Walk Me Home (40 page)

“Right,” Carly says. “OK. Thank you.”

“You just keep practicing that,” Alvin says. “I expect it’ll get easier as time goes by.”

WAKAPI LAND

May 23

Just as Alvin turns into Delores Watakobie’s long dirt driveway, Carly says, “Maybe we should’ve called. You know. Let somebody know you found me and you were bringing me back. And then somebody could’ve told Delores.”

Alvin is wearing that knowing half smile that Carly sees on so many faces and never quite understands. He brakes in front of the henhouse, shifts into park. Pulls on the hand brake.

“Wish I’d thought of that,” he says.

“Meaning…you thought of that?”

“I called Pam that first morning and told her we were on our way back, and to drive over and tell Delores so she could stop worrying.”

“Where was I?”

“Sleeping.”

“Oh. Yeah. I had my days and nights turned around.”

“You might’ve mentioned that a time or two. Or ten.”

“Was she really worried?”

“Ask her yourself.”

He flips his head in the direction of the house. Delores is standing in the open doorway. As if trying to decide whether to go to all the trouble of meeting them halfway.

Carly steps out into the dry oven of the desert. Sets her wonderful new hat on her head. Saves Delores the trouble by walking to where she stands.

“Well, well,” Delores says. “The prodigal loudmouth.”

Carly doesn’t know what to say. So she says nothing at all. In the silence, she hears and feels Alvin step up behind her.

“What’s that?” Delores asks, and reaches up to touch Carly’s new hat. “Mind if I take a look close-up?”

Carly takes it off and hands it to the old woman. She still hasn’t said a word. She can’t help being painfully aware of that.

Delores holds the hat up close to her face. Runs her hands over the felt. Feels the shape of the crown, the weave of the band.

“This’s a nice piece of goods. Couldn’t of been cheap. Where’d you get a nice hat like this?”

“It was a gift from Alvin,” she says.

Delores hands it back to Carly, who snugs it back onto her head. It feels good. She likes who she is when it’s up there.

“Damn,” Delores says. “Now I got to wear that old floppy thing myself. Hate that hat. Pretty fancy present, Alvin. Don’t remember you ever gettin’ me anythin’ that nice, and how long’ve we known each other? All your damn life, isn’t it?”

Alvin speaks, and Carly notices how much his voice has become a comfort to her. She feels that, deep in her gut. Like a hot water bottle, or the first sip of a hot drink going down when you’re cold. When the fog and the wind has gotten into your bones and you just can’t get warm.

“You want a better hat, Delores? I’ll be happy to get you one.”

“Don’t you dare, young man,” she says, pointing one spotted finger in his general direction. “You know I can do for myself.
Always done for myself, an’ if I want a new hat, I’ll weave my own. I can still weave, you know. Don’t need to see good to weave. Day somebody got to gimme a new hat’s the day I let my creator put me six feet under.”

She turns and shuffles back into the house.

Carly looks at Alvin. He’s smiling that same little wry half smile he uses on her.

“See what I mean? Birds of a feather.”

“Except I shut up and took the hat.”

“That you did. Say, day after tomorrow for that fence work, OK? I’ll come by, pick you up.”

“OK.”

He tips his hat to her. Which means he’s leaving.

She rushes in and throws her arms around him, knocking her new hat into the dirt. Holds him tight, the way she grabbed Teddy in the Whale Tail Lounge. But Alvin doesn’t make a wheezing noise. He doesn’t make any noise at all. He seems to be able to take it. He hugs her in return. Which, if she’s remembering right, Teddy never did.

Then she steps back, embarrassed. Picks up her hat and brushes red dirt off its crown.

Alvin tips his hat again. Climbs into Pam’s car and backs all the way down the driveway. Carly stands in front of the house and watches him go. She raises her hand in a wave, but Alvin never looks back.

Carly stands and looks around. Breathes deeply, as if smelling the Wakapi landscape. As if allowing the dry air to fill more than just her lungs. Just for a moment, she notices the way the sun lights up the big mesa behind the house.

