Nothing but a Smile (37 page)

And so Wink got out the papers Doerbom had just sent him and they got the manager of the motor court, who had a little cardboard sign in his bug-screened window announcing he was also a notary public, to notarize their signatures. And then he escorted his wife back to their unit, where he took a match and burned the bottom of the document, fanning the flame just until
it had eaten away their signatures, then snuffing the edge with a hiss in the toilet. Part of the embossing seal remained, a raised arc of blisters that indicated it had, moments before, been official and legally binding, and then he borrowed Sal's lipstick and wrote in red across it:

He folded it back up, sealed it in a business envelope addressed to Price (no return address), put the whole deal in the manila envelope addressed to the lawyer, and walked it back to the big mailbox by the manager's office.

He knew in his gut that would be the end of it. Because guys like Jericho Price sometimes went after things just to go after them; just to squeeze some of the juice out of the lemon. Since they had no creative talents, once the lemon was wrung dry, guys like that were shit out of luck. Whereas, Wink knew, he and Sal would go on to do other things in their lives. He would create other images. Sal would have other projects. They wouldn't live and die by Weekend Sally or Winkin' Sally, whichever the hell was which.

The licensing had never honestly felt like all that much of a priceless commodity to Wink. They'd made a nice profit on the specials, but only because Sal had calculated ways to keep the overhead costs down, to put them out for cheap. And the fan mail that had come in, in care of all the preexisting magazines, that had been satisfying and rewarding in a way, and it helped sell each subsequent photo story they pitched, sure. But it wasn't as if Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth were looking to buy the movie rights to make some watered-down Hollywood version
for MGM—
The Two Sallys
or something. There was only so much actual value in the trademarks. No, Jericho Price had wanted to horn in, mainly, just to horn in, because he couldn't bear to see these upstarts make something of their own.

Price must have known, too, especially once Sal was about to be a mother, that the girls probably wouldn't be modeling much longer. They would have to find another pretty girl. Or two. And as long as they were changing girls, why not cook up new catchy names for them? Different pretty girls, different catchy names … Wink adored Reenie and, obviously, Sal, but what was the difference, really?

No, it really wasn't that much of a unique commodity Price had been trying to get his hands on. He'd just wanted to wring the lemon dry. He just wanted to
push.

Which, of course, made him a fucking ass-fucker, as he'd already stated, but it didn't mean he'd actually stand to gain anything in all this.

Wink stood at the edge of the gravel turnaround, looking out past the dark road for a moment, wondering which light out there might be the home of the real-life Rosie the Riveter, that biceped, grin-and-bear-it girl with grit, and if, in fact, she was still out there. He felt pretty sure she was. They hadn't all turned back to housewives.

He wondered, too, if his own mother might have done something like Rosie—rolled up her sleeves and did what had to be done. He knew he'd likely never know anything about her life after he got sick and she hightailed it, but he liked to think that at some point, she'd landed somewhere downstate like the Willow Run Bomber Plant, that she'd ended up doing something on behalf of the war effort, doing her part, getting by. The thought made him like her more, picturing her with her hair in a bandanna, toughing it out.

Turning to head back to his own amazing woman—this wife of his who had just been told the only home she'd ever known had been torched and yet was facing it not with unstoppable sobs and shrieks but unflinching plans and agendas of what they must do next, what was on the docket for tomorrow and the next day, he had the thought that
Maybe if the baby's a girl, rather than Manuela, maybe we should name her Moxie …

She'd never heard them before coming out here, but the heat bugs, as Wink had explained they were, were buzzing and screaming at a high zingy pitch when Reenie and Keeney pulled in with their stuff the next day, the last load of belongings they'd gotten away with before the fire, and Reenie hopped off the running board, skirt flying, before Keeney even got it into park.

“Easy, tiger!” he called to his wife. “Settle down now.”

They hugged and cried and she'd never seen her friend quite like this, not trying to put up a front. Even Keeney threw his good arm around Wink and pulled him in close.

