received came because she worked hard to see to her customers’ needs, not because she charmed them. And she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“I take it the gunshot wound wasn’t serious then?”
My mother was seeking corroboration for what she had heard from Doris Greiner, that and the small odd, possibly lurid detail that her regular informants might not have provided.
“A superficial abdominal laceration,” I said, not entirely sure of the rightness of the terminology, but proud nevertheless of my ability to use it.
“Lucky gal.”
“That’s what the doctor said.”
“You know anything else about her?”
“She worked at Burke’s. Lindahl. Louisa Lindahl. But you already know that.”
She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “She was living with the fellow who shot her. Lester Huston. Not married to, living with.” My mother was no moralist, but she obviously regarded this piece of information as essential to the narrative. “You know anything about him?”
“Not a thing.”
“Except that he had a bad temper.”
That verb’s tense almost slipped by me. “Had?”
Before answering, she devoted an unusual amount of time and care to pinching a scrap of tobacco from her lip. Then, as if she’d decided the entire smoking enterprise wasn’t worth the bother, she crushed out the cigarette.
She looked up at me, vaguely surprised. “You didn’t hear? Lester Huston killed himself in the county jail. Tore up a sheet, tied one end around his neck and the other around the frame of his cot, and then just leaned forward and strangled himself.”
“Damn!”
“So, no trial for Mr. Huston. And no getting up on the witness stand for Miss Lindahl.”
“Jesus Christ. He strangled himself?”
“Doris says that’s why they don’t have lights or any overhead fixtures in the cells. So the prisoners can’t hang themselves. But I guess where there’s a will there’s a way.”
“Nobody at the Dunbars’ said anything about ...”
“Maybe they don’t know. This is fresh news.” She stood and straightened her robe. “I guess your doctor can’t save’em all.”
That remark’s nasty edge was almost surely not an accident. I’d always suspected that my mother didn’t like Dr. Dunbar, and while jealousy would have been the obvious explanation, I doubted that was it. She knew I looked up to the doctor, and that I’d attached myself to the family. But those things didn’t seem to bother her. She subscribed to the laissez-faire school of parenting, a philosophy that reflected her own upbringing. She was the seventh of eleven children, and growing up on a dusty little family farm during the Depression fostered in her the belief that we all had to look out for ourselves in this world. Accordingly, she felt she was fulfilling her parental duties by providing food and shelter for her only child. As long as I stayed in school and out of jail, she’d stay out of my life.
No, my mother’s dislike of the doctor didn’t have its source in jealousy, not least because she believed it was a sin to be impressed by another human being. Her feelings about Rex Dunbar could best be understood in the context of the town’s divided opinion of itself. On one side were the town’s civic leaders and politicians, its merchants and professionals, and the wives of those men. Those people genuinely believed in the town’s slogan—“a city on the rise”—though the use of the term “city” was a bit overstated in light of the fact that its population was right around two thousand at the time. They truly thought that more people hadn’t settled in Willow Falls only because they didn’t know about it. And they saw the presence of Dr. Dunbar as corroboration of their view of Willow Falls as a special place. After all, the Dunbars were discerning, intelligent people, and they could only have chosen Willow Falls because they could see the town for what it was—a desirable place to make a life and raise a family. The attractive and refined Dr. and Mrs. Dunbar, in turn, gave the town a glitter it never had before they arrived. If Willow Falls could see the image of Rex Dunbar when it looked into the mirror, life there had to be ascendant.
My mother was squarely in the other camp, which included all those suspicious of outsiders and uneasy at the prospect of change. They felt that the Dunbars’ fine clothes, their grand house, and their trips to Minneapolis to take in the symphony or ballet were not markers of culture and sophistication, but rather of ostentation. And for many Minnesotans, there could be no greater failing. These folks were determinedly unpretentious, and their sense that life in Willow Falls didn’t amount to much was consistent with their perspective on life in general. In our wind-blown part of the world, where nothing rose higher than a few cottonwoods, to want too much or to reach too high was to set yourself up for inevitable disappointment. Not surprisingly, most of the people who felt this way had farming in their background; they might have been town dwellers by this point, but not for more than a generation or two, and they likely had a relative or two who still lived out in the country.
Before leaving the kitchen, my mother said, “Phil asked if you want to bus tables during your Christmas vacation. He’s willing to hire you on.”
Phil Palmer was my mother’s employer, and I knew she would have asked him for this favor. “I’m thinking about it.”
“Don’t think too long.”
My mother walked out of the kitchen, but then returned almost immediately to retrieve her Pall Malls. And she had another question for me. “How does Mrs. Dunbar fix her stuffing?”
“She mixes in sausage. And slices of apple. To keep it moist, she says.”
“Sausage and apple ... huh!” Her eyebrows rose as if she found Mrs. Dunbar’s method of preparing dressing more baffling than the news of the shooting.
“It was good.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Have you had your fill of turkey yet? If you haven’t, I could make a little one for us. But big enough so we’d have some extra for sandwiches.”
“That’s okay.”
“Well, let me know if you change your mind. Red Owl’s going to sell their leftover birds cheap.”
“But it wouldn’t be for Thanksgiving.”
“No, but it’d be turkey.”
I knew the Dunbar house so well that I could tell which of their four telephones Mrs. Dunbar had answered from the sound of her footsteps as she walked away to find her son after putting the receiver down. High heels on the wood floors—the telephone on the small table next to the wide staircase.
As soon as Johnny came on the line I asked, “Did you hear about Lester Huston?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Deputy Greiner called a little while ago to tell Dad what happened. Dad lit into him because apparently Greiner told Lester Huston that Louisa Lindahl was in critical condition. He made it sound like she was going to die. So Lester Huston thought there was a good chance he’d be charged with murder.”
“What
