Improbable Solution Read online

  His check-in sheet didn't balance, and he spent fifteen minutes looking for the error. When he finally found it—thirty-four written as forty-three—the other two route men had left for the weekend.

  Frank looked up as Gus entered his office.

  "Roger Blakely told me you worked on cars when you were a kid," he said.

  Damn! His ex-partner had a big mouth, but until now he'd been fairly discreet whenever one of Gus's employers had checked with him.

  "Yeah, why?"

  "Today was the Chamber luncheon," Frank said, looking down again at the paper he held in his hands. "I sat next to Bernie Cowles."

  Bernie Cowles? The name was familiar. Gus waited. Frank liked to work his way into a subject, and Gus didn't have to be anyplace soon. He could wait.

  "He's losing his mechanic. Oh, he's got a young fellow who's sharp as a tack and willing to learn, but Bernie thinks he's too green yet to take over the garage."

  Gus remembered the talk in the Bite-A-Wee Cafe on Wednesday.

  "So?"

  "So, Bernie's looking for someone to help out while Pete grows up a bit. Someone who's got a little experience, a little maturity, but who doesn't want to make a career of it."

  "What's that got to do with me?"

  Frank looked as innocent as a newborn babe.

  "Nothing, I guess." He laid the paper down, and Gus saw it was an employment application. Not his. "Unless you want it to."

  "You firing me?" For all he'd intended to give notice, the feeling of being replaceable was galling.

  "Not unless you want me to. You're doing okay. I just thought you might be interested in something a little more..." He shrugged. "...challenging."

  "Cut the crap, Frank," he snarled. "If you want me out of here, just tell me. I can be gone in thirty seconds." Snatching the paper off the desk, he skimmed it. Some young punk, whose only prior experience was helping on a Pepsi truck one summer. "Who is this? A cousin?"

  "My wife's sister's nephew-by-marriage." Frank wore a sheepish expression.

  "Give him the damn job, then. I don't care!" Gus tossed the sheet of paper back onto the desk. "He can start Monday! I'm gone."

  By the time he reached his furnished efficiency apartment above the hardware store, he was merely seething instead of feeling ready to explode. He'd never been fired in his life. Dammit, Frank had said he wished he could get more people of Gus's caliber for what he was able to pay them. He could probably sue, if he were so inclined. It had to be illegal to fire someone without cause.

  A shower barely cooled him down. He stomped down the narrow wooden stairs, ducked his head as he jogged along the sidewalk to the steamy little greasy spoon at the corner. Frank hadn't actually fired him. What would happen if he turned up for work on Monday? He had every right to.

  Or did he? Frank might have taken his angry words as the equivalent of saying "I quit."

  He'd been going to anyway, hadn't he? Made up his mind to move on. Someplace where there wasn't a woman with a flowery scent and a musical voice who needed him.

  He'd planned to tell Frank tonight, but Frank had beat him to the punch, damn him. And now he had a whole new understanding of the often-impotent rage he'd seen in so many faces, in so many employment agencies. Being fired hurt like hell.

  He shoved the plate aside, most of the too-salty stew and the soggy biscuits still uneaten. Was the Bite-A-Wee Cafe open for dinner? Too bad it was so far away. If Georgina's stew was anywhere near as good as her short ribs, she was wasting her time in a dying little burg like Whiterock.

  Tomorrow he'd pack his few possessions into his pickup and head on down the road. There was a quarter change from his dinner check. He held it on his thumb. Heads, he'd go north, up I-84; tails he'd go south into Nevada. Maybe stop over a few days in Winnemucca or Reno. He flipped the coin into the air, waited impatiently as it rose, then fell.

  His fingers touched the spinning coin, knocking it sideways. He heard rather than saw it hit the sidewalk. He lost sight of the quarter until it glinted in the blue light of a mercury vapor street lamp, just before it rolled into a storm drain.

  * * * *

  Sally saw the dark-blue pickup as it glided slowly along Main Street late Tuesday morning. Since Whiterock was off the beaten path, few vehicles drove its streets she didn't recognize. This one she didn't know.

