly think of a lot of terrible things.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Three days after I decide, I can move in.”

“And you’ve always wanted to run a gift shop. I know.”

“Tell me I’m doing the right thing, Cal.”

“I can’t. Not yet. I hope I’ll be able to, though.”

She had gotten him a room at the Sageland Motel. That night, after dinner, he studied Persons’ records. On Wednesday he looked up the tax situation in Dona Ana County. He talked to the proprietors of three other gift shops in the area. He talked to the realtor. He talked to two builders, a plumbing contractor, a well driller, a state highway engineer. Wednesday evening she teased him to give her some opinion.

“Can’t do it, Lollie. Not until after I talk to Persons again. Alone.”

“But what are you going to say?”

“Just ask him a few things.”

“What kind of things? They’re such a sweet old couple.”

“Just a few little questions.”

“If you make him mad, he might not sell it to me, Cal.”

“I won’t make him mad.”

“And I can’t come with you?”

“Sorry.”

Thursday morning he drove Laura’s car out to Persons’ place. Mr. Persons jabbered all the way into the living room behind the gift shop. Cal met Mrs. Persons. She was a plump old party with a sweet vague smile.

Cal sat down in the living room, facing them, put the notebooks on the table beside his chair, smiled and said, “You two bandits ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Persons stared, gasped, sputtered. “What do you mean, coming in here like this and... and...”

“Settle down,” Cal said amiably. “You’re not talking to Mrs. Barnes. I can’t be charmed and I can’t be bluffed. I assume you want to sell out. I can either spoil your chances of selling to Mrs. Barnes, or I can work out some equitable deal.”

“But Miss Laura is real anxious to...”

“Miss Laura is real anxious not to waste her money. She can get a license to go into business. She can buy a piece of land a mile down the road at a reasonable figure, conditional on finding a good water supply. She can put up a very attractive place. She can do that or she can buy this.”

“I don’t see what call you got to come in here and...”

“Shut your face and listen, Dave,” Mrs. Persons said quietly.

“There are a few things wrong with the picture you presented to Mrs. Barnes,” Cal said, his voice mild and factual. “Last season one of your cottages was rented. The year before neither of them was. Yet, in going through these... uh... notebooks, I found rental income shown. In every case the rental income was at the bottom of the page with indications there had been erasures and new totals put in. On many other sheets I found that sales of gift items had been added, sometimes with a pencil, sometimes with a ball-point pen using the same shade of blue ink in every entry.”

“I told you were a damn fool, Dave,” Mrs. Persons said.

“Shut up, Mary.”

“I adjusted the income and expenditure figures and I have learned that this business is not even marginal. It operates at a loss. Because you haven’t had to mortgage it, I assume you have some sort of pension income so you can make ends meet.”

“But it’s like having a house for free,” Persons said.

“Not exactly. I checked your inventory. You’ve put most of the items in at retail value. Mrs. Barnes would not be interested in that merchandise. You can dispose of it yourself, or sell it to her, if the deal goes through, for four hundred dollars total.”

“I wouldn’t hear of any such damn thing!” Persons roared.

Cal Burch smiled at him. “Come now! You’ve been trying to sell out for nearly four years, and it may be another four years before anybody else comes along.”

“Sell it, not give it away,” Persons said bitterly.

“You’re still talking too much, Dave,” the woman said.

“Property taxes and school taxes are going up next year. Your roadside signs are on the state right of way, and they’re so beat they discourage trade rather than attract it. Mrs. Barnes will probably have to put several thousand dollars into structural repairs and into your water system.”

“Some, maybe, but not...”

“After checking it all out, I’m prepared to advise Mrs. Barnes to offer you twenty thousand cash for the whole thing.”

“But the highway frontage alone...”

“The land is all right, but there isn’t much on it.”

“Look here, Burch, that’s less than half what I got to get. You and that Barnes woman are trying to steal this here place!”

“You weren’t trying to steal anything, Persons? You know she’s been a widow nearly one year. You know she has no business experience. You weren’t trying to steal anything?”

“When you got something to sell, you have to...”

“Falsify your records?”

“That would take some proving.”

Burch stood up and moved toward the door. “Not very much.”

Persons followed him outside, his face ugly with anger. “I’m not going to talk to you about this. I’m going to talk to her!”

“To the Barnes woman, or to Miss Laura?”

“Don’t you twist what I say!”

“Mr. Persons, I’m asking you to think this over. Talk it over with your wife. You wanted cash and a mortgage from Mrs. Barnes. This way she’ll give you the whole amount in cash. You think it over and phone me at the Sageland Motel, Extension 18, before four o’clock this afternoon saying either yes or no. There’ll be no dickering. This is a final offer. And if you make any attempt to see Mrs. Barnes or talk to her about this, I’ll take my photostat copies of some of your notebook pages to the local law and see what the ground rules are around here on fraud.”

All the anger seeped out of Persons’ face. “Now wait a minute,” he said weakly. “Now you just wait a minute!”

“All you have to do is phone me. If the answer is no, I won’t use those records to try to pressure you, Mr. Persons. The offer is fair. Just don’t go near Mrs. Barnes.”

As he drove out onto the highway, he glanced back and saw the elderly couple standing and looking at each other, their mouths working, their faces angry. Too easy, he thought, to feel tolerant and even sentimental toward them. Yet what is more reprehensible than cheating widows and orphans, hiding guile and lies behind that folksy manner? A widowed woman, unused to having money, having a little, anxious to use it to build a future, is the most vulnerable thing our culture can produce...

