Story

Perspective on the Oulde Kerk at Delft

 

            “Either you see the dog lifting his leg to pee on a pillar in a church or you are blind to it. That is the critical difference between her and me, them and me, because I include Dad in that.” CJ scooched her glass across the bar for a refill, but Dil slotted it into the dirty glasses rack.

            “C’mon CJ love, help me close.”  Dil’s Manchester, England accent made it sound like “c’mon loovf.”  CJ still found it a little sexy, something to juice up the ham-on-Sunday sameness of effing flat Nebraska. She watched her go to the plate window in the front and draw the venetian blind, closing out the parking lot that now held only their truck and the dishwasher’s little banged-up Ford. Wendy’s, across the lot from the Shot & Brew, was closed and dark. It was snowing but not enough to add up to much.

            “What my mother saw, no one can say. But either you do or do not see two 17^th century boys in hats writing graffiti on a pillar in the center of the church, spelled ‘k-e-r-k’ because it is a Dutch painting of a Dutch kerk where this dog is having a whiz and the kids are writing something probably cock-titty-cunt.”

            Dil laughed.  “How to you spell that in Dutch.”

            CJ slid off the stool and came around behind the bar. She poured herself a splash of scotch and leaned, looking out over the beer taps into the dim tavern. “And another dog is running around like he’s flea-bit or just enjoys the wide-open spaces in the kerk,” she punctuated her sentence by stabbing at the bar top with a stirrer, “at Delft, or the way his claws clitter-clatter over the tiles.”

            Dil upended the chairs to sweep out the room. CJ liked to watch her do this, she was methodical, moving left to right across the room, flipping up each chair onto its tabletop, then starting in the corner by the jukebox and sweeping left to right and under the seat of each booth all the way to the coat rack in the front corner. CJ snapped on the back-of-the-room lights so Dil could see the floor better, round up all the pork rind wrappers, cigarette butts,

lottery stubs.

            “Two grown men are in the painting, but they are ignoring all the things you would expect them to go bonkers about, like urine and graffiti in a church. Maybe they are supposed to be watching the kids, maybe not, things appear to be relaxed there.” CJ looked up to the ceiling like the painting hung there. “Light is bouncing off the high white columns and shining down on the dog like a spotlight. But this goes unseen by my sister and my father.”

            “Very poetic, CJ. Could you get those glasses loaded into the dishwasher so we can be out of here sometime before the end of bleedin’ January?”

            “‘Now what do we see when we look at this painting, Chloe-Jeanne? Zoe?’ That is how he talked back then, school-teachery all the time.”

            She picked up the top rack of dirty glasses, carried it to the swinging kitchen door, and hip-butted her way in. The glasses weighed a ton tonight, she nearly tripped on the safety mat in front of the double sink and crashed into Honorio Rios who bent over the sink scrubbing pans. She dropped the rack on the counter with a slam. Honorio, jumped and furrowed his brow at her.

“Honorio Rios,” she loved to say his name.

She took the scrub brush from him. It was the most musical name she had ever heard.

“I love your name, dude. Whenever I say it, it sounz like I got a little bird chirping softy sweet

in my mouth. Honorio Rios. I’m a little drunk Rios. D’jou know I went to Paris when I was a kid?”      

Rios smiled and nodded uncomprehendingly and started to re-line the trash cans with fresh bags.

“Paris, Gay Par-ee. We went to Paris. Francia. When I was a little niña. To the Louvre, Loove-rah.” Her tongue felt thick. She opened the icemaker and plucked out a few chips of ice and put them in her mouth.

            “Oh.” Honorio nodded. “Adonde?”  He piled the full trash bags by the back door. CJ reached for the pressure hose. The oven pans, caked with pigs-in-a-blanket dough and nachos cheese, lay greasy in the bottom of the sink. She squirted dish soap atop them and blasted them with the hot water. She went to work with the brush. “Loovf, c’mon Louvre, come on love.” 

            *****

            Dil drove. CJ watched the dashboard lights and the flat snowy road. She was glad to be off her feet. They made the bank deposit at the drive through. It had been good for a Thursday before payday. The meat packing plant paid every other week on a Friday so tomorrow and Saturday would be their busiest nights. Dil stopped at the all-night convenience store for milk and cigarettes and got CJ a candy bar. When she climbed back into the warm cab of the truck CJ registered her familiar scent. Beneath the cigarette smoke and beer, lingered notes of fresh cut wood and pears, like she worked in a lumber mill next to an orchard instead of a little town bar full of hog slaughters and hog gutters and hog choppers and hog packers.  They smelled not so good, like cold blood and chemicals. How had Paris smelled? Mom had smelled of Evening in Paris that she bought at Bellford Drug before the trip. They always called it ‘the trip.’  There had been others, Omaha, once to Chicago. But they were not called ‘the trip.’

