* * *
—
When Marian came home, Jamie dutifully told her about Wallace losing the car, absorbed her initial fury, stopped her from rousting their wretched uncle out of bed to be excoriated. She demanded why he wasn’t angry, and he said they couldn’t both rage. “So if I weren’t angry, you would be?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
It was true they’d always been like two adjacent locks in a canal, one opening into the other, pouring off excess feeling, seeking equilibrium, though she was usually the lock in danger of overflowing and he the one who absorbed excess, rose up as she sank down. People thought being twins made them the same, but it was balance, not sameness, she felt with him.
That night in their cots on the sleeping porch, she asked, “Why do you think he gambles? We’d be fine for money if only he wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think he means to,” came Jamie’s voice in the dark. “I don’t think he can help it.”
“You wouldn’t think it’d be so hard to stop throwing your money away.”
“I think he’s after the thrill.”
“What thrill? He never wins.”
“And if he quits he never will, either. I think he likes to hope.”
“Hope shouldn’t be so expensive.”
“You know he’s sorry.”
Marian’s cot creaked as she turned over.
“Yes,” she said. “He even cried a little when he finally stopped hiding from me. He kept saying he’d gotten into a tough spot. That’s all he’d say. He wouldn’t tell me who’d won the car, just said a stranger.”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? Better not to know. Maybe you’ll see it around.”
“Probably not, because no one but me would take the trouble to keep it running.”
After a hesitation, Jamie said, “The car was Wallace’s, though. He owned it. He could bet it if he wanted to.”
“But he bet it for nothing. For no good reason. He was just losing something for the sake of losing it.”
* * *
—
The next day from her hiding spots in the cottage she collected most of her flying money, earned bottle by bottle, basket by basket, and went into town and bought a used Ford from a mechanic she knew. He was a customer of Stanley’s. His wife was a lush, and he gave her a good deal. People treated her differently now she knew their secrets.
She informed Wallace that he could drive the Ford to the U, but if he was going out gambling or drinking he’d have to walk or find a ride or buy his own damn car. If he lied, they both knew she’d find out. And she told him she would only pay three dollars a week in room and board now. The rest would be his rent on her car.
The sadness of the cottage, an emptied treasure box, outweighed the pleasure of the jaunty black Ford, her own wheeled and engined thing. On the bright side, her debt to Wallace seemed eased slightly, made bearable. She and Jamie might have been foisted on him, but Wallace had a way of acquiring burdens for himself, too. Without the twins around, he might have ruined himself long ago. Perhaps they had kept him just far enough from the precipice.
The model airplanes hanging in the cottage had come to seem forlorn: the tender relics of a child’s fantasy. Flight, the reason for all her labor, was almost forgotten as she worked to make back what had been spent. The money was slow in returning. Mr. Stanley’s business had stagnated. The feds, desperate to make Prohibition something other than a dismal failure, were cracking down. Stanley was being edged out, he hinted, by Barclay Macqueen.
Ever since the night of Barclay Macqueen, Marian had made her deliveries to Miss Dolly’s as swiftly as possible, never venturing beyond the kitchen.
“What’re you so sore about?” Belle wanted to know when Marian refused to be dressed up again. “We only had a bit of fun. No one touched your pure self.”
“I’m not sore,” Marian said. “I’ve got a lot of stops to make, that’s all.”
She wasn’t sure what she was, but it was bigger than sore. When she thought about Barclay Macqueen, her skin tickled; her pulse accelerated; her guts felt pulled in different directions. At night on the sleeping porch, sometimes she thought about Caleb kissing her, pushing her shirt off her shoulders, but lately her mind had been veering away to Macqueen, how he’d pinned her against the wainscoting with his gaze, how he’d asked, Who are you?
She took a second job, making deliveries for restaurants in the Ford. Berit’s son Sigge, who’d become a Prohi, came by the house once and warned her that Mr. Stanley was going to get raided. She tried to give him what money she had, but he brushed her off. “I’m not crooked,” Sigge said. “I just know you haven’t always had it easy.”