  She couldn't see the driver because of the bright sunshine reflected from the passenger window. Watching until the truck pulled into Cowles Implement, across from the Post Office, she sipped her coffee.

  This morning she'd given in to temptation and stopped for coffee and a cinnamon roll. Pop was docile, had been ever since last Wednesday. He'd gone into the front room without prompting, sitting quietly in his chair and staring at the rolling TV screen. Just to be safe, she'd set the monitor on the front hall table, turned on and tuned to the receiver in Milly's living room. She'd decided she couldn't leave him completely unattended anymore unless he was sedated. And she hated to do that, unless he was so agitated he was violent.

  She really owed Lyle Curran for finding and hooking up the baby monitor, even if she had paid him for it. She hadn't been aware such things existed.

  Such a sense of freedom. She didn't have to ration her minutes quite so strictly, and she didn't have to feel so totally imprisoned, just because a little electronic gadget sat there and let someone else listen to her father and call for help if he needed it.

  "More coffee, hon?" Georgina was holding the carafe over her cup and Sally hadn't even seen her approach.

  "I've really got to get back. Buster Jones came in Saturday and did some tilling, and now I've got to finish what he started. I thought I'd put in a garden."

  "You want to try snow peas, I'll take all you can grow," Georgina said. "I can't get anybody to raise 'em for me, and the ones I can get from the restaurant supply are froze."

  "Georgina, I am not going into the kitchen garden business. I just thought I'd put in a row of beets and one of carrots. Maybe a small patch of corn, when it warms up."

  The door opened behind her. The hairs on her nape stood at attention.

  "Morning, Georgina," Bernie Cowles said.

  Another, deeper voice echoed his greeting. A familiar voice. She stood stock still as two masculine bodies edged past her to slide into the front booth. From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of bright red hair, a dark-blue jacket, faded Levis.

  Immediately, Georgina was there with her coffeepot. Sally tried to take advantage of the distraction to slip outside.

  "Hold on, there, Sally!" Bernie called. "I want to introduce you to my new right hand."

  She turned. Stared.

  The right hand's smile was as full of canary feathers as any cat's.

  Seeing his quarter disappear through the storm drain grate had somehow brought Gus to his senses. He didn't want to move on. For the first time in three years, he really didn't want to pack up the truck and head down the road.

  He hadn't had a chance to explore this area, but the little he'd seen appealed to him, despite its emptiness.

  Or maybe because it was so empty?

  He'd walked around town for nearly two hours, listening to the quiet, catching a whiff now and then of wood smoke and damp soil, nodding at the occasional passerby. By the time he'd circled back to his apartment he'd pretty much made up his mind to stick around a while. If Frank was serious about letting him go, he'd look for another job on Monday. Construction work had picked up with the warmer weather—there was almost always an opening for someone who knew which end of a hammer to was the business end.

  Frank was serious.

  By noon on Monday, Gus had talked to three building contractors and the foreman of a trailer manufacturing plant. He could have had a job with any one of them, but each time he hesitated, told them he'd get back to them.

  Not the usual behavior of a man needing work.

  When he stopped at the bank to cash his paycheck, he discovered two other items in the envelop
e—a letter of recommendation from Frank and a newspaper clipping. The clipping was from the Help Wanted section of the Sunday paper, one Gus had already seen and ignored.

  Cowles Implement in Whiterock needed a shop manager.

  He'd wanted to see some of the country around Harper and Westfall, country he hadn't had a chance to explore while he was on his delivery route. So, while he was trying to make up his mind what he wanted to do, he headed out that way. He finally saw the badlands area, the white bluffs and quarries where diatomaceous earth had been—still was being—mined. He even stopped at the played-out Carruthers Chalk Mine, its entrance marked by a decrepit log gate and a faded wooden sign, but he hadn't entered.

  After that he'd followed the unpaved, poorly maintained road along Hackberry Creek, through a shallow valley dotted with white-faced black cattle and bisected by a willow-bordered stream. When he emerged from the pastoral valley, he had seen Whiterock spread out before him, its windows sparkling in the sunlight, looking like every rustic small town Hollywood had ever portrayed.