            CJ split the wrapper on the candy bar and tore off a bite for Dil then bit into the remainder. She felt the caramel and chocolate melt together and her teeth snap through the peanuts. “If you want candy in Paris, you’ll have to say bon-bons, Dad told me. Say it Chloe, bon-bons.”  Zoe and Dad had talked of nothing but the trip for weeks before and months after.

            “You should see us in photos from the trip, Chloe and Zoe, dressed like peppermint sticks at the Louvre. The Polaroids make the colors of the peppermint stripe dresses look more peach than pink, but they were pink and white with sashes and Peter Pan collars. We wore Mary Janes and hideous anklets with lace, had pink matching ribbons in our braids. Other kids we saw wore sneakers and shorts sets.”

            Dil chuckled softly, cracked her window to smoke a cigarette. The frosty air filled the car along with the cigarette smoke. She did not wonder how cold it was. It was Nebraska January cold. It went with the Nebraska snow that covered everything on both sides of the road which was to say covered fields and hog farms and the roofs of hog sheds.

            “Mom made those dresses of course. Somehow, she got the idea girls in Paris dressed like that. Maybe they did in 1950. Dad says, ‘Now what do we see when we look at this painting, Chloe-Jeanne? Zoe?’ And Zoe goes. ‘Per… persp…’  Not because she had a stammer, but because she was too excited to cough it all out at once, too excited at her own brilliance. So, my dad points to the top of the tall pillar in the foreground of the painting, then he points to the top of the shorter pillar in the background. He ignores the dog-pissed pillar in the middle ground, points back and forth ― tall pillar, short pillar ― and Zoe is nearly busting to get the answer out. ‘What does this painting show?’   He completely ignores the little vandals and the dog at the base of those pillars which were right at eye level to an 11-year-old girl that was me and another 11-year-old girl that was Zoe.”

            “Yer bat shit, yeah, you know that love?” Dil gave her a quick wink and slipped her cigarette through the crack in the window so the wind could have it. CJ watched the red speck fly out behind the truck.

            “‘Perspective,’ Zoe finally says. It comes out sort of breathy like an angel is announcing it.”  

“Is that it then? Is that the punchline?” Dil asked.

            “Screw you Dil, yeah, kind of the punchline, but it isn’t the end of my story so shut up and keep listening.”

            “Listening.”  She pressed the button to raise the window. The windshield steamed a little and CJ wiped it with her scarf.

            “So, Dad goes, ‘Exactly, perspective’! He kind of rocks on the balls of his feet like he’s standing in his classroom at Bellford Junior College teaching art history to the same hicks who will wind up packing pork and drinking boilermakers in our bar for the rest of their lives and never give a shit about any kind of oils except motor oil and corn oil.”

            Seven miles out of town, Dil signaled the turn into their lane. When they passed the mailbox the motion sensor turned porch lights and garage lights on, and they could hear the two dogs’ excited barks. CJ got out to open the garage door and went on through to the house to let them out. She set the kettle on for Dil’s tea and poured herself a diet coke then poured it back. She’d have tea too. She stood in the dark kitchen in her coat. It had stopped snowing when they were nearly home. A half-moon peeked through the clouds lighting the drifts in the soybean field beyond the snowy yard. She watched the dogs run over the frozen mounds, chase each other around the corner of the house, then re-emerge, check the perimeters of the property, sniff at tracks in the frost, and then run back into the garage to find Dil. The three of them came into the kitchen together.

            “Is there any of that beefy macaroni thing with the cheese left?” Dil opened the fridge, pulled out the casserole and put it in the microwave. She washed the dog bowls and fed them while CJ made the tea and scooped macaroni and ground beef casserole on to two plates for herself and Dil. They carried the meal into the living room and Dil turned up the heat. They settled on the couch and CJ pulled the afghan Zoe had crocheted over them and handed Dil her plate. The last of the late-night talk comic shows was still on. They watched an interview with an antsy Olympian and Dil remembered the Olympics were starting soon. CJ liked to watch the speed skating. She’d put it on in the bar when it started so CJ wouldn’t miss any of it. They switched channels to catch the local weather and it looked like a blizzard would move in in the next 24 hours.

