Going to Bend (2 page)

Petie shrugged. “I don’t know. They’ll grow up. They’ll date, they’ll make stupid choices. At some point they’ll realize their lives aren’t nearly as good as the ones they expected. Same old same old. Everyone’s ruined somewhere along the line.”

Rose started to laugh. “Oh, Petie.”

“Really. Sooner or later something terrible’s always going to come along. It’s really just a question of timing.”

Rose took the carrot peeler and started scraping potatoes, a small mountain of them, into the sink. “Something terrible like what happened to those boys is not going to happen to everyone, Petie. My God.”

“Of course not. It could even be something that seems like not much—moving to another town, say, or having bad acne or liking beer too much. Or it could be something quiet like hopelessness or boredom. No one ever said that ruin always comes in a big loud package.”

Rose watched Petie tear apart some sprigs of parsley and toss them into one of the pots. “Well, I’m thinking I might start driving Carissa to school.”

“Does she worry about the trip?” Petie stirred some heavy cream into one of the pots.

“No.”

“Does she complain about having to wait after school?”

“No, but—”

“So she’s a smart kid. She can take care of herself. Stir.” Petie put her spoon in Rose’s hand.

“You worry about the boys,” Rose pointed out, stirring.

“I worry about Ryan. I
fear
for Loose. There’s a difference.”

Five-year-old Loose Coolbaugh (short for Lucifer, although even that wasn’t his real name) was a fearless, physical kid: he would hit before he’d concede he was wrong. His playground daredeviltry had already made him, in less than a month, an object of admiration in his first-grade class. He’d been to the emergency room over in Sawyer twice in just that time period: once for a minor concussion when he swung into thin air off the monkey bars, once for stitches in his hand from an old can he’d systematically broken apart with a rock.

Ryan, on the other hand, was frail and suffered for it. At eight years old, he still had frequent asthma attacks, night fears and daytime dreads: large dogs, sneaker waves, public toilets, physical contests. He was also bookish, which no one in the family could fathom. Loose needled him mercilessly, and often got the upper hand. Eddie Coolbaugh used to push him to try harder, be bolder, cry less often, but since Loose had come along Eddie had lost interest. Petie and Rose often took turns bringing Ryan along on after-school errands, just to give him a break from the household. Petie protected him when she could, but she admitted to Rose more than once that she didn’t exactly get the point of him, either.

“I think this is ready,” Rose said. “It’s getting late. We better go.” Petie was cutting Rose’s scraped potatoes and stowing them in a Tupperware container filled with water, for the morning. The finished corn chowder on the stove was one of their favorites. The other vat was lentil, a recipe of Rose’s that wasn’t even on the Souperior’s list. The soup was supposed to have been vegetable barley, but Petie refused to fix anything submitted by Jeannie Fontineau. Jeannie Fontineau was nothing but a sad-eyed fat woman now, but she had fooled around with Eddie Coolbaugh a little bit years ago, before she got so fat but after he and Petie were married. Jeannie Fontineau wasn’t the only one Eddie had ever fooled around with, but she was the first, and that made her stand out. Nadine would be mad about the soup substitution, but they’d just tell her something.

Petie stowed the Tupperware container in the refrigerator and said, “You call Nadine and tell her we’re on our way. I’ll load the car.” The vats
of soup were too hot and too heavy for either of the women to carry, so Eddie Coolbaugh had rigged up a table-high dolly for them, and a ramp down the two steps outside. From there they just slid the vats into the back of Petie’s old Ford Colt. Together they jockeyed the huge pots onto the dolly and out the kitchen door. Petie disappeared down the ramp while Rose dialed. It was ten-thirty in the morning; Souperior’s started serving lunch at eleven. Nadine answered on the first ring.

“You’re pushing it, you guys,” she said when she heard Rose’s voice. She sounded unusually testy; Rose guessed it was a migraine day.

“Petie’s got the engine running. Corn chowder and lentil.”

“Where’s the vegetable barley?”

“We got a deal on salt pork, so we switched. Does it matter? Did you publish the menu in the paper?”

“As it happens, the ad doesn’t start until next week. But I’d like to have known. You should have asked me. I’m the owner. You’re the employees.”

“You sound like you have a headache.”

“I have late soup, is what I have. Give me a break, Rose.”

“We’d be there already if we weren’t talking.”