The good thing was, they didn't have a lot of time to sit and stew over what had happened. They had to meet the loan officer at his home in the Burns Park neighborhood and take a look at this house the neighbor had to sell.

It was late afternoon, and the light through the trees was summer gold on the homey little lawns as they followed the loan officer's car through the residential blocks just south of the university campus. Before they even pulled in the drive, she wanted to live there.

Reenie whistled, low, sitting on Keeney's lap.

“You said it,” Sal said.

The loan officer got out of his car, and his wife came out of their house with a toddler in her arms and met them in the driveway. “Welcome, welcome,” she said all around, and when she got to Sal, she touched her belly and said, “You hurry up and have that baby, won't you, hon, so our Jack'll have someone to play with?”

It was almost enough, she thought, to make a person forget they'd been the victim of arson in the past twenty-four hours.

Then the homeowner came out on his porch. He was all smiles and hearty handshakes with the men, declaring, “Good neighbors let their current neighbors help pick their future neighbors!” He said it twice, as though he thought it was clever, something to be needlepointed on a sampler.

He was a professor of some sort and would be teaching somewhere else in the fall, so they needed to sell. His wife and two kids were up north at a camp called Michiana or something, so the kitchen and laundry room part of the tour, he explained, would have to be left in his own “incapable hands.” She found it a little annoying, the way he seemed to be both apologizing for his lack of domestic knowledge and also bragging about it, but the house was adorable, especially the kitchen, and the dining room with French doors and built-in glass-fronted bookcases. It
seemed
like a professor's house, she thought. And there certainly was enough room.

Wink and Keeney roamed the far regions of the house, mostly with the loan officer—and, now, potential next-door neighbor— as their guide, stomping around and discovering all manner of manly fun, like a workshop in the basement and a den in the attic.

When they asked to see the garage, the loan officer said he'd walk them through it, since he needed to check back in with his
wife anyway, and the two of them trooped out after him, talking excitedly, leaving her and Reenie alone again with the homeowner.

He seemed suddenly nervous, or maybe he'd just reached the far edges of his reserve of small talk. Finally, he said, “Now who's with whom here?”

It was so silent, she could hear the heat bugs again, even inside.

“Kidding!” he said, nodding toward her belly. “I see at least one of you is married.”

Sal snuck a glance at Reenie, who curled her lip in disgust. She seemed to be saying,
What's this clown's deal?

She was standing alongside Reenie when she realized he was looking at them sideways, in profile. She recognized, too, that she'd undone an extra button on her own blouse. But why the hell not—it was in the upper eighties, she was getting ready to give birth to what was starting to feel like twins. She was entitled. The other thing was, it was so humid, she'd been afraid her hair would frizz up on her, so she had it covered with a lightweight scarf, a sort of dark lavender, and she decided, later, that this is what made him notice her: if you were to squint, she might look like a brunette. And, of course, Reenie looked like Reenie.

“Will this be your main residence or—you know—just a hideaway for the
weekend?”
The man actually winked. A shimmer of nausea swept over her.

As soon as he said it, he had one hand up, waving it as if wiping clean what he'd just said. “Don't mind me, ladies. See, I was in the service and, well …”

She could have taken this last to mean he wasn't right in his head, that he had a plate in his skull or was nervous-in-theservice,
as they used to call it, but she knew better than that. She knew what he meant.

And she was certain of it when she looked up a moment later at the creak of the screen door and moved to the window over the kitchen sink to see him striding across the yard to talk to his neighbor, their loan officer.

Reenie joined her, peeking through the lace curtains, watching them back there by the property line, the two men peering back at the house, not taking their eyes off it as they leaned close to each other, talking low, conspiring, two citizens on high alert as if there were dangerous intruders in their midst.

He loved the whole house, but especially this attic den the owner had built in a walk-up garret above the second-floor master bedroom. The oval windows at both ends gave a view down to the sloping backyard and the park just beyond where kids were playing baseball and out the front window, a canopy of tree-tops running north to ring the Diag and the campus.