*****

            “We should have salted out front before we locked up,” Dill said coming out of the shower and into the bedroom. She nudged the bigger dog down to the bottom of the bed and climbed in next to CJ.

            “It’ll be ok. Rios will shovel and salt in the morning first thing. Once the blizzard hits it won’t matter much anyway.”

            Dil shut off the lamp and they worked themselves under the comforter and into a curvy spoon with two dogs as foot warmers. Dil waited for the story of the trip to Paris to resume because she knew there would be more.

            “Go on then, what happened next?”

            “We stood in the gallery of Dutch masters wearing those matching dresses, Zoe hanging on Dad’s every word and me gaping at the dog and the boys in the painting. “In this painting we see a perfect example of perspective. Linear perspective was created by an Italian actually, and an architect, not a painter, a Florentine, that means from Florence, Fillipo Brunelleschi.’”

            “He doesn’t sound like that, CJ, not that bad.”

            “I looked at mom who stood next to us, looking like the last person who would ever be painted by Dutch masters. They liked women who looked like they would take a gamble every time, women whose faces showed some backstory and promised a whale of a next chapter. Mom was more like . . . like a cone-hatted Lady Whose-It in a medieval tapestry, flat affect, lute music loud in her head to drown out reality.”

            Dill laughed, like the way she would laugh if someone was telling a good one down at the Shot & Brew. But she felt slightly out of her depth, knowing there were layers and layers to this story, that CJ’s telling of it was full of warnings, sirens, trip wires. Sooner or later Dil would stumble over one of them. Some of the layers had to do with the family, CJ’s parents and sister, but some of them had to do with her too, and she was now getting layered into the meaning of the story, decades after it happened, involuntarily but in a way that can’t be avoided if you are in something with somebody for the long haul.  Where her fingers rested on CJ’s clavicle, she could feel the vibrations from her vocal cords as she told the story. Her fingertips brushed CJ’s pulse point and Dil felt the small signals and thought of Morse code. CJ was sending out beeps and dashes of a personal Morse code and Dil hoped she would be able to decipher it.

            “I took a good long look at Dad and Zoe. They were still coo-ing about perspective. Not a word about the dog unloading on that pillar, and it was a long pee. Probably a gallon. How is that for perspective. See this is what I am trying to tell you. They are still the same. They see but they don’t see. They see only what they want to see, but nothing like reality.”

            “Is this because I said perspective the other day?”

            “What?”

            “The other day when I said if we sold the bar and moved away it would give us a whole new perspective.”

            Silence. The Morse code ticking.

            “Oh, yeah, Dil. Of course, it is all about that.” CJ rolled over onto her stomach, turning away from Dell’s warmth. She flipped her pillow, gave it a couple of fist slaps. “You are such a simpleton. Go to sleep. Just, forget it.”

            Dil lay in the dark. Yep, it was exactly and all about that, about her saying what if we sell the bar and house and move somewhere warm and new. Somewhere far away from hogs and corn where maybe even some other gay people lived besides us and Gary and Stu and the local closet cases.  The long tale about the painting in the museum in Paris was CJ saying hell no. There were layers and layers to a thing like this, like a whole winter’s snow on the Plains, layer upon layer, impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins.

            She hoped the Anheiser Busch delivery would come early tomorrow and that the heavy dog sleeping on her ankle would not cut off the circulation to her left foot.

 

TWO

            CJ pulled her Escort to the curb in front of the house where Zoe and their dad lived. Not her childhood home by the Baptist church, that had gone to pay Mom’s medical bills, mainly the dialysis. This was the small bungalow Zoe kept when she’d dumped Larry the truck driver after two years of marriage. “He sleeps with truck stop Jennies! Do you even know what that is Chloe Jeanne?” “Call me CJ please.” “Oh, yeah, your lesbian name.” Then Dil smirking, “Larry shagging Truckstop Jennies? I don’t think so CJ, do we tell her it was more likely truck stop Johnnies?”  Zoe had a privet hedge planted all the way up along the sidewalk and a trellis arch over the front door. She was going for full English cottage CJ guessed. Dad had gone to live with her there after mom died. When Mom got sick, CJ and Dil built the ramp for Mom’s wheelchair because of course Dad didn’t know the business end of a hammer. They had taken Mom to every appointment and then sat up with her in the hospital every night for six weeks at the end. She and Dil cleared out the old house and got it on the market. As far as she was concerned, it was Zoe’s turn, Dad was Zoe’s turn. But that is not how it would go because Zoe lived in La-La Land and so did Dad.

