I put both feet on the floor. "I don't come in. I'm sure you're both perfectly nice ex-drunks, except maybe him''-I motioned at Shane-"but I have no desire to continue this relationship."

Shane did the bob-up-and-down-on-his-hands deal. "Listen to the college girl firecracker. 'Continue this relationship.' I'll give you twenty dollars to see your t.i.ts, little missy."

"In your dreams, p.r.i.c.k face."

Shane's face ducked low and went sly. "What if I said I was dying and I could go peacefully if only you'd give me twenty minutes of nice?"

"I'd say your death isn't worth twenty minutes of my time."

Lloyd stepped toward me. "Do you have a driver's license?"

"What are you guys, an act?"

He rubbed his right hand on his overalls leg. "We both lost ours to alcohol."

"I could get mine back if my legs worked," Shane said.

I said, "You shouldn't drink if you can't handle it."

The ripple pa.s.sed through Oly again. Faith t.i.ttered. "Ain't it amazing, Lloyd's sober and can't drive because the law thinks he's drunk, and Maurey's a drunk but can drive because the law thinks she's sober."

"Irony," Shane shouted. "Get yourself planted in a wheelchair and the world explodes with irony."

"What's a wheelchair got to do with it?" Faith asked.

This a-drunk taking for granted was wearing thin. n.o.body said "Maurey's drunk"; they said "Maurey's a drunk." I hadn't admitted that yet, and everyone else's unquestioned conviction of the fact showed a lack of sensitivity.

I stood up from the bar stool. "None of this relates to me, I'm going home."

Shane hunkered down. For a man living on wheels, his head did an amazing amount of vertical action. "Where's that?"

"What?"

"That home you're going to? Is home the tent with the list?"

Lloyd took another step toward me. He's one of those guys who can make his eyes go totally unguarded. "If you have a driver's license, we can take you to North Carolina."

"I'm not going anywhere." I wondered if I slapped him would Lloyd blink. In the unnecessary-movement category, he was the exact opposite of Shane. "Why would I go to North Carolina?"

Shane hooted again. "Don't play stupid with us, la.s.sie."

Lloyd said, "You have a daughter there you need to be with."

"How do you-"

"And the people in charge will never return your son if you don't get off the front lawn."

You know that tone you imagine Jesus talked in, that's Lloyd. I met a guy in college had deep-sizzled his brain on LSD who talked the same way. It's like the speaker is wearing a sweatshirt that says "I am gentle. Kick me, I won't mind."

"Why does the whole d.a.m.n state know my business and feel the right to offer an opinion?"

Faith cackled. "You're the valley entertainment right now, Maurey. Unlucky for you it's off-season. Middle of July n.o.body would've cared that you've gone nuts in public."

"I'm not nuts."

Lloyd still hadn't blinked. "Nuts or drunk, you need to get out of sight and we need help hauling a load of Coors to North Carolina."

I looked over at the pinball machine and the jukebox. The jukebox had a picture of a ferris wheel on the back with a happy couple in the top chair. Next to them was a pay phone with hundreds of numbers written on the wall. "Why North Carolina?" I asked.

Shane wheeled toward me too. I was being surrounded. "Because the cur Ashley Montagu burned Granma's barn."

"I knew it would be something like that."

"And Lloyd's looking for his wife who ran off."

Faith spoke from the backside of the surrounding forces. "Watch out, he'll show you her picture any minute now."

Lloyd finally blinked with a moment of insecurity. I wondered what the picture of his wife looked like-a skinny-armed farm wife with a dust-colored face, or maybe a small-town beauty operator type. The kind who chewed gum and gabbed while they touched women on the head.

"You drive all the time," I said. "I've seen you show up late for AA."

I looked at the hair on Lloyd's arm while he talked. I've always been into hair on men's forearms. Lloyd's arm muscles were stringy yet tough. The hair lay dark and uphill instead of inside to outside like on most people. "I can drive fine, just not legal. Mangum knows I'm clean so he lets me loose on the north end of the county, but we can't take Moby d.i.c.k on the road without a licensed driver."

"And one hundred cases of Coors," Shane added.

All men want something from me, but usually it's out-front man-on-woman stuff. These guys had dreamed up some scam or another that involved more than s.e.x or mothering. "I'm outta here."

"Maurey." Lloyd used his unguarded eyes as a weapon-like a sheep dog left outside at thirty below zero.