  That was when his tire went flat. When he discovered the spare was flat as well. Once he was through cursing, he hiked down into town and to the only place for miles where a tire could be repaired.

  Cowles Implement.

  When he walked in the door, Bernie had greeted him as if he'd expected Gus to drop in.

  And then Bernie offered him the job of shop manager.

  He hadn't wanted the job, didn't want the responsibility, never wanted to see Sally Carruthers again. Now he had two people depending directly on him—six if you counted Bernie's wife, Pete's wife and the two Garcia kids.

  "Hello, Gus. Welcome to Whiterock." Sally's voice trembled, and the hand she held out to him shook, although he didn't think anyone noticed but him.

  Her hand was like ice, and he wanted to hold it close to his chest, to warm it against the furnace heat of a body burning from the merest pressure of her palm against his. Instead, he released it. "Glad to be here." And wondered if he was.

  With a fleeting smile, she was gone, hurrying up the street toward the Post Office. He turned back toward Georgina, aware he'd missed what she was saying. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Just said I thought you'll find a lot about Whiterock to like." She added more vitriol to his cup.

  * * * *

  She knew who was at the door before she answered it. Taking several deep breaths, Sally strengthened her resolve, stiffened her spine and squared off her heels. She was not—repeat, not—going to fall into his arms again. And she most certainly was not going to ask him to make love to...to have sex with her.

  She couldn't forget the bone-melting desire she'd felt in his arms. Before common sense set in.

  "May I come in?"

  "It's late." She didn't let the door open more than five inches.

  "Only eight-thirty," he said. His smile was white in the dim porch light, and his eyes were dark caverns with tiny, golden gleams in their depths. "Please."

  His voice could melt a glacier.

  She hesitated, and was lost. He pushed the door open, not forcing but with an inexorable strength, nonetheless. She had to step back to get out of its way.

  "I came to see how your father was," he said.

  "He's fine."

  "And how you were."

  "I'm fine."

  "And to ask your help."

  She imagined she heard in his voice the purr of a cat whose prey was securely caught.

  "My help? How can I possibly help you?" She wasn't sure she wanted to know, but she couldn't not know, either.

  "I need a place to live."

  "A place...?" She took another step backwards and found her retreat halted by the wall. "I thought..."

  "You thought what? That I was going to drive back and forth from Ontario every day?" He shook his head vigorously. "No way! Bernie said you might know of a place for rent. An apartment."

  Sally closed her eyes a moment, banishing the fantasy that had leapt into her mind.

  "When you were here before, we...I...you..." She gulped and tried again. "Last week, when you came back, I did some things I didn't mean to do."

  Well, she had wanted him, desperately, for a brief, burning interval. But she didn't want him now. He had to understand that, to believe that she'd succumbed to loneliness and exhaustion for a moment.

  "Is there any chance you can forget how I acted?"

  His hand approached her face, and she found she could already feel the tingle of his touch. The brush of his finger against her cheek was as gentle as the brush of a spring zephyr, and warm as June sunlight.

  "It's forgotten," he said, his voice low and throbbing, "if you're sure you want it to be."

  Sure? She wasn't sure of anything at this point in her life. But in order to live with herself, she had to devote all her time and energy to Pop. She couldn't let herself look for the distracting excitement Gus Loring could bring to her life.

  And she hadn't the fortitude to deal with the heartbreak when it was all over and she finally made her escape from Whiterock.

  INTERVAL

  Caution! Precipitate assumption of success dangerous...

  Passion achieved, but not enduring; not yet permanent. Need assurance of continuity...

  Generation of offspring optimum solution...

  Experience indicates time and proximity necessary to task. Also love...

  Proximity initiated with capture of Loring, but no assurance of duration. Need further enhancement of environment...

  Humans gratified by visual stimuli. Peculiar concatenation of bronze minus appendages. Calcium carbonate and lignum structure deteriorating...

  Translocate molecules, refurbish surroundings...