            “There’s a pot of coffee,” Dad called in return to her hello from where he sat at the table in the foyer off the kitchen. He was in slippers and a flannel-lined corduroy jacket, piecing together a jigsaw puzzle – Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

            They had phased out Art History at the Junior College or at least only let him teach it part time by the time CJ and Zoe were in high school. So, he had to also start teaching civics a couple of days. But he would still always tell people he was an art history teacher, even later when he had the job driving the bread truck. He and Zoe always said it as if art history teacher was some badge of special that should inspire awe. But this wasn’t exactly Renaissance Florence, it was Bellford bleeping Nebraska.

             “There’s a box of donuts.”

            Mom had only ever had her job at the meat packing plant helping with payroll. What her mom had thought about that job CJ could not say. It was like her own job and Dil’s, they just did them because that was the job they had. Not like Dad and Zoe. They made a big deal out of their jobs. She slipped three packages of chicken legs and thighs into the freezer and set one in the refrigerator. She chose a glazed donut, poured a half cup of black coffee.

            “Are you cooking everyday Dad? I brought some chicken on sale. There’s a package in the fridge, you can cook something for supper. Are you guys getting a lot of take-out? There is too much salt in that stuff. Use the crock pot. That’s pretty easy right? Then you can keep it hot for Zoe.”

            Zoe ran a little craft shop at the mall and did picture framing and taught scrapbooking classes. She sometimes helped people pick out paint colors for their walls. She hired herself out to stencil fluffy lambs and teddy bears on bedroom walls for people with newborns and called that interior design painting and called herself a design painter which was a load of baloney. She had an easel set up at home in the basement and spent a truckload on paint and brushes but painted nothing but loud flowers in pots because she could draw a pot and flower stems and petals and that was the beginning and end of it. They looked like a five-year old painted them. When Zoe talked about painting, she called it “my work.”

            Her flowerpot paintings hung floor to ceiling in the bungalow in frames she took straight out of the shop stock without thinking about the cost. The books for that shop would probably make an accountant weep. CJ did not want to think about that or about the second mortgage Zoe had on this bungalow that would need a roof in a year or two. She found potatoes, onion and carrots and placed them in a colander on the counter and put the crock pot on the countertop. Power of suggestion. She carried her coffee to the foyer.

            “Gonna blizzard later.”

            “Yeah. I heard.” She sat beside him at the table and sipped her coffee. “Did mom like her job?”

            “Did mom like her job? Well sure, I guess. She talked about how fast she was on the adding machine and when they switched over from punch cards to something, maybe digital.”

            CJ watched him, his arthritic fingers shook a little as he plugged the planet Venus, blurry and bright into the dawn sky. His heart meds sat untouched on the table next to his coffee cup.

            “Gonna take your pills Dad?

            “Van Gogh considered this painting a failure. Did you know that?”

            “Remember those dresses we wore on the trip to Paris?”

            “Your mom made them.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Thrifty of her. But that trip must have cost a bunch huh?”

            He snapped a piece on the black cypress tree in to place.

            “Oh, I s’pose so.”

            On a chair near his table stood two more puzzles, a Manet, and a Monet. Not Dutch masters.

            He supposed so. CJ damn well knew it had. She’d seen just how much when she cleaned out Mom’s desk. There was a whole folder, plane tickets, hotel, passport applications, the $5000 loan he took from his credit union at the Junior College and then the past-due notices on that loan, the six years it took them to pay it off. Mom’s handwritten thoughts in the margins. Ask if we can get a payment plan. Ask if we can get the payments a little smaller. And a list of ideas for raising cash: see about overtime, try to sell Grandma Lou’s quilts, do a garage sale. For what? So, Dad could spend a week playing docent to a couple of kids in candy stripe dresses?   

            “I suppose Zoe will close early and get home before the worst of it begins.”

“Well, now, I think today is that thing she has.”

“What thing Dad?

“Well, what is it now? That thing about the plate.”

The clock on the stove said 10:20 and she still had to pick up the paper towels and napkins order from the restaurant supplier.