Laura and her children were in the motel swimming pool in the late afternoon when Cal came walking toward the pool. She could read nothing in his face. She felt exasperated with him. He took her wet hand and helped her out. She went with him to sit in the shade of a big faded beach umbrella.

“I don’t see why you have to make it all so dam mysterious,” she said. “I’m glad you came to help me. I almost didn’t ask you. But I didn’t expect to be... left out of everything.”

“You won’t be, from now on. But there are ways to do this and ways not to do it. You got too chummy with those people, Lollie.”

“They’re dear people, really.”

“If you want it, you can have it.”

“You know I want it, Cal.”

“Tomorrow morning at ten we’ll go to the realtor’s office and you’ll sign the papers.”

“Then you do think it’s a smart thing.”

“I know it’s what you want to do. I don’t know how smart it is. You should have the chance to do what you think you want to do.”

“I’m not a child, Cal.”

“And you’ve never run a store and you’ve never been a landlord. You’ll have to see how you like those things.”

“I will. I know I will.”

“So you’ll have to come up with twenty thousand cash.”

“And how much mortgage, Cal?”

“None. That’s the whole deal.”

She stared at him. “But that’s impossible!”

“That’s their price.”

“But I can’t do that to them, Cal! They’re my friends. How did you get them to set a price like that? What did you do to them?”

She saw an odd, cool expression on his face. “I suppose I must have strung them up by the thumbs and kept whipping them.”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t understand.”

“It’s very simple. And it isn’t exactly unusual. They were trying to cheat you. Those fine old people told you a few dozen lies and he falsified the records. You were fair game. But you sent for me and I spoiled the game. But they’re anxious to sell anyway, so they’re taking a fair price.”

She looked at him and knew he was telling the truth. She felt old and soiled and sick. She remembered the evenings with Dave and Mary Persons, telling them about Mitch, telling them all about herself. “Excuse me a minute,” she said in a small voice. “Keep an eye on the kids.”

She stepped into her sandals, picked up her towel and went to her motel room. She looked at herself in the mirror, sternly, accusingly, and said, “Idiot! Silly female person!”

She showered quickly, changed to shorts and a blouse, then sat on the edge of the bed and cried a few meager tears, small hot tears that burned like a mild acid. She felt that it had all been spoiled, that she no longer wanted the place, but she knew that to be childish. She would do it because she wanted to do it. But some of the innocent enthusiasm was forever gone, replaced by an almost sullen determination. She fixed her eyes, her hair and her mouth, and went back out to where Cal waited for her.

“You all right now?” he asked.

“I’m just fine, thank you. I wish I didn’t have to see them tomorrow, though.”

“You won’t have to talk directly to them. I lined up a lawyer for you. Nice guy. George Emer. He’ll be there. When they vacate, they’ll turn the keys over to the realtor and you can pick them up there.”

“Cal, why do things have to be so stinking?”

“I don’t know. I could make some tiresome comment about how that’s the way the world is. But usually it’s not quite this... flagrant. Cheer up. You see, you would have found out anyway. But it would have been worse to find out a year from now, when there’d be no chance at all of recovering any of the twenty-something thousand they’d have gouged out of you on top of what the layout is actually worth. Be glad you found out before it happened.”

“I guess I will be, after a while.”

“You’ll be working too hard to give it much thought anyhow, Lollie. Making that thing pay is going to take all kinds of work.”

“Good. It’s what I need.” She gave him an oblique look. “Twice now you’ve saved me, Cal.”

“Twice?”

“I would have tried to hang onto the kind of life I had with Mitch. But I would have had to keep pretending it was what I wanted. There were people who sort of wanted to... take charge and tell me how to live. You came along and just gave me a gentle nudge, at the right time.”

“You would have come up with the same idea.”

She hitched her chair into the shade of the poolside umbrella. She looked at Kit poised on the low board, scrawny, brown and vital, visibly taller than when they had started the trip.

“Would I, Cal? I don’t know. There’s such a terrible temptation to leave things as unchanged as possible. You are supposed to believe children get insecure if you go moving them around, forcing them to make new friends. I guess I would have used that as an excuse. But they have a strange wisdom, don’t they? Because you brought up the idea of the trip, I was obligated to bring it up, and pretend to them that I wanted to do it. I expected David to be terribly upset about missing summer camp. I’d promised him. And I thought Kit wouldn’t want to leave her friends. But before I could finish explaining the idea, they both wanted to go. Actually, it annoyed me. I’d been so sure of staying, for their sake. When we actually left, I felt lost and scared. But then every day began to be better and brighter. How could they know it would be like that? What special instinct did they have?”

“Maybe they weren’t as adjusted as they seemed.”

“That could be it. And then we found this place, and all three of us fell in love with it. So quickly. We talked about staying. They were making new friends. But I couldn’t believe they meant it. I knew that when I talked about selling the house, they would be upset. But they were so darned casual about never seeing it again.”

“Things went wrong for them there.”

“So I farmed them out and went back and closed the deal. Some nice people had been very anxious to buy it. I went through the house like a whirlwind. I packed stuff and stored it so I can send for it, and let the rest go with the house. I said my good-bys. When I got back here I slept the clock around. I still can’t believe we won’t be going back.”

“I thought something like this might happen, Lollie, if you could get away from there. I wasn’t really sure you would. I thought you might change your mind at the last minute.”