Something is different in just these few days. Delores’s old truck is parked out behind the henhouse, covered with a giant blue tarp. It’s not in its usual spot under the carport. And there’s some
new fencing, a semicircle at the open end of the carport. Thin metal posts with three strands of plain wire strung between. And there are three strands of wire stapled to the posts of the carport, too, so the whole thing is like a partly covered paddock. So now you couldn’t drive the truck in there if you wanted to. Carly notes this but doesn’t understand it. In fact, she doesn’t try.

Instead, she joins Delores inside the house. It’s nice in there. Cooler. Not cold, like air-conditioning. But a lot nicer than outside. The old woman is standing in the kitchen, pouring a glass of cold water from the fridge. It doesn’t occur to Carly that Delores might be pouring it for Carly, not for herself.

Carly takes off her hat and holds it in her hand.

Roscoe thumps his tail against the rug but doesn’t get up.

“Have a sit,” Delores says and sets the glass of cold water on the table. In front of the chair Carly always used at mealtimes. Back when she ate her meals here. Seems like a long time ago now.

“Thanks,” she says. She sits. And sips. Hat on her lap. “It’s nice in here. Cool.”

“Got the swamp cooler goin’.”

So that’s what that noise is, she thinks.

“Where’s Jen?”

“Still at school.”

“School?”

“Don’t tell me you forgot what that is.”

“I didn’t think Jen would be going, though. I mean…this soon. I just can’t believe you even got her signed up for school so fast.”

“Signed up…well, maybe not exactly. But she’s goin’. And the teacher don’t mind if she sits in for now. We all tried to tell ’er wait for next year. This year’s good as gone. But she wanted to go. No talkin’ ’er out of it. Said she wanted to catch up what she missed. Really I think she’s wantin’ to make some friends ’er own age. Tide ’er over the summer, you know?”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s good. That’s nice, if she can make some friends.”

Delores says nothing. She’s still at the kitchen counter, but she’s not doing anything special there. Just leaning. As though thinking. As though she’s putting Carly’s words on a scale to see how much they weigh.

When Carly gets tired of waiting for the old woman to speak, she says, “Were you really worried about me?”

“You could of got yourself dead a dozen diff’rent ways, you know.”

“I know. I almost did.”

“Well, you’re OK now. Guess that’s what matters.”

Delores waddles off into the living room and sits down on the couch, emitting a noise that’s a cross between a grunt and a sigh. Roscoe lifts his head briefly, looks over his shoulder at Delores, then sets his chin down on the rug again.

“Mind if I take my water into the trailer? I’ll bring the glass back. It was such a long drive and I’m tired, and it would be nice to lie down.”

“Swamp cooler’s fixed in there now. Chester came over ’n fixed it. Got a chain hangs down in the middle of the room. Just give that chain a good hard pull. Noisy, but it should cool off in there right quick.”

She wants to question the idea that Chester would do such a thing. But it seems pointless. Since he already did.

Carly wakes from a long nap to find that the trailer is cool. Cooler than the house. Maybe because it’s so much smaller.

She sits up.

The window that used to have no glass has been mended with what looks like a scrap of Plexiglas, cut to fit just right and sealed with duct tape around the edges. So you can still see through it. But the cold can’t get in. Or out.

Just for a minute, Carly thinks she hears a distant sound like the slow, gentle clopping of hooves. Then she decides it was only in her head.

She gets up and washes her face in a bucket of water that’s sitting near the sink. Behind the partition in the back of the trailer. When she comes back out, the sound is louder now. And definitely real.

She looks out the window to see Jen riding up the road on Virginia’s old mostly brown paint horse. Carly sinks into a sit on the bed and watches. Jen is riding bareback. Nothing but a woven blanket between her and the horse. Her reins are a loop of rope tied to a rope halter. Her legs swing free. She’s still wearing that straw cowboy hat Delores gave her. It still suits her. Carly always knew it did. She just wouldn’t admit that at the time.

It’s a sight. Really. A sight.