“We’ll get over in the morning and shovel for you, Dad.”

                                                                        *****

            Dil turned down the heat in the house, packed dog food, a change of clothes and the mystery novel CJ had on her nightstand. They would open early, close early and sleep on the fold-out couch in the office above the bar – the storm day routine. It was a surprise blizzard. But then again, no blizzard in Nebraska was all that much of a surprise. It just required a different check list than a typical day.

            She ate a bacon sandwich and coffee and then locked the snow plow on to the front of the truck. She ran the dogs over the fields, watching the two dogs, one large and one small range out across the white expanse. They found the scent of a hare or bobcat, chased it to futility then dashed back to her and off again. She liked the crunch of her boots on the frozen snow. But even as she enjoyed the moment, she pictured running these dogs down a long warm beach and watching them dip in and out of warm water, feeling her bare feet kicking sand behind her as she walked. The low sky this morning was gunmetal gray. After 15 years of looking at the skies over the plains, she knew that to call skies blue or gray or the fields green or mud black was a great over-simplification. Each view of sky and field held a subtlety of shades too intricate to name. The Inuit, they say, have a hundred names for snow, Dil wondered if the Plains Indians had a hundred names for the variance of the colors in the sky on the morning prior to a blizzard. She wondered if native people dwelling by beaches had a hundred names for the colors of warm sand. She could see herself and CJ watching a sunset over such a beach on their day off. They would have the same days off in this fantasy.

            She checked the tire pressure and gasoline supply in the cans she kept in the truck. She put extra flashlight batteries, and a couple snow shovels into the truck’s knack box. She loaded up the small generator and then the dogs and headed into town.

            Dil and CJ had watched a sunset once over a beach, twice actually. It was the year they met, working in the student union café at State. They went to California for the precise purpose of beaches and sunsets. They dropped down through Kansas and the top of Texas driving an oil-guzzling old Dodge, picked up Interstate 40, saw the Grand Canyon and the deserts and made their way to the shores of the Pacific. CJ had never been west of Omaha herself, but she said it was pathetic that Dil had come all the way from the UK and wound up in Nebraska and she wanted her to see something more than corn, hogs, and cattle.

Dil did not feel pathetic to be in Nebraska. Nebraska State and volleyball were her ticket to free college tuition and off the streets of Manchester where the rest of her family studied mainly drugs and petty crime. She didn’t give a damn that the state was flat and boring, too hot and too cold by turns. Manchester let her out and Nebraska had let her in. And then CJ had let her in and, after they got their heads around the idea that CJ was a lesbian and Dil her partner, CJ’s family let her in too. The town of Bellford more or less let her in. She and CJ owned the Shot & Brew and ran it by the rules, and they had succeeded. The meat packers who drank there sniggered into their beer about them. But they kept buying the beer and hard liquor too so, all things, considered it worked out. Now though, yes, she was restless, and CJ was the one who wanted to stand still. On that California trip, they’d sat on the terrace of an inn where they stayed like honeymooners for two nights. The horizon was a thousand or a million shades of peach and umber or amber or egg-yolk, with blues like azure and turquoise and night-black blue.

“I’d love to live someplace like this,” CJ had said. “I could see myself running a bed and breakfast in a spot like this. Think of all the lovers who would come, just like us. That would be a beautiful way to live. We could get a big old Victorian house and fix it up little by little.” She had said that. Dil remembered it and she remembered how she looked when she said it and had pulled thin little weeds from between the flagstones on the terrace and leaned against her as they watched the sun tumble into the Pacific.

            *****

            Rios stood at the stove in the kitchen of the Shot & Brew dumping fried onions and peppers into a giant pot for five-alarm chili and listening to his Spanish Jesus station on an old radio above the sink. CJ rolled dough crescents around miniature franks and set them out in long baking pans.

            “Anheiser Busch come yet?” Dil shut the dogs in the office and came down the stairs into the kitchen.

            “Nope,” CJ pulled off her plastic gloves. “Finish these will you and I will start getting the bar set up.”

            She shoved the cartload of clean glasses out to the bar and restocked the racks, switching on the high-mounted TV to get the weather update. She inventoried the liquor and replenished the shelves with new bottles from the storeroom.