I neatly deflected his needs. "You'll have to save yourselves because you're not using me."

p.i.s.sed-off thunderheads piled up over Yellowstone, but the Tetons sparkled in the west, clear and real. I stood on the Sagebrush mud mat breathing fresh air and listening through the door for the word that always follows when a man wants something and a woman won't give it.

"Holy Hannah, what a c.u.n.t." That was Shane. I couldn't hear Lloyd's answer. I remembered his eyes, though, and the hair on his forearms, and I pretended to myself he didn't say "Dumb b.i.t.c.h" or "Women." He probably did and I was just wishful thinking. Sometimes I'm not cynical enough.

The white ambulance out front was like an antique, the kind of bus you think about Hemingway nailing nurses in the back of while outside the Spanish civil war rages in the olive groves. Shaped like a loaf of Wonder bread, it had stretched windows along the sides, what appeared to be an extra layer of white sheet cake on top, and airplane running lights at the eight corners of the loaf. Over the two-pane windshield a sign read Ambulance backward, so when it came roaring up on a car the driver could look in his rearview mirror and see Ambulance written the right way. Below that was another hand-lettered sign-Moby d.i.c.k.

That explained one of the out-of-the-blue references they'd tossed off inside. Lloyd had personified his vehicle. I did the same daily with bottles; that was natural. I guess he did it with cars. Lord knows the piece of junk looked like a white whale.

I cupped my hands around my eyes to peer in the back window. Engine parts and loose playing cards lay over ratty blankets and sleeping bags. They read a lot of magazines-Playboy, Popular Mechanics, Reader's Digest, and Guideposts, some others I couldn't see their covers. The prevailing motif was grease. Jesus himself couldn't have fit a hundred cases of anything in that back end.

The d.i.c.k did have a trailer hitch, which seemed odd for an ambulance. A trailer would solve the s.p.a.ce problem, but I'd have to fumigate before stepping in the door. If only there was a way to tape Shane's mouth shut. Two thousand miles cooped up with that hoot of his and I'd commit murder.

"Whoa," I said out loud. "Don't even think it. Better to rot in jail."

The frustration came because the skinny farmer in sandals got to me with that daughter jab. He knew I needed Shannon. Was Lloyd intuitive or a lucky guesser or what? If he was so smart about human feelings, why had his wife run off? If somebody ran off from me, I sure wouldn't go chasing after them.

Here's the deal about love and children. A few people cared about me-Sam Callahan, Lydia, Mom in her limited way-but for them, caring was an in-spite-of situation. "Maurey is a mess, but we love her anyway." Mess might not be the exact word they used.

But Shannon and Auburn loved me without acknowledging flaws. Shannon thought I was okay. I could rest if I was around someone who thought I was okay.

It seemed the right idea to walk the block from the Sagebrush to Kimball's Food Market. Those two shots might be just enough excuse for Mangum Potter to crucify my a.s.s. Besides, the day was pretty. Living in a land with seven months of winter, a person comes to appreciate spring. Alcohol use and a suicide attempt hadn't killed off all the fun of fresh air and nifty sunlight.

Mrs. Hinchman's wild rose bushes sported tiny pink blossoms. The day I lost Auburn the buds had been nothing but green swells. A red-tailed hawk wheeled over the grade school playground, searching for lunch in the jungle gym and teeter-totters. GroVont was a good place to raise kids, compared to Idaho Falls or Utah, anyway. I'd been raised here and I wasn't evil or anything. Shannon was fine, although she'd left when she was four to go off to college with Sam.

Shannon was more than fine, she was beautiful. Inadvertently, I'd given birth to a bundle of curiosity and compa.s.sion. I don't remember having compa.s.sion at her age, at least not for anything other than a horse. If I lived in Greensboro, I could sit on the porch swing as she talked about dolls or cotillions or whatever girls talk about. In the evenings she would kiss my cheek and say "Good night, Mama." n.o.body had ever done that.

It would be nice to hear Sam go on about G.o.d's relationship to baseball or writing stories or something equally as silly. Normally his girlfriends didn't like me any more than Dothan liked Sam. They couldn't catch on that we'd had a child together but we'd never dated or felt an iota of romance. This new girlfriend in the letter didn't sound any better than the last six, although I would bet the ranch she'd moved up the road by now anyway. Sam was too giving to hold a woman more than a month.

Outside Kimball's, Mary Ellen and Shawn McKenzie played on the painted mechanical horse. Mary Ellen had managed to balance her little brother on the horse's head while she sat on his stiff tail-born trick riders.

