Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [235]
“Oh my goodness,” Susan said. “She’ll be filthy!”
Ollie and Betsy were rescuing Agnes and diverting the pup. Oliver stood by the wheel laughing. Many summers of sun and wind had roughened and seamed his skin. His jaw seemed to have grown heavier, his mustache hid his mouth. To Susan he looked as impenetrable as a rock, and older than his thirty-nine years.
“She seems to be in great shape,” he said.
“Yes. All of them.”
Nellie got down and went to dust Agnes off. For the moment the two were alone, with nothing to divert them from looking at each other straight. She looked for signs of dissipation in his face–How had he been living with her not there to save him from his weaker self?–and could see only a rude outdoor strength. He had the kind of face, she realized, that John had. Put him on a frontier ranch and he could not be distinguished from the cowboys. But she thought she was entitled to some sort of assurance that she had not come home to a repetition of their old quarrel. “Oliver . . .”
His look, bright blue, direct, fully comprehending, warned her off. He refused to be put in the position of defending himself or justifying himself or taking any oath. He did the best he knew how, his look said. He was himself, for better or worse. He did not grant her the supervision of his habits. “You married me,” his look said. “Maybe that was a mistake. But you didn’t marry what you could make out of me. I wouldn’t be much good remodeled.”
Something in her that had been trembling to open, closed again.
“Aren’t you coming down?” he said, with his hand up.
“Yes.”
His big calloused hand closed on hers, she stepped from the step to the ground. Nodding, he said, “I put that veranda all along the west side to keep the sun out of our eyes till the trees grow up.”
“That was thoughtful,” she said. “I hate a room full of glaring sun.”
The back door had opened, and Wan stood in it, wildly flapping a dishtowel. She stood on tiptoe to wave, calling, “Oh, Wan, hello, hello! I didn’t know you were here! This is wonderful! Just a minute . . .”
Betsy and Ollie left the puppies and bolted to greet him. Agnes, dusted off, hung back, not quite sure who he was.
“She doesn’t remember him,” Susan said. “But how wonderful you could get him back. It broke my heart to see him go. It’ll be almost like old times, with Wiley and Wan and all of us. And John? Is John with us?”
“He’s filling the water wagon down at the windmill. I saw him as we drove in.”
“Oh, really like old times!”
There was another name that hung between them unspoken. She saw it in Oliver’s eyes as plainly as if it had been spelled there. Unsmiling, dry, calculatedly expressionless, he stood by her in the dusty yard. Then he moved his head, indicating something to the north, up toward the canyon. “The whole tribe,” he said. “Here comes Frank, I expect, to say hello.”
She turned, as much to hide her face as to look, and saw a small moving dust midway between her and the hazed mountain front. The appropriate words, the appropriate feelings, tangled in her throat and breast. Anything less than gladness would be noticed, too much gladness would be marked. She was not sure, anyway, whether what she felt, what had made her heart jump at that name, was gladness or panic.
In a voice that to her own ears was brittle and false she said, “Frank?