Work Song - Ivan Doig [67]
“Such a day, Morrie,” Grace wound down as the trolley back to town toddled along the tracks to us. Her violet eyes sought mine. “I feel as if I’ve been on that roller coaster with our star runner.”
With a pensive smile to match hers, I provided my arm to help her up the step as the trolley rattled to a halt. “I know the feeling.”
9
Now we can get back to business,” Sandison met me with as the staff reluctantly queued up on the library steps to be let in, the morning after. “I never have understood the meaning of holiday. Didn’t have time for loafing of that sort on the ranch. Cows never took time off from eating.”
“The nomenclature, Sandy, I think you’ll find goes back to Middle English—the term recognizably became ‘holy day,’ and subsequent centuries of quickening pronunciation have given us—”
“Damn it, Morgan, did I ask for the history of the universe? Didn’t think so.” His shaggy gray eyebrows knitted, he contemplated me in either amazement or extreme irritation, it was always hard to tell which. “You have the damnedest brainbox ever created, I swear. Anyhow, get yourself caught up on the usual chores”—a near impossibility the way he kept adding to them—“the next couple of days. I have something I want you to do. Tell you when the time comes.”
GRACE HAD BEEN QUIET as a mouse at breakfast, as had I, out of respect for the kingsize hangovers Hoop and Griff brought to the table. I was unprepared, then, when I came home from the library and heard the urgent stage-whisper from the kitchen: “Hsst. In here, Morrie.”
Expecting to perform an act of rescue on whatever was cooking for supper, I stepped in and found Grace miserably seated at the kitchen table, her face a smeared mask of white. A bottle of calamine lotion was standing ready for more application. Wrapped around her forehead was a rag soaked, according to its eye-stinging odor, in vinegar. Not that I needed any further evidence, but the red welts on any inch of her skin not yet daubed with calamine told me I was seeing a prime case of hives.
“What on earth—?” I sat down quickly and reached over to hold her hand, trying madly to think what to do beyond that. If the goons had shown up here on a glory hole mission despite my warning, I was going to have to find some way to make them regret it; I did not look forward to that. She continued to gaze at me with a forlorn expression, her eyes smarting from the acrid vinegar cloth, which, truth to tell, did not seem to be cooling her troubled brow appreciably. “Grace, you have to put it into words. What’s the matter?”
“You are.”
This was worse than if she had said, “The goons were here, breathing fire.” My hand withdrew. Apprehensively, I asked, “How so?”
“By being you, whoever, whatever—” She started to scratch her arms, thought better of it, and instead dug her elbows into the table and leaned practically flat across to confront me. “I tossed and turned all night trying to figure out who am I with when I’m with you. Take yesterday. One minute I’m on the arm of someone I enjoy thoroughly”—her reddened eyes blinked more rapidly at that emotion—“and the next, you’re gambling away money like you’re feeding the chickens.”
“Russian Famine won by at least eleven yards,” I pointed out.
“All right, then,” she said, no less miserable, “half the time when you’re busy getting rid of any wrinkled money, the wind blows a little back.”
Still trying to catch up, I asked hoarsely: “What brought this on? Just a few bets I happened to place when the opportunity seemed ripe?”
Wordlessly she gazed past me, through the kitchen doorway, to the wedding portrait on the sideboard, and my heart sank. The ghost of Arthur hovered in from the next room, and how could I ever compete with such a paragon of domestic virtue? Her whitened, rag-wrapped countenance as tragic as a mummy’s, Grace leaned farther toward me as if to deliver that verdict more fiercely. But what came out was practically a whisper.
“Arthur was a betting man.”
Silence followed this shocking news. Grace sat back as if exhausted, scratched under an