Do you know what would happen if I put a wild spin on the ball and started knocking that 10 pin down?
I would start to think I am something special.
Do you know what they do in this town to anyone who thinks she is something special?
They eat her for lunch.
I walked home after bowling and it was so warm I could smell myself inside my coat. I took off my coat and my blouse was soaked with sweat. As I walked up the rise to the go-around, I could see that someone—Huff probably—had attempted to string Christmas lights on the tree in front of my little cottage, but had got only halfway through the job, as many of the lights were just lying on the grass.
In Huff’s house, Doc and Gerald were sitting around the kitchen table drinking Coors Light. Huff had his head in the oven but pulled it out when he heard the door shut behind me. His face was red and sweaty and smiling. He raised his whiskey, in that glass with a mallard on it that was perpetually fleeing a whiskey lake, and said, “Big turkey this year. Like there are two of them.” Then he squealed like a hog and pointed to my waist.
Gerald followed Huff’s hand. “Well. Isn’t that a lovely,” he said.
I had forgotten to take off the belt.
The laughter—it seemed to tip over chairs and go on for hours, but not from Gerald. Gerald just sat there, drinking his beer. Waiting.
I walked back down to my office and I cleaned the whole place with Formula 409. I fell asleep, scrunched up on the little green love seat in my waiting room, in sweaty clothes. When I woke up it was dawn and my cheek was stuck to the vinyl. But still I did not go home. I sat in my chair at my office and I waited for whoever would walk through the door.
I was hoping for the Vo-Ag teacher, but in the interest of clarity I can say that if it had been Clive, I would have been all right with that as well.
When the Vo-Ag teacher came, I let him in, and when he sat down across from me in the chair usually reserved for clients, I pulled the red ashtray off the shelf behind me and slid it toward him.
The Vo-Ag teacher put his big man clogs on my big wooden desk. Just like Clive, yes, but more compact, in control. He didn’t touch a single thing. He just lit a cigarette and waited.
“Would you like to hear a story?” I asked him.
“I’ve got all day,” he said.
So I told him.
There is a headstone out at the cemetery already engraved with my name. Before he died, my father had the prudence to purchase the plot right next to his.
There is more.
Immediately after my father’s funeral, when I was just eighteen years old, I was sitting in Huff’s dining room as blank as a new orphan could be. Huff was at the end of the table, cutting the obituary out of the paper and sticking it in a scrapbook with double-sided tape, muttering about how the whole world was going to shit and he was the only one who cared enough to document it. Doc was at the other end, alternating between staring at me and staring at the table, leaving giant drops of wetness on it from his eyes.
At some point, Doc reached into the pocket of his old denim shirt and pulled out his pack of cigarettes. There was one left. He tapped it on the table to set it, but he did it too hard and the cigarette snapped in half.
His face, it was like it melted. Then his body shook so hard the whole table shook, and, consequently, Huff’s scrapbook project shook, so Huff threw the double-sided tape at Doc and called him an old jackass and then shook with sobs himself.
I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I am just a good and helpful person. Maybe I have a natural inclination toward customer service. Maybe my father taught it to me. Maybe I will never know. But I picked up the double-sided tape and both ends of the broken cigarette and I taped the cigarette back together. Then I laid it on the table in front of Doc.
Doc looked at it and then he looked up at me with a kind of hopefulness, as if I had made some sort of important promise to him. I looked away to the double-sided tape in my hand. I turned it over and over.
Doc picked up the cigarette. He lit it. He smoked it all the way through the tape, which burned up with the cigarette, turned into smoke, and went up into the air and then into all of us.
“You’ll go far in this town,” I heard Doc say. I just nodded. I wasn’t proud or excited or even upset. I was relieved. It was done. I would go far in this town. This would be the town I would go far in.
I moved back into the little cottage next to Doc and Huff. My father owned it free and clear. I finished college by correspondence so I could work the business. When Gerald graduated high school, I married him because my father had once cheered loudly for him at a track meet. Gerald moved into the cottage and started driving school bus. For five years I did payroll for Mueller and under-the-table CPA work that one of Huff’s clients in Decorah signed off on because he owed Huff money, until I got my CPA license.
I never lost one business day, not counting my father’s funeral. Last year, the Chamber of Commerce elected me secretary and treasurer, my father’s old positions, vacant for almost seventeen years. By then the Chamber was essentially inactive—it was just me and Doc and Huff and Pastor Howie Claus, even though Howie often wasn’t invited because his righteousness was so tiresome and his church has tax-exempt status.
Mostly we just ate bean soup together on Wednesdays.
“So that’s what a nice girl like you is doing in a place like this,” the Vo-Ag teacher said.
“That is why I still live here, yes,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” the Vo-Ag teacher said. He was looking at me in a way that showed me he was serious, that he really cared, or at least that’s what I believed at the time.
“My husband bought a hot tub,” I said. “I will stew here until I die.”
Then some kid threw a mathematical compass at the back of Gerald’s head while he was driving the school bus.
The pointy end of the compass stuck into the back of Gerald’s neck, and it continued to be stuck there even as he drove the busload of kids to the hospital. Judy Skody, the nurse on duty, yanked the mathematical compass out of Gerald’s neck while he was standing in the hospital lobby. The kids ran off the bus and scattered through town like roaches, eventually ending up at Prairie Lanes, where they tipped over a vending machine and smashed the glass for the candy, until Dusty and Vern from the police department showed up with their police car lights flashing and they all scattered like roaches again.
I heard from Judy later that Gerald had been very mature about it, that he simply said thank you and then sat silent and still on the examining table as Doc stapled the wound closed, that he patiently waited an extra hour for the painkiller prescription to be ready so he wouldn’t have to make a special trip back.
Gerald stayed home for a couple of days, watching television, eating all the casseroles my clients brought to my office for him, and making me check his wound every two hours when I was home, even