“Except for the pressure from the kids, I might have. But... I thought this was going to be so nice. I thought this was going to be such a good idea. And now it all seems sort of shabby. Some... some of the shine is gone.”

“Because they tried to cheat you?”

“I guess so. I thought they were nice. I thought they liked me. I liked them.”

“And you thought the place was making money. That would be nice and easy, if it was. You could go right in and start having an income from it. You’d have time to make mistakes. You could play a nice little game of pretending to run a business. This way you’ll have no room for mistakes. If you want to play games, you better skip the whole idea, Lollie.”

She turned her head sharply to stare at him. “What do you think I am?”

He shrugged. “I’d do you no favor to pat you on the head. You’re a young widow. Business experience zero. How many retail businesses fail every year? Fifty thousand? Certainly not all those people are inexperienced. The widow puts her money into a gift shop or a tea room or a motel, and traditionally, while she’s going broke, she finds out she didn’t know what it was really like.”

“Are you telling me not to do it?”

“What do you think?”

She glared at him. Her chin looked more prominent. She doubled a small tanned fist and banged it on the aluminum arm of her chair. “I don’t care how grim and nasty and rugged it gets! I don’t care how much I have to learn or how fast I have to learn it. I’ll show you, Cal Burch! I’ll show everybody. Playing games, indeed! And when I’ve done it — when I’ve made it go — I’m going to invite you to come and look at it and eat boiled crow.”

He grinned in a lazy way. “That’s what I had to hear, woman. Now I can tell you to go ahead with it.”

After a first flush of wild anger, she gave him a rueful smile. “Manipulated again, by golly!”

“As soon as I get back I’ll airmail you some very practical manuals on operating a small business.”

“I’ll learn them by heart.”

After the sale was closed, he made flight arrangements and she drove him to El Paso. The kids did not go along. She seemed subdued on the trip down. She did not recover her good spirits until they were in the airport restaurant. “Those old people,” she said, “they were pleasant enough to me, but they both looked at you as if they despised you. You didn’t seem to notice.”

“I noticed. It’s a normal adjustment. I’m used to it. They can’t live with the idea they tried to steal your money. So I have to become the villain of the piece. A year from now they’ll firmly believe I slickered them out of their property, and they’ll moan about it to their friends.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“It used to, until I realized it doesn’t cost anything to be a villain.”

“I take possession two weeks from tomorrow. It scares me.”

“You take possession after the inventory is verified. I told George Emer to be sure to tell them it will be verified. Otherwise I’m afraid that sweet old couple would take off with the wiring, the fuse boxes and the water pumps.”

“I’ve got so much to learn. Can I write you about things that come up?”

“I want you to. And that guy at the bank will give you good advice in an emergency. So will George Emer. Don’t be afraid to ask. And don’t get reckless with your working capital, Lollie. Cling to it like a miser.”

She shook her head in wonder. “Mitch used to get purple over the strange things I’d do to check stubs. If he could see me now, he’d have hysterics.”

“That fellow George recommended will set up your books, show you how to keep them, and make out all your statements and tax forms.”

His flight was announced. She went out to the gate with him. After he kissed her, he kept his hands on her shoulders and gave her a little shake and, looking down into the solemnity of her green-gray eyes, said, “You’ll make out, Lollie. I believe that.”

“I wish I was as sure as I was yesterday.”

“Spend the two weeks going around to good business operations and asking nosy questions.”

“Okay, Cal.”

“Write me.”

“I will.”

After the plane took off it banked toward the Northwest. He looked back and saw the tiny figure in the blue skirt and white blouse trudging toward the parking lot, looking very alone in the hot golden weight of the sunshine.

For Laura Barnes it became a long strange time of unreality, made strangely dim by the unrelenting expenditure of energy involved in coming to terms with survival. She said at first that her working hours were from dawn till exhaustion, and then it ceased to be a wry joke.

For a time she was able to divide the project into specific segments. Settle on a new name. (The Mountain Shop.) Collect and destroy the shabby old roadside signs. Design and have made and select locations for new signs. Alter the roadside appearance of the place from that look of dusty, withered defeat to a look of green and shade, of coolness and invitation. Extend that same face-lifting treatment to the rental units. Repaint, refurnish — and do it all as cheaply and tastefully as possible. Clear out all the tawdry, vulgar junk in stock and find good sources for smart and beautiful things, and arrange attractive display areas for them. Learn how to buy and how to price and how to sell, and how much inventory to maintain. And, on top of all this there was the unavoidable business of living, of clothes, cleaning, food, meals, children.

But the neat division of projects soon merged, and there was a blur of lists and things unfinished, and not enough hours in any day or any week.

In all this gray time of effort, the memorable moments — good and bad — stood out with a strange clarity.

There was the evening when she broke down the barrier between herself and the Gutierrez family, Joe, his plump wife Ampara, and their eighteen-year-old daughter, the dark, lovely Maria. From the beginning she had paid them more than the Persons had paid them, and had put Maria on the payroll too to help out in the shop. But the new total was still embarrassingly meager. Yet they seemed very wary of her. Joe and Ampara particularly, worked slowly, never looked directly at her, and often did assigned tasks carelessly.

One evening after the children were asleep, Maria was in the shop with her, helping her unpack a shipment of pottery which had arrived that day. They were both tired. A heavy pot slipped out of Maria’s hand and shattered on the glass top of a new display case, cracking the glass. Maria gave a wild cry of despair and fled into the night.