Carly grabs her hat up off the counter and steps out into the heat. The big creak of the door doesn’t surprise her, nor does it feel like a problem. It’s just something she remembers.

She stands at the top of the driveway.

At first Jen is looking off in the direction of the mesa. But then she turns her head to the house. Carly can spot the moment when Jen sees her. Even though they’re too far apart to see each other’s face. But she can still tell.

Jen drums her heels lightly on the paint’s sides. She’s still wearing those cross-trainers Carly took—borrowed—for her in New Mexico. The paint breaks into a rough trot, and Jen holds on with one hand woven into his mane.

Then she pulls back on the rope reins and just sits her horse for a second or two, maybe twenty feet from where Carly is standing. All in one motion, she throws a leg back over the paint’s butt and drops to the ground. Runs up to Carly. And she doesn’t stop when she gets there. She hits Carly like a moving train, nearly bowling
her right over into the dirt. Her arms wrap around Carly’s ribs. Squeeze tight.

Jen knows how to turn her head just right so that her hat, which curls up tight at the sides, doesn’t get knocked off. Carly wonders if that means she’s been giving a lot of hugs since she started wearing it.

Carly wraps her arms around Jen in return, the stiff straw of the roper’s hat rough against her scarred chin. After a while she thinks it might be time to let go. But Jen doesn’t. So neither does Carly.

After a few more seconds of this, Carly says, “Shouldn’t you tie up that horse?”

“Anoaki won’t go anywhere. He’s real good.” But she straightens up and lets Carly go. “Nice hat!”

“Thanks. Alvin gave it to me.”

“Looks good! You look like you belong here.”

Jen waits to see if Carly has anything to say about that. But Carly chooses to let it go by. Well, not chooses so much. It just goes by. And she doesn’t know what to do with it. So that’s the way things stay.

Jen walks back to her horse, who hasn’t moved. Takes him by the reins and leads him to the new fence built onto the carport. Peels back a section of wire that Carly didn’t even notice has been set up as a gate. Then Jen slides the blanket off his back and drapes it over the fence. Unties the rope halter and lets it fall. It swings from the reins still clutched in her hand. Jen steps back, and Anoaki walks through the gate and into the shade of the carport. Jen hangs the halter on a fence post and hooks the gate closed. Walks around behind the carport, emerging a moment later with a flake of hay. She throws it over the fence to the horse, then walks back to where Carly is standing in the afternoon sun.

“So Virginia gave you that horse?”

“Not exactly. She called it a loan. But I don’t really think she’s gonna ask for him back. ’Cause he’s retired. She doesn’t use him much anymore. But he can take me to school and back. That’s not too much for hardly any horse. I’m so glad you got back, Carly. I was scared to death. I thought you might die.”

“Well, I didn’t,” she says.

She decides she can—and should—keep her close calls to herself.

“Stay, Carly. Please. Just for a couple of months. Do it for me. So I can show you how good it is here. Then if you still want to go, you can. Please?”

“I don’t know if Delores will
let
me stay.”

“Will you ask her?”

“Yeah,” Carly says. “I’ll ask her.”

Carly ducks her head down going through the door into the house. And she still doesn’t know why.

Delores is sitting on the couch, weaving strong, stiff tan grasses around a frame of thicker straw. She’s not looking at her work. Her eyes are trained off in the distance. As if looking out the window. But Carly doesn’t think that’s the case. The old woman probably can’t see that far. She’s probably staring into space.

Carly sits in the only chair, across from her. Roscoe thumps his tail.

“Making a basket?”

“Makin’ myself a new hat.”

Then neither says anything for a time. This is that moment Alvin told Carly to practice. Admitting she needs something. And would appreciate getting it.

So she pushes harder. Puts a figurative shoulder behind the words.

“Jen wants me to stay a couple months. She thinks I’ll get to like it here. She thinks if I give her a month or two, she can show me why she loves this place so much.”

Nothing happens at first. The silence makes Carly’s heart fall. Her poor heart, she thinks. Not really in a self-pitying way. More like she finally has some empathy for the poor abused organ. How many more falls can it take?