Kingdomtide. Rye Curtis

the wine and said, I’m sorry if I seem distracted. I just hung up with my daughter. She’s been trouble recently.

      I figure she’s the age for it.

      Bloor went over to the coffee table and set the bottle there beside the other and took from his chest pocket a cake of chalk and chalked his hands. I don’t want to say she’s slow, but it takes a long time to get her to understand the complexity of a thing. He took up the bottles and held them out for her to choose.

      Lewis pointed at the merlot.

      Bloor uncorked the bottle with a corkscrew from the table. She was caught today with that clerk with the dead tooth I was telling you about. In the school restroom. Suspended. What do you think of that?

      Nothin.

      Bloor poured two glasses of merlot. She told me one morning over eggs she wanted to do it. Can you believe that?

      Do what?

      Sex. I’m a progressive man, Ranger Lewis. Cultured, of this time. Beyond this time, even. But you know, part of me wants my daughter to be the eternal virgin.

      I expect that’s only natural, Lewis said.

      Bloor smiled and sat on the couch. He patted the cushion next to him. Lewis went over to him and sat. He handed her a glass and raised his. To the Waldrips and Terry Squime, may Light and Love have mercy on them. May they rest in peace.

      Lewis raised her glass. That’s premature talk.

      The two drank.

      How did you meet your ex-husband? I apologize if I’m too curious. My wife always told me that I’m curious in a way that makes people feel probed and unsafe.

      Lewis told him that she had met Roland at her dad’s veterinarian clinic when she worked there after school and Roland had brought in his dog to put it down. She told how they had gotten married just after she had left high school and had begun working in the Missoula Parks and Recreation. After a few years, she said, she took the ranger’s position in the Bitterroot Mountains and Roland was put in charge of purchasing in the small-game department at a hunting-goods store. At the time she had not thought anything of him running off on a business trip every other weekend.

      He was seeing someone else?

      He had a wife in Nebraska, one in Colorado, and one more in Montana. Lewis pointed to her badge.

      The man is a Mormon then.

      If he is he never told me about it. He’s in prison for trigamy.

      Koojee. At least you don’t have kids.

      Goddamn it, never needed any.

      Kids. You know, when we moved from Tacoma to Missoula I hoped the change of venue would help. But I don’t know. My daughter’s already lost her virginity straddling a toilet. It’s not that I’m made uncomfortable by sexuality. My tenure as a sergeant in the National Guard made sure of that.

      Bloor drank off a glass, then reached for the bottle and poured himself another. He stroked together the chalked fingers of his free hand and studied the wine with eyes that did not seem to see.

      When my wife passed away three years ago, he said, I thought I’d become a better person. To honor her memory, you understand. I haven’t. Not at all. I don’t know why.

      Sorry about your wife.

      Bloor looked at the ends of his white fingers. I love people, he said. Do you know what she used to tell me?

      No.

      That I could rule the world with love and compassion.

      All right.

      I miss her. When I tell people about her I can see it in their faces they don’t understand what a visionary woman she was. They don’t know what she meant to me.

      I expect that’s true.

      I’ve always lost people, you know. I think it’s why I first started in search-and-rescue. My mom disappeared watering pansies one morning when I was an infant. Nothing left but a pair of size-six clogs and a water hose running. My dad was already long gone, somewhere dead or alive in a country we had no idea about. Some people thought he’d come back and kidnapped my mom and drowned her in one of the Finger Lakes. They never found her. My sister raised me. Then she died of food poisoning in a hotel lobby ten years ago this Thanksgiving. Koojee.

      Goddamn sorry to hear that.

      Room service killed her. The hotel settled handsomely in court. Now I never have to work another day of my life if I don’t want to.

      I figure that’s a good thing.

      Losing my wife, Adelaide, was the hardest. We knew each other since we were kids. But I don’t think she ever was a child, you know. She always spoke like she’d been born with a life already lived in her. Most everyone didn’t know what to make of her, so they were vile to her. The boys at school tormented her. But I don’t think any of them ever really had the upper hand. It was even then like she’d wanted them to be vile to her in just the way they were. As if she’d orchestrated the whole thing for a pleasure only she knew about.

      Sounds like she was a goddamn special woman, Lewis said. She missed her mouth with her glass and dribbled merlot down the front of her uniform. She blotted the spill with her sleeve and held out the empty glass.

      Bloor poured her another. He turned his drawn face to the windows, where a blue light outside showed fog in the trees. A finger-mark of chalk was on his chin. You don’t even know, he said, and he took her fingers between his chalked hands. Thank you for coming over tonight. He pinched the skin of her ring finger hard and filled his lungs like he were to submerge himself in water.

      Lewis took back her hand. You’re welcome.

      Bloor let out his breath and smiled.

      Lewis, rubbing the back of her hand, pulled the Wagoneer crookedly into the driveway. The lights were off in the pinewood cabin and the windows dark. Over the radio Dr. Howe spoke gently to a woman who had phoned in with the name Ronnie and asked how she could be expected to go on and live the life she had come to live when all she had ever wanted was to leave her husband and her three children and sing country-western music all night long in Nashville. Lewis turned off the engine but kept the radio on and listened.

      The woman said: I’m three hundred pounds. That’s somethin to do with it. But it ain’t fat that’s in me. I got all this frustration poolin in my belly and my thighs and my ass. I can’t be a country-western singer. I’m morbidly obese and I ain’t got a particularly good singin voice. I count myself betrayed, Dr. Howe. I just knew that’s what I was goin to be when I was a little girl, but here I am now and I’m not and I’m large and I’m tonedeaf. My gran was a singer. Sometimes I go to the downtown library and look through those old microfiches they got of her and the shows she used to put on around town and I just get so frickin jealous, pardon my language. Jealous of my dead gran. That’s low, ain’t it? Tell me it’s low. And then my husband, not long ago I caught him eyeballin my baby sister at the church fish fry. That’s been on my mind. She’s only just able to have a legal drink and weighs nearly a hundred pounds less than me, so I ain’t no competition. Where’s a person like me with all this frustration poolin in them supposed to go to get their self-worth? I’ve just been dismissed and dismissed, even by people that’d say they love me. And I go to doin it to myself, Dr. Howe, I go to dismissin myself and I just sit on the end of my bed while the kids’re at school and my husband is at work and just watch the cat come in and out of the room.

      Dr. Howe said: Ronnie, life is about adjusting our expectations. It is what it is, and will be what it will be, like it or not. And I believe that the secret to happiness is to find a way not only to accept and tolerate life as it comes, in any manner it comes, but to find a way to enjoy it in spite of yourself and the conditions it sets. You can’t have everything you want or you would implode and disappear. Do you understand me, Ronnie? You would have nothing at all without all that you believe you do not have.