 The storm was moving east and would set in earnest around 7pm. That would give them just a few good hours for business. The plant workers coming off the 7-to-3 shift would be in, but most on the 11-to-7 shift would forego stopping and head on home. They’d be lucky to have any business by 9pm and would close then in any case because they never served booze to people headed home on treacherous roads.

She hooked up a new CO2 cannister and checked the taps. She polished everything and restocked the paper supplies, made the mixers, and chopped up limes. Dil’s tablet sat on the bar, and it irritated CJ. It was booted up and waiting for Gary and Stu to Facetime from their fabulous vacation in the Dominican Republic or Mexico or wherever they were. They took a beach vacation every year this time and loved to Skype to show off their tans and declare the place fab-u-lous and perfect and emote about how much they wished CJ and Dil were there too. CJ set out bowls and filled them with salty peanuts and chips. The guys did not seem like themselves when they were on the vacation, but like some imagined versions of themselves, leaner, smarter, cooler, richer. They loved to ask how cold it was at home and say: “Oh, my god, you poor things! It is 87° here.” They would come home and fight for three months over some disagreement they’d had on the trip and then spend nine months planning the next one. She and Dil did not have big fights anymore. They bickered a little sometimes. They’d had all the big fights years ago. Maybe.

CJ liked Stu and Gary better when they were just sitting in the Shot & Brew drinking beer and guessing at the answers to Jeopardy. But it wasn’t waiting for them to Facetime that rankled, it seemed it was the tablet itself, sitting there on its tripod on the bar. She raised the venetian blinds in front and started pulling the chairs off the tabletops where Dil had put them the night before so she could sweep, and Rios could mop. She resented the tablet because she thought that if she put her fingers on the keyboard and pulled up Dil’s search history, it would show searches for bars for sale in beach resort towns. They would be trashy looking bars with fake tiki-bar motifs and a couple skinny palm trees and unaffordable hurricane insurance. Dil wanted to move somewhere new and strange and warm.  She had hinted as much for some time now. She wanted to sell up all they had worked so hard to get and move somewhere like the places Gary and Stu liked to go. Dil was going the direction of Dad and Zoe, living in a fantasy world, dreaming. Only with Dil it was worse because it wasn’t a life-long bad habit. It had come on sudden. CJ yanked open the cash register and started cracking rolls of coins into the plastic drawers. It was a sudden derangement. She smelled the pigs-in-a blanket and the chili and the Buffalo wings that Rios was frying now. She caught a glimpse of the Anheiser Busch truck and heard the driver’s honk as he pulled around to the back alley. What had Dad meant about the plate? He’d said today Zoe has that thing about the plate. What plate? What thing? Was he getting senile now? Zoe should not leave him alone all hours. She should take him to the store for part of the day. It would give him something to do besides jigsaw puzzles. Dil had to see that Zoe was useless at taking care of him, even if it was her turn. How could they ever move away or even get away? Zoe could not even manage to get her own driveway ploughed out or file her taxes on time. What would she do in a real emergency? “Busch is here,” she called out to Dil and Rios. “About time.”

******

Dil at 8pm pulled drafts behind the bar. She watched CJ carry a tray of longnecks to the big table in the back where Harl Hinters and Stacey Loeb were entertaining her brother from Scottsbluff. The brother was knocking them back pretty fast. Dil was sick of drunks. The thought surprised her. She used to find them funny, she liked the Nebraskans, they were open, what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of people. She liked the coziness of the bar and the jokes, the coming and going and the low-key drama of the snubs and spats. She liked that they took up a collection if somebody got hurt or died. She didn’t mind listening to their beefs. Tonight though, she felt fresh out of sympathy and low and not amused. She was sick of the smell of barbeque wings. She wanted Stu and Gary to call for a little comic relief. She and CJ never could get away for a vacation. That was the bar business, or any hospitality business when it came to it. They took that little camping weekend once a year with the guys. Big deal. Another good reason to live somewhere where the climate was good, you were never going to get a vacation, you might as well be in a nice locale. Dil thought she could understand CJ’s dad taking the family to Paris. So what if they couldn’t afford it? It was once in a lifetime. Geez, Gary and Stu did something they could not afford every year. Maybe CJ’s dad just wanted to show his girls some knock-out art and give them a ride on an airplane, what’s so terrible about that? Maybe he wanted to see them wow-ed. She watched CJ clear beer glasses from three small tables and push through to the kitchen with her tray. Maybe some people just made up their minds not to be wow-ed.

