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  He brought it home and stowed it, still in the sack, in a dresser drawer.

  The following day he came straight home from work. He needed a shower, and took one, but decided Thursday’s shave could last another day. Back in his room, he opened a window for the breeze and lay down on the bed for half an hour. He almost fell asleep, but didn’t, and got up and dressed.

  How, he wondered, did they come up with Old Crow as a name for a brand of whiskey? The label, with its illustration of a dapper black bird, held no clue. He decided that Crow, spelled that way or with an E at the end, was very likely the name of the original distiller.

  Before uncapping the bottle, he took his toothbrush from the glass and found a place to set it down. He poured precisely two ounces of bourbon and seated himself by the open window. Someone was running a power mower, near enough so that he could smell the fresh-cut grass. He took a moment to enjoy the smell, and then he raised the glass and breathed in the smell of the Old Crow, and enjoyed that, too.

  Drank it right down. Liked the taste, liked the burn. It was smooth enough, but there was just enough of a burn to let you know that what you were drinking deserved a measure of respect.

  Sat there, looking out the window, listening to the sound of the mower, breathing in the smell of fresh-mown grass.

  After maybe five minutes he walked down the hall to the bathroom, where he rinsed and dried the glass. Back in his room, he put it back in its place, set the toothbrush in it. Returned the bottle to the dresser drawer.

  The following afternoon he came home, showered, shaved. Drank his two ounces of Old Crow. He had the same ration of whiskey each of the next two days, and on the first of June he paid Gerda Minnick four times the weekly rent.

  “So you’re month–to-month now,” she said.

  “It suits me.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, and came as close as she ever did to a smile. “Well, you’re no trouble,” she told him.

  He’d been wearing the money belt every day, though after a couple of days he’d begun removing it when he went to bed and donning it in the morning. The same night that he paid a month’s rent all at once, he stowed the money belt at the back of the bottom drawer.

  Partly, he supposed, because he’d seen no sign that anybody went in his room, except on the day when the girl came in to change the bed, leave a clean towel, and run the vacuum. He’d left little traps once or twice, just to see if she opened a drawer, and she hadn’t done so.

  So wearing the belt seemed an unnecessary precaution, and an increasingly cumbersome one, as the belt was thicker than it had been when he got off the bus. He wasn’t earning a fortune working for Andy Page, but his rent—weekly or monthly—was low, and of course his meals were free. He’d bought himself a shirt and a second pair of shoes—he’d left with only the ones on his feet. Aside from that, he’d hardly spent any money at all.

  For a couple of days it felt strange to be walking around without that pressure in the small of his back. But he got used to it.

  There were magazines in the parlor, and he was leafing through a year-old copy of Time when he came across the card you mailed in for a subscription. It was offered with a guarantee; if you didn’t like it, you wrote CANCEL across the invoice and mailed it back.

  He filled out the card: William M. Thompson, 318 E. Main Street, Cross Creek, MT. He didn’t know the zip, but copied it from an address label on another of the magazines.

  Mailed it in the morning and forgot about it.

  Mail for tenants was stacked on a cherry end table in the vestibule. One evening there was a copy of Time on the table, addressed to him. He took it upstairs and turned the pages while he drank his two ounces of Old Crow, then set it on his own bedside table.

  A few days later the bill came. He put it with the magazine, and over the next two weeks he received two more issues of Time, along with junk mail from another magazine—Sports Illustrated—and a few charities, including an organization that provided therapy dogs to wounded veterans.

  When his next day off came around, he went to the Cross Creek Public Library. He’d stopped there before, but this time he applied for a library card, and for ID he showed his rent receipt, along with a copy of Time and several pieces of mail addressed to him. He thought he’d have to come back in a day or two for the card, but the librarian made it out on the spot.

  “I never knew your name,” she said, “but I recognize you well enough, Mr. Thompson.”

  “Oh?”

  “From the restaurant. You wouldn’t have noticed me, I always sit in a back booth, and I’ve generally got my face buried in a book.”

  “Next time,” he said, “come sit at the counter.”

  He found a book to borrow, Golden Spike, about the building of the first transcontinental railroad. She checked him out and told him to bring it back for renewal if he didn’t finish it in the allotted month. Otherwise there’d be a fine, and it wasn’t steep, but why pay a fine if you didn’t have to?

  He went home, discarded the various pieces of junk mail he’d brought with him, and added his copy of Time to the stack in the parlor. He printed CANCEL on the Time invoice, mailed it back the following day.

  The book was interesting. He’d thought it might be, hadn’t just grabbed it off the shelf, but neither had he counted on getting caught up in it. For five nights running he sat down with the book and his two ounces of bourbon, just sipping the whiskey while he followed the story of the building of the Union Pacific Railroad, from the laying of the first rails in Omaha to the sinking of the titular golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah.

  The next day, a few minutes past noon, he was behind the counter at Kalamata when the librarian paused in the doorway. He flashed a welcoming smile, and pointed at a stool.

