Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [48]
“It’s fine.”
“Is it the way you imagined it?”
“I don’t know that I imagined it much.”
“Oh, I did,” said Susan. “All wrong.”
She looked at Lizzie’s room, clean and bare; went out through the dining room where her gifts lay on the table and read the inscription on the olla: Help thyself, Tomasita. Out on the piazza she sat in the hammock and looked out over the green and gold mountain and thought how strange, how strange.
Rocks clattered in the trail, and Oliver came in sight with a great black dog padding beside him. He made it sit down in front of the hammock. “This is Stranger. We figure he’s half Labrador and half St. Bernard. He thinks he’s my dog, but he’s mistaken. From now on he goes walking with nobody but you. Shake hands, Stranger.”
With great dignity Stranger offered a paw like a firelog, first to Oliver, who pushed it aside, and then to Susan. He submitted to having his head stroked. “Stranger?” Susan said. “Is that your name, Stranger? That’s wrong. You’re the one who lives here. I’m the stranger.”
Oliver went inside and came out with a piece of buttered bread. “Give him something. You’re to feed him, always, so he’ll get attached to you.”
“But it’s you he likes,” Susan said. “Look at the way he watches every move you make.”
“Just the same, he’s going to learn to like you. That’s what we got him for, to look after you. If he doesn’t, I’ll make a rug of him. You hear that, you?”
The dog rolled his eyes and twisted his head back, keeping his bottom firmly on the boards. “Here, Stranger,” Susan said, and broke off a piece of bread. The dog’s eyes rolled down to fix on it. She tossed it, and he slupped it out of the air with a great sucking sound that made them both laugh. Over his broad black head Susan looked into Oliver’s eyes. “You will spoil me.”
“I hope so,” he said for the second time.
Then she couldn’t keep the question back any longer. “Oliver.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me something.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want you to be angry.”
“Angry? At you?”
“It seems so petty. I shouldn’t even mention it. I only want us to start without a single shadow between us.”
“My God, what have I done?” Oliver said. Then a slow mulish look came into his face, a look like disgust or guilt or evasion. She stared at him in panic, remembering what his mother had said of him: that when he was put in the wrong he would never defend himself, he would only close up like a clam. She didn’t want him to close up, she wanted to talk this out and be rid of it. Blue as blue stones in his sunburned face, his eyes touched hers and were withdrawn. Miserably she stood waiting. “I know what it is,” he said. “You needn’t tell me.”
“You didn’t just forget, then.”
“No, I didn’t forget.”
“But why, then?”
He looked over her head, he was interested in the valley. She could see shrugging impatience in his shoulders. “It isn’t the money,” she said. “I had the money, and there was nothing I would rather have spent it for than coming to you. But your letter never even mentioned it. I thought perhaps . . . I don’t know. It shamed me before Father. I hated it that he had to send me off to someone he would think didn’t know . . .”
“What my duty was?” Oliver said, almost sneering. “I knew.”
“Then why?”
Impatiently he turned, he looked down at her directly. “Because I didn’t have it.”
“But you said you had something saved.”
He swung an arm. “There it is.”
“The house? I thought the mine agreed to pay for that.”
“Kendall did. The manager. He changed his mind.”
“But he promised!”
“Sure,” Oliver said. “But then somebody overspent on one of the Hacienda cottages and Kendall said no more renovations.”
“But that’s unfair!” she said. “You should have told Mr. Prager.”
His laugh was incredulous. “Yes? Run crying to Conrad?”
“Well then you should just have stopped. We could have lived in it as it was.”
“I could have,” Oliver said. “You couldn’t. I wouldn’t have let you.”
“Oh I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t understand. I’ve been such an expense to you.”
“It seems to me I’ve been an expense to you. How much did you spend for those tickets?”
“I won’t