Laura put a sweater on and took her flashlight and walked back through her property to the Gutierrez shack on the other side of her back line. The lamplight inside shone through cracks in the outside walls. She heard a loud argument inside, conducted in Spanish. It stopped abruptly when she knocked on the plank door. Ampara let her in, and backed humbly away from her, nodding, smiling nervously, saying, “Bad girl. Clumsy girl.”

Maria sat up abruptly on a narrow cot, her, face marked with tears.

“Didn’ mean nothing bad,” Joe said, staring at the floor.

She realized they were terrified. It was the first time she had been inside the shack. She had not realized how tiny it was. A small charcoal fire glowed on an improvised structure of cinderblocks and sheet metal.

She smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring way and said, “I just came to tell Maria she didn’t have to run away. I know it was an accident. And it was my fault. I knew she was tired. We were both tired. I should have stopped working...”

Suddenly she felt an unreasonable anger, directed at the smallness of the shack, the outside plumbing, the lack of electricity. She stamped her foot and said, “I won’t have you living like this! It’s not right! It’s not fair! We’ll have to get this place fixed up.”

They were all staring at her, their eyes wide and startled.

“But... I don’t know when we could start... you could move down to one of the cottages... until... until...” And suddenly there seemed to be too much to do, and it would never be done. The tears began to run down her face and she turned blindly toward the door. But Ampara caught her there and put her arms around her. Laura began to sob, and was furious at herself because she could not stop. Ampara took her over to the couch. Joe bustled about and gave her a cup a third full of fiery colorless tequila. They patted her and beamed at her and soothed her. By the time she had herself under control, they were friends. They talked a long time. Joe Gutierrez summed it all up when he looked sternly at her, thumped himself on the chest and said, “Now you got wan beeg family here, Señora, all work like mad.”

And they did, with skills and energies she had not known they possessed. And perhaps they spelled the difference between survival and failure.

Another vivid, and less pleasant memory, was the morning when the salesman of leather goods came back in answer to her complaint about what had been shipped her. He was husky, with a narrow face, a lantern jaw, and a soft coaxing voice.

“I ordered about half that stuff,” she said, “and the rest of it is junk I don’t want around. Nasty little stuffed alligators. Phony beadwork.”

“Why all the heat, sweetie? It’s a new line for you, and a consignment deal to try it out, so what’s it costing you?”

“I don’t want junk I didn’t order. Why was it sent?”

“I stuck it onto the order, sweetie. As a favor. I hate to see you go wrong, starting out like this. What you don’t know, the public loves junk. You put it out, it sells. Dirty postcards, carved coconuts, peekaboo key chains, they sell and they pay the rent.”

“Not here, friend.”

“Your big trouble, sweetie, you think you got Saks Fifth Avenue here maybe, way in the boondocks. It doesn’t work that way. You got to be realistic. You just can’t build a class trade.”

“I don’t want any other kind.”

“You’ll fall on your face. Give it a chance.”

“No thanks. Let’s go get that horrid junk out of the storeroom and you can check it off the packing list. The stuff I wanted is all right. I’ll keep that and see if I can move it.”

She led the way back into the main house toward the room she had converted into a storeroom. As they crossed the living room he touched her on the shoulder. “I got one more idea, sweetie.”

“Like what?”

“I want it to work out for you, so what I can do, I can check off that stuff so a bill will never come due, and leave it anyway, like a gift.”

“How can you do that?”

“It’s a little bit a loose inventory operation. So it would be like a present. Whatever you get is net.”

“Why would you do that?”

He smiled in a sly way. “I want this should get to be one of my favorite stops, sweetie.” He pounced at her, grabbed her, swung her around against the nearby wall and began bruising her mouth. For a few seconds she was stunned with surprise, and then she began to struggle. He was a powerful man. She yelled several times, but it seemed to amuse him more than alarm him. He was wrestling her toward the couch when Joe Gutierrez came in, catfooted, pruning shears in his hand. He came up behind the salesman and laid the cool steel of the blade against the side of the man’s throat. The salesman turned ashen. He stood rigid, his mouth making small fish-motions.

Laura backed away from him and said, “Thank you, Joe. Now you can help this man load all his merchandise back into his car.”

“It was just a little joke, Mrs. Barnes,” the salesman said weakly.

“I’ll laugh later. Get the merchandise.”

As they were getting ready to carry the merchandise out to the car, Laura suddenly realized she was making an un-businesslike decision. The things she had ordered were handsome. “On second thought, just take the junk. Leave the rest. But bill it to me at the cash discount rate instead of the consignment rate.”

He looked at her nervously. “You want to pay?”

“Oh, no! I just don’t want to take the trouble to discuss the whole thing with your sales manager.”

“I... I guess I can work that out. Sure, Mrs. Barnes.”

After he left, her knees felt weak and her hands trembled. An hour later she sold one of the handbags he would have taken away. She sold it to a honeymoon couple. It was a handsome saddle-leather bag, hand-stitched, priced at $32.50. It was as much satisfaction as when she gambled on the line of handmade jewelry from Santa Fe and, after it was in stock for a week, sold two amethyst and silver bracelets the same day, one for three hundred dollars, and one for a hundred and seventy-five. And a week after that she came close to tears when a fifty-dollar necklace from the same line was filched from a counter top when both she and Maria had their backs turned, busy with other customers.