 

******

Zoe came in just before 8.30 wearing a matching Burberry coat and boots. She looked like she belonged in a different bar in a different town. Everyone else there just wore down jackets. She carried a large, flat box, shiny black with a coral-colored bow on top. And because she was the kind of woman who loved to make an entrance, she had to wave at everybody in the place to make sure all had seen her before she could land somewhere. She wound her way through the tables, tiptoe-ing around slushy spots on the floor where ice melted off the patrons’ thick-soled work boots. CJ thought she moved like she was waiting for applause to ring out, her pale coat brushing against the meatpackers’ plaid flannel sleeves. At the bar, Zoe swept aside a bowl of peanuts to set her box smack in the center in front of the taps.

“Is it my birthday?” Dill rescued the peanuts and moved them down the bar.

“This is my masterpiece,” Zoe declared.

“You do wrap a nice box, Zoe,” Dill said. “Best gift wrapper in town.”           

“Not the box Dil.” Open it. No, I will.”  Zoe slipped the lid off and standing up on the bar rail, dipped both hands into a bed of tissue paper and extracted a dinner plate. “Voila.”

CJ joined Dil behind the bar and unloaded a tray full of empties into a wrack.

Zoe held the plate up and shifted it right to left and left to right showing it to them like she was a model hired to display the prizes on a game show.

“You had one of your flower paintings made up as a plate?” CJ asked. “How much did that run you? You didn’t have more than one made up, did you?”

Zoe looked wounded for a split second and then wriggled her shoulders and shot CJ a look of pure pity. “For your information, I didn’t have any made, the Ohaka dinnerware company, which you may just have heard of if you ever went shopping for something to lay on a table, bought my painting.  They will feature it as the design on a whole line of tableware, dinner plates and platters and saucers and dessert plates and even a set of mugs and a beverage pitcher. They call it Bright Bloom. The line is aimed at a young suburban/urban market and will be available in 18 different retail outlets around the country.” Zoe beamed. “I sent my design out to 20 companies and finally got a bite, Ohaka, one of the biggest of all.”

Dil let out a whistle to show she was suitably impressed and took the plate to examine the design.

“So, what do you think about that Chloe Jane?”

“Did you sign anything?”      

“I signed the plate, and I signed my contract, Chloe Jane.”

“It’s CJ.”

“A big fat contract for a big fat payday plus royalties. And in the next few months I am going to do some more signing, like signing the mortgage on a nice condo in Boca Raton right across from a mall where I am going to sign a lease on a new shop and next door to a senior center where dad can go during the day. I have it all worked out with a realtor down there. I met her when I went down for that craft store business conference last year. I’m taking Dad so he can sit outside all day in the sunshine even in January and do his puzzles.  Now Dil, do you know how to make a mojito? CJ Have a mojito, you look a little green.” 

CJ escaped 20 minutes later, into the alley with the dogs. Was there anybody in the whole state of Nebraska who didn’t want to rot in the sun and drink mojitos?  The big and little dog sniffed and dived between the garbage dumpsters hoping to find a rat. The wind had picked up. The snow came hard at a slant from west to east. The glow of the dogs’ reflective collars was all she could see of them in the wet gloom. She watched the circlets bob and glow as they darted about the alley like fireflies out of season. She whistled them to her and leashed them, set out walking down the alley. Icicles hung from the eaves above and from the tail pipes of the three trucks parked in the alley.

She had the snow globe feeling that she always had when walking in a snowstorm. She could be a tiny person walking a pair of miniscule dogs over white frosty mounds in a snow globe. The dogs slowed down when the snow deepened at the mouth of the alley. The three of them clambered over the drifts and continued around to the front where the parking lot lay, windswept and empty except for the dozen cars parked in front of the Shot & Brew. Soon Dil would holler out last call and the Shot & Brew would empty out; Zoe would go and the meatpackers and the visiting brother from Scottsbluff. They’d all joke and unbury their cars and scrape off their windshields and climb into the cars and drive away. She’d be left, the snow globe woman with the dogs, insignificant and mute and obsolete, a novelty knick-knack.  Or would she be in a snow globe on a coffee table in Boca Raton or Cabo San Lucas, Zoe’s coffee table or Stuart and Gary’s? And where was Dil? She was not in the snow globe and the thought made CJ lonesome to the bone. If Dil was not inside the snow globe, then she must be one of the tan people drinking mojitos, lounging around the coffee table, probably on a patio, one of the people with a sea-breeze chuckle who would pick up a snow globe and shake it, so thoughtlessly spinning and flipping the tiny woman and dogs while mad flakes whirled around them. It was all a matter of perspective.