He imagined walking to work at the new shop up on Liberty. From here, it would be a snap. Reasonably close enough, too, if he ever got a job at the Argus headquarters—a possibility he'd been mulling over all week.

This would be a great space for a little studio, he thought, a place to work on his own private stuff.

It smelled of cherry pipe tobacco, but he imagined that could be remedied with a solid airing out. There was a bar, of sorts, at one end, with cabinets built into the eaves. In one, he found
a stack of unused ration stamps, no longer any good, a Japanese flag and some other war souvenirs, and a stack of girlie magazines.

He didn't have to dig very far to find one with his wife on the cover. There were even more with Reenie. He thought he even recognized the spine of one farther down that they'd done themselves, one of their S&W Publishing specials.

He thought Sal would get a charge out of that, and he wished she could come up, but she'd said climbing that many stairs was beyond her today, that he'd have to describe the attic to her.

As he was returning them to the cabinet, he heard some sort of commotion out back and went to the rear window to look.

Down below, in the backyard, he saw Reenie glaring at the loan officer. It was hard to see her whole face, this high up, but from the set of her bony jaw and the cock of her hips, he was pretty sure she was letting him have her worst black Irish evil eye. Keeney began pulling her back toward the driveway, corralling her into the car. Wink couldn't hear what she was saying, but it didn't seem likely it would be appropriate to the neighborhood. She stuck out her tongue. He watched the loan officer cross back into the house, shaking his head, and heard the sound of him downstairs, coming up. Sal appeared in view now, hugging herself, arms crossed over her belly, moving toward the driveway, looking small for a lady expecting and more weary than mad.

He started down the stairs. Halfway down, on the second-floor landing, he ran into the loan officer. He was smiling to beat the band, wiping sweat from his forehead with what appeared to be a complimentary ink blotter from the bank, a fact which Wink took to mean the guy didn't have the sense to carry a handkerchief. “You know,” he said, leaning against the railing as if they were just shooting the shit, as if Wink didn't have loved ones
downstairs clearly upset and pulling up stakes, “funny thing … My neighbor, he's just not so sure about selling right now.”

Wink was listening, but he was moving, too, heading down the stairs. The loan officer followed, still talking. “Probably why he didn't go through a real estate agent to begin with. Maybe his heart's just not in it yet … Folks live here, it ends up meaning a lot to them …
you
know. Anyway, I feel bad about it, but I can sure help put you in touch with some of the developers on the edge of town—some of those new ranch-style houses are quite affordable and stylish, I think …”

Wink was hardly listening now, the guy rattling off all kinds of rationales. He didn't bother pointing out that the professor had said he was moving, that he had to sell.

“Maybe this wasn't exactly your kind of neighborhood, anyway. You're probably used to a little wilder life in the big city, I imagine.”

Wink stopped and faced him. He would not punch him. They'd made some decisions about their life, he and Sal, and he was going to have to make this new chapter work, come what may. They still had to deal with the bank, and he had to be civil. But he did say, “You imagine, huh? That's what you imagine?”

It wasn't the beautiful elm-lined neighborhood she'd had her heart set on. It wasn't the avenues of the Old West Side, and it wasn't anywhere near that Burns Park area, in the heart of the town. It didn't feel like it was even part of the town, especially a town that made reference to trees right in its name. This was out in the open—nothing more than a cow pasture, it seemed
like. A dilapidated barn was the nearest man-made structure she could see, and that was far off to the west. The only thing keeping her from feeling they might as well be back at Winks uncle's, setting up a tent in the back forty, was the graded, winding road, running all through it, and the foundations that had been poured. It looked, she thought, like a memorial cemetery for giants. It wouldn't feel as barren, once there were walls on these houses. In fact, the neighbors would be packed in on either side far closer than anything they'd looked at so far.