Shawn took his fist out of his mouth. "Nicgel."

Mary Ellen fleshed out the thought. "Can we have a nickel, Mrs. Talbot? We want a ride, but it takes a nickel."

"Let's see if I can find one." They waited patiently while I fished for change. Mary Ellen wore a pinafore that I know Mabel made from a pattern she cut down, because it had darts. I'd bought Shannon enough birthday presents to know dresses for seven-year-olds don't come with darts.

"Here you go, kids-two nickels for two rides."

Shawn held out his chubby hand, but Mary Ellen took the money. "Thank you, Mrs. Talbot."

Shawn said, "Tang you, Mrs. Talbud."

"You're welcome."

The deal is that Lydia is a personal appearance sn.o.b. She sends away to New York or someplace exotic for all her makeup and shampoo and conditioners. Her fingernail polish came from Paris and cost about two dollars a finger. Her shampoo was concocted from edible objects-eggs, aloe, and cuc.u.mbers-and made me smell like a salad. Time for some regular green Prell. I also picked up a comb, two Hershey bars, and a picture postcard of two girls in bikinis lying on lawn chairs set in a s...o...b..nk. Dad would get a kick out of that.

Reaction from the fellow shoppers was roughly the same as it had been at Zion's-t.i.tters, stares, or embarra.s.sment, each in about equal doses. If you've ever been pregnant and thirteen in a small town, you know the vibes. I'd made myself fairly insult proof, but you never completely outgrow the leper thing.

Mr. Betts made a pa.s.s at me. On the canned goods aisle, he blocked my path with his shopping cart, held both my hands in his, and did a soul search of my eyes over frozen cranberries and his wife's Dexatrim.

"If you need anything at all, Maurey, don't hesitate to call me at the office."

"Sure, Don."

"I always told your father that if you ever came to a bad end, I'd be here to help. I think he took comfort in that."

"I'm certain he did."

Mr. Betts's hands gave a squeeze. "I'd do anything for Buddy's little girl."

At the checkout counter Lucinda Wright held up my comb for Mr. Kimball to inspect. "Is this a sharp object?"

Mr. Kimball peered down from the gla.s.sed-in box where he counts money and adds figures. "It's a comb, Lucinda."

"I thought it might be a sharp object."

"Look at her, she needs a comb."

Mary Ellen and Shawn still played on the horse that had run the course of its two rides. Mary Ellen had moved up on the horse's hips, only facing back the wrong way. Shawn smiled when he saw me and held out his hand.

"Sorry," I said. "Out of nickels."

Shawn kept smiling as if he'd expected as much.

"Say h.e.l.lo to your mother for me."

"She'll say h.e.l.lo back to you," Mary Ellen said.

I'd just reached the curb and was about to step into the street when Mary Ellen and Shawn broke into song.

How dry I am, hic, How dry I am, hic, How wet I'll be If I don't find, hic, The bathroom key.

Shawn erupted into giggles while Mary Ellen stared at me with defiance, daring me to come back righteous. I looked from his five-year-old innocence to her seven-year-old experience, and I saw what had happened. The town had won.

10.

"If we can't leave town in twenty minutes, I don't want to go."

Lloyd and Shane did a mutual freeze frame. Lloyd was bent along one of the Sagebrush's crooked cues, the tip of his tongue showing pink between his lips. Shane sat over past the phone with his finger in the pinball machine coin return and a bag of chocolate-chip cookies on his lap.

"It may take a bit more than twenty minutes to organize," Lloyd said.

Shane pulled a wheelchair 180. "No, it won't."

I stalked in, holding my shampoo-and-comb sack. "What's the scam on the beer?"

The scam was that Buck Fratelli would sell the boys one hundred cases of Coors for four dollars eighty-five cents a case, and a high school friend of Shane's in Gastonia, North Carolina, would buy it for ten a six-pack.

"Four thousand bucks for a four hundred-eighty-five-dollar investment," Shane bragged. "You can't beat that with a stick."

"You said they'd cough up five a bottle."

"That's what my friend retails it for out of his tavern. You can't expect me to move twenty-four hundred bottles one at a time."

"You'll need a trailer."

The Bobbsey Twins needed more than a trailer and a driver's license-they needed cash. Lloyd had the beer money, Shane had squat. I was expected to provide gasoline, food, and alcohol-soda pop for the men-for a two-thousand-mile run.