One Saturday afternoon she learned something about herself and something about her son. By that time Joe Gutierrez had finished the shady patio at the west side of the building, and she had set him to work building the cactus rock-garden beyond the patio fountain. She stepped out to see how the work was coming along, and found David laboring along with Joe, lugging the smaller rocks from the big pile and setting them in place on the slope. The boy’s lean brown back gleamed with sweat, and small muscles bulged against the shiny skin as he lifted the stones.

On a Saturday, she thought, a small boy should play, not indulge in child labor. She thought of how many times she had seen him helping Joe without her thinking much about it. She was angry at herself. She went striding out and said, “David, dear, I’m sure you’re getting in Joe’s way. You run along and play.”

David set the rock in place, straightened up and stared at her.

“I’m not in his way, for gosh sakes.”

“Good man,” Joe said, grinning.

“Come inside, dear.”

She went into the house with him, out of the bright sun. “Dear, why don’t you go down the road and see what the Lamont kids are doing?”

He sat on the arm of the couch and looked at her. He had a thoughtful look which reminded her of Mitch. “Mom, are we making any money?”

“As soon as we get the other cottage fixed up and...”

“Are we making any money?”

“Not exactly yet, dear.”

“But we have to, don’t we, pretty soon?”

“That’s the general idea.”

He frowned at her. “We voted to do it, didn’t we? All three of us, not just you.”

“I know, but...”

“We talked about it, Kit and me. You’re worried all the time and you work all the time, and you’re sort of cross. But we don’t mind about that. We voted too, Mom. We can’t play like we were little kids. Kit, she helps Ampara and Maria and I help Joe, and more things get done. Honest, we don’t get in anybody’s way. Hey! Please don’t start crying!”

“Okay, dear. I... I won’t. I just didn’t know how you felt.”

“Yesterday after school, we washed all the windows in the first cottage, Kit and me, and Ampara said she couldn’t do it better herself.”

She took his hands. “I’m a stupid woman, dear. I just didn’t understand. I just didn’t want you... cheated out of having fun.”

“Honest, I’m having a lot of fun with those old rocks. I want to go back out before he gets too far ahead of me. Can I?”

She kissed the sweaty face. “Yes, dear. Run along. And I’m most truly grateful for the way you’ve been helping. I’ll tell Kit too. And I won’t be so cross.”

“You haven’t been too cross,” he said judiciously, and hurried back out to the rock pile. After she sat quietly for a few minutes, she went to the phone and called the contractor at his home and told him she had decided to go ahead and get a construction loan for the two new cottages and the enlarging of the shop area.

Cal Burch reread the significant portion of her letter many times on the plane trip from Hawaii to California. It had been forwarded to him there from his office.

“Congratulations, of course, on your promotion. And I guess it is time, dear Calvin, to request some congratulations of my own. I am certain, at last, that I have turned the corner. I don’t think I am sadder. Only wiser, I hope. And terribly impressed with the fact I was able to do it in less than two years. Not much less, but a little less. And I guess you will remember you estimated it would take at least three, if I made it at all. But with all the arrogance of the self-made woman, I feel that it took an expenditure of effort that would make your entire business career look like a Sunday afternoon in the park.

“I have expected you to drop in to view the fiasco. And I guess you would have, if I hadn’t so carefully ignored the little hints you put in your letters. I did want to see you, desperately, many times, but on the other hand I didn’t want you to see what I’ve done until it felt halfway finished. Pride, I guess. And now I am terribly proud, but suffering a sort of letdown.

“So, if the mighty weight of your new responsibilities could possibly be shucked for a couple of days, now is the time to come view my small triumph. There is one cottage free and, until I hear from you, I shall keep it empty, thus incurring a loss of revenue which stabs me to the heart. I want to show it all to you. I want to see you, Cal. I want to talk to you. So... please.”

When he got to his apartment, after midnight, he took all her letters out of the drawer, all the long letters of the past twenty-two months, and read them over. They followed an odd pattern. In the beginning she had often asked specific business questions, but by the time six months had passed she had stopped. And soon after that she stopped talking about whatever progress she was making. Many of them were written late at night. She told him of strange and amusing things which happened, weird customers, anxious salesmen, curious tenants. It was as though she used the vehicle of her letters to him to escape from the day-by-day tensions. His letters to her were in the same vein, affording him a release from the implacable demands of his job...

Ten miles outside Las Cruces, as he drove the rental car north, he came across the first sign advertising The Mountain Shop — Straw, Fabrics, Wood, Leather, Stone, Silver and Gems. The sign was a plywood silhouette of a chunky burro, tasteful yet gay as a carnival.

When he arrived at her place, the visible changes astonished him. Several cars were parked on a white expanse of crushed stone. There was a patio garden to the right of the shop area. All the plantings looked lush and green and carefully tended. The shop had been enlarged, the new portion designed to blend handsomely with the basic structure.

Laura and a dark pretty girl were waiting on customers. She had written of Maria, the Gutierrez daughter. Laura excused herself at once and came quickly to him, gave him a quick hug, a warm welcoming smile. Two years had changed her. She looked little older, but seemed more poised, confident, direct.

“Be patient a minute,” she said. “They come in clumps.”

When she went back to her customers, he wandered through the shop. She stocked beautiful things, and displayed them well, so cleverly lighted and. arranged the shop had an almost urban flavor. Most of the handsome things were indigenous to the Southwest.

As soon as she was free, she walked him up to the cottage where he would stay, and beamed with her pleasure as he praised it.

“I put the Hamiltons in this one. You were a dear to send them to me. Such nice honeymooners.”