Nadine sighed. “You’re both taking advantage of me.”

“Yes,” Rose said, “but we’re completely supportive. Look for us in five minutes.” Rose retrieved the empty dolly and closed the kitchen door behind her, smiling. She’d just been kidding about a newspaper ad.

S
OUPERIOR’S TURNED
its back on the highway to moon westward from the high and rocky rim of Hubbard Bay. Petie remembered when the shambly little place had been the barbershop and all the Hubbard men had looked alike because old Walt Miller hadn’t gone to barber school up in Portland yet to learn a second way to cut hair. Petie’s father used to hang around the place half plowed making a pest of himself, especially after her mother died and they lost the house and had to move into the camp trailer up at the top of Chollum Road. Old Man was
a contentious drunk; sometimes Walt had had to sneak out of his own shop to get away and call her to come get him. Once, while Walt wasn’t looking, her father had taken his little buck knife and carved into the shop’s doorjamb,
I got fucked in ’74. JST
. That was the year her mother’s uninsured hospital bills came to seventy-five thousand dollars and she died anyway. Walt had sanded most of the message away, but he’d left the JST as an expression of sympathy. Although the initials had been covered over with a few coats of paint by now, Petie could still feel a faint depression with her fingertips.

But Old Man had been dead for five years, Walt for two, and now Souperior’s was wedged between the Kristmas Kottage and Passionetta’s Fudge and Candies, its ruddy old fir floor rippling westward towards the sea. Nadine had edged the great drafty old plate-glass windows in country lace and dark-stained oak, and she hosed and squeegeed away the salt every morning from a catwalk Gordon had built for her the first week they were there. The one thing that made Nadine tolerable, in Petie’s opinion, was the sense of honor with which she looked out over the foamy chop. This woman, whatever else you could say about her—and Petie hadn’t found much else worth saying about her—loved the place with a deep and abiding respect. In Petie’s book that nearly made up for the rest of her, which was all nerves, snip and anxiety. More than once Petie had held her up to Rose as living proof that some people shouldn’t give up smoking.

Nadine met them now at the door, a thin woman with graying flyaway hair and an overbite. “This is not going to happen again,” she said, holding the door as Petie staggered through with one of the pots of soup.

“There’s still fifteen minutes until opening,” Rose said over her shoulder. “And the soup is nice and hot. All you need is a ladle.”

“That’s not the point,” Nadine said.

“What is the point?” Petie said, returning from the kitchen.

“The point is, I need to be able to depend on you, Patricia. The point is, my customers depend on you.”

“The point is, you need to goose the guy who’s sitting on your refrigerator order,” said Petie, slapping Nadine lightly on the back. It always
amused her to hear herself called Patricia, a name she hadn’t gone by since the day she was baptized thirty-one years ago. “It’s insane for us to be doing same-day cooking.”

Nadine wilted. “He said there were delays at the factory. It’ll be another week, maybe two.”

“We could probably rent freezer space over at Pacific Seas Packing,” Rose said. “It’s slow right now.”

“I’m not serving frozen food here,” Nadine said. “Not even for one day. You know that.”

Nadine didn’t realize that in order to get more than one day off a week they doubled up sometimes, freezing and storing the extra batches down at the fish plant thanks to a favor owed Jim Christie, Rose’s boyfriend. They thawed the soup out a couple of days ahead, reheated it that morning, and whichever of them delivered it to Souperior’s put on a dirty apron saved from earlier in the week just to make it look like they’d been cooking. Rose wanted to tell Nadine the truth, but Petie thought it was nicer to just leave her in the dark, where she wouldn’t worry herself.

“Look, Nadine, we’re sorry,” Rose said. “We didn’t cut it so close on purpose. When we’re cooking things we haven’t made before, it’s not always easy to guess the timing right. When the refrigerator gets here and we can get a day ahead of ourselves you’ll be off the hook. Okay? We know how important it is. And we like this job. We’re not going to let you down.”

