“Fred asked why, and Lena said because she doesn’t like to get nursing mothers by mistake in the spring. Then this stranger who was in the game said, ‘Must be expensive to have a heart.’ And Lena said if the babies die now she can’t trap them later.”
Jamie was too puzzled by the line of conversation even to feel his usual burst of aversion to trapping. “Seems like more foresight than most people have. Is that where the car is? Lolo?”
Wallace stared up at the porch’s ceiling, hands behind his head. “Do you think if Marian were to become a pilot she’d end up like Lena?”
“You mean ugly?”
“Yes, I suppose. Tough and alone, with a cigar stuck in her face. I imagine Lena’s raw material was rougher stuff than Marian’s, but Marian…I already have trouble picturing her in a dress. Can you imagine Marian as a bride?” His laugh stumbled over itself, became a cough.
“We’re only fourteen,” Jamie pointed out.
“I know,” Wallace said. “I know. It’s not too late.” He propped himself on his elbow, looked at Jamie. “Maybe you could have a word with her?”
“She’d punch me.”
“Mmm.” Wallace subsided onto his back. “You’re probably right. I wish Berit were still around.”
He’d been late paying Berit so many times she’d finally taken a job for a professor’s wife in a big house south of the Clark Fork, though not without shedding a few rare Norwegian tears when she embraced the twins goodbye. Before she left, she’d taught Jamie to cook a few things. He refused to cook meat, of course, but he didn’t mind frying up fish if someone else did the catching and gutting. So Caleb brought trout sometimes, or Marian did. She got bread from Stanley’s, too, and when the housekeeping money Jamie extracted from Wallace wasn’t enough, she made up the rest. Jamie tended a vegetable garden modeled on the one Caleb kept. Sometimes a gift shop in a hotel downtown sold one of his drawings, though that money he put away for himself. He tried to keep the house clean, but because neither Marian nor Wallace seemed to notice or mind the creeping grime and disarray, he was gradually surrendering.
“Berit was always trying to get Marian to wear dresses,” Jamie said. “It’s impossible.”
Wallace didn’t say anything but covered his face with his hands.
“Wallace?”
“I need you to do something,” Wallace said, his voice hollow against his palms. “I need you to tell Marian when she comes home. I can’t do it.”
“Tell her what?”
“I lost the car.”
“What do you mean lost it? Where?”
“I lost it. I bet it in the card game last night.”
Jamie couldn’t help himself. “Why?” he burst out. “Of all the things to bet!”
Wallace sat up, swung his legs to the floor. His hands dangled between his knees. “I was winning—well, first I was losing.” Then he’d felt his luck turn, like wind knocking a weather vane. He’d won a small pot on three of a kind. Then he won again, kings, a bigger pot, and again, on a flush. Besides Lena and Spokane Fred, there’d been a stranger at the table, a red-haired fellow in a swank overcoat with a fur collar. The stranger had pulled out a bottle of Canadian whiskey—“The real stuff,” Wallace said—and poured a toast. A lightness had come into Wallace. “I wasn’t likely to win the next hand, but I knew I would. And I did. I knew I should lose a couple of times for form and get out of there, but I couldn’t even lose when I tried.” The chips, flocking around the table like wayward birds, had homed for him. “Then this stranger said, wasn’t I the uncle of the girl who delivered booze for Stanley? I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, you’re Wallace Graves, aren’t you? He knew Marian’s name.”
Wallace paused. “He got under my skin. I started thinking about Marian, about how when you were little I only cared that you came home eventually and with all your limbs but now I’m supposed to worry about her reputation. I should have left. I knew my luck was gone.”
But he’d stayed and lost, and lost, and lost. Spitefully, sullenly, determinedly. He lost all his chips, and several IOUs, and then he’d lost the gray Cadillac. The red-haired stranger in the fur-collared coat won it. The car was ancient now, the last remnant besides the house of the Great Winning Streak of 1913, kept running only by Marian’s devoted ministrations, and maybe that was why he’d allowed himself to bet it: out of vindictiveness, because the car was the loss Marian would feel most acutely. Bad luck, Wallace believed, was no more than a kind of gloomy mood that welled from an internal spring, and Marian—the way Lena had reminded him of her, the stranger’s unsettling mention—was the cause of his mood and therefore of his losing streak, too. “There’s no money for another,” he said. He wiped his nose with his cuff. “Will you tell her? I need to go to bed now, but you’ll tell her?”