 The doors of the Shot & Brew opened. Warm light and people spilled out, a couple here and a foursome there. Zoe came out with her box and her Burberry matching set that were really for springtime and not nearly warm enough for a Nebraska January. She got a man to scrape off her windows and off she went with her Bright Bloom, a glowing promise of a new life for herself and Dad in Boca Raton. CJ felt cold and sad and guilty about not feeling happier for Zoe. She had to admit the figure on the contract Zoe had shown them had had enough zeros to take her out of Bellford to points south. If Zoe sold her house and shop, it could work. It just might work.

The dogs looked cold. Dil would wonder. She could not go in. She wished her mom was here.  Mom, those peppermint pink dresses and the ribbons. He must have come home one day and said, “Barb, I want us all to go to Paris, may be just for a week, but I want the girls to see those museums, and the architecture, I want them to go to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre.”  And mom must have said . . .

“CJ?” Dil’s voice, came across the parking lot. “What are you standing there like a popsicle for? It’s a blizzard. Everyone is gone, babe, come in before you catch your death. I have to take Rios home; his car won’t start.”

Inside, the dogs shook their frozen coats and shards of ice showered the tables hitting the last of the empties that would need to be cleared away. Dil helped her peel off her coat and tried to catch her eye but could not, so gave her a bear hug instead.

“Don’t clean up. It’ll wait until tomorrow. I’ll run him home and be back in a few. Make something hot and go on up and get cozy. Lock up behind me.”  Then Dil was gone with Rios.

CJ shut out the lights except the one over the front door that she left on for Dil. She poured a cup of old coffee from the pot and nuked it. Dil’s tablet sat on its tripod. She nibbled peanuts and considered it. Probably she had missed Gary and Stu.  Well, she didn’t mind that.  “Barb,” Dad must have said, “I want to take the girls to see the Mona Lisa and so many others.” And what did you say Mom? CJ hit the start button on the tablet. The screensaver showed a photo of CJ and the dogs on last year’s camping trip. Mom would have said “well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?” Or she would have said, “well, maybe we can someday.”  Dad would know what she said. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was the damned dresses. Because they meant that Mom had signed on. Somewhere between him saying let’s go and her selling quilts and working overtime to pay back the loan to the credit union, she’d gone to Bellford drug and bought Evening in Paris cologne and gone to Howser’s fabric store and bought the patterns and the fabric and yard and yards of pink ribbon because she had a picture in her head too. Of Paris, and them in it. Maybe she’d never once before thought of taking them to Paris, maybe the idea did not start with her, but she took it up, didn’t she? She cut out the fabric and stitched up the dresses and packed the suitcases and sprinkled on the Evening in Paris and off they went.

The tablet glowed and CJ opened a browser. She did not look at Dil’s search history but, Googled instead: Bed and Breakfast Inns for sale North America. Her cursor ran over the menu headings, Coastal Maine and Maritimes, Pacific Northwest, Carolinas and Chesapeake, Gulf Coast and Florida, Desert Zones and Rockies. She sipped the warmed-over coffee and clicked on Carolinas and Chesapeake. The wind whipped up outside and the driving snow whited out the front window. Dil might have to plow her way back. The big dog joined her behind the bar and leaned into her thigh, his wet coat dripping melted snow onto her foot.

“Big baby,” she stroked his head.

She picked her way through the listings, pausing mostly at Victorian beauties with views of a sparkling sea or bay. She marked a half dozen of them with a heart shaped ‘ ’ tag. Her favorite favorite was a yellow one with white shutters and deep white porches and long staircase down to the beach.

“Nice one, don’t you think?” CJ said to the dogs. Then she switched off the tablet and set it on its stand. She moved through the dark to the kitchen where she put a full kettle on low for Dil. She put a tea bag in Dil’s mug and set out milk and sugar. Then she climbed the stairs to the office with the dogs running up ahead of her. It was a matter of perspective, ok, it was. She’d been right about that. But it was also a matter of knowing how to see what’s right before your eyes when the time comes. You have to look a situation right in the eye.  That was just being realistic. She slipped beneath the duvet on the fold-out couch, and lay listening to the wind and waited for the sound of Dil’s truck.