While Rose and Nadine talked, Petie walked over to the coffeepot and helped herself to a good strong cup. Whatever else, Nadine made great coffee, dark and fragrant, nothing like the weak-tea coffee they served down at the Anchor: the early morning boys took their coffee thin and watery, and hell would freeze over before they’d ever let Connie or Rose or any of the other waitresses thicken it up. Petie had worked on them every morning for two years and not one of them had given an inch. That was before Ryan was born, when she still went down every morning at six-thirty with Eddie Coolbaugh. There’d been her and Rose and pretty-faced Pogo Robinson, and Eddie, of course, plus eight or
nine others in the back three booths. Petie had sat in the same chair at the same table, morning after morning, keeping a plate of eggs or pancakes going and smoking a cigarette or two, minding a cup of coffee for Rose to sneak from as she waited on them all. Petie was twenty, twenty-one then, cocky and lean, proud as hell of their new beater car and their mouse-scratchy one-bedroom apartment a block back of the highway. She could still remember all their morning go-to-work smells: the jean jackets that had aged on a barstool, the weather-beaten, sweat-permeated ball caps, the safety boots that gave off engine grease and fish, the newsprint from Dooley Burden, who had to do his crosstik. Petie and Rose and Connie had been the only women most days, and of them, Petie was the only paying customer. Petie liked it like that, liked their not talking any special way to her, liked the guff they gave, liked giving it back again. She’d even liked Eddie Coolbaugh, for that matter, with his clean pretty fingernails no matter what job he was working, his tucked-in shirt and big brass belt buckle centered like a hood ornament over his fly, the strut in his walk that almost fooled you into forgetting he was only five-seven. Eddie cared about looking good, and used hairspray on his thin blond hair long before it was fashionable, to keep it in place. In those days he still wasn’t letting anyone cut it but Petie.

All those mornings at the Anchor she had slouched low and easy in the vinyl tuck-and-roll booths, thinking she had a rightful place there, and then she got pregnant with Ryan. Suddenly no one was making eye contact anymore. The boys cleaned up their jokes around her. They stopped slapping at her back pockets with newspapers or jacket sleeves when she got mouthy. Just like that, they got polite and threw her over to the women. And except for Rose, Petie had never liked women—at least women her own age—and had never known how to be around them. So she defied them and kept going down for coffee right up to the day she delivered, but once Ryan came it was over. Ryan had cried all the time and Petie’s milk had backed up and clogged and she was awake twenty hours a day, sometimes more, and then Eddie Coolbaugh had started getting his hair cut by Jeannie Fontineau. No one but Rose came around for weeks, and then some of the women started to; Rose must have told
them Petie was in trouble up there alone in her lousy one-bedroom with no washer-dryer. She was so crazy by then she was grateful for the company, and the world had been nothing much but women ever since. She’d gotten better at them—there were always kids to talk about, for one thing—but she never felt the same about mornings after that, or about men, either.

Petie rubbed her eyes and watched the water: medium chop, medium high tide coming in. Paul Kramer’s boat
Mariah
was picking its way through the channel, loaded with rockfish. She and Rose had started cooking at five-fifteen, with a break to get everyone off to school, and Petie was tired. At least Eddie was working day shift right now at the mill over in Sawyer and would be gone until suppertime. He’d been working security there for just over a year: good job, good benefits. But when he was rotated to swing shift or graveyard it messed up their routine. He was always stirring up Loose or getting on Ryan for something, or else promising to do something with them and then not showing up.

Petie rubbed her eyes again. Something else had happened to them the year Ryan was born: Eddie Coolbaugh had gotten his first dirt bike between his legs. It was just a little gnat of a bike but he’d worked the machine until he wore it out, bumping over back trails and ripping new ones out of the woods. Broken fingers, torn-up knees, stupid stuff, but he loved it. Ever since that first bike he’d been trading and rebuilding and selling and rebuying and generally garfing up their garage and side yard. By then it hadn’t mattered that much to her. Somewhere in the back draft left by Ryan and Jeannie Fontineau, the spark between her and Eddie had been sucked right out. So had the talk. Now there were just little bits of nontalk like,
Do you think that clutch is still slipping
, and
What about fixing some of that venison Luther brought by
, and
I’m going down to the Wayside to have a couple beers
. That was good-days talk. On bad days it was,
Try picking up your clothes once in a while
, and
I thought you said you were coming home for supper
, and
Why don’t you be nice to Ryan for a change, he’s got your blood in his veins just as much as Loose and all you do is make him feel like shit
. They mainly got along, though, as long as Eddie was working and kept his hood ornament to himself. Every once in a
while Rose and her daughter Carissa came over to stay with the boys and they went and threw darts down at the Wayside like they used to, but Petie always won and that pissed Eddie off.