  “Oh,” she said. “I always want support for my back. But these stools have backs, don’t they? I never noticed that before.”

  The special, he told her, was goulash. “My own recipe,” he said, and she said that in that case, she’d have to try it.

  It was the diner’s busy time, and he had meals to prepare and customers to serve, but they’d had a few exchanges by the time he took away her bowl and brought her coffee. When he set the cup in front of her she said, “Thank you, Mr. Thompson,” and he told her to please call him Bill. That gave her the opportunity to tell him she was Carlene Weldon, and to please call her Carlene.

  “Carlene,” he said.

  The next morning was Thursday, his day off. He rose and showered and shaved, although he’d shaved the day before, and left the house with Golden Spike under his arm. He’d stayed up late the previous night to finish it.

  Carlene was at the front desk, talking on the phone. It gave him a moment to look at her without being himself observed.

  Her hair was light brown, cropped close to her head, and in a large city on either coast she might have been taken for a lesbian. But he knew she wasn’t.

  Her face was heart-shaped, her features regular and unremarkable. Large eyes, a clear pale blue in color. She wore ironed jeans and a red-and-white checked blouse, and her body was neither slender nor plump. No ring on her finger, and no mark where one might recently have been. She looked like what she almost certainly was: a woman in her early thirties whose life offered everything a solitary life could provide.

  Each of them, he thought, was just about the last thing the other needed. He was examining that thought, and wondering where it ought to lead, when she replaced the receiver and looked up at him. Her smile reached all the way to her eyes.

  “If you liked Golden Spike—”

  “I did, very much.”

  “Well, was it railroads generally? Or the history, the role the Union Pacific played in the development of the country? Because either way I could suggest a book or two you might like.”

  The answer came easily. “The history of it. I got a real sense of the way the country used to be, and the way people saw things.”

  She knew just the book. “It
’s set back east, and a number of years before anybody was thinking about transcontinental railroads.” It was called Wedding of the Waters, and it was about the building of the Erie Canal. He opened the book at random, read a couple of paragraphs, and knew he wanted to read more.

  He gave her his library card and she did the paperwork, then invited him to browse. Perhaps he’d find something else he liked. Oh, could he borrow more than one book at a time? She assured him he could. Up to five, she said.

  He made a show of browsing, picking the occasional volume from the shelf, turning the pages, putting it back. He figured one book at a time was plenty, given that he’d paid his first visit to the library for the sole purpose of obtaining a library card.

  Off to one side, an oak table held four desktop computers, with patrons seated at two of them. A sign explained that computer use was free, but there was a half-hour limit. You could print anything you downloaded, for a fee of twenty-five cents a page.

  He stood there for a moment, then shook his head and turned away. Why spoil a nice day?

  She was busy on her own computer when he returned to her desk, but she looked up at his approach. “I think I’ll have my hands full with the Erie Canal,” he said. “But I do have a question.”

  “Part of my job description, isn’t it? Answering questions.”

  “What I haven’t worked out yet,” he said, “is where to eat when I have the day off. I could go back to Andy’s, but—”

  “But that way it doesn’t feel like a day off.”

  “What it feels like,” he said, “is I ought to put on an apron and wash up after myself. I figure one night a week it’d be nice to sit down someplace with a white tablecloth and let somebody wait on me.”

  She told him about three restaurants, only one of them in Cross Creek. She seemed particularly fond of the Conestoga Inn, located halfway between Cross Creek and Burnham, and he said it sounded really nice.

  “But too far to walk to,” he said.

  “Oh, I’d say. It’s twenty miles, or close to. You don’t have a car?”

  “Or even a license. Last place I lived you could get along fine without a car, and I went and junked the one I had when the transmission quit. My license was out-of-state, and I never bothered trying to renew it, or getting a new one.”

  She nodded, taking this in.

  “What I’m thinking,” he said, “is this Conestoga place sounds just right, except for two things. It’s too far to walk, and it sounds like way too nice a place for a man to dine alone.”

  Something else for her to take in.

  “So if you’d provide the transportation,” he went on, “it’d be my pleasure to provide the dinner. As far as conversation’s concerned, I figure that would be our joint responsibility.”

  When the waiter took their drink order, she asked for a Diet Coke. He said he’d have the same.

  When he said something about her name, she said, “I’d have been Carl Jr. if I hadn’t been a girl. And they were just positive I’d be a boy. There was this old Indian woman who supposedly always got it right.”

  “Until you came along.”

  “And I could have been Carla, but my mother came up with Carlene instead. There’s a singer, Carlene Carter, and there was a country song, a man singing about a girl from high school. ‘Carlene.’ You would hear it a lot, but you never hear it anymore. In thirty-four years I’ve never met another Carlene.”

  “Over the years,” he said, “I’ve run into a fellow named Bill now and then.”