“I just made a mild suggestion. But he works for me. Lollie, you’ve done a tremendous job.”

“If you’re willing to pay for the very best, come to The Mountain Shop. No tired junk. Repeat business is beginning to show, Cal. And local trade too. And even a little mail-order trade from happy customers, with no attempt on my part to attempt to build it up.”

“I’m truly amazed.”

“Listen, you! Don’t be too darned amazed. Almost two years at a dead run, Cal. Now I’m over the hump. I can’t tell you how many times I was certain I’d never make it. I made a thousand dumb mistakes, and some were big, but somehow I never made a big enough one to sink me.”

“You didn’t ask me for much advice.”

“Don’t look hurt. When I did, in the beginning, it helped a lot. But nothing is as educational as a nice juicy mistake. The lesson stays with you.”

“Lollie, you look bouncy and bright-eyed.”

“Should have seen me six months ago, friend. A hag. Mean, shrill, scrawny. Now I’m even getting fat.” She sat on the foot of the bed. “You don’t look so good, you know.”

“Weary. That’s all. I’ve had to push hard. Now I can take it easy for the next few weeks. So you’re really in the black?”

“The accountant says so. I’ve got a total of thirty-seven thousand in it, plus a loan against it. But it’s netting at the rate of over five thousand a year before taxes, after taking off a reasonable amount for salary for me and rental on the main house. So I could walk away with fifty-five thousand, Cal.”

He kissed her on the forehead. “Consider that a gold star. But what do you mean, walk away?”

“The shop is running the way I want it to now, Cal. So it’s decision time again, maybe. I don’t know. Do I want to go on just like this? Seven days makes a long week and I have, I guess you could say, met the challenge. Or should I hire somebody to run it, or sell it, or sell a half interest? I just don’t know.”

“It depends on how much you really like it.”

“That’s what Stan tells me.”

“Stan?”

“Oh, Stan Colby. A friend. A nice guy from Texas. I asked him to come to dinner tonight to meet you.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a construction engineer over at White Sands.”

“How did you meet him?”

“Sort of through David. His kids live in Las Cruces with his sister. The boy is David’s age, twelve. The girl is older.”

“He’s not married?”

“His wife was killed in an accident... almost five years ago.” She went to the window and looked toward the main building. “The lull is lasting. Maria can cope. Do you want to take the grand tour now, or unpack first? What time is it? Nearly four. The kids went riding. They’ll be back by five. You won’t know them, Cal. They’re growing like weeds.”

“They’re happy here?”

“They love it.”

“Why don’t we take the tour now? Then I can unpack and change later. A construction engineer, did you say?”

“Who? Oh, Stan. Yes, that’s right. First I’ll show you the greenery. We had fantastic luck with the water situation. It’s rough around here. As you know. We drilled twenty feet from the old well and hit the seam right on the button and tripled the flow, so we could afford to build an oasis. Joe has a green thumb. Look at the mountains, Cal. I know them by heart. Over there is Mount Riley, then the Florida Mountains, then Cook’s Peak in the Mimbres Range. Then around the other way, on the other side of the river, there’s the San Andres and beyond them, way, way off, the Sacramento Mountains. White Sands is in the Tularosa Valley, between those two ranges.”

“Long way to come.”

“What? Oh, for Stan? Fifty miles on a fast empty road, through Organ. About an hour. Not even that. Forty-five minutes. It used to take Mitch fifty minutes to get home from the city. Look at my healthy juniper, Cal. Come on, I want to show you the weird cactuses in the rock garden.”

Stan Colby was a big, likable, leathery man. Kit and David greeted him with yelps of pleasure. Laura closed the shop at six, earlier than usual. Maria had a date. While Laura helped Ampara get the dinner started, Cal and Stan Colby took their drinks out onto the shady patio and sat in the deep redwood chairs.

Colby said, “Laura’s been telling me how that company keeps you on the move, Cal.”

“From now on there ought to be more time between trips.”

“I had me my wandering years. Panama, Venezuela, Haiti, Algeria. Finally lost the taste for it. Found me a lasting job. They’ll never stop building stuff at that Proving Ground. I guess I’m a little older than you are. Maybe you’ll get tired of it too.”

“I’ve been tired of it for quite a while.” Colby looked at him with mild speculation. “Anybody forcing you to keep it up?”

“I’ve been sort of promoted out of that end of it, finally,”

“Known Laura a long time, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I know how much help you were to her after her husband died, and I know she appreciates it. She puts a lot of store in your advice, Cal.”

“I hope it’s been good advice.”

Colby frowned. “One thing she had to know, and that was if she could get along in the world by herself. A person has to find that out. And I guess she’s proved it, wouldn’t you say?”

“She certainly has.”

“Cal, I can’t tell you how glad I am you could come here at just this time.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“I hear her coming, so we’ll have to talk about it later on.” They got up as she came out, carrying her drink.

“Rest easy, gentlemen. We have lots of time. The kids were famished, so Ampara is feeding them first. Every man is his own bartender, so don’t be shy. What were you talking about? Me, I hope.”

“Naturally,” Cal said. “I was just telling Stan how business life has turned you into a brittle, grasping, arrogant woman.”

“Now just a minute!” Stan said with obviously genuine indignation.

“I even cheat myself at solitaire,” Laura said. “Don’t be upset, Stan. Cal never smiles when he’s making a joke.”

“Strange kind of a joke,” Colby mumbled.

“A nice woman can’t spend all day cheating tourists without some little signs of moral disintegration,” Cal said.

