Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [30]
Tennie relayed these developments matter-of-factly. When Libby, benumbed secondhand by the humiliation, asked what his new wife thought of all this, Tennie replied, “I’m his one true wife and the mother of his children.” Libby didn’t challenge or contradict her, partly because Tennie seemed nuts and partly because, well, what if she was on to something? What if Tennie eventually wore him down and he capitulated, sat himself down before his steaming plate of limas and rice?
“Come home, husband—it’s dinner time” … imagine trying that out on Stockton! Libby could see his lips curl back like razor-cut paper. Still, she now could admire the mad plunge of Tennie’s approach, the disregard of civility and civil law in lieu of a higher administration. “Your bed is made, dear, your clothes laundered and laid out.” In thrall to such devotion, Libby thought, one simply bows to the yoke of contempt, welcomes it, suffers it gladly in Jesus’ name. …
She wrote: I’d rather stick my head in the oven.
She pushed her hair back from her face and began writing in earnest. She’d been keeping a journal long enough to know that self-indulgent speculation, however gratifying in the moment, wasn’t half as fascinating or useful in a month’s time as brief, factual notes that could evoke otherwise forgotten days. Dinner last night with Billie and the Bills. Rack of lamb cut into little chops, tiny yellow potatoes. Wine so good it made me want to cry. They ridicule environmentalists. Their ranching is an unrepentant rain of herbicides, miticides, pesticides, fungicides, etc. Am surprised, as ever, they want me around. They don’t, can’t, have any sense of who I am, but have decided, for reasons not apparent, that they like me. …
Libby closed her journal and dressed for work. She packed jeans for practice later with the Cactus Pharaohs, a not-bad band who, in addition to all the sappy covers required at every wedding, played a mix of Western swing and barnyard jazz. Grabbing fiddle and purse, she left the trailer.
Libby’s car was a 1960 baby-blue Ford Falcon. Reaching for the driver’s-side door, she paused. Every little hair on her body rose up, as if an army of tiny bugs blanketing her skin all raised their antennae at the same time. Her crazy first thought was, I’ve been cut in two at the stomach. Then time slowed down, way down, and she actually observed her mind filter the information before her: the huge, bearded man sleeping in the backseat of her car.
Libby stepped back carefully, soundlessly, and dashed to the trailer in two or three bounds. She locked herself in and, fingers noodly, called the sheriff. The phone rang and rang—she could have been stabbed fifty times at least—before the woman dispatcher picked up.
“There’s a guy sleeping in my car,” Libby said, “and I have to go to work.”
The woman took her name and address, then asked for a description.
“He’s big and has a gray beard and … I don’t know. He looks like he lives in a pumpkin patch.”
“Keep your door locked,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll send Burt over.”
Libby was about to call Billie Fitzgerald, but remembered Billie and her father, Old Bill, drove her son, Little Bill, to prep school in Ojai every morning.
Libby sat at the kitchen table, where she could see the car. Nothing moved. She took a knife out of the drawer: a well-weighted twelve-inch chef’s knife. She considered sharpening it, since you were supposed to do so before each use.
She blamed Stockton for abandoning her out here like a litter of kittens. He would say, You should’ve locked your