  “Well, I guess. Your full name’s tons more common than my first name. Bill Thompson. Not quite John Smith, but not too far off.”

  “I could change it to Carlene, but people might look at me funny. Are your parents—?”

  She shook her head. “He disappeared when I was in the second grade. We never heard from him, not a word. I couldn’t guess where he’d be living, or even if he’s living. And she died, oh, it’s almost eight, close to nine years now. Nine years in November. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  One of each, but he’d lost touch with both, and did either of them need to be in this conversation? “No,” he said.

  “Neither do I. I used to think it would be nice, but they say the only child learns to be self-reliant.”

  “And are you?”

  “Self-reliant?” She thought about it. “I guess so. I seem to be all right at getting along on my own. I got along when my father left and when my mother died, and when my marriage failed.”

  “You were married.”

  “I’m divorced longer than I was married. Two years married, three years divorced. That’s a strange expression, isn’t it? A marriage failing, like a business with too much money going out and not enough coming in. Except you couldn’t explain it by bookkeeping. Have you been married?”

  He shook his head. “Came close once or twice.”

  “What I came close to was backing out at the last minute. What the preacher says, if anyone has any objection to the wedding. You know, ‘Speak now or forever hold your peace’? I was wishing somebody would speak up. My mama never liked him, but she’d have had to rise from the dead to make her objections known. There was really nobody to speak up, there was nobody at all but the minister and his wife and two witnesses who lived next door. I don’t know why I’m going on like this, telling you way more than anybody’d want to hear.”

  “No, I’m interested.”

  “I’m in the house I grew up in. I never moved out, and when mama died it got to be my house, and he moved in, and two years later he moved out.”

  “And you’re still there.”

  “And I’m still there. Born in Cross Creek and likely to die in Cross Creek, and sometimes that seems sad, all that road-not-taken business, and other times what it seems is fitting.”

  “Andy says he wouldn’t mind going to Paris, and in the next breath he says he never will.”

  “Maybe everybody needs a place to never go to. For me it would be London. Did you ever read a book called 84, Charing Cross Road? It’s all letters, from a woman in New York to a bookstore owner in London. I forget what she was, a writer or an editor or something, but she could just as easily have been a librarian.”

  “And lived in Montana?”

  “Anywhere. For twenty years they wrote each other letters, and all she wanted in the world was to go there and visit the store and meet this man, and by the time she finally went, the store was closed and he was dead.”

  “Another of those happy endings.”

  “Life’s full of them. Anyway, London is the place I’ll never go to. What’s yours?”

  Home, he thought.

  What he said was, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Hawaii.”

  They didn’t talk on the ride home, but it was an easy silence, with no edge to it. She was a careful driver, her eyes on the road, and he passed the time watching her. He ran different lines through his mind, trying to find the right way to express a desire to see where she lived. He couldn’t come up with anything that would seem natural. He could just say something, anything, about her house, and give her the opportunity to ask him if he’d like to see the place.

  Wondered, sitting there and looking at her, if she was going through the same little dance in the privacy of her own mind. Wanting to invite him home, worried he might decline, worried he might accept.

  She had picked him up a couple of hours ago in front of Mrs. Minnick’s house, and now she braked to a stop in the same spot. He had the wild notion to invite her in, simply because it was against the rules. What he said was, “Well, this is where I get off.”

  “I had a really nice time, Bill.”

  “Did you? I know I did. Maybe we could—”

  “Do this again? I’d like that.”

  “Do you ever go to the movies? I thought maybe dinner and a movie, one of these nights.”

  “I’d like that,” she said, and rested her hand on top of his. Was it a good time to kiss her? Maybe, if they were
standing on a doorstep, but not in the front seat of a Ford Escort.

  He passed the parlor without looking in and climbed the stairs to his room. He got ready for bed, then realized he hadn’t had a drink. He could have had one before she picked him up, but didn’t want it on his breath. Besides, he figured they’d each have one at the restaurant, but when she ordered a Diet Coke he’d followed her lead.

  The hell with it, his teeth were brushed, he was already in bed. He turned off the light, drifted off.

  There was another date, three nights later. He finished his shift, came home for a shower and shave, and this time he had a drink before she picked him up. They ate at one of the Cross Creek restaurants she’d mentioned, and the waitress greeted her by name.

  “She was a year behind me in high school. Pregnant at graduation,” Carlene explained, and frowned. “Like it matters, all these years later, but you never get over high school, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  She asked about his high school years, what they were like, and the truth was he couldn’t remember them all that well. He said, honestly enough, that he supposed those were difficult years for everybody.

  “Even when they’re not,” she said. “I read something, don’t ask me where—”

  “Probably the library.”

  “You think? What it said, there was a follow-up study on what the high school experience felt like ten years down the line. And the ordinary kids all said the same thing, how self-conscious they were, how isolated they felt, how they couldn’t wait to get to the next stage in their lives. But you know what the cool kids said? The athletes, the class presidents, the beauty queens?”