Читать книгу Inhabited - Charlie Quimby - Страница 18

Fun has always been part of our hardworking western heritage.

—“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style

Years had passed since Meg last attended the Barclay’s annual barbeque at the Crown B. A party that once celebrated the end of spring branding, it had been nudged into July for warmer evenings and in recognition that most of the partiers no longer came from the branding crew. Their ranch skills inclined more toward drinking, dancing and shooting fireworks. Since the winding drive back to town challenged even the sober, all were welcome to stay overnight in one of the houses, the barn or the meadow, thus averting one danger with another.

Meg had come early under the pretext of helping Terri Barclay prepare the feast, which also gave her the option of departing before things got too wild. There was not much to do since the food was catered by a chuckwagon outfit run by a Barclay neighbor. Donnie asked the caterer if he would be serving Donnie’s own beef, since a few head were missing last fall. Meg sensed some tension behind the joke since neither party treated it as very funny. The alleged rustling could have happened fifty years ago. Change came slowly in Glade Park, and its history was sometimes indistinguishable from its grudges.

Terri herself looked out of time but at home under a broad-brimmed hat, her long Emmylou Harris hair pulled back in horsewoman’s tresses. She bore her grey not as an erasure but as an underscore. Women in Terri’s family, which had been around as long as the Barclays, had never been expected to rein themselves in and even when she met Donnie at seventeen, it was too late for him to try. Her name was on half the Barclay property, fifty-one percent in the case of Barclay Enterprises because it gave the company woman-owned status for bidding on government contracts. Donnie was pragmatic. While he didn’t want a woman or the Feds telling him how to run his business, he was willing to listen—especially when the government suggested easier ways to take its money.

Terri eyed Meg’s black pegged jeans and embroidered corral boots. “You want to go for a ride before it gets too crazy?” she said. “I haven’t got Roamer out all day.” Donnie had named Terri’s gelding Roamer after a former Democratic governor. He had not intended it as a compliment.

Meg enjoyed Terri’s company but the boots were for show and she did not consider a rocking saddle five feet off the ground to be a relief. “Thanks. It’s enough just to get back up in this clean air.”

They moved instead to the kitchen where they mixed punch and cut key limes for the moonlighting school teacher who would be tending bar. He wanted to practice his cocktails and they agreed to be his judges. Before long they were happy, chattering guinea pigs.

“Donnie said you needed a break. What’s going on?”

“A bunch of different things. It’s a busy time.”

“He’s got a big soft spot for you.” Terri’s frown seemed to be working out the reason. Meg wasn’t sure how she had earned his attention. It was as if one day Donnie had walked up and introduced himself as a long-lost uncle.

God, Terri didn’t think something was going on...

A lime rolled under Meg’s paring knife. The blade snicked the pad of her thumb, drawing blood.

“This is probably enough limes.” Terri examined the wound. She wetted a tea towel for Meg and went in search of a bandage.

Meg dropped the knife into the sink and put pressure on the cut. A dull summer house knife meets a round fruit in a tipsy moment. Now the hand holding the towel reacquaints itself with the bloodied one. Easy to blame the neglected blade or the tough rind, but her wound resulted from losing awareness. Was that the purpose of pain, to bring us back to ourselves? Was the purpose of inattention to escape our pain?

The kitchen clock read twelve forty. It had to be later. The second hand ticked against the seventeen and did not advance. She heard its faint buzz now, like a fly tapping the windowpane. She ran cold water over her thumb. The cut didn’t hurt any more but the idea of the laceration opening its tiny mouth turned her stomach.

Terri returned with a Band-Aid tin. “Let’s see. Good and clean. All I found for disinfectant was horse liniment so we’ll forget that.”