Mission Flats by William Landay Read Free Book Online Page B

Annie not to have to work so hard. Who knows? Maybe there was even an exotic appeal to Versailles, Maine. Of course, she’d never seen it, but the idea of Acadia County must have been romantic – the forest primeval and all that – especially to a young woman who had been literated to a fare-thee-well, educated beyond all reason. Her father forbade Annie to see Claude Truman, but she defied him, and the couple married three months after they met. He was thirty-seven, she was twenty-nine.
    The price was high. Mum and her father had a ferocious argument, and the rift between them never healed. She called him every now and then; after she hung up the phone, she usually went to her bedroom to cry. When he died, Joe left his daughter enough to pay for my education and a little extra for herself, but not the lode she might have received if she’d stuck to the plan.
    Mum did continue one Wilmot family tradition. When I was a kid, she’d pay me for various demonstrations of self-improvement. A dollar for learning the ‘we happy few’ speech from Henry V, and another buck for reciting it before dinner. Fifty cents for reading a novel (if it was not ‘crap’), a dollar for reading a biography. Five dollars for sitting with her through all of I, Claudius on PBS.
    The day Mum kicked Dad out for getting doughnut powder in his hair, she cleared aside the kitchen furniture and asked me if I wanted to dance for a one-time payment of one dollar. She put on a Frank Sinatra record in the TV room and left the door open so we could hear it, then she instructed me on the proper placement of the man’s hands and the proper execution of the box step.
    I laid my left hand on her hip and held my right hand up so she could rest hers in my palm.
    ‘Now what?’
    ‘Step with your outside foot.’
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘Any one, Ben. I’ll follow you.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘That’s how it works. The man leads. Just keep stepping with your outside foot. Make the box.’
    We danced for a while, to ‘Summer Wind,’ then ‘Luck Be a Lady’
    She asked, ‘Do you want to talk about what happened this morning?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Do you have anything you want to ask me?’
    I was preoccupied with the complexities of the box step – look up at your partner, never down at your feet; stand straight, as if there were a string coming out the top of your head pulling you up, up – and all the while I was con-cen-tra-ting-on-the-beat. So I said no, it was okay.
    She clinched my head a little too tight to her tummy and said, ‘My Ben,’ which meant she was sad but didn’t want me to know it.
    ‘You can’t bet that. It’s your badge.’
    ‘Of course I can. It’s worth something, isn’t it? It’s gold.’
    ‘It’s not gold. Besides, what am I gonna do with it? Melt it down?’
    ‘No, you could wear it, Diane. It’s jewelry’
    ‘Ben, I’m not going to walk around wearing your damn badge.’
    ‘Why not? You can be the new chief.’
    She rolled her eyes, unamused. ‘Come on, bet money or fold. That’s how it works. U.S. currency’
    Bobby Burke added, ‘Legal tender for all debts public and private.’
    The pot was somewhere just south of fifty bucks, which is about as high as it gets in this game. I was sitting on three queens, with just Diane to beat. It was no time to drop out. I appealed to Dick: ‘Is this badge worth fifteen bucks or not? Tell her, Dick. These things cost twenty-five, thirty bucks. I can show you the catalog.’
    ‘That’s if you buy it new,’ he demurred.
    ‘Dick, it’s not a Buick. It doesn’t matter how many miles are on it.’
    ‘It’s up to Diane. If she wants to take it, she can take it.’
    ‘Jesus, Dick, you have no backbone. You’re like a . . . a squid. What, are you afraid of Diane?’
    ‘Yup.’
    ‘Diane—’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Diane, just listen.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Look, if you take it, you can wear it around town and make me look like an idiot. Now, how’s that?’
    She shook her head no.