“And whipping the help. Don’t leave that out,” she said.

“The Gutierrez family loves Laura,” Stan Colby said. “Every one of them just loves her. You got to say one thing for the Mexicans. You treat ’em right, you get a lot of loyalty. A lot of loyalty.”

“A lot of Mexican loyalty?” Cal asked mildly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Colby asked.

“I just didn’t know there were different kinds.”

“This fountain is a fake,” Laura said. “In land as dry as this, it looks like conspicuous waste, doesn’t it? But it uses the same water over and over. Kit asked me one day if the water didn’t get tired.”

“Those are great kids, Laura. Just great,” Colby said.

“Now one of you can fix my drink,” she said. “Don’t all jump at once. You win, Stan dear.”

The conversation at dinner was strained from time to time, but Laura didn’t seem to notice. Cal found himself baiting Colby too often. It seemed a childish thing to do, a display of bad manners, and he attributed it to an irritability arising from his wearied condition. Colby seemed a sincere, honest, uncomplicated fellow.

After dinner was over, Colby had a chance to continue his conversation with Cal while Laura was cleaning up. She’d sent Ampara home earlier. The night air was cool and dry. The stars looked too numerous, cold and remote.

Colby said hastily, “To get back to what I was saying. She’s got no brother or father to turn to. And she’s worked too hard on this place. It took a lot out of her. It’s time she had some more advice from you, Cal. I know you want the best kind of life for her.

“I love that woman, and she knows it. God knows I’ve made it plain enough. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her. My kids haven’t got a proper home and, in a way of speaking, hers don’t either. And all four of our kids get along just fine with both of us, and each other. I make pretty fair money. I’ve been asking her to marry me. Right now she’s wavering on the brink, so to say, and she needs a little push, and you can give it to her. I swear I’d be good to her. I’m a steady man, Cal. I don’t play around, and I drink moderate, and I’d never lay a hand on her. Along with my first wife, I think she’s one of the finest women ever walked the earth. She’s carrying too big a load, and it’s time for her to have a proper home again. I guess you can see all sides of it, and I know you’ll do the right thing and give her the right kind of advice. I could say it’s none of your darn business, but I know how she turns to you for advice.”

“This is pretty sudden.”

“Not to me, it isn’t. From now on, waiting time is time wasted, the way I figure it. You can sort of imagine she had me here so you could look me over. Maybe you and me we don’t get on so good together, but I know you’re fair enough to see that doesn’t mean Laura and I couldn’t get on just fine.”

“That could have been a reason for her getting us together.”

“You’ll know for sure when she asks you what you think of me.”

“Yes, I guess I will.”

“Funny thing. After Edith, I never thought I’d find another woman I’d want to marry. Edith got cheated, you know. She got the wandering years, the years when I was doing a lot of scratching. She missed out on the fat years, most of them.”

“What about this place?”

“It’s done the good it was supposed to do. She isn’t a woman meant to live a widow’s life. I’d have her sell it right out, and put the money where she’d have the income from it all her own to use any way she wants.”

“You have it all figured out.”

“I’ve been thinking about it for some time, Cal.”

“I’d like that same opportunity. To think about it.”

“What is there to think about?”

“It’s the process one generally goes through before one hands out any gratuitous advice, Stan.”

“But you know it’s right for her.”

Laura rejoined them then. The three of them talked idly for a long time. Cal realized Colby was trying to outsit him, and in spite of his weariness he did not want to let that happen.

Finally Laura reminded Stan of the lateness of the hour and his long drive home. Colby was obviously reluctant, but soon he said good-night graciously enough and drove off, accelerating through the night, heading east through Mesilla toward Las Cruces.

“Sweet guy,” Laura said idly.

“Seems a very decent man.”

“I’ll walk you to your cottage, sir, so you won’t lie down and go to sleep in the path.”

“There’s a definite risk of that.”

“I haven’t really had a chance to talk to you. Will you be in shape for talking tomorrow?”

“If I happen to wake up. Sure.”

It was noon when he awakened. He had slept so soundly he could not at first comprehend where he was. He felt rested, but when he remembered the Colby problem he felt strangely depressed. He showered and dressed and went down to the main house. Laura was full of high spirits. She gave him coffee, and told him they were going on a picnic brunch. She had hired a girl to help Maria in the shop for the rest of the time he would be there.

They went in her car. She drove because she knew the roads and knew exactly where they were going. She headed in a generally northwesterly direction, taking little roads that became increasingly rough the higher they climbed. They left the car at the mouth of a small canyon, then climbed a winding path which ended in a picnic grove of ponderosa pines looking out over a distant vista of desert and mesas. A shelf of rock formed their picnic bench.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Wild and beautiful. How did you find it?”

“Pure luck. A year ago. I come here alone when I feel broody and beat. It renews me, sort of. I’ve come here fairly often lately.”

“Broody and beat?”

“Just thoughtful, Cal. Wondering. Thinking.”

“What about?”

“Let’s eat first.”

After they had finished, he said, “You have been coming here to think about what?”

“The worst of my venture is over, and I’m on safe ground. So now I begin to feel... I don’t know... unutilized... unrealized. I could start a big expansion program and get all overworked again, I suppose. Too busy to think. But that doesn’t seem to be a good answer.”

“You’ve done a wonderful job.”

“And where am I?”

He found the next words astonishingly difficult to say. “Maybe you’re the sort of woman who can’t feel any genuine sense of usefulness unless she’s married.”