  May Fest incomprehensible, but of significant importance to inhabitants, therefore requires facilitation...

  EIGHT

  Spring finally came to Whiterock, and it did so with an explosion of color. A singular fancy struck Sally that every bare tree in town had been waiting, quivering with embarrassment, for winter to turn its back. With the first warm rain of April, they stretched skyward, as if to loosen limbs stiffened with cold, and did their best to unfurl each leaf as quickly and completely as possible, to go from naked one day to fully clothed the next.

  Had every spring been so fruitful, so pregnant with the promise of extravagant harvest? Had she been so blind, so insensitive to the shifting seasons in the past to have not noticed this prodigal expression of nature's bounty?

  Perhaps her mood of expectancy was because she no longer felt so imprisoned. Just having Milly Kemp come in twice a week to care for Pop gave her such a sense of freedom. So far she hadn't gone anywhere on her free days, but knowing she could made all the difference.

  If there were only some way she could take the good things about Whiterock with her when she went back to her life—the home she'd been born in; her wonderful, caring neighbors; the bucolic atmosphere. Although, come to think of it, hadn't the atmosphere been what stifled her, back when anywhere else in the world seemed more exciting than Whiterock, Oregon, population 639? And the neighbors often went beyond friendliness, all the way to nosy, so a person had no privacy whatsoever.

  Of course, seeing Gus Loring each morning on her way into or out of the Post Office had absolutely nothing to do with her new, lighter mood.

  Seeing him, but not speaking to him, not in the ten days since he'd come to ask her if she knew of available lodgings. She had heard—oh, last Friday or Saturday—that he'd persuaded Walt Kemp to rent him the long-unused apartment over the drugstore. He must now be a resident of Whiterock.

  Every day as she emerged from the Post Office he had been standing just inside the large overhead door of Cowles Implement, or outside at the gas pumps. He always waved. She had more than once been tempted to cross Main Street and speak to him. If he'd called to her, even just an acknowledgement that it was a good morning, she might have. But he always just smiled—that heart-stopping smile he was so frugal with—then t
urned 'round and went back to work.

  Sally pulled her gaze from the view out the window and back to the ice pink satin in her lap. She really had to get this dress finished for Rhoda Garcia so she could begin on her regular sewing, no matter how sweetly spring called to her.

  Sally had been Queen of the May her eighth-grade year. She remembered how excited she'd been when she was chosen by a vote of the entire student body in Whiterock School. Her mother had made her dress, a lace-covered, ruffled Victorian gown that had looked just like the fancy prom dresses she'd seen in Seventeen. Bill Holmes had been her reluctant Consort. He'd worn a wide-sleeved French peasant's smock, also made by her mother from a folklore pattern they'd found in Boise, and had complained loudly about looking dumb. Pop had told her all thirteen-year-old boys were embarrassed by dressing up, unless they could wear a sword or cowboy boots.

  Milly stuck her head in.

  "Lunch," she said.

  "I'll be right there." Sally finished basting the bodice seam and laid the dress aside.

  "I hope Kate Garcia knows what she's doing, letting Rhoda have that dress," she said to Milly as she entered the kitchen. "When did little girls start wearing skintight, strapless satin gowns?"

  Milly passed her the salad dressing. "I seem to remember a certain young lady who wasn't allowed to wear her swimsuit in public the summer after she was Queen of the May."

  Sally grimaced.

  "Oh, lordy, I'd forgotten that." She could feel her face burn. "It really was skimpy, wasn't it?"

  The bikini in question had been little more than strings and a trio of tiny fabric scraps. She'd bought it with her carefully saved allowance. Her mother's initial reaction had been to tell her to return it, but when told that bathing suits weren't returnable, she'd forbidden Sally to wear it anywhere outside her own yard.

  That summer the corner of Fifth Avenue and Jasper Street had been the busiest intersection in Whiterock.

  "Walt says that new fella is all settled in." Milly slipped into the chair across the table. "According to Walt, he travels real light. A few books, a fancy coffee maker, a little bitty TV and a microwave oven." She stirred blue sugar into her iced tea.