She turned and looked at him gravely. “I’ve thought of that, of course.”

“Could that be it?”

“I think that could be it,” she said in a small voice.

“But to be married just for the sake of being married doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

“I’d have to be in love.”

“Are you?”

“That’s a good question, Cal. That’s a dandy question. I sort of think I am.”

“You should be sure, you know. You should sound a little more joyful.”

“Should I?”

He got to his feet and stared at the faraway desert.

Laura said again, “Should I, Cal? Is that the way you tell you’re in love?”

He turned and saw that she was standing, too. He looked at her, almost with consternation and something seemed to click into place at the back of his mind. She was turned toward him, waiting. With his voice pitched slightly higher than usual, he said, “What do you want? What do you want me to say?”

“I want to hear anything you want to say.”

He took her by the upper arms. There was a strange expression on his face, and the pressure of his fingers hurt her.

“What I want to say, and what you want to hear are different things, Lollie. What do I want to say? Good God, I feel as if the bottom has fallen out of the world.” He shook her, a small surprising violence. “I love you. I didn’t know it until last time when I was here helping you buy from those crafty old thieves. I didn’t really know it until I got back, and then I knew that way back as far as the time we parked on that road and sat at that table. Even then.” He shook her again. “How could I feel joyful? Thirty-five letters from you. Thirty-five exactly. I read them all again, last night.”

Her voice was so low he couldn’t hear the first part of her response. “...impossible for you to have come here just once in the last twenty-one months.”

“What? I wanted to.”

“And I asked you to, didn’t I, in at least a dozen little ways?”

“But all that would have done was made it worse.”

“Made what worse?”

“Wanting you, and knowing I didn’t have a prayer.”

“There was love in your letters.”

“What?”

“I have thirty-four from you. I read them all last night, all of them. Love, Cal. Clumsily hidden.”

He looked at her soberly. “How about Colby?”

Her eyes went wide. “Colby? How did he get into this?”

“Wasn’t he on display last night?”

“Heavens, no!”

“But you’re wavering on the edge of saying yes to him.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Some wavering! I’ve given him a dozen answers, and every one has been no. He’s a bore about it, dear. I couldn’t possibly marry him. He’s a dear, sweet, reliable, earnest man. But he is absolutely humorless. Could I endure that? Of course not. He’s good-humored, but without humor. And there is a tragic difference. I couldn’t marry a man like that. Now let go of my arms. I’ll have to wear sleeves for two weeks.”

He released her suddenly and, just as suddenly, she came into his arms, vital, lithe and very sure of herself.

He held her, feeling the beginnings of a wondrous warmth. “Do you love me?” he asked.

“Golly, Cal! Do you want it in writing. I love you! I got you here and got you to admit it, like pulling teeth.”

A midday wind sighed in the pine boughs overhead. He pulled her to the grass and kissed her to a softness, to a sweet drowse, to murmurs and promises and the tears that mark the end of being alone.

“Between the lines of all the letters, my darling,” she said. “Yours and mine. Growing. But I knew it. I guess you didn’t or you would have come to me sooner.”

“I wanted to. But I goofed it that other time.”

“Your noble gesture. To be married just for the sake of being married doesn’t make much sense. We weren’t ready then. But it didn’t mean we couldn’t ever be. I was half a person in the wrong way. I had to turn into a whole person and then start feeling... fragmented another way.”

“I guess I can like it without understanding it.”

“Of course, dear.”

“So where do we go from here?”

She straightened up abruptly. “Darling, for longer than I care to remember, I’ve been making all the little decisions and all the middle-sized decisions and all the big decisions. From now on I’ll make little ones. I’ll split the middle-sized ones with you. The rest are all yours.”

“Put a price on the place that’ll move it quickly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It will take two weeks for me to get straightened away to take a month off. I haven’t taken a vacation in years. It could start... August first. Find out the local ground rules so we can be married here August first.”

“Yes sir!”

“Find a good place to park your kids for the month of August.”

“Right!”

“We’ll come back here from our trip, gather up the kids, find temporary quarters in San Francisco and be settled into a house by the time school opens.”

“Consider it done, sir.”

“And there’ll be a platoon of executive wives, honing their little knives for you, Lollie.”

“They don’t know it, but they’ll be playing my song.”

“Rough, huh?”

“No, dear. Just invulnerable. That’s what the loved and loving woman always is. Infuriatingly invulnerable. More so now, I guess, than I’ve ever been.”

“Except to me.”

“Oh, there’s that, yes.”

They beamed at each other and then laughed aloud, each knowing the rareness of that special kind of joy.

“Like kids,” he said.

“I’m kind of a wrinkled kid, Cal.”

He drew her into his arms again. They kissed, and then kissed again, then sat breathless.

“I’ve needed you, Cal,” she said. “I needed you each time you helped, and now it’s all right. I needed the complete change of scene and all the hard work. I needed to put all this time between me and Mitch. I love him still. You know that, don’t you? You accept it.”

“Of course.”

He sat in silence for a little while, his arm around her. “Lollie?”

“Yes dear.”

“How come I missed all my cues?”

She was tempted to chide him in some fond and loving way, but then recalled one of the first commandments of the executive wife. Solemnly she said, “I guess it’s a kind of compensation, dear. You see, you are so very, very good at everything else, you earned the right to have one small blind spot.”

“I still can’t believe it.”

Laura smiled placidly at him. “You will, darling. That I can promise.”

Content

John D. MacDonald
The Widow’s Estate